This is the second part (I) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and also one of the most popular strategy games currently on the market.
Last week, we looked at how HoI4 simulates combat, particularly its focus on operations (rather than tactics or, as we’ll see in later weeks, strategy). Much of Hearts of Iron‘s success is due to its effectiveness as an operational simulator and its operational model is by far the most developed part of the game.
This week we’re turning to the question of how Hearts of Iron IV handles what is going on below the operational level that the player operates at. Because the player does not themselves handle – or even really see – how their armies function below that division-level operational simulator, the granularity here comes from how Hearts of Iron IV understands ‘doctrine,’ which is to say the practices, guidelines and expectations that militaries use to guide their function in the field. The player is thus notionally given some ability, by choosing doctrines and determining the composition of their divisions, to shape how their units fight in the small scale (or at least how those fights are abstractly simulated). In practice, however, as we’ll see, HoI4‘s approach to doctrine is less developed than its approach to operations and never quite succeeds in really capturing the different ways that armies in this period understood themselves and functioned.
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This is, to be clear, historically speaking, a fairly absurd idea in practice, but the game makes it possible. Pursuing it early on is a significant handicap as it is necessary to bank around 500 political power before taking the major decision to hold the Imperial Conference (you need a few hundred for the decisions themselves, but also several hundred to run ‘improve opinion’ diplomatic efforts to get all of the relevant countries to agree).
I was finally in a position to fire the conference in January of 1941, while my armies continued to hold the line in the Low Countries.
Also, Iraq decided to go fascist at this point in the run and it went very badly for them, as you may be able to see in the background.
What is Doctrine?
Now military doctrine is a concept we have been meaning to get to here on the blog for quite a while and – at last – we have a good opportunity! Military doctrine, as a concept is one of those famously tricky to define concepts, but also absolutely essential for understanding how a military in any period – but perhaps especially in the Second World War – operates in practice. Parshall and Tully1 offer what I think is one of the most accessible and useful definitions of doctrine, “At its simplest, doctrine is the body of formal knowledge that tells a fighting force how it is expected to fight…doctrine is bigger than tactic in that doctrine encompasses not only the means for actually handling forces in battle, but also augments it with command structure and communications procedures.”
Doctrine is thus the term for the ‘standard operating procedures,’ as it were, of an army or indeed of an entire military.
The reason doctrine is essential is because, as Clausewitz says, everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult (drink!). The concept of a coordinated attack on an enemy position is very simple. The execution of a coordinated attack on an enemy position is very hard. After all, a real army does not actually consist of a few dozen units that, as in a video game, respond more or less instantly to the precise, clear and unambiguous commands of a single leader. Instead, a real army consists of many thousands (or hundreds of thousands or even millions) of human beings, each of whom is in their own experiential little universe – unable to read their minds and often unaware of the positions of their fellows.
If you want a large group of people to execute even the simplest of commands effectively, they need to already have some common conception of what the orders mean and how they carry them out. If you want two units, with different commanders, to coordinate effectively – often when they cannot be in direct communication – those commanders (and their soldiers) need to share some common conception of the normal or correct way to attack or defend. If I am commanding, say, a division’s artillery support (probably split into half a dozen or more batteries) and I am supposed to support a brigade’s attack in the morning, I need to have the same conception of what an attack means as the brigade commander. On the battlefield, armies cannot ‘make it up as they go along,’ they need to function according to standard procedures, a shared understanding of what an attack looks like, what a defensive line looks like, how to call out information on a radio, what orders mean and so on.
That shared conception is at the core of the concept of doctrine.
By the Second World War, this sort of doctrine had been largely formalized in nearly all of the militaries of the major participants. That body of formal knowledge consisted of training materials and best practices often laid out in an extensive catalog of field manuals, complete with their own bespoke jargon. As the war progressed, changes to doctrine could be promulgated the same way, with After Action Reports and ‘Lesson’s Learned’ summaries flowing ideally up the chain of command and new doctrine publications, updated field manuals and such flowing down the chain of command.
That said, as a pre-modernist, I have to note that while formal military doctrine – written out in field manuals – is a relatively modern invention, informal military doctrine is as old as warfare itself. Pre-modern armies also had ‘standard operating procedures,’ – often every bit as rigid as modern doctrine – which were learned informally, with older soldiers teaching newer ones (and young officers practically ‘apprenticing’ to more senior ones).
In short doctrine is necessary for armies (and navies, and air forces) to function. While it can be constraining, a ‘straitjacket’ that imposes standard approaches (sometimes to non-standard problems) there is simply no other way of coordination battles that might involve tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals who need to act in concert in order to be successful.
In terms of what doctrine includes, we run the real risk that because almost everything a military does (or has) interacts with doctrine, there’s a sense in which everything is doctrine and so nothing seems like doctrine in a kind of ‘the fish doesn’t know it is wet’ situation. Instead, while it is the case that doctrine tends to be evolutionary (smaller changes, iteration on iteration) rather than being designed ‘from scratch’ from first principles, it is helpful to think about building a doctrine from first principles to get a sense of what it entails.
Beginning at the operational level (we’ll put strategy aside for now), doctrine begins with a theory of victory, a sense of how an army defeats an opposing force. That theory of victory could be, for instance, attritional in nature (“we win by inflicting more casualties on the enemy until their force collapses”) or it could be based in maneuver (“we win by breaking through enemy lines and then maneuvering to cut off enemy forces or disrupt their logistics.”) Heck, in the case of some kinds of militaries waging protected war (or engaged in non-violence or terrorism), the theory of victory may be entirely abstract, focused on public opinion or popular will. Naturally armies with different theories of victory are going to construct very different doctrines for achieving those goals.
For instance, an army that has a theory of victory based on maneuver is going to need to concentrate a lot of force and coordinate it to create that breakthrough at a specific spot in the enemy line and then the ability to go fast once that breach is made, which is going to demand different command structures and procedures than an army that is focused on simply inflicting attrition. In particular, the maneuver army might want to push a lot of command authority down to lower ranks so that they can go fast in situations where communications with high command are difficult and conditions on the ground are rapidly changing. But a different army might want to pull command authority up to enable very large, well-coordinated, intricately planned ‘set piece’ battles, perhaps in order to try to shift the attritional balance in their favor (or achieve a very choreographed advance).
That theory of victory in turn is going to shape the conduct of a battle. To take our ‘maneuver’ theory of victory army, the next question becomes “what is the force structure of the sharp forward edge of your breakthrough force?” Do you want your tanks distributed widely or concentrated into a handful of units? What is the role of infantry in this attack? If the infantry and the tanks are expected to coordinate closely, they probably need to be placed together into the same divisions so that they can train together and be commanded together. What about the artillery? Do you want each small unit to have a little bit of artillery of its own, or a really big ‘grand battery’ at the disposal of the division commander, which can be unleashed in a coordinated manner, perhaps focused on a single objective in a larger battle? Doctrine is going to play into the structure of your army: what capabilities, equipment and troops does a given division (or corps or brigade or army group) have? What is its command structure? Which elements are subordinate?
Those concerns then flow downward into the fighting procedures for individual smaller units. When the divisional commander orders his armored brigade to ‘take that hill’ – what does that look like? Do the tanks have a formation to advance in? Does the infantry expect to go first in front of the tanks or to follow in their wake (or is the infantry not in the same command chain as the tanks at all and so will just struggle to mutually support each other – a persistent problem for the British Army for much of WWII). How does air power and artillery factor in here? What level of ‘fires’ support does the company commander advancing his company expect to get – and how does he expect to get it? Doctrine gets all the way down to “how does the company commander’s signal officer call for an artillery strike?” because in the chaos of battle you need standard ways to indicate a specific location and call a specific strike (grid squares, usually).
And again, the ‘best approach’ here may differ if the theory of victory is different! We might ask for instance, during a large offensive, what is the best use of your close air support aircraft? Are they best employed to focus their attacks on the point of breakthrough, contributing to the massed firepower at the decisive point? Or perhaps it is a better idea to have them striking deeper along an enemy’s operational depth, hitting reserves, reinforcements on the move, supply depots and rear echelon units that might be softer targets? The balance between those missions (with implications for what the guys on the ground expect from their aircraft) is going to depend on what you are trying to achieve (that theory of victory) but also how you are trying to achieve it.2
(As you can see, doctrine for land troops, navies and air forces are going to interact here too: these elements often need to be mutually supporting, so they need doctrines that link up effectively. Shore bombardment support gets a lot more effective if the troops ashore have a way to signal rapidly to the ships where they need the big guns.)
Mixed in with these choices are also just a ton of ‘best practices.’ Often the ‘best’ way to do something is not obvious or cannot be reasoned out easily from first principles but emerges slowly with experience. Something like, for instance, the ‘combat box‘ bomber formations, which enabled greater coverage and fields of fire from heavy bombers’ defensive guns (thus limiting – though by no means removing – the damage enemy fighters could do) had to be developed and refined based on experience from the field. Already mentioned but shore bombardment doctrine in the United States Navy evolved a lot during the war, particularly the somewhat counter-intuitive realization that often cruisers and destroyers provided the most effective shore support because their lighter (though still massive by land-warfare standards) guns could be quick, accurate and responsive, whereas the Big Guns on battleships were harder to fire ‘danger close’ and slower to get effectively on the target.
But what I want to stress is just how expansive doctrine ends up being. It isn’t just a simple tactical field manual – for one, by World War II, tactics are so complex that the ‘simple tactical field manual’ for a combined arms division with motorized, mechanized and armor elements supported by artillery and anti-aircraft along with maintenance and logistics elements would be enormous (in practice that’s dozens and dozens of field manuals). But equally command structures, communications practices, unit structures (what elements go in what division at what level), operational concepts and training procedures all fit into doctrine too.
And all of that matters because it gets to how two armies with broadly similar equipment can fight very differently, because they understand what they’re doing with that equipment differently, because they have different practices for its employment and different training to set up those practices. So doctrine is really important.
In the meantime, I focused on locking down North Africa and dealing with the Italian Navy, the Regia Marina. I had split my navy into two main battlegroups, a home fleet (organized around my more modern, deadly fast carrier group) and the Mediterranean fleet, organized around eight of my big ol’ battlewagons. The French navy was a lot less helpful than expected, so my fight with the Regia Marina ended up being somewhat attritional: the Mediterranean fleet won a series of battles basically trading screens favorably with the Regia Marina. Under normal circumstances, the way naval battles work in HoI4 is that damage accrues first to the smaller screening ships, so for the most part you have to ‘burn off’ an enemy’s supply of destroyers and cruisers before getting to put away their capital ships.
The Doctrine Tree
Sussing out how Hearts of Iron IV handles formal doctrine is actually really easy: it is a specific, discrete game mechanic called ‘doctrine,’ which is then split between land doctrine, air doctrine and naval doctrine.
That said, I think it is fairly clear that this is a set of mechanics the Hearts of Iron IV team has never been fully satisfied with. You can tell because the doctrine system has undergone more changes than most core Hearts of Iron IV systems, getting two major overhauls and a ton of minor tweaks. On release, doctrine was part of the research system and so doctrines were basically technologies which thus competed for research slots with every other kind of technology. However with the 1.11 patch (in 2021), doctrine was moved out of the research tree into its own space and used ‘army/air/navy experience’ as its currency instead of research time. Then with the 1.17 patch (in 2025) the system was massively overhauled again to drop much of the ‘tree’ structure entirely.
I want to talk about both the system as it existed post 1.11 and post 1.17, because I think both doctrine systems help understand what the developers are trying to do and also expose some weaknesses with the end result. We’re going to focus here in particular on Land Doctrine, but in each case the Air and Naval trees work basically the same way.
Let’s start with the ‘old’ doctrine tree:
Basically the structure here was a series of doctrine paths. Players first had to choose a tree (you could only develop one of the four doctrine categories) and then spent army experience (or air experience or navy experience for those trees) to ‘buy’ each progressive notch on the tree (originally this was research using technology). At a couple of points in each tree, it branched and the player chose one of the two branches (losing access to the other branch). Each stop on the tree confers a set of statistical benefits, making your divisions (or air wings, or ships) slightly better in a given way. The currency for this is that army/air/navy experience, which can be gained in peacetime slowly through having theorists in your high command or by doing military exercises, but is gained rapidly during a war simply by fighting, representing the battlefield’s role as a harsh teacher.
