The Command and Control system still needs work.

[Sherhi]

So the whole discussion revolves around few individuals who dont know that they can just click through field marshall and make one huge army just as before? Hmm, strange.

Just watch a god damn dev diary, I think they showed how it works there. I was watching a stream where this dude was manually assigning 5x24 armies filled with infantry on a huge frontline, made shitty attack plans and was surprised when 24 division general went from 12 province frontline to 3 province and whole frontline broke into pieces filled with gaps everywhere. Well obviously when he drew those attack plans that way.

Whole stream was screaming at him how to do it, he didnt even try. He then got salty and cried about this system being stupid. Just like here.

 

[Lord of Beer]

So the whole discussion revolves around few individuals who dont know that they can just click through field marshall and make one huge army just as before? Hmm, strange.

Just watch a god damn dev diary, I think they showed how it works there. I was watching a stream where this dude was manually assigning 5x24 armies filled with infantry on a huge frontline, made shitty attack plans and was surprised when 24 division general went from 12 province frontline to 3 province and whole frontline broke into pieces filled with gaps everywhere. Well obviously when he drew those attack plans that way.

Whole stream was screaming at him how to do it, he didnt even try. He then got salty and cried about this system being stupid. Just like here.

That's not the point at all. The point is that the DIVISIONS still need to be manually allocated against each general, and there is no way to ensure they do not go over 24 divisions. Normally when we talk about buffs or nerfs to components of this game, its due to stat changes. But 10 and 20 width divisions have had a huge nerf due to the interface!

Try having 2x Field Marshall with 10x Generals controlling a total of 240 divisions on your Frontline with Germany as Russia for example. Your entire bottom section of the screen is filled with portraits. What is the purpose of so many generals? Does it actually help you manage the Frontline or add extra gameplay?

Plus, if you have tanks, you wont want to use them in your main Field Marshall's frontline, you'll want to control them manually. So you potentially have Three Field Marshalls on the bottom of your screen!

The other problem is that its forcing us to use the Battleplanner, which is not better than micromanaging yourself. For example, if you're garrisoning the Pacific as the USA, one general can control 72 divisions. Do it yourself (and thus avoid the AI shuffling troops around dangerously at sea) and you can only control 24!

 

[grandad1982]

Am I missing something?

I just put my generals under a field marshal and assigned them fronts as normal, there didn't seem to be any issues with doing so.

 

[a_sophist]

Am I missing something?

I just put my generals under a field marshal and assigned them fronts as normal, there didn't seem to be any issues with doing so.

It seems like the general audience isn't receptive to my arguments, but I'll foolishly continue anyway

For me at least, this is ultimately just a QoL gripe. It's not game breaking and I'll get over it. But to answer the query:

Given that:
1. It doesn't feel right to not take advantage of all combat bonuses available (i.e. FM/General stat stacking)
2. Certain strategies for high manpower nations require more officers than are available to use said bonuses, and the PP cost to hire more is often prohibitively expensive
3. The battle planner is a very finicky mechanic

I conclude that the present C-O-C system encourages game play that adds busywork and UI clutter for little benefit relative to how I played previously.

The arguments against have essentially been:
1. Get over it and don't play that way anymore
2. It's good than org spam strategies have been made less convenient because they're untenable in real life.

I can't really argue with number 1; I'll have to get over it because I enjoy the game as a whole too much, but I thought I'd make my opinion known anyway.
On number 2, I've never really cared about historically accurate OOB in this game, so I'm probably predisposed to disliking the new system from the get-go. Not to mention that there are several other aspects of army design that defy historical considerations.

 

[sinanziric]

You can change the view of the Field Marshal. By clicking on the little tree-icon under the Field Marshal view. You will see all the divisions under the Field Marshal, making the generals invisible. And than you can assign all your 100 divisions to a frontline like before.

I have found that I could do all the old stuff I could before, now as well. So I it maybe that I do not entirely understand your issue.

You mean 400 (USSR) xD

 

[Lord of Beer]

Admittedly, I'm observing into AI USSR in 1942. But you cannot tell me this is is a good user interface. Almost half the screen has been taken up!

Here's another:

And the second pic gives a maximum control of only 312 divisions. The AI might be able make sense of that, but I as a human sure can't. The list on the right side is so long, it even brings up a scroll wheel (against which mouse wheel doesn't work BTW)

(HOI4 video feature for Chain of Command)

Opening line: "In HOI4 we wanted the players to feel more connected to the Generals and Divisions that they had". Does the above make you feel that?

