HOI 4: What do you want to see?

Many suggestions regarding Graphics in this thread. I prefer better "inside" content, like AI.
No provinces doesn't make the game any better, because on every military map there are "provinces" by terrain, infrastructure etc. To calculate the battles, there would be an underlaying structured map anyway.

AradoX said:

A whole new system with no provinces, but fluent borders (or whatever it's called in english). Paradox has newer done anything like this, but I think it could be a logical progression.

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What would it change besides aesthetics ?

Nicolas I said:

What would it change besides aesthetics ?

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Distance between fleets in combat suddenly become real and the CTFs need to move on the map during battle to keep distance as one example.
Stationary Transport ships are quickly cought.

You have a division dynamically "float out" along a big front and if you place several divisions closer to eachother they each protect a smaller front section but with alot more men and artillery.

You could have actual roads on the map along which truck based units advance quicker.

Provinces are fine in a grand strategy game, removing them would mean much more micromanagement and increase the game's complexity, thus making it harder for the AI, which already has big problems with prioritisation etc. Naval combat can be improved independently.

cromsworld said:

Making the ideological spectrum a triangle was kinda dumb. It should be a four quadrant square labeled with Democracy on the top, authoritarian on the bottom, communism on the left, and capitalism on the right. This would make it much easier to understand both where your political/economic ideology lie and how they relate to other countries. It would be a fun feature to try shifting your country to any of the extreme corners or the middle and see how well those polices work on the global playground compared to other countries. The top left would probably start out fairly empty but it is nice to have the option to go there and see what happens. I always wanted to see the advantages and disadvantages of combining a democratic government with a communist economic system in a global war scenario. This would place USA in the top right somewhere, Germany in the bottom right somewhere, and the Soviet Union in the bottom left somewhere. The HOI3 triangle puts both left and right democratic economies into the top corner making them indistinguishable until the country shifts down the triangle towards authoritarianism.

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This is not a political theory course but a game. Then it make sense of having a triangle when there was three historic factions.

Both left and right democratic governments sided together in the Allies camp even if they have (sometimes big) differences in their ideological/economic ideas. The most important is that they valued democracy over ideology.

What would ne the fouth faction in your diplomatic square ? If none then your model is no better than a triangle with 3 factions.

delra said:

Super Heavy Carriers.

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Can`t you mod that in yourself?

Alex_brunius said:

Distance between fleets in combat suddenly become real and the CTFs need to move on the map during battle to keep distance as one example.
Stationary Transport ships are quickly cought.

You have a division dynamically "float out" along a big front and if you place several divisions closer to eachother they each protect a smaller front section but with alot more men and artillery.

You could have actual roads on the map along which truck based units advance quicker.

Click to expand...

I think you have to understand that "no province" is physically impossible for computer. Troops&fleets will be positioned on a coordinate grid anyway, and each position effectivly is province.

Then, if province numbers are significantly more than number units, there is a need for rule that allows a single unit to controll multiple provinces, and such.

Which effectivly doesn`t change the HOI3 system all that much, just adding more micromanagement.

1alexey said:

I think you have to understand that "no province" is physically impossible for computer. Troops&fleets will be positioned on a coordinate grid anyway, and each position effectivly is province.

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Not more impossible then it is for the human playing the game... There is a limited amount of pixels you can click on aswell!

1alexey said:

Then, if province numbers are significantly more than number units, there is a need for rule that allows a single unit to controll multiple provinces, and such.

Which effectivly doesn`t change the HOI3 system all that much, just adding more micromanagement.

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In what way would it add micromanagement? You still have the same amount of unit's to manage and they still retreat or advance from one point to another.

I think it would actually remove micromanagement since you don't get sent popups and battle start finishes all the time when provinces are taken/lost/attacked.

The 12 year old PC game Total War: Shogun has a similar system where a formation of many individual smaller units can get pushed forward or backwards on the battlefield depending on relative strength with the surrounding units it's fighting.

Alex_brunius said:

Not more impossible then it is for the human playing the game... There is a limited amount of pixels you can click on aswell!

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So you basically agreed that "no provinces" just means more provinces.

Alex_brunius said:

In what way would it add micromanagement? You still have the same amount of unit's to manage and they still retreat or advance from one point to another.

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more points of advancement or retreating.

Alex_brunius said:

I think it would actually remove micromanagement since you don't get sent popups and battle start finishes all the time when provinces are taken/lost/attacked.

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But you will still have more fights for each point of the grid, and you still have to get notification for eacj result, and monitor each battle.

But if you wish to ignore those,..

