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podcat

Game Director <unannounced>
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Jul 23, 2007
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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.

View attachment dd7_rally.png

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.

View attachment dd7_prestige.png

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:

View attachment dd7_horse.png

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.


View attachment dd7_build.png

Mobilization Changes
Mobilization will now be capped based on the size of your standing army. How much depends on your ruling party's military policy. A pacifist party can mobilize as many as they have a standing army, whereas a fully jingoist party can mobilize up to 4 times their standing army.

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.
 
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Are there any changes planned to the mobilisation system?

yes in fact I was supposed to write about it this dev diary, but it got a bit long and I forgot about it. here goes (also editing OP):

Mobilization Changes
Mobilization will now be capped based on the size of your standing army. How much depends on your ruling party's military policy. A pacifist party can mobilize as many as they have a standing army, whereas a fully jingoist party can mobilize up to 4 times their standing army.

If you meant where they go, mobilized units will also gather in rally points.

look below the factory on the map, ive never seen an airplane below a factory

Its a late game trade good which is why. we haven't changed those icons.

The number below the conservative party had indeed never been see by me before, what could that mean?

see future dev diary :)
 
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Did I miss something? There's what looks like a ballot-box symbol underneath the word "Hull" in the first screenie. Not sure I've seen that before.

its an indicator for party loyalty. you can hover your mouse over it to get information about your voters. see DD 4


I'm not sure that the penalty will fire, since you'll free one merging 2 armies, not removing him, a process can't be penalized without punishing legitimate merges... that's why i consider hard to really avoid this kind of behaviour.

if you merge in thus free up a general you can exploit a tiny bit, but:
1. the highest prestige general will be selected as running the army, so cant teleport him, only the other general.
2. you had to move them both there in the first place so if you are fighting on two fronts its not really very practical to do this.
 
[britney fan voice]Leave Hull alooone![/britney fan voice]

there is nothing wrong with hull :D
 
what about rally point for ships?

its a land army only thing. ships already gather in ports and we have plans to limit things so we get more historical amounts of ships. eg no 250 dreadnought when historically Britain had like 20-30.
 
A number of excellent improvements for managing armies, and the leader prestige thing is a nice addition. However, are we likely to see a new military score system, so that it actually reflects the military ability of the nation? The present score calculations for both industry and military leave a lot to be desired.

yes and no. I want to improve it, but its not really there to be an accurate representation of their power in war (the ai never looks at military score when deciding war for example). Stuff like deadnaughts did historically count a lot more than their actual power in war because they became a symbol of might
 
Very interesting! So a big navy doesn't necessarily protect you from DOWs.

it helps, but if you are neighbors its not going to matter as much compared to land power.
 
So suppose a province has a supply limit of 60. Troops gather there and an army of 60 is formed. As new armies arrive, do they gather in that province and stay as a single army or stop at the province before? If they stop in the province before, will they move to the rally province is the army of 60 is removed?

Is this like EU3's split in half option?
Any details on the other changes?

Also whats the expected release date for this?

- if you hit the limit it will no longer join that unit and will start gathering a new one. its up to you as a player to move the one there for being over limit which isnt so bad because you can see it in the outliner for your rally points when this happens.
- like EU3 split, but done during reorg so you can move stuff about.
- what other changes do you want details on. stuff I havent talked about will be in future dev diaries but feel free to ask about stuff we already announced. Implementation wise we are about 1-3 weeks ahead of diaries depending on the feature which is why I wont talk about everything at once because the design and ideas might end up not working and we have to change it during actual implementation (this happens sometimes)
- release is about jan 24th.
 
With the new sprites for different army composition, what's going to determine which sprite is used? Will it be based on the number of units of a given type in the stack, the most advanced unit, something else?

both but weighted on their strength. we are still working on it so its not final.
 
Cavalrymen have uniform different from infantrymen

Yes I know. Instead of having to re-do all the units we went with same uniform. Better to spend that time and get tanks and planes
 
I find it ominous that the devs haven't said anything about general life-expectancy...

hint: instead of writing a post like "I think general life expectancy is completely broken *nudge* *nudge*" try to write something like "I think general life expectancy needs to be changed. The problem right now is <insert description of the problem>" and there is a chance we'll look at it. If people don't tell me assume I don't know what the problem you are talking about is.
 
better, although I'm not sure about their nostrils...

edit: tweaked the baseline, so we dont have a lot of deaths under 25 unless actually in combat
 
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Just wondering: could war policy influence the prestige hit for removing a general? I guess that a militaristic and jingoistic society or class (i.e. the prussian junkers) could be more sensibile to this than a pacifist one, which doesn't care very much about the military or could be even hostile to it. Maybe it's already done in this way, but otherwise could add one additional pro and cons about different war policies.

I dunno, seems to me a militaristic society would care more about their famous general being relieved of command?
 
Sorry to repeat my own post, but I think I asked this just as the weekend was beginning... and I'm hoping for some clarification for my own peace of mind:

was sure I had replied to that one. if you have no army you cant mobilize. you need trained soldiers to get your riff-raff up and running.
 
Is the ratio of standing army to mobilizable reserves going to be moddable so that it can be affected by things other than military policy? For example, will it be possible to have some National Values let you mobilize a greater number of reserves, or make an invention or decision "standing reserve formations" that would do the same thing?

yeh its a regular modifier so can be put in a lot of places.

@The Arch Mede if it turns out to be a problem during testing we can modify it. so far it hasnt been