Unit Choices in Hearts of Iron 4 - What do you want to see?

[phantomrider]

One of the possible deficiencies of the HOI3-4 system divisions is the lack of simulation of true support functions such as supply, medical, communication, security etc. One way to do that is to have each division have a headquarters unit with a set manpower cost of 3 to 4,000 manpower points (instead of the current 0). When you get above division level things really start to get "unreal" in that corps, army, army group and theater forces really were heavily loaded with "non-combatant" manpower, particularly when supply lines were long (think Germany in Russia or Africa or the US in Europe or the Med or the Pacific). There should be big manpower penalties for setting up HQ units at these above division levels (although 1 answer could be there already is in HOI3 for the US at least) as well as a requirement to set up these HQ units every 3 to 500 km to simulate the supply and security needs for getting stuff "to the front".

 

[Gratch11]

SP art and assult guns are not the same thing, the first fire indirect fire and the other direct fire, big difference. Its true that some models were used as both but usually they were either only used in one way, or much better as one of them, and thereby used more that way. The ISU-122 could be used as SP art but usually wasnt, it was mostly used as assaultgun/AT gun

Also assult guns, like Stug, later(42-43) became very good at AT. If im not mistaken I think I read somewhere that stugs killed more enemy tanks then any tank in the Wehrmacht.

 

[msaaim89]

HOI provinces are too small. Something like 1 unit per region, maaaay be.

Yes I agree, they are too small, but as Kigge suggested, it could be done as part of the theatre screen. Right now it is just a huge clutter. If it is region based, it could be done like in EU4 provinces but instead of permanently fixed, allow movement to neighbouring regions.

I had once the idea for an "off the map" garrision to suppress rebells. You would build a certain member of military police units which will be automatically distributed among the different states. If there are too few of them, you will get more problems in occupied territory - something like loss of supplies or damages to industry and infrastructure. There would be no whole divisions rising up (unless actively stirred up by your enemies combined with a lack of military police). You would not to have build and place a lot of units just to whack the few random rebell stacks - it would all happen on a pure strategic level. Still partisans can become a problem if you don't handle them properly.

Exactly. Right now it is just chasing random pop-ups from a dice roll.

I think this would be really cool, I often get confused when I have a lot of units on the map, and having less units to care about, for me, it's nice. But I think they could stay as garrison and then you could use a sortie button like in EU4 so they appear on the map to be controlled by you

Only units that do not fight should be off map. If police units do nothing but suppress partisans and dont engage in battle in any way, they can be off map. If Garrisons should be usable in say port defences against enemy invasions, they should be on map.

I agree with police, but I also think Garrisons should be province based as well as there is too much clutter. Of course that means there is a problem with controlling when the units engage enemy. Maybe allowing units to fight like they do in EU4 but also allow option to retreat to another province?

If something like this were implemented I would like it to be in a theater of occupation type setup and not single province based. Example, say as Germany you take Poland, France, etc. It will (i presume it hasn't changed from HoI 3) be occupied territory, you could then have a political tab similar as collaborator gov, exploitation etc that show every occupied territory, so occupied Poland, France etc show as different, and from there you can delegate production and manpower, so say the larger the area of occupation the more production and manpower you need to add to have it secure, say Poland require 10.000 manpower and X production to be kept relatively secure and functioning. Then you could spend production to place that force there, then it could slowly dwindle over a large portion of time depending on the situation there, say if the enemy start to retake area then perhaps the supplies in the territory go down faster as partisans increase sabotage and attacks to help the liberation army. (Assuming they are there to liberate)

On the other hand, if you go below that line the production, resources, manpower etc will lower and unrest will be more frequent. If on the other hand you place more equipments and manpower in the occupied zone production etc increase as you have a stronger hold on the area, drawback could be that the revolts would happen less frequently since you have more troops to keep it secure but when the revolt do trigger its stronger and better equipped since they have more places to scavenge weapons from your suppression troops, and you will have less equipment and manpower for your armed forces.

So it becomes a mater of how much resources you are willing to tie down in occupied areas, Its basically built on the same system as we had in HoI3 since you had to build garrison troops, but in this way it would directly affect parameters inside the occupied zone and keep them away from the map in the way you propose, simplifies it while still going deeper and adding to the occupied territory dynamic of the game.