And you can see what this system is trying to do. Each of the four major ‘trees’ is meant to represent the military doctrine of one or more of the major powers. The Mobile Warfare Doctrine tree is meant to reflect German doctrine through the war (generally called by its German name, bewegungskrieg, ‘maneuver warfare’), with split branches favoring offense or defense meant to reflect the potential for Germany to get in over its head and have to shift to a more defensive approach to warfare (as it did, historically). The Superior Firepower Doctrine tree is meant to reflect the American approach to the war, with split branches that honestly don’t make a whole lot of sense and mostly gesture towards late- or post- Cold War doctrinal revisions (AirLand Battle was a 1980s US military doctrine and a significant depature from what came before while the phrase ‘Shock and Awe’ is most often associated with the 2003 Invasion of Iraq). The Grand Battleplan doctrine is meant to reflect countries that stuck closer to WWI tactical approaches (France, Britain, Japan), with one line for increasingly artillery and armor heavy British doctrine and another for Japanese infantry infiltration tactics. The formal doctrine it most clearly evokes is French Methodical Battle (La Bataille Conduite). Finally, the ‘Mass Assault’ doctrine was supposed to encompass both Chinese and Soviet approaches and that’s just…a real problem for reasons we’ll get into in a moment.
The update changes this system, recognizing that it was way to rigid. So the new post-1.17 system replaced the single doctrine tree the player must choose with a ‘grand doctrine’ and then supporting modular doctrines for each combat ‘arm.’ Thus a country’s army doctrine becomes the sum of its ‘grand doctrine’ (representing overall operational concept), plus a choice of one of several infantry, support, armor and operations sub-doctrines. That said the main four ‘grand doctrines’ retain the names and framing of the doctrine trees.
A country picks a doctrine for each of these categories (spending army experience as before) and then as that unit-type (or any unit from the grand doctrine) fights, they accumulate ‘mastery’ which unlocks progressive tiers of bonuses. The idea is that you spend army experience to pick the kind of warfare you want to do and then get better at it over time as the approach is practiced and refined.
There’s clearly a second intention to this system which is to enable players to try to recreate historical doctrinal systems. That is very evidence in the original ‘four trees’ system, where each tree (or branch) is clearly themed after the doctrine of a specific combatant. But it remains true in the post-1.17 modular system. Players are going to quickly pick up on, for instance, in the ‘armor’ subdoctrine, that ‘Armored Spearhead’ shows an American tank (a Sherman), while ‘Armored Infantry Support’ shows a German tank (a Tiger) and ‘Streamlined Deployment’ shows three Soviet tanks (T-34s, I think, though so small and in profile they could also be IS-2s).
And on the one hand, I think this is a noble attempt to actually model something fairly complex and on the other hand I think quite a few problems remain.
The first problem, somewhat reduced but not removed by the new system is simply that the ‘grand doctrines’ don’t necessarily map on well to what major powers were doing or at least thought they were doing. Both the United States and the Soviet Union understood themselves to be attempting to do a kind of maneuver warfare, the USA attempting to reverse-engineer German maneuver warfare doctrine, whereas the USSR came into the war with its own maneuver warfare doctrine (Deep Operations), which it needed to refine but also actually train and implement because Stalin had purged most of the officers who knew and developed it. It is certainly the case that the United States pursued a firepower-based solution to generating maneuver, enabled by the USA’s much larger industrial base, but the goal was still breakthroughs and maneuver, not merely blowing things up for blowing things’ up sake.
Meanwhile, placing the USSR under ‘Mass Assault’ is honestly borderline insulting given that the USSR would finish WWII with what is generally now regarded as the most sophisticated maneuver warfare doctrine around. While Soviet armies often took huge casualties and Soviet commanders – especially early in the war – often didn’t seem to understand their own doctrine and engaged in under-prepared, under-resourced infantry attacks (not infrequently because Stalin demanded counter-offensives before they were ready), the USSR was not doing ‘human wave’ attacks a la Enemy at the Gates (2001) and indeed by the time we are at Operation Bagration in 1944, it is very easy to argue that the Soviets are better at maneuver warfare than the Germans (indeed one could potentially try to make that argument as early as Operation Uranus in late 1942).
Likewise, ‘Grand Battleplan’ as the umbrella for France, Britain and Japan is equally odd. The British Army struggled a fair bit with infantry-and-armor coordination through the war and generally preferred carefully planned ‘set piece’ battles, with a pretty clear legacy reaching back to the lessons of the First World War (alongside the French Methodical Battle approach), but the Imperial Japanese Army was devoted to the cult of the offensive and favored quick marches, surprise and tenacity in offense, rather than a slow operational tempo characterized by intensive planning. If I were to place the IJA anywhere on the doctrine tree, it would be as a kind of alternate branch of the Mobile Warfare tree: Japan was trying to do speed, infiltration and maneuver, just with infantry (for the most part) rather than with armor (for the most part). The limitations of a ‘light and fast’ approach become pretty shockingly clear as one gets into the back half of 1942 and the IJA starts tangling with well-supplied Americans and Australians who have a lot of firepower at their disposal. In short, the Imperial Japanese Navy may have favored baroque, overly complex and choreographed battleplans, but the IJA was very much a ‘cult of the offensive’ organization that prioritized speed and surprise – albeit with a lot less trucks and tanks than what European armies were using.
So in the notional layout, these doctrines are often a weak match for the historical countries they are supposed to represent. The bonuses also often do not line up clearly either. Admittedly, the new doctrine system is significantly better in this regard. One of the classic balancing goof-ups of the old system was the ‘Mass Mobilization’ branch the Mass Assault Doctrine, which offered bonuses to manpower and reduced frontage for infantry brigades (enabling a country to get more infantry in the fight on a given section of front), which was meant to represent Nationalist China and (to an extent) the USSR reaching deep to mobilize enormous amounts of manpower – a ‘muscle not metal’ approach – but actually was basically useless for those countries (they have plenty of manpower anyway) and extremely useful for small highly industrialized countries which desperately needed the huge boost to recruitable manpower.
The new tree avoids these kinds of errors, but in playing I have generally found the connections between doctrine choices and actual operational concept to be fairly weak. Part of the problem is that doctrines are presented as a confusing collection of tiered bonuses to a bewildering array of things. Which is better for building armored divisions arming for decisive breakthroughs: +5% breakthrough, +10% soft attack and a flat +5 organization for medium and heavy tanks or +10% breakthrough, +2 organization and +0.05 recovery rate? I have six hundred hours in this game and I would still have to consult a guide to figure out which was the better option for that specific concept.
Meanwhile, balance remains a problem. Ideally, this would be a case where different countries would find that different doctrines supported their own mix of industry, terrain and strategic needs. In practice, each balancing patch tends to just alter the array of ‘meta’ choices with entire grand doctrines almost invariably assigned to the scrap heap of ‘never pick.‘ This is a problem that, as we’ll see, is intensified greatly by the division-designer. From my perspective, this system could actually do to be a lot simpler, with the player being tasked to think about their intended operational concept and then guided into choices that fit that concept, rather than having to confront a bewildering array of stat bonuses which often don’t do what they are supposed to historically model in any event (and do almost nothing to really tell the player what they are supposed to do).
The final issue here is very strong path dependence in doctrine choices. Historically, armies frequently tried things, realized they didn’t work and then tried new things. American amphibious operations doctrine – which by 1944 was an absolute marvel of efficiency in managing enormous and extremely complex operations – largely emerged by getting it wrong a whole bunch. The marine landings at Gaudalcanal in August of 1942, for instance, failed to load supplies so that they would be unloaded in the order of the most essential to the least, leaving the marines in the lurch when Japan contested the waters around the island, stopping unloading prematurely. That problem was fixed for the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November of 1942, but the major takeaway of allied commanders from the Torch landings is that if they had been facing truly fierce, determined resistance, they probably would have failed. In short, no one set out in 1939 to plan D-Day: the doctrine for Operationa Overlord emerged out of a process of trial and error.
And while the current doctrine system allows for lessons learned and experience gaining through the ‘mastery’ system (which ‘levels up’ existing doctrines to unlock new bonuses), it heavily penalizes shifting doctrine in response to changing conditions. A player that goes in with an ‘Armored Spearhead’ oops-all-tanks armored division concept only to have to realize they need to back up to a more combined arms ‘Armored Infantry Support’ doctrine – which is exactly the experience Britain and the United States had with their armored doctrine! – is basically forced to reset to zero as if they hadn’t learned anything at all.3 The player is aggressively penalized for trying an operational concept, realizing it doesn’t work and trying to shift tracks (because it resets their bonuses and costs more currency), but this is exactly what the most successful armies in World War II did.
However none of these issues are, in my view, the biggest issue for Hearts of Iron IV‘s concept of doctrine. The biggest issue for HoI4‘s doctrine is that the most important – for the game itself, at least – parts of doctrine do not take place in the doctrine system.
However, the near total destruction of the German surface fleet the previous year gave me the ‘trump card’ which I now played, moving the Mediterranean fleet into repair, while shifting my fast attack fleet into the Mediterranean to keep the pressure on the Regia Marina.
The result was suitably lopsided: by the end of June, 1941, the Regia Marina had largely ceased to exist except for a smattering of submarines and a handful of surface ships that would be badly outmatched by my repaired Mediterranean fleet. That was important as it bought me the opportunity to now transfer my fast battle group East.
The All-Powerful Division Designer
As noted in the first part of this series, the basic unit of Hearts of Iron IV‘s combat is the division. Now, as we’ll see, divisions can vary a lot in size – indeed, divisions can be as small as a single brigade or practically as large as an entire corps. But the game treats all of these units as divisions, which cannot either be split or merged.
This is actually a significant change from previous entries in the series. In Hearts of Iron III, countries actually produced brigades (each of a single type) which were then combined into a division (which could have 2-5 brigades in it). A player could thus pull a brigade out of a division and attach it to another, or cobble together a division from available spare brigades, or produce new brigades and attach them to existing divisions and so on.
By contrast divisions in Hearts of Iron IV are produced to templates. Each division has a template which determines what its components will be and it will automatically attempt to pull the necessary manpower and equipment to bring those components to full strength. In essence, the actual ‘brigades’ in the division structure are really mostly notional: a division is actually a container for battalions (the sub-units of brigades in the division-designer). In addition to the core ‘line’ battalions (which determine a division’s combat width – the amount of frontage it takes up), a division also can have support battalions, which boost its capability (and raise its equipment and manpower cost) without adding frontage, but it is limited to five of them.
As divisions go, this configuration makes for an effective defensive unit, with high enough piercing to stop light and even medium tanks and enough soft attack to mulch infantry, however its low breakthrough means it should not be used to attack much (or you will eat manpower losses).
Because the United Kingdom is very much ‘long’ on industry but ‘short’ on manpower, I’ve opted for a template that emphasizes metal over men, thus the full raft of regimental and divisional support (including a field hospital to limit manpower losses). That equipment makes this a fairly expensive template, but Britain can pay for it. I’m sure a player could punch these divisions around, but the AI really struggles to make offensive headway against 3 or 4 of these divisions on good terrain.
Divisions go into training as whole units (the entire division is trained together before deployment), but once deployed, they remain ‘attached’ to their template. If the player changes a division’s template, that instantly changes the expected composition of every division using that template. All of those divisions will immediately request or return the necessary equipment and manpower from (or to) the national stockpile to reinforce up to their new expected components. In practice, because being under-strength for a given composition can impose pretty significant penalties, it is a wiser idea to copy an existing template, upgrade it, and then swap divisions over to the new template when they’re out of combat.
Now this needn’t necessarily be a problem if you could have infinite division templates, but you generally can’t. Modifying a division template requires army experience, the same currency used to buy doctrines (and also to modify vehicle templates – so designing a new tank or creating an upgraded version of an old one burns this currency too). In practice, of the three ‘experience’ currencies, army experience remains precious the longest in the game, because it is used for the most things. That means that unnecessary division template changes burn a real and limited resource.
Again, I make no claims to this being an ideal division template – like all of my division templates, it’s a design I got stuck on quite a few versions ago and it works well enough in single-player not to be worth changing.
That will matter to a different degree to different countries. France and Britain, in particular, tend to be ‘starved’ for army experience prior to the start of the war where they then suddenly have to face Germany. You can see the resulting incentives play out in the UK run I have been showing in the screenshots: my army experience was very carefully ‘budgeted’ until well into 1942. I needed enough army experience to have two effective infantry division templates (one for UK infantry, one for units recruited from India) ready in 1939, plus enough to create templates for one armored and one motorized division, to design the tanks and self-propelled artillery to go in those divisions and finally to buy all of my sub-doctrines. That leaves functionally no space for specialized division templates.
