For the Motherland Developer Diary 7 - Historical Elections and Foreign Ministers

[podcat]

Podcat, in the screenshot I see that domestic spies can no longer raise national unity as well as the announced change of not being able to lower neutrality. Are there now different mechanics to influence national unity positively, and will the freed-up interface space be used to show more countries in the scroll menu?

ah someone noticed :P Its temporary only as I removed it by mistake, but havent put it back in time for screenshot.

[Slan]

I don't know if the flight path arrow is only on the map for decoration or if it is actually calculated by the engine, but if it is, then yes, it would be possible to use that to dish out some damage to the bombers on the fly. Now the only problem is how do you tell the AI (or even the player) where the planes will come?

[podcat]

I agree AA should be able to damage bombers on their way to targets, but currently the engine doesnt really support it, mostly because the planes do not actually enter the province because of speed and when combats are checked. The changes in the dev diary were only for making them stronger for local defense.

[Darkrenown]

ah someone noticed :P Its temporary only as I removed it by mistake, but havent put it back in time for screenshot.

I was covering for you, but you ruined it!

[oribiasi]

I agree AA should be able to damage bombers on their way to targets, but currently the engine doesnt really support it, mostly because the planes do not actually enter the province because of speed and when combats are checked. The changes in the dev diary were only for making them stronger for local defense.

That's too bad. I was really looking forward to this upgrade as it was so logical and used in HoI2 and it seemed silly to leave out something in a newer version of game.

I am at least happy that the changes will make AA a meaningful investment; I hope you can find some way to change it or at least implement in HoI4. Which I hope is inevitable

[Baltasar]

I agree AA should be able to damage bombers on their way to targets, but currently the engine doesnt really support it, mostly because the planes do not actually enter the province because of speed and when combats are checked. The changes in the dev diary were only for making them stronger for local defense.

Would you mind telling us what your (possible mutiple) approaches to this problem is? Eg if you plan to give AA enough punch to really hurt bombers, or if you are going to eg add neighbour province AA to the calculation at the and of the skip or... AA in one province should not be able to criple a Strat wing, but in the game, it does cross mutiple provinces with AA and thus should suffer accordingly, both in strength and org.

In the state you described AA, one would still not only need to build a wall of AAs in length but also in depth. It is somewhat annoying that you have to assume that a considerable part of the stationary AA would probably never fire a shot because the aircraft are warping in between provines without ever crossing the provinces in between. Stationary AA would only be useful to protect really high value targets. This needs to be considered as well when balancing the new stationary AA :/

[Danmark Rising]

I definitely like the changes to the elections. Also love seeing the foreign ministers. I'm really itching to get my hands on FTM. I'm still concerned about how the changes to neutrality will affect minor countries but I'd like to see how that plays.

[Traks]

Positive news.
Will non-linear repairs be back? So repairing radar/AA from level 1to 3 takes dunno, 3 days, while repairing 9 to10 could take 3 weeks? Or "non-linear" is forbidden expression?

[Baltasar]

Positive news.
Will non-linear repairs be back? So repairing radar/AA from level 1to 3 takes dunno, 3 days, while repairing 9 to10 could take 3 weeks? Or "non-linear" is forbidden expression?

If they take exponentially more time to build, they would also need to be exponentially be more effective and harder to hit.

[Chromos]

While I'm working on multi-threading improvements for For The Motherland I figured we'd share some of the small improvements we made lately. Stuff we have seen mentioned on the forums or didn’t feel were quite up to standard.

Last but not least, static anti-aircraft batteries have gotten a bit of an overhaul. They are now much more resistant to bombings (for modders this is a scriptable value per building type now) and much more powerful (before a destroyer was better than even a fully upgraded level 10 AA), they also get a twice as strong boost for each level of the Heavy AA Guns tech than before. Hopefully this should give them a bit more importance in the game.