This is a good solution for police units but for garrison units I don't think it is feasible. After, they are essentially fighting units that need their movements controlled.

 

[Amoral]

HOI4 will have a new equipment system which if implemented right will be able give lots of flexibility in outfitting divisions without needing a whole bunch of different unit types. I would like to see fewer unit types but with the ability to give them different equipment to allow them to specialize more in different roles or different expected enemies. I prefer this because it will give you more flexibility.

For example you could equip in Infantry division with cold weather Infantry kits if you were gonna send them to fight in Norway but if you wanted to move them to reinforce North Africa you could re-equip them with warm weather Infantry kits instead. If your Infantry divisions were gonna fight in rough terrain with poor infrastructure you could could give them them Infantry kits that had less heavy weapons so they that used less supplies and moved quicker but if you brought them back to a theater with good infrastructure you could give them an Infantry kit with more heavy weapons.

I'd prefer this kind of flexibility over locking units into certain roles and capabilities by requiring them to be a bunch of different specialized unit types. It would also give us the ability to differentiate different divisions even if they are the same division template. That way we wouldn't need as many specialized division templates for different situations since a more general division template could fill different roles depending on what they are equipped with.

Or instead of having to click some check-box when moving between Norway and Africa they could just be 'infantry divisions', and the assumption can be made that if they have supplies then they have warm boots, or suntan lotion, whichever is called for.

if you make specific troop types for different environments you are just adding one more fail state for the AI. I don't think that this chrome is worth it.

 

[Jazumir]

[....]
I agree with police, but I also think Garrisons should be province based as well as there is too much clutter. Of course that means there is a problem with controlling when the units engage enemy. Maybe allowing units to fight like they do in EU4 but also allow option to retreat to another province?
[...]

There´s a problem with your enemy being unable to see it.

 

[Evilfisher]

would be better if different divisions was created based on the training policy

 

[Premu]

There´s a problem with your enemy being unable to see it.

In my original idea there wouldn't be "invisible" divisions actually engaging the main enemy forces. The occupation forces wouldn't be a whole division or even a whole brigade per province. They only exist to handle these pesky partisans and will retreat if a province is lost. (I.e they return to the "pool" where they can be redeployed automatically.) With the state concept we don't even need a strict number for each province, though - it would be sufficient to have a certain number of such occupation troops for the whole state which will reduce the partisan activity in all provinces. The more controlled provinces the state contains the more occupation troops are needed - but this can be handled automatically if you provide a sufficient amount in the pool for such purposes.

 

[Jazumir]

As i said earlier: If a unit will not fight the enemy (´s regular forces) it can be off-map. If it does engage regular enemy forces, this is a no-no.

 

[Kovax]

In the earlier discussion about brigade types and support units (ART/AT/RCN), the one sticking point is that Paradox has not yet indicated exactly what the various support icons in the division screen do.

If they bring up a slider or selection screen where we can assign HOW MUCH of a particular support element the division has, and assign priorities for upgrades and reinforcements independently of the basic divisional manpower, then we have the flexibility to allocate relatively more ART or more AT, etc., to that type of division. This has the potential to be an extremely powerful tool for crafting and fine-tuning the army of your choice.

If it's merely a "yes/no" toggle, and has no options for its own priorities, it will typically be "yes" for 95% of the cases, and not of much use in creating a wide range of potential division types. In essence, there's no reason NOT to have all of the options in most divisions, other than a few specialist divisions where the support elements would just slow them down in the terrain where they operate best. Without the ability to set levels of the various support elements, the only factors that really differentiate one division template from the next are how many line brigades are there and whether they are foot, armored, mechanized, or motorized. I would seriously hope for more than that, for all of the effort that went into making the shiny new menu screens.

 

[msaaim89]

There´s a problem with your enemy being unable to see it.

This is were intelligence gets involved. If your spies are doing a good job you should be able to click enemy province and see exactly what is there.

 

[kigge]

This is were intelligence gets involved. If your spies are doing a good job you should be able to click enemy province and see exactly what is there.

