Btw even though not historical accurate for the early part of the time period, would you guys prefer to see HOI 4 style combat or more like Vic2 ? Personally I prefer HOI 4's but would like to hear the opinions of the rest of you.
The key to me is representing the "whys" and "hows" of that transition, something Vic2 did only partially.
With machine guns and bolt action rifles, you needed fewer men to hold a position, even from a larger force, that Vic2 represents well enough, with lowering cw.
At the same time, mass production and railways (and later trucks) allowed nations to mobilize, deploy and supply huge armies.
It's great to have a bigger army to overwhelm the enemy, but this created both a problem and a solution.
You need to supply that huge army, so you can't afford to be cut off from your lines, but a bigger army with more individual holding power means you can spread them more thinly over the front to avoid that.
This Vic2 doesn't represent well, as there's no real logistic system in the game.
Sure, leaving gaps in the line allows your enemies to pour into your nation, but being surrounded doesn't bring any immediate consequences as only the local supply limit is considered.
This needs to change imo, by the time you're deploying several millions, you need to take care of your supply lines.
I figure this could already be done within a Vic2 framework, simply mark surrounded provinces as having a severe penalty to supply limit, and give them grace period from atrittion based on supplies in the army.
A supplying system using railway infrastructure would also be necessary, increasing or decreasing how fast units there are supplied, at the very least you'd need to keep supply consumption lower than the supply rate in that province.
But that wouldn't address the single worse thing in Vic2, the micromanagement of an army of millions in the late game.
In that regard, I think HoI4 is a great example indeed, but not really for the frontline management, but for the fallback line mechanic.
Imagine how easier dealing with Vic2's armies would be if you could select a numbers of them and then just draw a line to deploy them.
Another mechanic I hope it would get is HoI3's mobilization mechanic (as that was another micro hell in Vic2), where you would make a "ghost" army and only when you hit the mobilize button they'd start getting their manpower and equipment.
I also think Vic works well with combat happening inside a province, as opposed to HoI's model of combat between provinces.
And finally, if we take the current PDX trend, I imagine Vic3 would have a much, much higher province density than Vic2, so I could see the smallest possible unit on the map being corps instead of armies (but not divisions though).
That's my 2¢ on how an eventual Vic3's combat should work.
