"things I dislike" - post things about the previews you dislike here **READ OP EDIT**
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I hope they do fix battle plans myself because it's the most original idea they have yet come up with for this title. IMHO I really like the idea behind it.
We were told about a penalty for not following plans before the 1st iteration of plans was even done, They're on the 3rd or 4th iteration, and we haven't been told that there even is a bonus for using plans anymore, most of this is speculation.
If we only posted about facts, there would be no posts outside of a few days after a DD.
This is exactly what I am wondering about, its all nice and well to draw a battle and great if it goes according to plan but its based around the idea that the player creates what are essentially the future movements of Divisions but not the actual ones and once that plan is being executed the player must avoid interfering with it.
So the best result for the player in HOI IV is that when the actual and I stress actual combat is taking place they do not need to do anything, people must admit that is a little strange.
Nah, people that can't behave will just be kicked from the thread.
That said, there was nothing objectionable about Centurian's post, but sending a PM was better.
1. No reason to not to interfere if there is a good reason for it.
2. Unless you can predict the future, you will always have to watch for unexpected development and react accordingly.
Here is what I thought it should be.
I create a battle plan, in order to execute this plan h build a supply depot near my front to stock pile gasoline and supplies for it, I cannot execute without enough supplies, if I give another order it is simply going to diminish fuel I had stockpiled, when I run out of fuel, etc distance from supply depot too far I must move it deeper, unless reasons like railway etc.
No penalties for reordering etc other than your operation has a limited amount of supplies, also you cannot March for forever without a pause, large scale assault didn't happen daily. Units adjacent to eachother should cause attrition if opposing side, you should be able to spy for plans and supplies.
Yeah, it is a little strange. So strange that it is not at all how the system was proposed. In the stream the devs explicitly mentioned a situation in which the player might have to take the helm themselves (such as to prevent their units to being encircled). I don't know why you guys seem to think the battleplan system will be completely non interactive. The goal the devs seems to be going is that the players should make a plan ahead of time and let the units move themselves to accomplish that, but always keep a close eye to figure out if something need to be changed part ways.
Here is something that gets me, the battle plans seem like the perfect accompaniment to a Corps - Army - Army Group OOB.
If a battle plan is all about assigning forces to attack / defense axis, then having those forces in useful groupings would be hugely beneficial for player organization. It wouldn't have to be mandatory, so no negative or positive gameplay elements, just a side system of force organization. Think of how easy it would be if you could have your Panzer Army for attack and your Infantry Army for defense? Push 1 button, grab 6 division scattered about a region, and then assign them an axis. Push another button, grab 10 divisions, and assign them to a defensive line.
What will happen is players spending a significant amount of time selecting the exact forces they want. And for each attack, the player will have to grab that specific grouping again. This is a waste of the advantages of the battleplan system.
Which leads me to a second problem, one which raises the dreaded counter topic. How well will Paradox's 3D models and division numbers handle a huge number of divisions? When you have 150+ division across an entire map, will the models still be understandable? Or will it make players work hard to find the specialty troops they want.
E.g. you have a defense line, band select 30 divisions, grab 8 provinces, done. But what if a tank force is coming? Now you have to go through the 30 odd divisions to find your AT grouping. What I don't know, and worry about, is if Paradox's proposed system makes it easy to find that needle in the divisional haystack.
If a battle plan is all about assigning forces to attack / defense axis, then having those forces in useful groupings would be hugely beneficial for player organization. It wouldn't have to be mandatory, so no negative or positive gameplay elements, just a side system of force organization. Think of how easy it would be if you could have your Panzer Army for attack and your Infantry Army for defense? Push 1 button, grab 6 division scattered about a region, and then assign them an axis. Push another button, grab 10 divisions, and assign them to a defensive line.
What will happen is players spending a significant amount of time selecting the exact forces they want. And for each attack, the player will have to grab that specific grouping again. This is a waste of the advantages of the battleplan system.
Which leads me to a second problem, one which raises the dreaded counter topic. How well will Paradox's 3D models and division numbers handle a huge number of divisions? When you have 150+ division across an entire map, will the models still be understandable? Or will it make players work hard to find the specialty troops they want.
