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

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podcat

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Jul 23, 2007
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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.

First up is improvements for giving a bit better feel to elections. Countries now have correct dates scripted in for previous elections and can have country-specific term lengths, for example Sweden has 4 year terms before 1970 and Finland has a 3 year term at the start of the game in 36. This means that we can trigger elections on the proper days instead of everyone having elections at the same time the same year.

Another thing that has been requested multiple times by you guys on the forum is the ability to see ministers in foreign countries and their bonuses and effects, so we put it in. It's in the intelligence view, but you don’t need spies to find out this information as it wasn’t exactly hard to get your hands on.

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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.
 
Static AA boost; me like :D
 
Regarding AA guns -- will they now FINALLY do the same they did in HoI2, wherein they shot at planes flying OVER a city, on to another city? This seems like the way the actual war worked, so I hope that this has been fixed, too.

Simply put: if a bomber group is flying over Hamburg (which has, say, a level 10 AA) on its way to Berlin, will the AA in Hamburg fire on the planes as they fly over the city?
 
Regarding AA guns -- will they now FINALLY do the same they did in HoI2, wherein they shot at planes flying OVER a city, on to another city? This seems like the way the actual war worked, so I hope that this has been fixed, too.

Simply put: if a bomber group is flying over Hamburg (which has, say, a level 10 AA) on its way to Berlin, will the AA in Hamburg fire on the planes as they fly over the city?

Bombers skip about 80% of the provinces on their way, so they would more likely than not skip the ones with the AA anyway...
 
Bombers skip about 80% of the provinces on their way, so they would more likely than not skip the ones with the AA anyway...

My grandfather was in WW2; he and his friends flew missions as escorts and often as bomber pilots/gunners. EVERY TIME they flew over a German city or a major landmark on the ground (as they needed to often, in the days before radar you needed to often find out where you were by looking below) the AA would open up on them. He used to say to me: "First, they'd fire their guns at us, then send in the fighters, then on our way home, more AA and more fighters, but never at the same time. One or the other, so they didn't shoot down their own fighters, especially during the later parts of the war."

They definitely had AA batteries outside of cities or within cities/around them to target bombers. They knew the allies' major bombing run corridors and planned their defense around them. So its silly, in my mind, that this hasn't been changed yet.
 
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The election date change is a good one, I hope it makes its way into Vicky ;)

There was no good reason to hide ministers, so it makes sense to have them show. It's good to see AAA become relevant too, but I'm also interested to see how much effect it has on enemy formations that are flying over rather than attacking that province.
 
Definately like the small improvements.

Regarding AA guns -- will they now FINALLY do the same they did in HoI2, wherein they shot at planes flying OVER a city, on to another city? This seems like the way the actual war worked, so I hope that this has been fixed, too.

Simply put: if a bomber group is flying over Hamburg (which has, say, a level 10 AA) on its way to Berlin, will the AA in Hamburg fire on the planes as they fly over the city?

Good question. May be not all barrels could aim for the bombers if they are just crossing as most assets would be concentrated around the provinces important facilites. If the bombers are just flying over the province, they can partially avoid AA. This would also mean that strategic bombing would still be a credible way to reduce enemy IC / UI without giving it too much importance.
 
My grandfather was in WW2; he and his friends flew missions as escorts and often as bomber pilots/gunners. EVERY TIME they flew over a German city or a major landmark on the ground (as they needed to often, in the days before radar you needed to often find out where you were by looking below) the AA would open up on them. He used to say to me: "First, they'd fire their guns at us, then send in the fighters, then on our way home, more AA and more fighters, but never at the same time. One or the other, so they didn't shoot down their own fighters, especially during the later parts of the war."

They definitely had AA batteries outside of cities or within cities/around them to target bombers. They knew the allies' major bombing run corridors and planned their defense around them. So its silly, in my mind, that this hasn't been changed yet.

With all due respect to your grandfather and his friends, what does this have to do with the fact that the engine doesn't represent the entire flight path of the bombers? The AAs can't fire at the bombers because the bombers don't fly over every province. Your grandfather had to visit every inch of land on the way, but the game advances one hour at a time and by that time the bombers can take multiple provinces. This is a major difference compared to HoI2 where the planes only moved one province per hour even if they were faster than that. The difference in HoI3 would be quite significant.
 
