I've noticed that I can command armies to take objective areas, but how should this be utilized?
When I mark objectives should I mark all territories that I want my army to take during a time period, or should I pick a few "lynchpin" points deeper in enemy territory? If I do the latter, will my army spread out and take a wider front or do they automatically bee-line to the objective territories with a disregard for for other factors?
Best Answer
From my experience, the AI is just horrible, so don't use it on a theater level. If the scale of operations is small enough, you should micromanage each unit. This is, of course, not feasible for larger (or even medium) fronts; for those, you should use "lynchpin" points, as a rule of thumb, one for each corps (if you're still managing at that level) or 3 for each army. See this excerpt from the wiki on it:
I think you'll probably find the entire page this was from to be of use, so here it is: http://www.hoi3wiki.com/Military_AI_and_human_control