Now what the AI does is it ‘versions’ its division templates (because it costs nothing to copy an existing template you already have), causing the AI to end up with a dozen or more templates, which are all incremental changes on each other. But my sense is most players do what I do: they maintain a handful of division templates which they work hard to get to a ‘final form’ before deployment and then subsequently make on minimal changes to.
Otherwise, this is a 4-4-1 on 26 width; the meta is for larger divisions, but honestly this division is already unusually big compared to historical armored divisions (300 tanks!). Whereas the leg infantry division has ~100 breakthrough and the mechanized infantry division ~200, this division has 745 breakthrough, enabling it to attack while taking relatively little damage, while its high attack value ensures that the defenders will absolutely take heavy damage.
Note that I am exclusively using medium armor – no light armor or heavy armor – for both my tanks and self-propelled. This is to save on research. Britain has good research ability, but is pulled in many directions, needing to maintain top of the line ships, aircraft and land warfare, so any simplification (like being able to ignore heavy and light tanks) is welcome.
The result are, frankly, ‘cookie-cutter armies.’ In that UK run, by the summer of 1944, my army consisted of 305 divisions (roughly 3 million men) using just seven templates (two of which are actually identical ‘colonial’ templates to pull manpower from India and Malaya; they stay unique even after those countries are absorbed, so it is really five templates). My main force in Europe thus consists of 130 exactly identical infantry divisions, backed by 13 exactly identical mechanized infantry divisions and 13 exactly identical armored divisions.
This is, to put it lightly, not how actual divisions generally worked. Of course divisions might be of different sizes and strengths due to combat losses (something HoI4 considers), but while most countries did have a standard ‘template’ sense of what an infantry division or an armored division should look like, that was no guarantee at all that every such division did look like that.4 The division template, for instance, treats light, medium and heavy tanks as no-substitution battalion types, but actual Panzer Divisions varied quite widely in how many light, medium or heavy tanks they had. Pretty much everyone threw divisions forward that were effectively missing elements, either because those elements hadn’t been stood up yet or were still in transit or had been detached for some other job. Hearts of Iron IV has no way to represent that: you either have all of a division or you have nothing. A division can be damaged, but it cannot be incomplete and it can never be ‘non-standard.’
The larger problem is the degree to which the division designer – the screen where you decide what battalions go into your division templates – largely usurps the role of doctrine. In the Second World War, having the right doctrine and training to get tanks and infantry to cooperate together effectively what substantially more important than the simple question of deciding to have armor divisions – command structures, communications, tactics all mattered. But the lion’s share of the work in Hearts of Iron IV is simply accomplished by placing motorized infantry and armor in the correct quantities into the division designer in a single division. The job of learning how to coordinate armor and infantry is now mostly complete; having the right doctrine provides a noticeable but decidedly smaller bonus to that ‘correct’ division template’s performance. But in fact, as was repeatedly demonstrated in World War II, having the ‘right’ division structure was not enough to produce victory, not without soldiers and officers who understood how to use that structure.
The importance of the division designer is, of course, most visible when it ‘breaks.’ For the first few years after release, for instance, due to the way frontage was calculated, divisions at exactly 10, 20 and 40 width functioned much better than any other configuration. That has long since been patched, but the example (especially in single-player) that remains is what the community refers to as ‘space marines:’ a leg infantry division with a single armored battalion in it (typically heavy armor, because who cares if it goes fast). Because battalions do not have stats, divisions do, the one battalion of armor has its armor value averaged across the entire division, which can push it just enough enough to get over the armor-piercing break-points for regular infantry or infantry with just support anti-tank, which triggers a massive reduction in the damage that division takes. Thus the label ‘space marines’ because the division fights as if its infantry were wearing powered armor. ‘Space marines’ can thus easily outmatch basically any division the AI will produce, although in multiplayer, players are well aware of this trick and can counter it.5
The irony is, of course, that this idea – distributing heavier tanks across the entire infantry force more or less evenly – was tried in World War II, but it was famously ineffective. This was the French and British approach to armor, the ‘Infantry Tank’ and the actual observed effect was that there were never enough tanks at the critical point when they were ‘sprinkled’ like this.
As a game design element, the division designer gives the player so many buttons and knobs to twist and turn that it is almost inevitable that players are going to min-max divisions out of the system that grossly outperform the more-or-less historical division templates the AI has to work with. On the flipside, the division designer has some trouble really representing historical differences in unit composition. If you want an ‘artillery heavy’ army, for instance, you have to add ‘line artillery’ (artillery used as a main ‘line’ battalion rather than a support company) as a co-equal element with the infantry brigades – you cannot just expand the ‘support artillery,’ but in practice American and British divisions remained ‘triangular’ (three infantry brigades) in structure, with division artillery (‘div arty’) simply expanded to include more batteries. The line/support distinction in the division designer doesn’t seem to have a real world parallel (unless there is one in the Red Army? I am admittedly less knowledgeable about the Soviet military).6
Meanwhile the system is again incapable of representing Soviet practice well. While Soviet divisions might notionally be close to the same size as German, British or American divisions, in practice they tended to be substantially smaller. Importantly, a lot of the heavier supporting elements (like artillery) were concentrated not at the division level but at the corps level, with the result that a Soviet corps almost functioned like a jumbo-sized western division. You can sort-of-kind-of simulate this in Hearts of Iron IV by using relatively large division templates for the USSR and simply pretending they represent corps instead of divisions, but HoI4 simply does not have a level of organization for a corps.
And while division-size may seem relatively minor – what is the difference between two twenty-width divisions vs. one forty-width division – the way that Hearts of Iron IV calculates damage reduction via defense (when defending) or breakthrough (when attacking) has typically meant that oversized divisions are better, particularly for attacking. So whereas in the war itself, the Germany, Britain the USA and the USSR all settled on a similar size for an armored division (or for the Soviets, a tank corps), with around 200 tanks and 8,000-10,000 personnel, the current HoI4 ideal tank division is a monster with nearly 20,000 personnel and around 450 tanks. There’s a reason no one in the actual war made their divisions regularly that large.
The end result is that a lot of what in the real world we would term doctrine is expressed through the division designer, but that frankly the division designer feels like one of the ‘gamiest’ elements of Hearts of Iron IV that doesn’t do a great job of expressing differences in doctrinal approaches between countries (‘meta’ division templates are often used quite regardless of the country or the doctrine) or in modeling the divisions that, by war’s end, most of the combatants had settled on as ideal.
The key problem was actually airpower: the Luftwaffe still had the attritional edge int he air over the front lines. Fortunately, I was developing a strong industrial lead, so I would spend the next six months or so not only building up my armored forces but also increasing my rate of fighter production so that I could run Germany out of planes.
No Obligation to Follow Doctrine
A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine
(An apocryphal quote generally attributed to an unnamed Soviet observer during the Cold War)
On the one hand, Hearts of Iron IV makes a real effort to try to model the way different countries approached doctrine. I’ve focused here on land warfare doctrine, which really at the time mostly meant maneuver warfare doctrine, as for the major combatants in Europe the defining question was how ought the tank be used – but there is a matching set of questions for air and naval doctrine.
On the other hand, I don’t think this model succeeds particularly well.
By the war’s end, the maneuver warfare doctrines apparent in Europe really were visibly different. German maneuver warfare doctrine emphasized devolving command authority downward to create rapid moving, agile forces (a concept that regularly goes by its German name, Auftragstaktik, “mission-tactics”), which aimed to achieve breakthrough by focusing all of its firepower on a key point in the enemy front line. Soviet maneuver warfare doctrine (Deep Operations), instead pulled command authority up, focusing support materiel up at the corps and even army level. It also aimed to produce mobile breakthrough, but by engaging the enemy across their operational depth, using infantry, armor and air power to simultaneously hit front lines, reserves and rear areas to induce a broader frontal collapse. American doctrine was, in some ways less developed, but – motivated by the limits of how many divisions the United States could realistically deploy in Europe – focused on packing as much firepower as possible into the smallest frontage and divisions possible, often using absolutely smothering quantities of airpower and artillery.7
And Hearts of Iron IV doesn’t really draw that out. Infantry divisions with line artillery isn’t a cute trick for just Superior Firepower doctrine armies to pack a ton of firepower into a small unit, but a fairly standard template choice you’ll find used by players running a lot of countries. Deep Operations doctrine doesn’t actually provide a way for players to strike across the operational depth of an enemy: damage accrues to enemy divisions reinforced into the front lines regardless and there isn’t any simulation of collapsing rear areas. Even the basic question of ‘should the infantry or the tanks go first in an assault’ (‘armored spearhead’ (USA, Germany) vs. ‘armor as exploitation force’ (USSR)) isn’t really modeled in terms of which divisions take damage.
Meanwhile at the level most visible to the player – at the operational level – the player is under no obligation to follow their own doctrine. Playing as the United Kingdom on the Grand Battleplan doctrine which should mean a strong preference for exhaustively planned set-piece battles, I find often launch far quicker, less planned operations which ought to be something out of the Mobile Warfare doctrine tree. Sure, the bonuses from Grand Battleplan make my planning cap somewhat higher, but the difference isn’t large enough to offset other momentary advantages.
The result here is a valiant attempt to model the way doctrine shapes how militaries conduct themselves in war that feels like it falls short, in part because it is too afraid of actually constraining the player, to force them to actually follow their doctrine. In particular, the game is afraid of ever having units simply function badly because their doctrine is poor or because they’re being used in a way not suited to it, but of course that absolutely was the experience of various countries which tried to use armor without the necessary coordination and communications doctrines. As a result, the doctrine trees end up mostly as a set of bonuses which may or may not be optimal rather than something more closely approaching playstyles.
I am, at this point, however, in a rather stronger position. Victory in Ethiopia and North Africa has meant that I could move a potent field army East, meaning that Singapore is actually unassailable by land (indeed, I’ll be invading into Siam instead) rather than only notionally being so. Meanwhile the neutralization of most of the Regia Marina means that my fast battlegroup could move east, basing out of Singapore and aiming to hold the Straits of Malacca. Essentially my goal is to keep the IJN ‘trapped’ in the Pacific Thunderdome with the United States Navy (as Japan has attacked the Philippines and thus brought the USA into the war), where attrition will swiftly destroy them.
Operating close to your bases is a significant advantage in HoI4 naval warfare and so my squadron – with four fleet carriers – is more than strong enough to keep control over the waters around Malaya and Indonesia and deals some stinging defeats to the IJN in the process, hastening the failure of Japanese naval power in the face of the inevitable American naval grinder.
- Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (2005), 83.
- In the event, to grossly oversimplify the complex, the German preference in the war was to focus that air support on the decisive point (the Schwerpunkt), while Soviet doctrine focused on using air assets to strike the enemy’s ‘operational depth’ (while their front line was hopefully being plastered by the assault itself). At least by 1944, the American approach was in some ways just more, using heavier air frames (up to and including massive strategic bombers) to plaster enemy rear areas, while artillery buried the enemy front line and fighter-bombers made it impossible for the enemy to move anything by daylight for fear of being bombed. In some cases, such as the demolition of the Panzer Lehr division as part of the Operation Cobra breakout, US commanders assigned more bombers to hit an enemy position than the enemy had men (the 2,200 remaining Germans in Panzer Lehr got hit with about 3,000 aircraft in a single day). But of course that doctrinal choice has strategic implications in terms of production and how much manpower is going to the front versus going to the factories!
- There is an irony that, as of right now, the Armored Spearhead doctrine is actually a fair bit stronger than Armored Infantry Support, so far as I can tell.
- Players of other WWII strategy titles, like Eugen Systems’ Steel Division series, where the player has access to the components of one specific division at a time, will be immediately and quite strongly aware that divisions, even divisions notionally of the ‘same type’ did not always actually have the same components! 16th Panzer, 116th Panzer and Panzer-Lehr (130th Panzer) were all notionally Panzer divisions but in June of 1944, they had wildly different unit and equipment complements, which Steel Division represents fairly well.
- Before anyone asks, no, I do not use space marine division templates in single-player. You can see my infantry template up above.