Look at the screenshots Paradox have taken for that video. They're always extremely zoomed in, with a few generals, maybe 19 divisions in each.

 

[Zwirbaum]

You said it - AI. Don't mind the date - I forgot to pause the game at some point (Also lazy git and had a little to much in one theater) 669 divisions. Seems quite organized IMO.

 

[Lord of Beer]

You said it - AI. Don't mind the date - I forgot to pause the game at some point (Also lazy git and had a little to much in one theater) 669 divisions. Seems quite organized IMO.

Thanks for posting that. But I think it actually assists my point, seeing it from a human perspective. How long did it take you to set that all up? Its still taking up 1/3 of the screen!

I fail to see how this new system is actually *better*. Can we do more than we could in 1.4.2? Nope, we can't use 10 or 20 width divisions as effectively, and we can't see much of our screen anymore, so we can actually do much less.

Stellaris folks got all up in arms about the changes to FTL - those at least were justified to make the game better and to enable the AI and other features. What has Chain of Command done for us? Its a huge change with no benefits, and we should be at least as angry about it as Stellaris folks are about FTL.

I know there is a style of play (like the one directly above) which favours very slow, precise combat and strategy. Going until 1954 to conquer the world, taking days to play the game. The other style (that I preferred) is to knock a whole game out in a few hours with a big victory, play testing and min/maxing combinations of research and production. That style of play has been hugely hurt by these changes, since you now need to spend a greatly increased amount of time and effort managing the Chain of Command.

Here's another scenario. Setup the defence of China. Prepare an army to defend your eastern ports. The most effective setup is to have 8 * 10 width divisions on each port, and a few on the tiles next to the port (to stop the landings there). About 80 divisions in total. If I do that manually, I need to have 4 generals. If I do it using the automatic garrison order, one general can control 72 divisions, but the garrison order is significantly inferior to what a human could do using manual placement - with inconsistent numbers of divisions on different ports, and no tile defence alongside.

Lets imagine I give up and use 4 generals, but position the troops manually. Now, even though they're all still really doing the same thing, the divisions clump over eachother on the map, and I need to go into one general after another to do things like change template. If I'm attacking with two divisions each controlled by a different general, I cannot just select them both and hit 'H' to cancel the attack, I need to go into one general after another and do it twice!

Plus there are problems like giving a garrison order to an Army does not properly assign every army group to that order, and the strategic redeployment shortcut 'B' doesn't work when moving an Army.

In this case I am literally battling against the Chain of Command to have a proper garrison. How does this make the game better?

I feel like the person responsible for this system has barely played the game. For example, we know the whole combat width thing is a big topic, and big thing to consider when designing your divisions. 10 width vs 20 width vs 40 width etc. Paradox realised this for Special Forces, and so made the limit based on your number of battalions. Why then for Chain of Command, their premier feature for 1.5.0, did they completely ignore combat width? You can control 4x the amount of battalions with a 40 width template than a 10 width template.

 

[Zwirbaum]

Thanks for posting that. But I think it actually assists my point, seeing it from a human perspective. How long did it take you to set that all up? Its still taking up 1/3 of the screen!

I fail to see how this new system is actually *better*. Can we do more than we could in 1.4.2? Nope, we can't use 10 or 20 width divisions as effectively, and we can't see much of our screen anymore, so we can actually do much less.

Stellaris folks got all up in arms about the changes to FTL - those at least were justified to make the game better and to enable the AI and other features. What has Chain of Command done for us? Its a huge change with no benefits, and we should be at least as angry about it as Stellaris folks are about FTL.

I know there is a style of play (like the one directly above) which favours very slow, precise combat and strategy. Going until 1954 to conquer the world, taking days to play the game. The other style (that I preferred) is to knock a whole game out in a few hours with a big victory, play testing and min/maxing combinations of research and production. That style of play has been hugely hurt by these changes, since you now need to spend a greatly increased amount of time and effort managing the Chain of Command.

I didn't play to conquer the world. I forgot to pause the game, and that's why the game was at 1954 And how long did it for me to set it up? Not that long tbh.

And yeah, it's not like I do theorycrafting or maximizing stuff you do/pull off etc.

 

[BaddoSpirito]

Then a huge amount of your troops are underpowered, and you're not properly min/maxing. We are literally battling against the UI here. I think this is a really bad decision of Paradox.