Further more, one could limit occupation province policing to military police units and leave garrison units left as the weaker but cheaper units, and say, limit the area the MP "pool" are active in a occupying province to say one or two provinces away from the front, so that the occupying force do not directly engage the enemy, so as the front falls further back the occupying military police and local garrisons fall further back so that you don't get the problem where you would have invisible units the enemy could only know of trough espionage, this would make it so you wouldn't need to crowd the map with units and still have a deeper take on the occupation part of the game. One could even make it so that the MP pool drain away from the front provinces slowly, so that if the enemy break through your lines and manage to enter provinces with MP occupying forces still remaining they would be lost since they wouldn't be equipped or fully trained to fight a "proper" army and essentially be caught as they are retreating in a generally disorganized way, rewarding a breakthrough to the enemy by forcing the occupier to re-produce MP forces.

 

[TartanClad]

I am very much in favour of Colonial troops. Over 2 and a half million British-Indians served in the war (not all of them in a combat capacity of course, but the point stands) along with others from Africa, Asia and the West Indies under nations such as the UK, Italy, France, the Netherlands and even the USA (US-Philippine troops were the first US infantry to engage the enemy in WW2) and the ability to raise these regiments to support the Far-Eastern Campaign and the Africa campaign should be included to reflect this.

 

[Poh]

As few as possible, but enough to make it interesting.

its pretty hard to say when we have no clue how HoI4 will handle recruitment. But if we take the Armor tree which we have been shown i dont think every unit type should have access to the 4 subvariants. The Super Heavy should imho be a mix of a tank/td in stats with no subvariants. Having arty and rocket arty is also weird from my perspective. I know we have had them in the other games and that theres some flavour in having rocket arties but it could be handled another way. As i see it the two unit types are too similar for a game to include both (or the difference should be made larger).

 

[claydulaney]

Bingo! Most armies may have a couple of specialized divisions [mountain, marine, para], while the rest of the units had special equipment when outfitted to go to Norway, then the same division or corps would be withdrawn, sent back to the rear, and re-outfitted for Africa, Italy, or wherever. To me this means that while some specialists are needed [a ski battalion for the mtn div would seem to be a standard unit, like a para regt. and a glider regt in a para div], most divisions are regular troops with special equipment that comes via research, similar to HOI3.

This method integrates both unit construction and tech trees, which I think is a good idea.

Q: does the cavalry tree go light>heavy>mech>armored cav, or does the mech>armored cav types come from motor troops and armor, even if cavalry is ignored [again, as HOI3]? I think that the horse soldier is a dead end, the only relationship that later units had was an old name and flag that was "unretired".

As to superheavies - while they were Adolph's favorites, they were really useless in reality, couldn't cross bridges, etc. Someone mentioned the concept of building prototypes [possibly only one or two units so equipped max], and this would take care of it. In fact, every new equipment type could [should??] have to go through a prototype unit phase before full production. The time frame between prototype and full production could be small or large, depending upon the player's choice [so he can try out something new, like the fast, unreliable plane mentioned earlier] without disrupting production lines. That way, any changes [better engine, more armor, etc] can be added on with a cost [time and IC] of some sort prior to full production. There can also be an option to skip prototype combat testing and go straight to full production, paying any upgrade charges/changes as already described in the DD's.

THen you can build a battalion of MAUS's or whatever to see how they work.

Clay
who wants to preorder DVD's of HOI4 and any SF/FTM or whatever type upgrades, and not buy online vaporware!

HOI4 will have a new equipment system which if implemented right will be able give lots of flexibility in outfitting divisions without needing a whole bunch of different unit types. I would like to see fewer unit types but with the ability to give them different equipment to allow them to specialize more in different roles or different expected enemies. I prefer this because it will give you more flexibility.

For example you could equip in Infantry division with cold weather Infantry kits if you were gonna send them to fight in Norway but if you wanted to move them to reinforce North Africa you could re-equip them with warm weather Infantry kits instead. If your Infantry divisions were gonna fight in rough terrain with poor infrastructure you could could give them them Infantry kits that had less heavy weapons so they that used less supplies and moved quicker but if you brought them back to a theater with good infrastructure you could give them an Infantry kit with more heavy weapons.

I'd prefer this kind of flexibility over locking units into certain roles and capabilities by requiring them to be a bunch of different specialized unit types. It would also give us the ability to differentiate different divisions even if they are the same division template. That way we wouldn't need as many specialized division templates for different situations since a more general division template could fill different roles depending on what they are equipped with.