- The irony is that Hearts of Iron III did have a real parallel: you researched ‘superior firepower’ which added one more brigade slot in the division and then added a second artillery support regiment to create something like the artillery-heavy British infantry division structure. For what it is worth, I feel like an obvious change here would be for a ‘superior firepower’ doctrine to work not by giving bonuses to ‘line artillery’ but instead to double or triple the size of support artillery components (thus also requiring you to have more artillery to supply them with), with a matching increase in firepower (but not frontage), to reflect what the United States and Britain were doing late in the war, which was massing a lot more materiel on a significantly smaller frontage.
- Though everyone used a lot of artillery, to be clear.
What’s that old meme? Might as well bring it up now, it’s classic.
In order to tell whose troops you’re fighting, fire a couple rounds at them, then hang up a dummy and leave.
If you come back to find the dummy with a trio of rifle rounds through its helmet, they’re British.
If you come back to find the dummy riddled with machine gun fire, they’re Germans.
If you come back to find the dummy standing guard over an enemy POW camp, they’re Italian or French.
If you come back to find the dummy decapitated with a sword through the gut, they’re Japanese.
If you come back to find the dummy stabbed, covered with treadmarks, with a red star painted on it, they’re the soviets.
And if you step away only to watch the entire horizon explode into burning fire as airplanes, battleships, and artillery reduce the grid square into shrapnel and ruin, they’re American.
On a more serious note, the division designer and equipment designer in particular are bewildering design choices. It’s simultaneously too gamified to be realistic, too granular to be fun, and too impactful to ignore. I honestly miss the days when you didn’t design equipment at all, and just unlocked different tanks and guns directly.
For a second there I thought you said that last dummy was hit by gridfire. Don’t mess with those guys.
Hilariously it’s fully in character for the Grey Area to be poking around WW2 incognito.
One of the problems I feel with the game is that it kinda *over* emphasizes the “produce one good/meta thing”. Which to be fair is probably at least partially incentivized (better have one tank model that you build a lot of than 15 where you have a small number of each)
But it’s especially notable for more “specialized” equipment: Especially the specialist armored stuff (SPART, SPAA, TD etc.) where both designing and producing them is often just not efficient (or not efficient *enough*) in SP. (or sometimes creates weirder incentives, like for a bit you were better off just building SPART rather than tanks, IIRC)
Similarily, I feel you don’t see motorized divisions to the extent that you should, for a varietyof reasons. (as contrasted to HOI2)
Theoretically that was part of what was supposed to have been solved by the chassis system. Basically every self propelled gun and tank destroyer was mounted on a modified tank chassis, which means that factories were able to assembly line out different components and have them assembled elsewhere, or at least work off of known blueprints and preserve technical knowledge. It didn’t cost a lot of retooling downtime to produce an upgraded version of a tank or gun, or to take a tank factory and start making self propelled guns.
The problem is that the lack of granular control and benefits on the sub-division level mean that you’re often better off never producing a lot of specialized chassis to begin with-it’s not too hard to also produce Stugs as well as Panzers, but why take the time to design a Stug? You don’t really need one to begin with, and it costs army experience. Better to just give your Panzers bigger guns so they can perform the same role well enough. The load of stats and such are so esoteric the player doesn’t ever really understand if they were better served by creating a dedicated system anyway, you’d realistically have to do dedicated testing with controlled combat situations to figure it out.
I think I am agreeing with the host when I say that part of the solution here is to devolve these decisions off of the player. Have the focus tree create recognizable weapon variants and then give the player a limited pool of resources to modify them. This more correctly models what the military procurement process generally looks like, which is more of a push pull system between various levels of the system and often highly dependent on the eccentricates of the countries military general staff or civilian manufacturing sector. It wasn’t really an option for Nazi Germany to not produce the STUG, Mannstein was personally involved in the project and the need for the weapon was recognized by a bunch of veterans, so on a bunch of levels there was impetus to make either that vehicle or something derived from it. Hitler didn’t need to say “I want a Self propelled gun!” nor have his generals draft up specifications from on high, the knowledge of what was needed and wanted was more diffuse than that.
And, of course, the times when the process did work from on high, with Hitler demanding bigly weapons[1] (See: H-Class battleship, Maus, etc.) it went absolutely terribly. This isn’t to say it shouldn’t be a part of the game, there’s a Wunderwaffle expansion for a reason, but the fact that the *default* procurement system in fact resembles the procurement process of deranged lunatics more interested in prestige than effect is a mistake.
As for motorized in particular, IIRC they were/are meta for the tank divisions because you can build them for cheap at the game start, while mechanized is too resource and research intensive to matter.
[1] Okay, so in fact the process was often more granular; the Germany industrial sector and General Staff would basically compete for Hitler’s attention for approval, and one of the surest ways to get approval was to promise to make something bigger, rather than Hitler directly saying “I want that but bigger” (which did happen more rarely). In any case it’s a failing of fascism and authoritarianism in general that decision making is pushed in this direction.
since your equipments are never obsolete in the game (you can always upgrade a panzer 3 to a panzer 4), there is less need to convert chassis to specialized variants, unlike in real life.
Your take on Hitler’s equipment preferences is ahistorical memery, I’m afraid.
– Plan Z was proposed by the navy prompted by its own desires. That Hitler didn’t care becomes rather obvious when looking at, y’know, the Anglo-German naval agreement
– Hitler approved of Plan Z, sure. He also approved of dropping it a few months later when the war started without making a fuss. Almost as if he didn’t actually care
– and some years later, he demanded getting rid of the big boats altogether
Coming to the air force, the emergent Luftwaffe did initially go for heavy bombers… But that was Walther Wever’s idea. Then people noticed that it was economically impossible and the effectiveness basically nil, and the strategic bomber approach replaced with stukas (originally an American concept that Udet fell in love with). Hitler loved it.
And army planning was still trying to keep things as light as possible straight into 1942, still focussing on the Panzer III above all else. Hitler did eventually interfere in the development of the Panther and Tiger to add armour – though inhowfar this was a bad idea is debatable, since given German demographics and the strategic situation (not enough manpower and in a defensive grind), focussing on survivability wasn’t exactly what I’d call an irredeemable error.
The famous super artillery in the 54- 80 cm range wasn’t Hitler’s idea, either. The army contracted the industry to produce maginot line crackers. It did.
The V2 was initially disapproved of by Hitler, as he recognised the considerable resource expense, although witnessing a test launch managed to win him over.
The V1, which Hitler did approve of from the start, was so staggeringly cost-effective, the Brits thought – correctly – that it’d just obsoleted the heavy bomber.
‘Hitler only liked it big and heavy’ is a nonsensical meme more disconnected from reality than Hitler in April ’45.
…Sorta?
There is scholarship that, at least with the H-Class battleship, Hitler specifically pushed for bigger guns until reigned in. Source: Garzke, William H. & Dulin, Robert O. (1985). Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-0-87021-101-0.
I am not deep enough into the topic to speak about the *validity* of this scholarship or review the primary sources, but I consulted it before posting to make sure that at least one of my remembered examples was true.
As you acknowledge with the other examples the question is a matter of degrees. There were situations where decision making process was more rational versus more irrational, but Hitler’s contributions were firmly on the irrational side. This didn’t always manifest in Hitler stenciling in bigger guns or anything, but it did manifest in how the upper levels of the procurement and design process worked. Hitler’s influence is not merely that he approved the V2, but that the people who made it were in power, thought that it had a purpose, and thought that he’d like it.
This, of course, wasn’t a feature of just Hitler or Nazism. Mussolini is documented as being a meddler too, who created procurement systems that were irrational and personally helmed that irrationality. It’s not an isolated trend. But there is actual scholarship on Hitler being part of this history, even if it was more complicated in most examples of *how* he contributed.
The Nazi knew they couldn’t win the war if they tried to outproduce the Allies with the same kinds of vehicle. Superweapons were the only hope they had, as other options were even more irrational.
Hitler does get a bit too much flack sometimes in military terms. By the very low standards of populist dictators with only low-level military experience he wasn’t bad at all (certainly better than Mussolini!). Earlier Hitler while rather risk-seeking was not always the incorrect one in arguments with his generals. But his judgement grew worse and his meddling greater as the war progressed.
One first hand account (I believe Erich Kordt?) has it that Hitler’s decision making method was to issue vague and possibly contradictory instructions, leave his ministers to interpret them, and then take credit for everything that he thought turned out well and blame the ministers for everything that didn’t. I think that may explain the ambiguity in what Hitler did or didn’t directly command.
(The account also says that Hitler claimed to have read all of Clausewitz – the account doubts that Hitler ever read anything.)
Tbf, you do actually see quite a bit of conversion of obsolete tanks into specialized roles in hoi4. It’s uncommon to see someone make a Pz4 and a Stug on the same chassis at the same time, but it’s pretty common to see them turn the pz4 chassis into a cheap Flame tank/tank destroyer once you have your Panthers being made. Overrall i do agree and it’s still pretty niche though.
I admit, this is more a question of game mechanics than the historical implications of the game, but how were you able to grind down the Regia Marina so badly even with a superior fleet? I would have thought that land based air power would be what dominates the Mediterranean, and unless you could win control of the skies, it would be hard to sortie out, but if you did, I imagine the Regia Marina would stay home at port under cover of their own fighters? Or am I importing too much WiF into HoI?
Also, what’s the situation with U.S. entry? How does the game model the political aspects there? (Or is that for a later post in the series?)
Technically you’re probably right, in that the Mediterranean can be dominated by land based anti naval bombers. In multiplayer this is the meta, meaning that if the allies lose their airports they basically cede the Mediterranean, and is how Germany is expected to invade Britain in a winning game too; dominate the channel with cheap naval CAS from land.
However the issue is that the AI isn’t terribly smart and can be suckered into fighting away from it’s land based air force, or at their extreme operational range, and tends not to use land based craft effectively at sea anyway. This isn’t unrealistic as the Axis powers were not terribly rational or effective when it came to using their air power, but it’s a marked difference from optimal play.
The USA typically gets brought into the war via one of two mechanisms. In a fully ahistorical game the extreme (Silver legion or Communist party) American focus paths eventually lead to intervention in Europe or Asia, at which point the cascading alliances almost inevitably pull them into a broad side of the war. Alternatively in basically all games Japan will almost always end up at war with the Philippines eventually, as even democratic Japan gets incentives to support their independence, and the Philippines are American puppets so that brings them in
Regardless of if the US goes to war or gets attacked you almost always end up with either the axis versus the allies, or communism versus democracy. It’s rarer but possible to have some sort of monarchist versus democracy war in Europe that the US is uninterested in and a separate communism versus democracy and or fascism war in the Pacific, which means you can end up with a very different world by the mid 40’s and a new, scarier, cold war. Every once in a while you see some truly epic final battle between the Pacific and Atlantic to end the game, if different sides win the two theaters.
And of course with ahistorical focuses you also occasionally see a south American war flare up that either starts or ends with a war against America, or Britain going full fascist and sucker punching America. America is actually quite vulnerable at game start because of it’s small army and the great depression, so it’s not fully suicidal to try that.
The “world tension” mechanic controls how Democratic countries enter the war. Tension goes up when countries do militaristic things, and Democratic countries aren’t able to take certain actions until tension hits certain thresholds. Fascist and Communist countries have no such constraint, which means they have some control over when and how WWII starts.
The US also has options in its national focus tree to give it a choice between neutrality (boosts their economy, but raises their tension threshold) and interventionism (lowers the threshold but makes it harder to build up the economy), so on the historical route it’s the slowest to get into the war.
I wouldn’t be surprised if national focuses get a post in this series, since they’re the main way the game presents “what ifs,” where a country could have taken a different route through history if its leaders did something different.
Actually the neutrality act doesn’t really improve the economy, not directly. It kinda averages out.
What happens is three fold.
A. Passing Limited intervention lets you switch off of isolation to the Civilian Economy mobilization law immediately (well, you need political power, which accumulates over time, but you can save it up). The benefits of that are myriad, as it basically gives you greater government control over the factories-the biggest effect is that it directly frees many of your civilian factories from making consumer goods, letting you make weapons or construct more factories. The game basically models the consumer economy as dead weight, with the only benefit being that it uses less energy than the mobilized economy, so this is a massive positive.
B. You then have to have *much* higher war support to mobilize further, I.E. from civilian to partial or total mobilization, unless you are in a defensive war. In practice, you’re usually technically defending yourself even if Japan declares war with a decolonialization focus, IIRC, so this effectively just stops you going directly from isolation to total mobilization. You aren’t really slowed much more long term, as you’ll bypass all the restrictions eventually.
