The plan is not to require extensive micromanagement of generals, but to expand the strategic and operational level options available to the player. We're still very much following the original warfare vision, we're just adding in areas where the current system is lacking.
A change that we're trying out internally right now is to remove the concept of 100% market access and ensure that local supply and demand always plays a role in price setting, to promote local synergies and add more weight to the decision on where to build buildings.
This is one of the pieces of content that is definitely part of the 'add more narrative content' bullet-point for this roadmap.
We chose to focus on different parts of the roadmap for 1.2 and 1.3, but Diplomacy is next on the list alongside Warfare.
Performance is absolutely a top priority for us, and we have a change planned for the update later this month that we hope should make a significant impact. It is something that is hard to put on a roadmap though, since we always have programmers working on it but it's hard to tell exactly what impact their work will have, especially on all the myriad hardware configurations involved.
Part of our plans involved in creating discrete armies and navies is indeed to allow reorganization of units in this way. We'll of course go over all this in dev diaries when it's closer to release.
The problem identified isn't one we've given up on solving, but we want to solve in a way that one long front acts more like a number of small fronts rather than actually dividing it into said smaller fronts, as the latter comes with all the issues involved when creating, splitting and merging fronts. More on this in future dev diaries, though.
As mentioned in the dev diary, Diplomacy is one of the top priorities for the large update coming later this year.
I believe these are actually fixed internally already!
Yes, this is part of the roadmap and in fact something we're working on right now. Austria and Krakow against Prussia should be one front, for example.
As mentioned in the dev diary, something being 'done' doesn't mean we don't plan to expand or build on it, just that it isn't on the roadmap for the next few updates. This also isn't a complete list of everything we'll be doing for those updates, just the most important items.
I'll quote what's written in the dev diary on what "done" means:
I can't speak from a programmer's side, since I'm a game designer and only know a little bit of coding. But generally, both systems seem to have their advantages and challenges when it comes to working with them or playing with them. In Victoria, we have the issue of front splitting and having no general there, in HoI I always get frustrated when my fronts expand due to an encirclement of the enemy, causing my troops to leave their defended positions to shuffle around. Pros and cons, really.
It's not impossible but it is very, very complex and would be a major undertaking to implement in a satisfying way.