Min-maxing also involves maximizing your ability to control your troops. You can use generals on infantry if you are a minor but with a country like Soviet, I'd rather have underpowered troops than letting the AI get half my front wiped in 1 month. In any case, vanilla multiplayer is unplayable for various other reasons such as Germany having 3x the econ of USA in 1941 anyway and I think the best option is to mod the game to increase the command capacity of generals to something like 200 for MP.

 

[Lord of Beer]

Min-maxing also involves maximizing your ability to control your troops. You can use generals on infantry if you are a minor but with a country like Soviet, I'd rather have underpowered troops than letting the AI get half my front wiped in 1 month. In any case, vanilla multiplayer is unplayable for various other reasons such as Germany having 3x the econ of USA in 1941 anyway and I think the best option is to mod the game to increase the command capacity of generals to something like 200 for MP.

If we *need* mods for multiplayer, then multiplayer is dead. We used to be able to play some great games on the vanilla version of HOI4, admittedly with some very well honed rules. Playing with a mod means each community will be fractured and the meta you learn will only be relevant for that one mod; plus it will be impossible to get lobby walk-ins into the game if you're running a mod, so you will need to launch with vanilla then relaunch with the mod. Its a huge PITA and it will kill the burgeoning 40 player game scene.

 

[BaddoSpirito]

If we *need* mods for multiplayer, then multiplayer is dead. We used to be able to play some great games on the vanilla version of HOI4, admittedly with some very well honed rules. Playing with a mod means each community will be fractured and the meta you learn will only be relevant for that one mod; plus it will be impossible to get lobby walk-ins into the game if you're running a mod, so you will need to launch with vanilla then relaunch with the mod. Its a huge PITA and it will kill the burgeoning 40 player game scene.

IMO, vanilla MP was already pretty bad. It's just that most people didn't realize how bad it is due to bad teams. I played like maybe only 2-3 vanilla MP in the last 6 months. In one of them, I killed Germany with France. Most of the good players already use mods because Paradox doesn't know or care about historical multiplayer games. It was obvious they would make it worse with new mechanics. I mean you got a Paradox dev saying division width doesn't matter, what did you expect? They probably playtested Germany trying to attack into Russia with 30w infantry or something and thought Germany is balanced lol.

 

[Lord of Beer]

IMO, vanilla MP was already pretty bad. It's just that most people didn't realize how bad it is due to bad teams. I played like maybe only 2-3 vanilla MP in the last 6 months. In one of them, I killed Germany with France. Most of the good players already use mods because Paradox doesn't know or care about historical multiplayer games. It was obvious they would make it worse with new mechanics. I mean you got a Paradox dev saying division width doesn't matter, what did you expect? They probably playtested Germany trying to attack into Russia with 30w infantry or something and thought Germany is balanced lol.

You got some shitty groups. There were communities like Commonwealth that hosted almost nightly, with 30 players, and had almost a 50% win rate between Axis/Allies. They had hosted around 270 games. They used Vanilla with rules.

 

[BaddoSpirito]

You got some shitty groups. There were communities like Commonwealth that hosted almost nightly, with 30 players, and had almost a 50% win rate between Axis/Allies. They had hosted around 270 games. They used Vanilla with rules.

Yeah I played Commonwealth before and it is probably the best vanilla group but the way they balanced the game is basically letting allies use a lot of ahistorical nations like South Americans, Turkey etc. And it is pretty difficult for most groups to find the required 30+ players. When I played CW as Russia, I had a Latvia air controller, Iran and Afghanistan in commintern, and allied Argentina (or maybe he was commintern too not sure) was fighting Japan in my eastern front. And when I played Raj, Turkish and Mexican heavy tanks were helping me against Japan. It is a pretty good group but many people like to play with only historical nations and can't always find 30+ people for the game.

 

[grandad1982]

I don't mean to repeat myself but I genuinely think I'm missing something! It's not that I agree or disagree with anyone but there is obviously a game mechanic here I've missed.

I get that there has been a change in the number of units a single leader can lead but I'm sure it's more than that that I don't understand.

 

[shultays]

Few hours in. First problems are apparent:

1. Certain traits are not explained. For example 'Cavalry Officer' gives 'Cavalry Leader experience factor: 100%', with the tooltip just saying 'trained as a cavalry officer'. What does this mean? Does the general gain XP faster when leading cavarly battalions? If so, why not tell us? Seems like lazy design. None of the tooltips really show any information useful to the player.