C. The neutrality act line has further focuses that both give you the civilian economy law then add in extra military factories and infrastructure. In practice there is a delay between getting the next focus, often of half a year or so. Theoretically being at civilian economy for that period is worth a few factories to begin with, but the additional military factories and dockyards the later focuses give a little more than that, except dedicated to specific types of infrastructure instead of being controlled.
So you eventually end up the same place, either because you mobilized sooner and had more time to build factories, or got free factories later.
The actual *immediate* benefit is that limited intervention causes stability hits unless your war support is high already, and neutrality act gives bonus political power. Limited Intervention then makes that up by letting you meddle sooner, when it has more effect, and giving you some mildly effective bonuses to spotting and espionage that you miss out on otherwise.
Land-based air is certainly capable of being used to great effect at sea, with bombers and torpedo planes getting to participate in naval battles and make independent air strikes against enemy ships at sea or in port, but it’s rarely decisive. Part of this is that the AI doesn’t throw enough planes to seriously threaten a well-designed fleet, and part of this is that there are severe limits to how much damage planes can do to stop players ‘cheesing’ the naval system by just bombing everything. As long as you have enough fighter cover or AAA batteries on the ships to avoid losing too many capital ships, the air power kind of fades into the background.
US entry is kinda weird. Basically, the big international alliance networks of WW2 exist as ‘Factions’, the historical of which mostly exist at the start of the game (modeled as the ‘Allies’ led by the UK, ‘Axis’ led by Germany, ‘Comintern’ led by the USSR; more factions both historic and fictional can be created over the course of the game like Japan’s GEACPS or the Chinese United Front). Each country has a limitation on how they can join factions, and which factions they can join, limited by their Ideology (Democratic/Communist/Fascist/Non-Aligned) and geopolitical conditions: being in a defensive war allows basically everyone to join factions at war with a common enemy, and high enough ‘World Tension’ (caused by wars and other acts of aggression) can allow a country to join factions with matching ideologies.
The way this works out is rising world tension combined with the discrediting of the US isolationist bloc (done through the USA’s National Focus tree) will eventually allow the US to join the Allies on their own, usually once Japan and Germany are hip-deep in their respective wars of conquest, which incentivizes but does not require Japan’s historical preemptive strike. Japan’s AI script, in a game with historical AI settings applied, will tend to declare war on the Allies and the United States at the same time around late 1941, which will cause the US to join the Allies.
This may be of interest to people here as it involves “War People” author Lucian Staiano-Daniels. He’s also poet (prose poet?)
https://thecollidescope.com/2024/06/09/a-dogs-head/
and soon to be a published novelist
https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/the_quiet_death/
The novel is about an officer in the 30 Years War solving murders which seems laser-targeted to us
If you want to see how fine-grained doctrine can get, a lot of US Army field manuals are freely available online. I once took a look at the manual of operations for the Stinger missile launcher, and it not only explains how to load, aim, and fire it, it also explains how to watch for incoming airplanes effectively, how the weapons team should divide up tasks when engaging a target, how MANPAD teams fit into larger formations, how the missiles should be stored and transported, etc. etc.
There are also a lot of WWII reenactors and YouTubers that provide fantastic overviews of the primary sources if you don’t want to read them yourself. Not as academically rigorous, but for those of us who passed 40 and had to pick a war to become obsessed (old joke about men, if you don’t get it) with it’s good enough and far more informative than most media. There are also US Army training videos that have been declassified and put out for public consumption. They go into great detail. The US military didn’t always follow the doctrine, but they had it!
I also had the opportunity to read my wife’s grandfather’s WWII Naval manual. There was a lot of really interesting information in there, from how to protect hemp rope to how to stand watch as a lookout (starting with the hour before you were on duty) to how to wash your cloths (surprisingly useful information for me). They really tried to think of everything–and then revised it as the GIs and sailors found new ways to make problems!
Honestly, we live in a golden age for the sort of history that professional historians gloss over–the actual lived experiences of people. It’s just that a lot of it is being done by people with webcams for the pure love of history, rather than professors in lecture halls.
This army cook doctrine from ww2 even dictates how you’re supposed to organise produce in your refrigerators
https://archive.org/details/14110590R.nlm.nih.gov/
“Which is better for building armored divisions arming for decisive breakthroughs: +5% breakthrough, +10% soft attack and a flat +5 organization for medium and heavy tanks or +10% breakthrough, +2 organization and +0.05 recovery rate?”
Despite being very far apart in their approach to history, this is something that the total war series and paradox games share in common. There’s an underlying “simulation” based on a huge barrel of stats that creates a huge complexity overhead for understanding the consequences of your choices, even while those choices often have obvious right answers once you know the actual consequences.
This seems completely backwards to me as an approach to game design (complexity is a cost and interesting choices is the reward, and this approach “spends” that budget very inefficiently), but clearly there’s a big audience who like the idea of an underlying simulation. It makes me wonder if there’s a way to implement the (pseudo-)simulationist approach that doesn’t have this issue; unfortunately the two main companies that are known for it don’t seem to appreciate or care about the problem at all, as both take these systems and then layer on a lot of “+1 to floop or +1 to florp” choices that make the problem much worse.
While I can’t comment on how Total War handles it, I for a moment thought about Age of Wonders 4, because it indulges in the same issue.
On the one hand, there’s these huge complexity of possible choices of unit types, how your culture’s units can be complemented by the tome units (tomes are the game’s version of a tech tree) and how different unit enchantments can interact. There’s a lot of combos possible that can be absurdly powerful.
But on the other hand, despite all these possible ways to add extra rules to your units, my “doctrine” never particularly changed. Early or late game, my armies consist of 3 melee units, 2 ranged units and 1 support units, and I always form the same tactical battle line with them. Playing a High Culture with Order tomes doesn’t really amount to that much of a different gameplay than being a Dark Culture with Chaos tomes.
Now now, sometimes the improvements are labeled, in sequence
1. More Rockets
2. More Rockets!!
3. MORE ROCKETS!!!
There is a certain type of player who greatly enjoys reverse engineering these systems and finding the correct meta in them. That is the game to them as much as any of the rest.
The part I can never get over is how the internet makes it so you only need a couple of those guys… then everyone else just plays the “meta” and you’re back to “why not just make the choices obvious.”
A huge advantage of modifier-stats based game design is that it’s a flexible framework allowing endless permutations without needing bespoke rules to be codefied for every occasion. It’s not just Paradox games that do this. It’s how many cRPGs work and for much the same reason, it allows you to combine different skills and equipment in a way that is guaranteed to work, without a tailored system for each possible load out.
From the developers’ point of view, it’s easy to create a game element (ie, armoured battalion) with a bunch of numerical variables (eg, breakthrough, soft attack, hard attack, etc…); these are the effects. It’s then also easy to have other game mechanics modify those stats: you can have doctrine give +5% breakthrough, a particular general giving +10%, winter weather in Russia giving -20%, logistics problems -5%, a truck related tech +10%, etc…. These are the causes. If your player base is clamering for more complexity, just create more causes for the existing effects. A bespoke system that treats the interaction between each part uniquely (eg, the truck tech has a different effect in Russian winters than Malaysian summers, but only if the general has the petrolhead trait) or which give/remove playing options to the player might be more realistic (or fun); but that’s unfeasible to do when there is an exponentially large number of combinations of causes possible.
However, in a stat-modifier based system cause and effect are separate, so they can be mixed-and-matched freely, with the guarantee that the system will work no matter what happens in the game (provided you have some cap to not only -100% modifiers and division by 0 errors). You don’t need to test them all independently. It even allows different devs working on different parts of the game (or different DLCs) to do their own thing independently, “plugging into” a modifier without affecting its compatibility with anything else. Balance is hard to maintain, but you can keep producing content and be fairly sure that the game will work in a predictable, though not necessarily desirable, way.
For the players this gives a huge freedom of action (at least theoretical freedom even if most choices will be suboptimal) that players typically love, especially those who like to role-play in their gaming.
It also gives a fairly straight forward game plan which makes them feel smart. The good’old min-maxxing. Pick a small handful of stats to focus on (ie, medium tank breakthrough) and _make every other decision in the game based on what will modify those stats the best_. That gives a clear holistic drive for a campaign that informs every other decision you have to make, which if anything reduces cognitive load. Always pick the tech that increase medium tank breakthrough, ignore the others. And if you manage to get -95% cost modifier to something (eg, factory construction cost) then you feel like an absolute strategy gaming god. This modifier-stacking playstyle is a huge part of the eco-system around paradox games, because breaking the game is how you “beat” it on a meta level. This might only be true for the small minority of the community that is vocal, but Paradox is obliged by its shareholders (voted on in a 2024 resolution iirc) to implement things popular with its audience: so the sweatiest of 2000+ hour neckbeards who prowl its forums have huge sway.
As for the drawback of too much complexity, that’s more a problem of having too many stats in the first place. Specifically, of having stats that compute things “sub surface” which the player only experiences multiple degrees removed. Eg: I care about how good my armoured divisions are at attack, whether they’re good because the side armour of the super heavy tank is +5mm thicker or because radios in medium tanks give +7% coordination is irrelevant. Sadly, Paradox’s doctrine seems to be that adding more detail means a better simulation which means a better game. Neither of those are true of course: a simulation draws its power from knowing what to abstract, and a game is more than the engine powering its simulation. EU5 took that to its logical conclusion, and the sharp drop in that game’s reception over the last 9 months seems to be making Paradox reconsider – based on what’s planned for the next patch (1.4).
There is always an underlying simulation, the question is whether to give the player the levers to see and fiddle with the numbers.
For example, in any TW game, there must be *something* to make cavalry perform better during a charge than when bogged down. Any player who cares will therefore want to know how to trigger this; what is the minimal thing I can do that will still constitute a charge?
In a newer total war game this is a mix of mass, speed and a bonus to melee attack which decays over 10s. Understandable predictable factors that the player can play around to get mostly reproducible results.
Older TW games still had to deal with charges. They did similar things but they were much more tied to the animations of the unit models. So it wasn’t “you get a charge bonus for 10s”, it was “you get a charge bonus til the rider pulls his sword out” (don’t trust me on the specifics, I’m not a Medieval 2 expert).
The advantage of the older system is that it feels less gamey. Missile block is tied to the physical shield model of the unit, not some silly abstract armor stat. The disadvantage is that its very hard for the developer to balance things. If the testudo is ineffective, you can’t just crank a defense bonus from 100 to 200, you have to go make the shield hitbox bigger (and who knows how much that helps, it may be 5%, it may be 200%). In the end the players will still endeavor to understand what makes a unit die (melee swing animation #3 which has an unusually long recuperation period) and how to avoid it (never make your unit a veteran, because only veterans use animation #3); it’s just that it’s now much harder for the developer to predict or affect these factors.
I suppose you can remove the simulation altogether, say that division A has 1000 combat power and division B has 1200 combat power and subtract one from the other. Or discard even that and throw a dice. At least for Total War, that would remove all reason to play for most players.
AFAIK the notion that the testudo physically blocked things (at least in Rome 1/med 2) is a myth. Shields worked slightly different, but it was basically a dice roll, just like in newer TW’s. (AFAIK it’s armour+shield defence?) if a projectile comes from the approporiate angle.
Typo hunt:
“Heck, in the case of some kinds of militaries waging protected war”
ITYM “protracted”
The practice of sending reports up the chain and new doctrine down is also an institutional standard operating procedure. Would that practice itself be doctrine or does it belong to some other category?
“Air crew surveys” is an Air Force Spirit if you have the DLC (main effect is kinda silly, you spend air exp now to get more air exp in the future).
Officer Corps spirits are kinda unimprovable doctrine – you have a slot for the category, you spend exp to buy an option and it is not obscenely costly in exp but you only have one in each category – do you pick more air exp or better air coordination? Do you pick the extra torpedo attack or extra heavy cruiser and battleship gun attack?
If the main doctrine is a tree, then officer corps spirits are more like a garden patch that takes less investment but also gives smaller, faster rewards.
I think that’s an incomplete description, and the actual doctrine is much more complicated. For one thing, doctrine moves up as well as down: there are LOTS of cases of “hey we figured out a better way to do X” becoming official doctrine (or simply being passed laterally and widely adopted without ever becoming official).
But yes, broadly, there are doctrines for how information moves through a military organization. For an easy-to-find example, you could look at AARs.
One thing that hasn’t been explicitly commented on but which I think is implied on all the shuffling around is that the game obviously has limits of movement, but doesn’t appear to significantly charge you too badly for shipping units around.