E.g. you have a defense line, band select 30 divisions, grab 8 provinces, done. But what if a tank force is coming? Now you have to go through the 30 odd divisions to find your AT grouping. What I don't know, and worry about, is if Paradox's proposed system makes it easy to find that needle in the divisional haystack.
Very well put DrRansom! I tried to make the same point in another post, but not as well as you have described it.
I don't think they wan't you to make special anti unit divisons such as anti tank divisions.
Just add a few anti tank guns to your infantry divisions instead.
Just add a few anti tank guns to your infantry divisions instead.
In fact, it is not very well put, because his (and your) concern are based on pure speculation that finding the important troops will be a pain in the behind. First of all, it should be quite easy to identify your tanks (on the map!) by their counters/markers. In HoI3, when zoomed out, you could not identify tanks easily, especially when stacked. you were kind of forced to go through your OOB. In HoI4, it seems, all units are easily identifiable, because the markers will stay and even group when zooming out. There are also different ways to organize groups outside of putting up a huge OOB. What about the traditional grouping with STRG+1,2,3...? This way the player could, let's say, group all the defensive forces (tanks, inf, mobile units, AA,...) together, have all the
spearhead forces for one initial push concentrated and so on. But again, this is pure speculation and my purpose is to demonstrate that you guys are hallucinating about stuff, we don't know much about. I am pretty sure PDS will find a way to quickly and easily select units you need, even without an OOB.
This was also difficult in HoI3, the counters could not deliver any information when zoomed out. It looks much better now under HoI4.
I did not say that it would be non-interactive I meant to suggest that the best plan would be non-interactive because why interfere with a plan that is going according to plan.
Of course I do not believe that a plan will fully go according to plan so the player will need to intervene that being the case why penalise the player and if you do how great should that penalty be?
The only penalty that I can see you could realistically apply is an attack delay so units operating within a plan face no attack delay while those that are ordered to do something outside of a plan will face an attack delay.
I'd guess the "penalties" are scaled with the deviation. Ordering a few divs to help another group that is in a bind just a few provinces away and then go back to the plan shouldn't penalize you too much, but sending the group that was meant to take St Petersburg in Sevastopol instead should be a huge hit for those divs.
Also i believe the biggest penalty is not having a plan or failing to have enough time to prepare the plan.
Attack delay was not a very good mechanic imo, it felt more like a quick band-aid rather than an actual mechanic representing operational realities.
This merging of counters when zoomed out appears to create less clutter on the map and allows the player to see and access a list of Division types within an area .
But knowing you have 40 Infantry,10 PZ and 5 Mot Divisions in Southern Russia is of little benefit unless you know exactly what provinces they are in and what they are doing.
You are in effect zooming out to an out-liner much like the out-liner you have in HOI III except that the means to access this out-liner is the merged counter. Not sure if the benefits of doing this outweigh the benefits of seeing where you Divisions actually are as opposed to having them merge into a counter where they are not.
You could have (for example) all motorized divisions in traditional grouping with STRG+1,2,3...
You can also select all divisions in the area and deselect those that you dont want.
Yeah, everything is speculation, because noone played the game yet. There's a reason, why there is attempt no.4 for battleplans. They said it themselves: It just didn't work and wasn't fun before. There is no reason to expect something to work, that just didn't work 3 times before. They know it. I know it. You know it.
I really hope they can pull it off somehow, but I don't think they can, because the idea itself is flawed.
And YES, that's speculation based on what we've seen. You're speculating too, if you think, it will be fine. I just don't see any arguments that support your thesis. All you say is that HOI3 wasn't perfect (well, duh!) and that some things improved (duh! again). So what? It still seems they messed up combat.
... and punishing the player if he wants to play the game (moving troops around manually), is just silly btw...
You assume that everybody thinks HOI3 was brilliant. There are lots of things better in HOI4. I love how the information for divisions changes when you zoom in and out. That's brilliant. It would still be way better, if there were real counters and no sprites or at least tiny sprites and huge counters (NATO counters ftw!). In all the screenshots I saw, I had to look twice in order to identify the correct position of divisions - thanks to sprites. Why are there no counters (counters only) hovering above the ground or something?
Penalty for sudden change of orders on divisional level is reallistic (and we dont know, what kind of penalty it will be - it could range feom one time hit to ORG to slightly lower combat efficiency).
IMO, it isnt a big deal - those objecting to that penalty will be able to just remove it.