Alex_brunius said:

The 12 year old PC game Total War: Shogun has a similar system where a formation of many individual smaller units can get pushed forward or backwards on the battlefield depending on relative strength with the surrounding units it's fighting.

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I onlo played total war since Rome, but that system is acceptable for tactical game.

Why not to go ahead and propose some features of Starcraft 2 then? Sure it is a good game, and nothing wrong will happen if ideas will be borrowed mindlessly from there,..

I would like to see a dynamic AI is complex and actually able to surprise me. I would go back to HOI 1 if I could get that. I always feel that AI always gets the short end of the stick on ALL computer games.

1alexey said:

But you will still have more fights for each point of the grid, and you still have to get notification for eacj result, and monitor each battle.

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Why on earth would such a game send you 2 million popup notifications for advancing across the screen (1920x1080 pixles = around 2 million pixels).

That would be such aweful game-design it would be silly and everyone would turn the "feature" off to ignore it anyways.

1alexey said:

Why not to go ahead and propose some features of Starcraft 2 then? Sure it is a good game, and nothing wrong will happen if ideas will be borrowed mindlessly from there,..

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Starcraft 2 is a great game that HoI3 could learn much from. After all there is reasons it sold much better.

The user interface for example is a good thing that Paradox actually already have started to learn from such games. A easy to use interface is super important and a big priority for Paradox to implement.

Another interesting thing which many HoI3 players want to borrow from Starcraft 2 is the easy multiplayer where you just can jump in and play. In this expansion for example Paradox improved the MP chat.

Alex_brunius said:

Starcraft 2 is a great game that HoI3 could learn much from.

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Do you mean DRM, or the sucky multiplayer UI?

Personally, I'd like automatic air support missions for air squadrons. For example: two tac bombers are attached to corps XIV, the air squadrons would automatically bomb/aid in the toughest battle the divisions of that corps are engaged in. Without any player input, other than attaching the squadrons to the corps and setting the automatic support mission.

An AI that follows orders!


In my Japan game,I invaded Malaya thru Khota Baru,Gave an Army of 10 Divisions 3 VP provinces as targets(all in a line ending in Singapore)with Blizing Stance.9 of 10 divisions ended up guading the Siam/Burma Border and 3 months later Singapore still hadn't Fallen.

- Better AI. Yeah, I know this is a bitch and a half to do, but I still want it.
- Better war objectives. Yes, this is a game of the only really total war we've ever fought, but there were enough cases where nations stopped short of total conquest(Vichy and the Winter War, in particular) that we should have some partial-conquest options.
- Something like a (very simplified) version of Vicky's POP system. There should be a tradeoff between manpower and IC somewhere along the line, because IC isn't just physical factories, it's also the people who work in them. This will also allow women-in-factories events and other things of the sort. It'll also help with things like the pre-war Balkan land-grabs, partisan mechanics, and postwar cleanup(This province is 40% Hungarian and 60% Romanian, so both want it. After the war, just move the people out until the border's easy again).
- In the same vein, add food as a resource. After all, that was the biggest issue with the Battle of the Atlantic - the UK was basically self-sufficient in basic resources, it just couldn't feed itself.
- Resource flows should be made a touch more realistic. I don't want to go full Railroad Tycoon here, but if I have a sizeable colony(e.g., India) with its own resources and IC, it should be able to produce its own supplies, instead of having to ship everything to the capital and ship the supplies back.
- I prefer a HOI2-style system of doctrines, where you actually have to choose instead of just getting all of them.
- Intelligence(in the sense of seeing stuff on the map) needs to be reworked a lot. Radar giving a god's-eye view of whole countries while the Military Espionage mission seems to mostly just tell you a handful of units they're producing is silly. Even just adding a few tooltips so we know the interaction between decryption, radar, and spies giving a view of the enemy units would be helpful. Espionage should also give you a sense of their whole order of battle - i.e., go back to HOI2's "We think they have about 100 Inf brigades".

And because every one of the above would make the game more complex, here's a couple to simplify it down.
- Remove fuel, go back to simple oil. The refinery step adds nothing.
- Go back to transports and escorts being duties for destroyers and transports, instead of separate units.
- HQs should be paper units, not ones with a physical presence on the map. You should not be able to have a group of clerks moving faster than infantry and capturing territory.

Well one thing I'd like to see is the break down of unit sprites into smaller groups of units. that it looks something like this:
It's not a huge thing but, I'd prefer to see small groups of units attack each other rather than one larger soldier or vehicle attacking.