I see that penalties accrue for the British using Indian Troops in Europe to *fight,* but there doesn’t seem to be much downside to having them in Europe. Nor does shuffling troops around SE Asia seem to interfere with merchant shipping in the region, though historically it very much did involve commandeering ships that would normally be carrying merchant cargoes.
Limited oil stocks constraining how much the US, Britain, and Japan were willing to shuffle their Naval forces around during certain periods was a thing during WW2 to my understanding, and that doesn’t seem to be a factor in the game.
In RL, shipping ground forces imposed a lot of costs – not only in ships and fuel (and the opportunity cost of not being able to use those ships to move food, munitions or other supplies while they are on troop transport duty), but also in needing to provide convoys and escorts for that shipping to prevent it from being jumped by submarines or airstrikes or even enemy surface groups en-route.
Parshall’s recent book notes pointedly that the US always prioritized escorting troop shipments over supply shipments (meaning the USN de-prioritized escorting war material shipments to the UK as a distant third after protecting it’s own heavy units and protecting the ground forces), whereas Britain was perhaps less sensitive to the PR damage from losing troops during transit, or perhaps just more desperate for material.
Convoys are a game mechanic, treated as basically a “capacity” used by your country to trade, transport troops, plan naval invasions and the like, and these can be destroyed by ships or planes, lowering your convoy count, and if a convoy transporting troops is lost killing a lot of the troops and destroying their equipment. I expect he’ll go more into this when he gets to the economy.
Fuel is also a mechanic, working as a stockpile you build up over time based on your access to oil, and which is spent down by all your vehicles, planes, and ships when they do things.
Games are not simulations, people have to want to play them. The game needs to offer problems which are interesting and challenging to solve, preferably fitting in with the overall theme of the game. Problems which are just difficult aren’t fun.
Shipping problems existed in the real WW2, but for me, and I suspect most potential or actual players, detailed logistics scheduling would not be enjoyable. Players want to command mighty armies doing battle, not be travel and logistic clerks.
There are people still out there playing Grigby’s War In the Pacific. And gameplay there is heavily focused on getting troops and especially supply in place to use effectively.
“Mr. Roberts”, the computer game?
Getting ready to start my 5th PBEM campaign. Each campaign only takes three or four years!
At the same time, the existence of “logistics sim” games like Factorio suggests that there may be some wiggle room here. Furthermore, when there are already complicated minigames like the division designer built into your “command mighty armies” game, it suggests, again, wiggle room.
The existence of games where logistics is the focus doesn’t mean that Paradox should add more logistics to HoI. I would argue the opposite, that if a logistics game exists 1. that’s great for people who do want to play a logistics game and 2. this doesn’t diminish HoI.
Games, like other creative works, benefit from conceptual clarity or design integrity or whatever you want to call it. What’s the game about? What’s the main theme? What do you want players to focus on?
For movies, Excalibur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail are both about the Arthurian legend, but they’re very different. Excalibur would not be improved by adding Monty Python sketches, and MP and the HG would not be improved by adding scenes from Excalibur. For books, Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice are both widely read, but P&P would not be improved by adding an epic LoTR style siege, and LoTR doesn’t need a comedy of manners ballroom chapter.
And I as a viewer don’t have to choose between one movie or the other, or one book and the other. I can appreciate both.
That said, there is a certain zero-sum aspect in that as a player I have only so many hours in the day and only so much money to spend, so there is a temptation to try and appeal to as many players as possible in any single game. The ideal game, from a publishers point of view, would the universal game that can be anything a player wants, so it’s unnecessary to buy any other game.
This runs into the other problem, which is finite resources for development. So again, the game developers have to decide what it’s worth spending money and time on. For a creative work, not a simulation, I firmly believe that designers should be leaving out as much as possible, not trying to jam more stuff in.
“The ideal game, from a publishers point of view, would the universal game that can be anything a player wants…”
Depends on the publisher. The Dark Souls series is built on the idea that the ideal game should cater to a target audience–and if people outside the target audience don’t like it, that’s okay. A game that tries to be everything to everyone typically falls flat, because there’s not enough to differentiate it from the masses of other games trying to be everything to everyone. Finding a niche and building the game around the tastes of that target audience, on the other hand, can yield significant profits. Dark Souls is hardly a rare indie game; it’s a huge franchise.
I will also argue that there’s room for weird games. Go back and look at NES or SNES games sometime–they were far more varied than games today. Okay, some of them didn’t work all that well. But some of these experiments spawned franchises that are still going (look at why Final Fantasy is called “final”). And truly novel experiences in gaming, because they are rare, are given more leeway. Portal, for example, is a fairly short game with fairly basic puzzles, but it was unique enough that people ignored these aspects and just enjoyed the game.
I’ll grant that for now publishers tend to avoid logistics simulators in war games, but that doesn’t mean that such simulators are inherently bad, it just means no one’s tried it yet.
And I think there would be an audience. There’s a fairly large number of guys (and women, but let’s face it, this is a male-dominated aspect of history) that spend their time watching old training videos, reading old army manuals, and studying exactly the kinds of stuff you say should be left out of gaming. I think there would be an audience for a game that told the war from a logistical angle.
Probably the best way to do this is either to have an indie game studio produce it and see if it gains traction, or add it as an optional expansion packet or small side game to the main series of games. Something like the Fallout base-building simulator.
Now (Sep 2026) would be a great time to release, or at least announce, such a game, as the Hormuz / Bab al-Mandab have made disruptions to logistics chains much more prominent in our daily lives than usual.
Overview of the problems the USN has had trying to support operations:
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-us-navy-gulf-supply-chain-uss-abraham-lincoln-diego-garcia/
(No criticism of the USN intended by me. They’re doing the best they can in an extremely dumb war.)
If anything, a (publicly-conscious) war going on makes it the _worst_ time to announce/release a game with connections to that war, as Advance Wars shows (It was supposed to release on April 8, 2022, but the game have one of its protagonist be Not-Russia that wasn’t demonized to high hell, and so when the Ukraine situation happened it got delayed indefinitely, and ends up releasing the next year.).
“If anything, a (publicly-conscious) war going on makes it the _worst_ time to announce/release a game with connections to that war….”
Agreed. The focus for most people in an active war is going to be the fighting spirit. From the nation’s side, we want people to have a high fighting spirit and willingness to do what’s necessary to win, and while paperwork is necessary it’s hardly going to make people feel heroic. From the individual’s side, seeing the fighting and then being asked to do the manifesting is going to feel rather anti-climactic. We have a very good example of exactly this process, by the way: Eisenhower wrote to Patton because Eisenhower had been put in charge of training troops instead of being allowed to go to Europe and fight.
A logistics game would be niche, but not so niche that we can ignore these sorts of considerations.
This is why something like WWI or WWII is a better option for a game focusing on logistics. Both are prominent in our cultural memory (WWII more than WWI, but WWI has some very interesting ideas that can be played with), and both are long enough ago that it’s not going to feel anticlimactic to deal with the paperwork. In addition, enough games exist focusing on the fighting that a game focusing on the logistics can be an interesting change of pace, especially if it’s done right and the player isn’t fully aware of what they’re shipping supplies for until later.
That said, scifihghf does have a point: Our culture is far more aware of logistics and supply chains than we were pre-pandemic. We’ve experienced a number of shocks that have rocked the economy, including a ship blocking a canal, the issue with shipping containers a while back, computer chip shortages due to data center construction, and the like. I think a game allowing the player to experience the impact of supply chains on war would have a better shot now than it would have in, say, 2020.
ok but, tangentially, now that you say that, I would like to play a game all about managing cargo ships’ travel, passenger train’s erlang, etc. in the chaos of war. Imagine having to barely put your dock under capacity because a ship just sank and you need to conduct the transfer from ship to anbulances as smooth as possible, or having to desperately radio a train that the track ahead just got cut off by enemy bombardment and you need to reverse NOW.
Then again that might just be me being high off the heels of playing 僕の航空管制官.
It’s somewhat represented. (“Convoys” has to be produced and are used both for foreign trade, transportation, and supplies) fuel is also somewhat simulated. (while convoys themselves do not consume fuel, divisions/airplanes and *especially* navies do) convoys can be intercepted and sunk by enemy shipping (especially submarines) etc.
There are abstractions (fuel is a global stockpile, f.ex.) and in practice the allies at least tends to be able to just produce /trade enough for it to not really be a constraint (the Axis can, depending on situation, be a bit more constrained since they don’t have easy access to oil producing areas)
“Parshall’s recent book notes pointedly that the US always prioritized escorting troop shipments over supply shipments (meaning the USN de-prioritized escorting war material shipments to the UK as a distant third after protecting it’s own heavy units and protecting the ground forces), whereas Britain was perhaps less sensitive to the PR damage from losing troops during transit, or perhaps just more desperate for material.”
I haven’t read the book, but this may be partly about two other factors:
1) Britain wasn’t shipping vast numbers of troops all over the place, at least not compared to the US. The US had to ship two armies worth to Britain before Normandy under BOLERO. Britain didn’t need to because, well, the British army was already conveniently located in Britain.
2) Britain tended to use its fast liners a lot for troop transportation, and these didn’t need escorting.
And there’s also the point that Britain was in the war to win it – the US did not have the same perceived existential commitment. Losing a few hundred troops when a transport was torpedoed would be unfortunate and tragic to Britain but it wouldn’t cause MPs to start undermining the government. (Giangreco is very good on just how bored with the war Americans had got by late 44-early 45.) The perception that Britain was losing the war due to lack of materiel, on the other hand, would.
having doctrines affecting the division designs would be a great idea!
Nitpicky sort of point, but “Auftragstaktik” is not the WW2 German term for something roughly akin to mission command- that would be “Fuhren Mit Auftrag” or “Selbständigkeit der Unterführer”. The US Marine Corps deliberately chose an ahistorical direct translation to avoid having words directly related to ‘Fuhrer’ in their manuals in the 1980s; but for historians looking to consult primary sources using the correct term can actually be very helpful.
Editing error:
Looks like “what” here should be “was”.
“My first attempt at an offensive breakout in Europe came in September and it did not go.”
-> did not go well(?)
“Luftwaffe still had the attritional edge int he air”
-> in the air
Thought: Since the military meaning of “strategy” isn’t really a great match to the game meaning of “strategy”, wondering if the game meaning of “strategy” is closer to the military meaning of “doctrine”?
I’m not sure strategy in gaming means anything as specific as the military meaning of doctrine. It seems mostly to mean “plan”. Any aspect of a game that isn’t about reflexes, reactions, or muscle memory (or role playing / narrative) typically gets called strategy; strategy games (going by steam tags) are those where planning makes up the majority of gameplay.
tactic, operation, strategy, how do your rifles and machine guns look like… are all parts of doctrine.
In common parlance, the term “strategy” seems to mean something like “An approach to accomplishing a goal,” with the implicit implication that there are multiple approaches available and a choice has to be made. My strategy in answering this question has been to speak somewhat formally and to the point (as opposed to snark, etc.).
A tactic is something like a technique, a method. Often, this comes down to equipment chosen and methods for their use. My tactic for accessing the internet involves a laptop running Linux.
Operations would seem to relate mostly to question of timing and place. I happen to be in a coffee shop, using it’s wifi.
These are obviously not hard and fast distinctions, but rather “more like guidelines than actual rules.”
Was the post truncated? The ending comes rather abruptly (I’m used to Collections series posts saying what they’ll discuss next week, or giving a conclusion if it’s the last post). The title and content also led me to expect a discussion of the tank designer as part of the game’s… gamey approach to doctrine.
« Heck, in the case of some kinds of militaries waging protected war »
That looks like a typo, you meant protracted war, did you ?
I would contend that there’s actually a third component to how the game simulates doctrine, beyond what it labels doctrine and the division designer: officer corps spirits, and these can cause “units [to] simply function badly because their doctrine is poor” but only for a few countries (to my knowledge, just the RoC and USA) and in a fairly limited way. I think there’s even an argument that the choice of military advisors is a fourth component to this, but I don’t know if there’s much that is meaningful to say about that.
Would it have been possible to have the early war British/French tank configuration in which tanks were scattered to support infantry if there were better doctrine in how to use those tanks? How much of this doctrine not working was it being a fundamentally flawed idea and how much of it was because they didn’t have good doctrine for infantry/armor cooperation?