Ministers... what about assassination?

looking at historical attempts it was tried quite a number of time and without much success, so if we want to keep it historical it would be a frustrating feature that would only work 1/100, or unhistorical and wipe out all the characters we know that add flavor during ww2. Feels to me it would be best done in a mod with something like a decision/event series instead.
 
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?
 
With all due respect to your grandfather and his friends, what does this have to do with the fact that the engine doesn't represent the entire flight path of the bombers? The AAs can't fire at the bombers because the bombers don't fly over every province. Your grandfather had to visit every inch of land on the way, but the game advances one hour at a time and by that time the bombers can take multiple provinces. This is a major difference compared to HoI2 where the planes only moved one province per hour even if they were faster than that. The difference in HoI3 would be quite significant.
I think the arrows of where the unit is moving towards is flight path enough, dont you agree ? and since its not possible to alter that route except for straight line airbase - target, its possible that if that route is over hamburg, to berlin, they should take damage. They skip provinces, but its entirely possible to at the end of that skip calculate the damage the planes got from every province they just flew over.
 
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?

Raise NU will be back, it was just hiding for that screenshot :)
 
With all due respect to your grandfather and his friends, what does this have to do with the fact that the engine doesn't represent the entire flight path of the bombers? The AAs can't fire at the bombers because the bombers don't fly over every province. Your grandfather had to visit every inch of land on the way, but the game advances one hour at a time and by that time the bombers can take multiple provinces. This is a major difference compared to HoI2 where the planes only moved one province per hour even if they were faster than that. The difference in HoI3 would be quite significant.

The game should still be determining every province crossed as part of its path finding though, even if you don't get to see it. "All" it takes is a quck calculation of time in that airspace and the level of air defence, and apply some attritional damage based on that. One of the programmers would be better qualified than me to say how feasible that is, though.
 
With all due respect to your grandfather and his friends, what does this have to do with the fact that the engine doesn't represent the entire flight path of the bombers? The AAs can't fire at the bombers because the bombers don't fly over every province. Your grandfather had to visit every inch of land on the way, but the game advances one hour at a time and by that time the bombers can take multiple provinces. This is a major difference compared to HoI2 where the planes only moved one province per hour even if they were faster than that. The difference in HoI3 would be quite significant.

Of course its abstracted for the game and that's partly my point; if "Hamburg" the province does not equal "Hamburg" the city, then fine, a level 10 AA only does, say, 65% of the damage if the bomber group only flies over it. If they decide to bomb the city/province of "Hamburg" itself, then they should get the full blast of the AA, depending on its level and your technology for AA.

This game makes major abstractions and that is fine; but this one is ridiculous. Sure, bombers cover gigantic areas in HoI3 that are a little silly, but the reality of this abstraction is that, for provinces, when flying over one that has a major investment in AA the guns should do some kind of damage to the air group. I don't have the time to work out what would be a fair mathematical damage equivalence, but I am guessing somewhere between 50% and 75% of what would be caused by a full level 10 AA when the city itself is targeted.

Look at my home state, Ohio. Cleveland's province is much larger than the city was in 1939 but a lot of it was hinterland; why would a bomber group hit that? Precision bombing was so difficult in WW2 that they would want to do their best to bunch together to maximize effectiveness of ordinance. In so doing, they would have to fly close together when going for a target run and hence maximize the ground defense's abilities to shoot them down.

But, I can see it both ways; to make your case for you, I would suggest reading Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich, especially the parts at the end where Speer, the Armaments Minister, explains that all too often, the barrels of AA guns were not produced properly or aimed inefficiently wherein their attempts to shoot down allied planes were just "an impressive light show for the people."

So, I really think something should be done to allow for province/city/whatever AA to cause some damage to fly over planes in this abstracted game. It's just way to unrealistic to think that a bomber group flying over Hamburg wouldn't be shot at on its way to Berlin.
 
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