Another thing I think would be cool is if you could organize the battalions in each brigade you make. I would see this working much like the Armament/Armor/Engines selector for ships. So for example, when you make an Infantry brigade you could decide whether you'd like to include an artillery, assault gun, or anti-air battalion. If you'd like to change this make up, you'd have to upgrade the and select the new composition.

Anyways, those are the things I'd like to see in HOI4.

Nicolas I said:

This is not a political theory course but a game. Then it make sense of having a triangle when there was three historic factions.

Both left and right democratic governments sided together in the Allies camp even if they have (sometimes big) differences in their ideological/economic ideas. The most important is that they valued democracy over ideology.

What would ne the fouth faction in your diplomatic square ? If none then your model is no better than a triangle with 3 factions.

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There doesn't have to be a forth faction and historically a country did not have to match ideologies to form pacts anyway. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is historical evidence enough of left/right cooperation on the bottom two corners of the HOI3 triangle and the modern day ties between USA and Saudi Arabia are evidence of Authoritarian/Democratic close ties between the top and bottom of the HOI3 triangle. The main point I am making is that the triangle is an unlabeled arbitrary triangle. If it can be made with labels on a logical cartesian plane to demonstrate a more informative assessment of every countries political position and relationship among each other, then why wouldn't we do so? The government type label given in HOI2 already followed such a 2 dimensional plane between left/right and democratic/authoritarian. If you moved your sliders to a far left democracy, the game labeled you as "Social Democratic".

It also occurred to me that an additional tab could be set up to see a similar ideological plane for hawk/dove lobby vs isolationist/interventionalist. Such a plane may be good for basic aggressive threat assessment of all nations. Neutral countries could be forced to stay in the isolationist dove lobby corner to maintain neutrality status. Hawk lobby interventionalists are clearly ready for the offensive. Hawk lobby isolationists are clearly preparing a defensive military. And Dove lobby interventionalists are simply economically aggressive nations. Once again, if this information can be shown on a very informative easy to analyze grid, why wouldn't you add it? I believe myself and many other players would find such a tool very informative and useful.

Maybe Venn diagrams to fill all these overlapping categories ?

The triangle is only a model, but it fits well with the three existing factions of WW2 and in that sense not completely arbitrary.

"HOI 4: What do you want to see? "
hm... AI?

I for one, would like to see an improvement of naval combat, movement, recuperation and modernization. The reason to this according to my perception, is that navies with many units dominate too easily even if many of them are of a low level like UK vs Italy in the Med.

In real life, UK had issues resupplying Malta and its naval units were often under attack from Italian and German airplanes and submarines. This forced UK to be a bit more careful and not just "dominate" the entire Med just by aimlessly patrolling the area for an indefinite period. Furthermore, most supplies were sent in convoys that had to be gathered and secured, the loss of one of these would have devastating effects on Malta or Cyprus. The UK navy wouldn't have just been patrolling because the loss of one capital unit to submarines or naval bombers would have been difficult to replace. UK's capital units and navy in general was used when necessary and not all the time in an aimless fashion. So, caution would be required.

In game I would like
1. Submarines and naval bombers to have greater effect against naval surface units so that it doesn't allow UK to dominate the Med too easily, forcing it to be more cautious. CAGs should have less effect against submarines since the CV and CVL find them too easily and they don't have any sonars.

2. When naval units enter a naval province they stumble upon each other too easily, I mean the provinces are large and a BB can only see as far as its radar or optics can. Instead, the possibility of a chance encounter in one province should be lowered significantly. Furthermore, the chance of meeting should also be determined by submarines acting as picket lines and naval aviation acting as scouts giving one side a better chance of being the attacker. However, as it is now you can hardly move through a naval province without being molested.

3. Naval units in game can be out at sea for too long a time. In reality, a country would have only a part of its navy out at sea, while another part has its crew recuperating or repairing or modifying its ships in port. Thus, a navy with many units would still have the bigger part of it in port for recently mentioned reasons and send them out only when a mission is given.

4. Navies did modernize their naval units with both guns, armour and engines which isn't possible in game. A process of modernization would be determined of available resources in dockyard facilities and the extent of the modernization required. This would allow for smaller navies to improve its capabilities with fewer resources. Admittedly, this is adressed in some mods, but it would be so fun to actually be able to change an old BC into a fleet carrier or a CA into an CVL or CVE.

Thus, I would hope for a change of this in vanilla TFH future patches.
Any comments... or am I just raving.

P.S I hope I haven't repeated what others have said, but I didn't want to read through 37 pages.

johan-erik said:

2. When naval units enter a naval province they stumble upon each other too easily, I mean the provinces are large and a BB can only see as far as its radar or optics can.

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Sure about that?