WW II history is one of the areas I struggle with the most. In general my knowledge of history is as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle. So even if I don’t know that much about any one thing, I can generally bring in the context of knowing a bit about everything that connects to that one thing and get a decent sense of it pretty quickly. But WW II is so sui generis and massive that it’s harder for me to get a handle on it that way.
I think that on a very low level, the infantry support centric tank doctrine was not a bad one. It was building firmly on the experience of the First World War, where small infantry cannons had proven their value, and tanks had demonstrated their ability to destroy machine gun nests reliably. For example, the French 1918-style method of assigning light Renault tanks in pairs, one with a machine gun, one with a cannon, was a prudent way of providing infantry with support both in anti-machine gun and anti-personnel missions. In the Winter War, when the Soviets learned to use such combined arms tactics in February 1940, the method of attacking with (mostly T-26) tanks followed closely by an infantry screen worked quite well on a tactical level against Finnish infantry that didn’t have much anti-tank capability, although the Soviets never achieved a strategic breakthrough.
So, if your idea is to wade through a fortified enemy with infantry, this is not a bad doctrine. It worked on the Western front in 1918, and again for the Soviets in winter 1940. It only fails when you end up having an enemy that puts all its tanks in a two or three divisions and hits one part of your front with that armoured fist and then exploits the hole in your front. (Although there was a lot of luck involved in the German attack. With better Entente leadership, it could have become a Western Stalingrad.)
If you look at how the Russian pre-Ukraine mechanised infantry doctrine worked, it included, on company and battalion level, essentially a doctrine of using tanks and IFVs with dismounted troops in a way that looked very much like the French WWI doctrine: a thin screen of infantry advancing with IFVs, with tanks behind with a fire support mission. This is not a bad way of fighting infantry, because of your vehicles don’t have an infantry screen and there are hand-held antitank weapons on the other side, the armour will not survive for long.
BTW, this historical newsreel shows, from 3:54 onwards, very nicely the French-style WWI tank doctrine in idealised conditions: peace time training exercise. As such, it tells very well how it should work, and allows you to understand why somebody would like to fight like that.
>(Although there was a lot of luck involved in the German attack. With better Entente leadership, it could have become a Western Stalingrad.)
Depends on what you mean by ‘Better Leadership’. In a white room scenario, in which the military gets to plan without political constraints and has the funds & industry to pull it of, starting to draw up (new) plans, doctrines and equipment around 1935, yes.
In a real world scenario, much harder to pull off.
– the lack of radios in the French army will take some effort to fix (though it is by far the most easily fixed issue)
– armoured warfare doctrine was in the process of being fixed, but well, too bad the war started in the middle of fixing
– crucially, political constraints. Strategic plans for TWENTY YEARS demanded that the next war not be fought on French soil. The maginot line was built with the express purpose of forcing the war to be fought on Belgian soil. You go and tell your superiors (or worse, are the superior who has to rethink the doctrines his entire career is based on) that actually, let’s trash twenty years of plans, ignore the whole idea behind that absurdly expensive maginot line project, just sit on your butt doing absolutely nothing while the Germans march into Belgium, because you just had a bad dream where the Germans cut off the French army as it advanced into Belgium.
That’s not even going into Germany’s advantage in the air leaving the Anglo-French forces effectively blind to German force concentrations. The severe restrictions to allied reconnaissance in early 1940 should not be underestimated.
What I’m getting at, Germany wasn’t simply relying on ‘luck’, on the French and English making exactly the wrong decisions. Rather, it was making an informed guess that the French would stick to their pre-war planning (since the alternative was no plan at all). Then the advantage in communication and information piled on top of that.
The campaign could’ve failed, and some of the issues in the allied command (chiefly the dramatically inferior level of radio communications; something that’d haunt the Soviets in ’41 and ’42 as well) had relatively easy fixes.
But it wasn’t a natural 20 in a desperate situation. Germany had a very good idea about what the French were going to do, and the French did in turn have very good reasons to want to do these things (which was avoiding another WW1 slugfest on their own soil).
Frankly, the exact same people who proclaim bright-eyed and fully convinced of their own brilliance that France shouldn’t have taken the bait and marched into Belgium in ’40 are typically also the same people yelling about idiots not reading Sun Tzu.
What does Sun Tzu say about fighting wars on your own soil again?
I think that the Battle of France was still undecided by the 15th or 16th May, and better tactical leadership could have prevented the French collapse. The German attack from the Meuse breakthrough was such that it could have been cut off, and the motorised units would have lost fuel in a matter of days, if not hours. As it included the best divisions of the German military, its loss would have been devastating.
The German victory in Fall Gelb was not predestined. A more layered distribution of units during the advance into Belgium (which was a political necessity) and the capability to handle enemy breakthroughs with your reserves would have made it possible to stop the German advance.
>The German attack from the Meuse breakthrough was such that it could have been cut off, and the motorised units would have lost fuel in a matter of days,
Between two roughly equivalent armies, yes. But the Meuse breakthrough is exactly the go-to example for the communicative failure of the French command – it had no idea what was going on, it thought it was being scouted by light formations that’d soon be captured at the same time that the front was collapsing.
In terms of material, the French/British force was close enough that it should’ve been a slugfest considerably worse than the Italian campaign. That it wasn’t, however, was not so much a matter of luck but of systemic failure on the part of the French, whose approach to fighting was too static and slow to react. Where they did fight, the fighting was hard. But once the line had been broken through, French command didn’t even know it had been broken through for a while, and thus utterly failed to react.
Given a five year leadtime, this is absolutely fixable. Changing the outcome with the army and command structure the French had historically, otoh, is IMO a rather tall order. Any fix that relies on the French command actually knowing what’s going on in something approaching real time (or what passes for it in 1940) is going to fall flat on its face.
With regards to a more layered defence… where do those divisions come from? Which sections of the front will be weakened to allow this, and what’ll the effects be?
I feel like this is an exercise similar to saying that Desert Storm was luck – if the Iraqis had implemented a different command structure, devolved decision making to lower ranks, possessed a high morale & cohesion army and had had access to GPS, their material and manpower resources should’ve made Desert Storm a slugfest with tens of thousands of dead coalition soldiers.
It wasn’t luck. For all its armour and artillery, Iraq just didn’t have that kind of army.
It’s interesting that the failure that @Rezo describes is impossible to model in HOI IV: Because you can always see where each unit is, a state of “They broke through but we don’t know that until it’s too late” can’t be modeled. Which makes it hard to simulate the collapse of the French without fudging with their army strength.
You wouldn’t get a Western Stalingrad this way, of course, but imagine a scenario where the French say “Yes, we *know* the Ardennes are impassible, but just in case let’s plan to put a couple of infantry divisions in there rather than just leaving it to a bunch of Belgian border guards.”
The problem there was that the Belgium king was being an idiot and refused to join the allies, believing that neutrality was possible. This meant that the French and British had to rush to get into position, which meant their understanding of the tactical situation was still developing even as they committed to deployment.
And, of course, the Belgian king had every tool to know better and was firmly working off of wishful thinking and stubbornness. He made the decision to try for neutrality in 1934 and didn’t move even as the Czechs and Poles were invaded. Even as Germany built up he did nothing. Even as German plans were leaked, nothing.
Even without hindsight the Belgian decision was folly.
All the tactical flaws were downwind of that. If the French and British had been integrated earlier they could have kept their mobile forces in a reserve, allowing them to contest the ardennes even if they’d made the same mistake, instead of having committed them to a madcap sprint to the border. And they could have moved more troops to reinforce all points of the border, potentially reinforcing the ardennes as well.
@Terry: Agreed that they were having to adjust to the tactical situation in a way that they shouldn’t have had to, but they had a plan for moving into Belgium after the Germans did, and deploying troops into the Ardennes should have been part of that.
Even putting one infantry division in there probably would have held up the Germans for two or three extra days at the minimum.
Agreed. Although I’m skeptical a single division could have held, as the Germans did brush aside some resistance, literally any further delay might have been enough to torpedo the German plan. It cost little.
Given how long the Brits tried distributed armor and how much it failed almost every time, versus how well concentrating armor worked, I’m inclined to say that distributed armor is a failed idea unless you have such a wealth of industry that you can have overwhelming tank numbers everywhere along the line.
Ultimately, isn’t the IFV basically doing the job of the infantry tank (plus that of the APC)? I’m not sure the concept of distributing armor in support of infantry is inherently flawed. It’s not a substitute for concentrated armor, but it is a viable way to enhance the capabilities of your infantry.
I think part of the problem was the limited capabilities of vehicles in the interwar/early war periods, and the British designs were probably too slow and too heavily armored for what they needed to do: some mix of light tanks and assault guns would have probably worked better. (Actually, didn’t the Soviets more or less do that?)
The doctrinal issue is that the IFV emphasizes speed and firepower over armor, whereas infantry tanks were often up armored and under gunned.The trade off is accepting that IFVs will get shredded when fighting heavier enemy contact.
Part of the tactical picture here is that CAS serves great in tank destroyer roles, but only with techniques and tech developed during and after the war. We don’t have heavy tanks or tank destroyers now, because we know that ground attack helicopters and planes like the A-10 can absolutely destroy any armored target that can move under its own power. Plus guideed missiles completely change the calculus, as do attack drones.
However even dive bombers can and did shred tanks, and proved quite capable even early in the war. The issue was doctrinal; CAS is *hard* and risky, and focusing on interdicting enemies and bombing factories from the air seemed safer the air planners. Of course the failure of strategic bombing has been argued to death, but most air.forces were long on it. Interdiction, striking targets not in contact with ground forces, is a better idea and forms part of modern techniques in particular, but without ground identification concealment is quite effective. It works better against static targets, but still.
You also can’t just directly use tactical bombers for CAS without doctrinal integration. It’s hard to figure out how to target enemies for the planes from the ground, and it took a few years of trial to get it right.
Only the Germans and maybe the Americans entered WW2 with a doctrine with room for CAS, with those challenges tackled. The other allies had tactical bombing, but the lack of support for units in contact was telling. The Germans actually hit on one of the key advantages of CAS, which is that you don’t strain your logistics line for your tanks like artillery support did which was critical. If you use planes for tactical bombing and artillery for targeted fires you end up with more logistical load on the front. That, and the artillery needs to be self propelled or motorized, or it can’t keep up with tanks.
In game this is modeled. Strategic bombing is not very good, not until nukes.Tactical bombing works but because the planes are bigger you risk losing more to air defense. The meta is spamming small, cheap, CAS, supported by fighters armed with as many machine guns as you can possibly fit. The only other plane built are also light naval bombers in two types, one with floats which operates from land airfields, and one without that operates from ships, each armed with torpedos and nothing else. That and transports if you want to do air supply or para dropping, both of which are fine but niche.
You don’t even need to research medium or heavy airframes. You can, and you can be annoying with strat bombing and do some damage with tac bombing, but CAS and air superiority are more important.
Which, as pertains to the topic, means that heavy tanks are more vulnerable than most planners realized, so smaller tanks with less armor are better. Because players arrived at “oops all CAS” sooner than in history they also arrive at “oops all mechanized and medium tanks” sooner too.
As an armchair general raised on WRD, I am also surprised to hear that distributed armor is a failed idea. Basic WRD doctrine is distributed pockets of probing/screening infantry supported from behind by heavier weapons (APCs, IFVs or a tank depending on available resources).
I guess it makes sense; at a tactical level an infantry screen is great, but operationally you’d get farther faster if you mass the tanks, drive down a road, and hope your air force can protect you from recreating the highway of death.
Arguablly, a lot of modern military IS doing distributed armor. Wealthier nations like the US have reached the level where you can support every infantry squad with armored vehicles. It is just that, most of the time that armored vehicle might be a M113 box with a machine gun on top instead of a MBT. Modern IFVs can easily outperform the Panzer 2s and 3s Germany is using at the start of WW2, and a BMP-1 can outdo a FT-17. The standards got higher as technology improved.
Hot take: It’s not armoured support if it is something enemy infantry can defeat at machine gun range. If dug in infantry can destroy your armour just as easily as it would your infantry, you haven’t actually brought armour, you’ve brought a self-propelled field gun.
In that respect, a Bradley can destroy a Panzer III in straight up combat, but the Panzer III was working against anti-tank rifles and grenades, while a Bradley is expecting to face a Javelin or whatever equivalent the Americans expect their notional opponent to field. A Panzer III was basically invincible to anything smaller than a crew-served weapon. A M1 is, as far as I understand, likewise impervious. A Bradley isn’t, and so is not armoured support.
