AHD DD7 – This is my rifle, this is my gun!

Welcome to this weeks development diary for A House Divided. This time we are going to talk about quite a number of things, but the common theme is military improvements.

Rally Points
As some of you might have noticed there are some interesting looking new icons in the province view and whoever guessed on a rally point system was correct. You can now mark any province you have access to (not just your own but say the front on allied territory) as a rally point. Newly constructed units will head to their closest rally point and merge with the army there automatically (up to supply limit size). The merging is togglable if you prefer to organize yourself but defaults to on. You can keep on top of your rally points in the outliner and there is also an updated recruitment map mode which will highlight rally points and indicate where units under construction will head once done.



Leader Prestige
Leaders can now gain prestige though successful battles (and lose it if things go pear shaped). A prestigious and experienced leader will get more out of his troops resulting in a morale and organization bonuses. Prestige will also help us stop the current exploit of being able to move your best leader before every new battle. Removing a leader with high prestige from command without reassigning to a new army at his current location will incur a penalty on your countries prestige, meaning its not something you want to be doing very often. For modders out there, starting prestige is scriptable so famous generals can start with an advantage and armies can now also be scripted with their historically correct leaders.



New Sprites
We are adding some new sprite types to the game so armies will look different depending on their composition. Tanks aren’t quite ready to be shown yet, but here is a picture of a mounted cavalryman being worked on:



Late Game Improvements
In the late 1800s things can start to slow down when working with large number of units so we have had a look at improving both the usability of things and performance.

• Units in the construction screen are grouped by continent and type with summary headers (see screenshot below). These lets you queue up all those units for construction with a single click. The list of current constructions also has a button for canceling all active in case of some economic collapse or early end of a war.
• When reorganizing units there is a quick shortcut button that will balance out your units for you in an even split.
• All unit lists have been rewritten to give a massive boost in performance (includes reorganization windows) and will no longer be a chore to use with many units.

I hope this wet your appetite for A House Divided. Next week we will talk about investing in foreign countries and changes to the market system for spheres.