Hi!
Maybe also add a scroll bar in the Statistics screen?
So also "your" DLC's show the used units correctly?
(Now that is not only a modder related stuff, but an official Paradox release since CWoWW2 and DIES IRE:G and SWoWW2 ?)

And I really like the current additions!

For the AA.
Nearly 80% of Bombers get through over the war IIRC.
So not sure how to modell that the best, and if later techs like early AA-rokets(Wasserfall) would make a big difference.
But I already like the possibility to mod the buildings some more.

Maybe the damage from AA of just overflown provinces can be modelled by an attrition modifier?
So lets say for bad navigation that brings you to near to another city?

I don't know if that is only my experience, but often if I intercept bombers they still get trough the fighter screen and bomb the tartget successfully. But maybe that is just a balance issue about Org?

Kind regards,
Chromos

[Traks]

If they take exponentially more time to build, they would also need to be exponentially be more effective and harder to hit.

No no no. Build time should be normal, I was mentioning Repairs. Mostly for infrastructure, but also buildings.

[Hakello]

Thanks for the update, elections are nice I guess, improved AAA was pretty much required (but moddable damage modifiers for buildings are awesome!) and beeing able to see ministers now is pretty cool

But seeing us fans are greedy bastards (or at least I am ):
On intelligence - intelligence isn't really intelligent at the moment, as they constantly forget what they knew 5 mins ago if a spy dies or you lose LOS on something, would be cool if you "remembered" building levels and units their last known location (or at least the fact that the unit actually exists).

Frontage - Combat modifiers are nice and all, but it would make a lot of sense if a mountain province had much less combat_width available than a plains province. Beeing able to modify that would be pretty cool (same with rivers, attacking over a river should reduce combat width)

Traits - I've never seen the "surprise_chance" (trickster) effect do anything in land combat, might be me, but if its not, maybe change its effect to something usefull? :P (small increase in chance for combat events to fire maybe?). Also, more modifiers are always awesome.

Weather - If it would be possible for weather to increase attrition for a unit that be pretty nice

Experience - Fixing experience for leaders (it takes the same amount of exp to go from lvl 5-6 as to go from 1-6 (all generals should start with 50% exp to fix this) would be cool

Stockpile - beeing able to define max stockpile somewhere would be nice (and easy to add? )

[Te. Kenzo]

Short AAR but very important informations.

[PaxImperator]

I was covering for you, but you ruined it!

Such a grave disappointment!

Anyway, I noticed just now that the foreign ministers in the screenshot are ordered very differently than your own country's in the politics screen. I hope you'll put the foreign cabinet in the proper order if you haven't already.

I've enjoyed this dev diary by the way. It isn't spectacular like the strategic resources one but the AA and variable elections are news to me (and good news at that), and it's satisfying to see the much-anticipated foreign ministers feature in action.

[Yazem]

Something I would LOVE to see in this expansion, is to see each countries civilian/solder casualties and perhaps the number of solders the country has killed! :P

[Frederic III]

I know this is not really about HoI3 FTM, but will this feature with elections at different times will eventually be implemented in Victoria II? Since the party system is alike (about the ideologies) it would make sense, along with a better representation of the lower chamber.

[Traks]

Something I would LOVE to see in this expansion, is to see each countries civilian/solder casualties and perhaps the number of solders the country has killed! :P

Totally no. Please go reread forum rules on why.

[Metz]

Totally no. Please go reread forum rules on why.

How about have a statistics of that but the game brings it disabled and you have to enable it in options to see it.



Also, the ministers show up in an inverse fashion. The Head of State and all the ministers below it go on the left column while the Head of Government and the other ministers go on the right column.

[Yazem]

Ah, I'm sorry! I usually don't read HOI forum, and therefor I forgot to read the rules. I apologize.
edit: I have read them now!

[Baltasar]

No no no. Build time should be normal, I was mentioning Repairs. Mostly for infrastructure, but also buildings.

Same thing. More time for repairs would require adjustments as descriped above.