2. Additional Army Groups cannot be added directly to an Army from the control UI on the bottom of the screen. Instead, they must be added through the command menu on the top right. It seems strange to require the player to use two different UI components to accomplish a task that could previously be done from one. (EDIT: You can right click the army groups onto the army to do this)

3. Generals cannot be shuffled around on the bottom side of the screen. It would be nice to position one on the left for my left front, one on the right for my right front etc. Devs, you've spoiled us with the production UI shuffle ability, now it needs to go everywhere! In general I found it too hard to figure out which general was controlling what. Maybe they need to flash or something when I mouse over a division under their command.

4. 24 divisions per general is too few. It adds a huge amount of extra micromanagement for little apparent gain in terms of gameplay. This is even playing as France today with only 60 * 40 width divisions! I don't know how players playing as China or USSR with hundreds of divisions will do it. I think the 24 divisions needs to be lifted to 72 as a base, or the extra division capability made easier to acquire. Maybe with a bit more play I'll get used to it, but for a player who prefers to micro troops manually in many instances (and with front shuffling a deadly problem when your troops lose entrenchment during a critical defense - eg. France) it has made the game less fun to play.

5. 'Last Stand' ability is literally unusable for large armies with big divisions. You can only hold a maximum of 100 command points, but with 19 divisions of 40 width, the command points needed to conduct the 'last stand' was greater than 100! This should be recalculated so that even a 50 width division of 24 divisions can still use the order.

6. The division capacity limit seems to change randomly. Playing as China, it jumped from 72 to 24 on multiple generals for no apparent reason. EDIT: When you have a garrison order, you magically can control 72 units :-/


Probably more to come as I continue playing. I'll add some more points based on discussion.

3. Agreed, I would be happy to implement it but it was not a priority. Hopefully we can make it to a patch.

5. You probably don't want to execute it for a huge number of units since it will waste your CP most of the time.

6. We failed to mention this in a tooltip, I added one to garrison button and army count tooltips to explain what is going on

I also made it possible to assign units to a group of armies by right clicking on army group (FM group), it will assign units to its sub groups (prioritizing smallest ones first)

 

[Uniform764]

I'm not saying the new system is perfect, or that the old HoI3 system should be the goal, but Id definitely say anything that disincentivises people from throwing three times the number of divisions the Germans used in Barbarossa under a single commander and call it a day is a step in the right direction in terms of creating interesting choices and engaging gameplay.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Try having 2x Field Marshall with 10x Generals controlling a total of 240 divisions on your Frontline with Germany as Russia for example. Your entire bottom section of the screen is filled with portraits. What is the purpose of so many generals? Does it actually help you manage the Frontline or add extra gameplay?

You can make 1 Theatre for each FM if you want a clean bottom section of the screen.

Making use of many generals and specializing them in different ways for different tasks is IMHO much much better then the 1.4 way of putting 300 divisions under a single General and having 30 other Generals you never use at all.

Do you prefer a HoI4 where each nation only have a single General? I don't think most players do.

How long did it take you to set that all up?

About 1% as long time as it takes to set up the 150 divisions Soviet Start with in HoI3 the way you want them... Back then you had to manually detatch, deploy, move and and re-attach each battalion when upgrading units, as well as assigning a General each for all 150 divisions.

Kids today!

 

[Jaremir]

You can make 1 Theatre for each FM if you want a clean bottom section of the screen.

Requiring the user to d extra work (however minimal) to improve the UI is bad design and the ability to do so is no excuse for it.

Using many generals and “specializing them” is basically non existent beyond very select theatres and groups of units. Very small chokes points like El Alamein are the only places a specific general could be better, on a Main front they are lost in the UI and general bloat. Tank generals don’t count since people already did that last patch.

Also making excuses for a system by saying the previous systems were worse is again no excuse.

The general problem with COC which I said from the very start, is for all its “rule of cool” adds very little in terms of actual interesting gameplay.

 

[Meglok]

Am I missing something?

I just put my generals under a field marshal and assigned them fronts as normal, there didn't seem to be any issues with doing so.

No. Just some valid complaints about ui clutter (which does need to be looked at @podcat ) and people not dealing with change well. I guess it gets them out of their comfortable speed 5 twitch MP meta or something.