Brett has an older post here arguing that tanks *are* glorified self-propelled field guns. The problem in WW1 was that the artillery could destroy any part of the line and create a breakthrough, but couldn’t follow up on it; the equipment would get stuck in the shattered terrain.
The Panzer II and Panzer III conquered France with their silly short guns because they could follow through and provide direct fire against the machine guns nests and anything else.
You need armor even for blowing up machine gun nests because the nests can fire back at you. On the advance you also need some minimal resistance to artillery shrapnel, mines etc.
When you optimize for something that can destroy enemy tanks in straight up combat, you get a tank destroyer. You make the gun bigger and move all the armor to the front in a low silhouette that wins any exchange against another piece of “armor”. The cost is that you now have a huge gun which can’t easily swing around in an urban or forested environment. You often don’t even have a turret that would let you provide quick fire support.
The MBT is a compromise that tries to be everything at once. It has a long gun that gets stuck on street poles so it can blow up other tanks. It has MGs and rear armor so it can fight infantry and survive artillery blasts.
It still must be vigorously protected from enemy infantry (think urban combat). It’s just not possible to effectively armor all sides; even ERA can be stripped by gunfire (what caliber of bullet triggers American reactive armor is presumably classified info). We bring the MBT into the city because it’s very useful to have all that firepower, and the firepower is protected, but it’s still vulnerable.
The trick is to find what degree of protection is acceptable; apparently the Russians introduced the BMPT because BMPs were vulnerable even to .50cal.
Part of the calculus with MBTs is also that guided missiles, i.e. the TOW, Javelin, etc. can defeat any amount of armor that can move on the ground. Plus, Helicopter gunships and both modern and period planes can strike tanks effectively. You don’t need a big tank gun when you can pop targeting smoke on a position and call in an a-10 to go hunting. Even with WW2 tech a dive bomber could rip even the heaviest tank apart once up gunned with a cannon, and even the “small” bomb loadouts often did enough to cripple the target.
This basically means that heavier tanks are a lost cause. You’re just a big target. MBTs are a compromise to try to preserve the ability to force strongholds with cost, weight, and performance. IFVs accept vulnerability to some things MBTs can shrug off in exchange for even better agility and speed, optics, and troop integration. And both are suffering greatly against drones, although their battlefield role is still needed.
“A Panzer III was basically invincible to anything smaller than a crew-served weapon. A M1 is, as far as I understand, likewise impervious. A Bradley isn’t”
A Javelin is in fact a crew-served weapon.
“Hot take: It’s not armoured support if it is something enemy infantry can defeat at machine gun range. If dug in infantry can destroy your armour just as easily as it would your infantry, you haven’t actually brought armour, you’ve brought a self-propelled field gun.”
But this is another way of saying “there is no such thing as armour”. Because any armour can be defeated by infantry within MG range, with NLAW or Javelin or something similar.
Or, you could argue conversely, no armour can be defeated as easily as infantry – a modern infantry platoon could defeat advancing infantry with a Pz II in support, but not as easily as if they didn’t have the Pz II!
“But this is another way of saying “there is no such thing as armour”. Because any armour can be defeated by infantry within MG range, with NLAW or Javelin or something similar.”
Part of what we should be talking about here is hard versus soft kill, too. A lot of tanks are technically vulnerable to machine gun fire, in that if you unload into the tracks it’ll stop moving until at least field repairs are done. Conversely some tanks can resist anti tank weapons, denying a hard kill, neither being destroyed utterly nor killing the crew, but still take significant damage often including loss of turret or gun control or track destruction.
Hence tank armor is a continuum. So is offense. A squad level weapon that can disable a tank long enough for accurate fires to be delivered or the squad to run is better than nothing, while armorr that converts a flaming wreck to a concussed crew and stuck turret is extremely useful because you can repair that tank and continue the assault later.
Part of the modern issue is, as I mentioned, that planes and helicopters can deliver killing blows, including converting tracked vehicles into dead ones. This is aided by incredibly quick fire support turnabout, aided by a ton of modern innovations ranging from the ubiquity of radio to gps.
The M113, at least in Israeli experience, has too bad survivability to be used manned. It has the reputation of basically being a Pinto.
These days, they normally use armored vehicles (both tanks and APCs) with active protection systems, which are reasonably resistant to anti-tank missiles and drones, but are basically tank-sized rather than M113-sized.
I’m not sure what Israel has to contribute to this analysis. They’ve faced hundreds of drone strikes, compared to Ukraine’s tens of thousands. They lack real experience here.
Israel is also much more vulnerable to certain…inefficiencies in their procurement as they aren’t facing existential threats and hence have less push towards effectiveness versus political concerns.
Part of this is casualty tolerance. Ukraine accepts some casualties. They’re still trying to restore maneuver, but their simplest theory of victory has always been to attrit Russia until they give up. In that style of war you have to accept the best effect for cost.
Israel isn’t fighting for its life (though they so desperately want you to think they are), they’re fighting offensive wars of conflict and volition. The casualty tolerance for that by the civilian population is inherently much lower; the population is propagandized enough that they’ll tolerate some, but that has limits.
The other factor is that Israel often complains it needs the new American system X not because it needs X, but because there’s a pretty clearly mapped deal for Israeli politicians to get kickbacks from defense manufacturers if they order X. Meanwhile American politicians golden parachute and political campaigns are funded by lobbying from Israel and defense contractors, in exchange for them dedicating aid to Israel. Israel will always ‘need’ new stuff because otherwise the quid pro quo stops.
Ukraine’s need for effectiveness against the existential threat of Russia cuts through some of that incentive structure.
From what I understand of the Ukrainian consensus m113 is fine. It can be fitted with anti drone systems because it’s frame and power train are solid, the simplicity of its power train means it’s familiar to Ukrainian mechanics and there’s enough Ukrainian know how to repair its dead simple construction. Plus there’s enough repair parts in circulation due to it’s ubiquity to keep a fleet running on the cheap.
Fancier systems might be better able to survive direct hits from dedicated fpv strike drones, but the 113 can move enough to frustrate spotting and can survive being winged or hit by light payloads. That’s enough.
”As an armchair general raised on WRD, I am also surprised to hear that distributed armor is a failed idea”
It is not, everyone used it in WW2 and even today, like the Americna regimental combat teams, German Kampfgruppens, Soviet independent tank battalions, etc… it depends the context.
That, and the fact that air support has gotten so good massed armored assaults are right out (ask the Russians). Deep Battle was good right up until an A-10 pilot could talk to a forward observer on the ground. Then its day had passed.
Perhaps the doctine system would work better if it just had the armies better at doing things they had done or practiced before. And worse at doing things new to them. Presumably that was what was really happening during the war, after all.
“In some cases, such as the demolition of the Panzer Lehr division as part of the Operation Cobra breakout, US commanders assigned more bombers to hit an enemy position than the enemy had men (the 2,200 remaining Germans in Panzer Lehr got hit with about 3,000 aircraft in a single day).”
A common fallacy. This is a misunderstanding of divisional strengths. According to Zetterling (Normandy 1944, the bible of information about German divisions in Normandy), the strength of Panzer Lehr before Cobra was around 12,000 men (probably slightly above). According to casualty and replacement reports, it had suffered around 2,500 casualties since D-Day, so its strength was much reduced from its original 14,600 (approx). However, most casualties were amongst the infantry, so it’s possible that Bret’s figure is infantry combat strength. Tank strength was severely depleted (though not much more by the bombing).
One thing touched upon here, that I’m unsure if you’ll mention again in the next parts, is about Paradox attempts to recreate historical events like the Battle of France.
I’ve seen in my own games and others accounts that HoI IV turns out to be pretty good at recreating WWII, with reliable Battle of France, Invasion of the Soviets that stop before Moscow, Stalingrad, Soviet pushback and the invasion of Italy and D-day at close enough dates, but the problem is how such feat is achieved.
They achieve the Fall of France, like you said, by “nerfing” the Allies since recreating the historical reasons would both be really hard and railroad the player too much, so in HoI (all versions really) France is weakened so that Germany has a game.
And I believe something similar is going on with the doctrines, where in part they recreate the surface level understanding of the doctrines and in part they nudge the nations to have their historical results, I think this explains the Mass Assault Doctrine, as the Soviets did have tremendous casualties, but recreating the beginning of Barbarossa and the Sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad (as well as Soviet’s complete unpreparedness) would be too hard and “railroad”, so the Doctrine both simulates the ideas while enforcing the historical results.
This is admittedly my own view on the issue, so I would be interested in hearing if anyone thinks I’m off mark here.
France has to be weak so an human player on the Allies side has a game. A Human playing Germany can overcome a historical strong France and allies by playing the game better than the AI does. But if you play i.e. the US and France wouldn’t fall and you expect some kind of historic pacing in which the US can conduct Overlord you would be disappointed because Germany never grows strong enough to be a proper adversary.
And the Soviets have some temporary debuffs to achieve an successful Germany in the East early on.
Thinking about it, this all reminds me of Ben Kite’s book Stout Hearts: https://helionbooks.wordpress.com/2024/06/06/stout-hearts/
This book is about, not the Battle of Normandy, but an anatomy of one of the units that fought it, 21st Army Group, and the attached naval and air units. So it is essentially a book about how things like infantry, medical services, engineers etc actually worked i.e. doctrine as applied in practice.
Unfortunately, I know of no similar books about the American and German armies in Normandy. Can anyone suggest any?
>moving the Mediterranean fleet into repair, while shifting my fast attack fleet into the >Mediterranean to keep the pressure on the Regia Marina.
You had your hastati retreat, then engaged with your principes?
If I’m reading Bret’s picture captions correctly he’s actually reversed Roman doctrine. The old WW1 battleships are the triarii, and they got sent in first. Once the enemy has been weakened, it’s the young fast hastati 🙂
Oh, yeah, I missed that!
…so, Stellaris next right? 😛
I’ve not played HoI but I wonder if the solution for doctrines is to make them basically identical to traditions in CK3, in that they enforce certain bonuses and penalties and also open or close options and unit types. You start with some dependant on who you are, and while you can change them or adopt new ones it requires time and in game currency to do so. The game could price that time and currency more expensively or cheaply to represent how ingrained in your military culture the relevant doctrines are, and perhaps having one doctrine might affect the price of another. The game could maybe make it comparatively easy to revert to an old doctrine vs adopting something completely new. Nations could also start part way through certain changes – Imperial Japan maybe has a doctrine focused on surface battle fleets, but it is in the process of changing to one focused on carriers, for example. If we wanted to get more granular, make it so that the benefits of the new doctrine apply to a limited number of divisions until it is fully adopted. So maybe Imperial Japan can build as many carrier fleets as it wants, but initially only the first two / three / four of them get the benefits of the carrier doctrine, to represent the number of old guard who don’t understand the new way of doing things, the dearth of officers with up to date training etc. (I may have read Shattered Sword recently…)
2nd vote for a stellaris series though its a LOT to cover I feel with both the breadth of the game experience and how much the game itself has change over the last 10 years.
“not merely blowing things up for blowing things’ up sake.”
Known as “the Hegseth doctrine”
Hi!
Do you have bibliography notes on the doctrine of the major powers? I’m kinda curious and would like to read more
I think that simply because of how video games work; the player has so much knowledge and fine control of all his forces that having a ‘doctrine’ in the conventional sense. The player can more or less ‘think on their feet’ and respond case-by-case without needing to commit to a specific doctrine that might sometimes be a hindrence.
The player is effectively ‘post-doctrinal’ in a way no real army can be, save in the hypothetical future of huge drone armies controlled by centralized AI.
The only way I could come up with to model doctrines in-game would be if ‘doctrine’ was constructed from a series of traits that all had strong positive effects and mild-to-moderate negative effects bundled together.
I have 2 thoughts.
1- I would be curious to know the player count that is driven by mods. There are several highly rated mods that alter some of the underlying mechanics of the game significantly (Fallout, Kaiserreich)
2- When you talk about not being able to detach and move supporting elements such as armor or artillery as distinct components, you could simulate this by designing templates that both have and do not have these elements, and switching between the templates as you need them. There’s no cost to change a division’s “design” besides the experience of the division (which i like as it pertains here as a unit might need to learn how to operate with an asset it’s not familiar with). I’ve never tried this as it’s a lot of micro, and I’m sure a multiplayer expert will know why it’s not great, but it does offer and option to moving “brigades” around.