Tiered Commands.

[Sirveri]

I used to occasionally play a game called Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I think it was the fourth in the series. They had a interesting thing you could do with military leaders. Basically you'd send out your armies, and then one person would lead one unit, and he could have up to two other people under him helping out. This was great if you had a person who had a good combat ability, but a really crappy war rating. I think that this could in theory be in some way used in HoI2 to good effect.

Say you've got a Lt. General with 3 motorised infantry. Tack on a Armor division and a Mj. General with Panzer Leader, and boom, away you go. You're not violating command limit cause the major general would bump up the limit and you'd gain the effects of panzer leader for your tank. Maybe have the benie divided between all the units that can have it past the command limit? I dunno, working theory here.

 

[aprof]

A good idea there. But I would guess the biggest trick would be to get it balanced.

As a simple example - each Field Marshall can command three Generals. Each General can command three Lt. Generals, which can command three Major Generals, which can command one division. So an FM is commanding/affecting 27 divisions. Each General, nine. Each Lt. General, three. All can pass down their effects.

So each Major general might be getting bonuses from three higher commanders. Some of those combos could very powerful without a very careful balancing of how the effects are passed down.

Imagine FM Guderian over Gen. Manstein, over Lt. Gen. Rommel over Maj. Gen. Manteuffel!

 

[Orthank]

I always thought that it exactly works like that.

 

[aprof]

I always thought that it exactly works like that.

IIRC, only one of the generals traits is used, though they do extend their command limits. I was following the idea that all traits are passed on to their subordinates.

But I could be wrong...

 

[Sirveri]

My main 'issue' at hand is that I hate to make all these fcuking stacks. OK, this stack has a single Pz IV Division with Mj. Gen Balck as their leader, he's lvl 4 and has Pz leader. OK, now in a differant stack we've got a corp of infantry under Lt Gen what's his name, skill level 3 with Offensive Doctrine. And then we've got FM Rommel with 8 PzGrenadiers and 4 Armor... Now repeat to the nth Degree.

What I was thinking, is that, if I want to add some armor support for my infantry, I could roll them into the squad and then attach a tank leader Mj General to bump up the command limit and give them Pz Leader. As it stands now, I have no make a seperate Division, and more importantly, NAME it (makes it much easier to track units), then force move them every where together. So basically just making a seperate division with that commander, and somehow binding those two unit stacks together is probably what I'm thinking of or looking for.

 

[Chaplain]

What I was thinking, is that, if I want to add some armor support for my infantry, I could roll them into the squad and then attach a tank leader Mj General to bump up the command limit and give them Pz Leader. As it stands now, I have no make a seperate Division, and more importantly, NAME it (makes it much easier to track units), then force move them every where together. So basically just making a seperate division with that commander, and somehow binding those two unit stacks together is probably what I'm thinking of or looking for.

I like this idea - simple and elegant.

 

[unmerged(15561)]

If only if only....

 

[Slargos]

A system where every division is assigned a major general would need a scheme of auto-assignment.

If you think assigning commanders to 20 corps is a pain, wait until you have to manually assign commanders to 400 divisions!

 

[jpd]

Yup. That's why I quite like the model as implemented in Victory! The battle for Europe, run by www.rollingthunder.com.

Just like the default HoI stack, unit stacks have a generic commander, without any special traits. Your country has 6, and only 6 named commanders for each branch, which can be assigned (or rotated) to any of your unit stacks. But that's it. No endless amounts of leaders to assign or to keep track of.

And let's face it. If you have so much commanders to choose from, in the end all stacks from friend and foe alike end up with roughly the same relative bonusses if each division in a stack is assigned a named commander. For relative strength comparison, it really doesn't matter if opposing units have a bunch of average named commander assigned, or both sides have an unnamed generic ones. A few commanders stand out of the crowd, and bring a real bonus to the fight. And that is what Victory! models. Only the few excellent commanders that really make a difference are actually present. All the others are abstracted away.

And if you are indeed thinking of 1) an assigned commander for each division and 2) auto assigning them to avoid micromanagement, then you are bound to assign hordes of more or less identical commanders, and you can just as easilly forget to whole concept and concentrate on the few way above average ones that command an army corps.

Jan Peter

 

[unmerged(23993)]

Leaders could give their bonuses based on the level they are in chain of command. Example: Mj Gen. gives all his bonuses to his division, Gen. gives 50% bonuses to all troops below him in chain of command and a FM gives 33% bonuses.
That would make wise to have best leaders in critical sections, even small ones, and wouldn't make all troops fighting under a super FM far better than normal(bad Mj Gen would ruin the effect).

 

[Sirveri]

Yup. That's why I quite like the model as implemented in Victory! The battle for Europe, run by www.rollingthunder.com.

Just like the default HoI stack, unit stacks have a generic commander, without any special traits. Your country has 6, and only 6 named commanders for each branch, which can be assigned (or rotated) to any of your unit stacks. But that's it. No endless amounts of leaders to assign or to keep track of.

That makes sense too, but it's not the way it currently works in HoI. And really it's all about command limits. My issue is not the fact that we have generic generals. We do have generic generals. The problem is that they're all Major General ranked, and can thus only command one division. If I have FM Rommel (cause he's ALWAYS a FM when a player plays Germany as is Guderian and Manstein) and he's not full, then sure, if I stuff him full of infantry and have slots to spare and desire to roll in tanks, I can do that. The system I'm proposing has just as much micromanaging as much as is in current HoI, it's just better organised.

I'd have no problem with generic generals... except that the generic generals they're giving us have a command limit of 1.