HOI4 Dev Diary - 1.8 Patch (wut?!) & Focus Tree Navigation

[wesleytj]

Yeah, but they could have made one or two small patches in between still. For example the mentioned Fleet reinforcement bug is a bug from a newly introduced feature and still isn't fixed nor is there any answer, if this bug is even on their list. I just don't agree with this kind of "priority management".

That's a cogent argument, and one that deserves to be heard. Throwing around non sequiturs like "they're not interested in bugfixing", as the OP did, is not. It's not constructive, and it's demonstrably false; it's just bitching for its own sake.

 

[PrezTNT825]

Ugh, new launcher. I hate the new EU4 launcher. Its glitch and messy. This new launcher just seems to be a carbon copy of the EU4 one.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

As someone who plays minors it's disappointing to see party popularity get fixed, but not civil wars. One state civil wars consistently break the game, but even British Malaya and such can have you fighting nothing in an unwinnable war.

Searching focus trees is very nice. Were the tooltips on them fixed also?

 

[szmik]

what are weekly 3-4s pauses in ironman game for?
they are very annoying

 

[Gingerninja]

- Reduced number of destroyers needed to cover convoy routes from 1 destroyer per 5 convoys to 1 destroyer per 10 convoys

- increased number of convoys covered by each destroyer on escort from 10 to 12

- Added 2 sub detection to radar 4 to make t4 subs not so hard to detect when matched up against modern destroyers

- upgraded t4 radar to have sub detection from 10 to 14

So which is it

 

[Exekution]

I've got the new patch, but i cant find the "browse nf" feature.
I cant even zoom in and out in the NF :/

What am i doing wrong?

 

[petarpoparacrni]

so the mission turns off? or they dont do anything measurable after an hour?

Here is how you reproduce this.

1) Start a war between UK and Italy (specific nation is irrelevant)
2) Send some kind of plane that is capable of performing Naval Strike missions to either of the above nations as an air volunteer
3) Create an instance of naval combat in Central Mediterrenean (specific seazone is irrelevant and specific mission should also be irrelevant, the key thing is that there is naval combat)
4) As that nation that sent air volunteers begin naval strikes on the seazone with active naval combat

What you should observe: Within an hour of planes entering the naval battle you should see the naval battle disappear. There is retreat phase triggered or anything like that. The battle is simply gone.

How this can be used to cheese games: Imagine you are Italy and you just entered the war in a competitive multiplayer game, but find that the enemy UK player is raiding Central Med. Imagine you ask your friendly AC to bomb his fleet, but the AC replies that he is losing many planes to the fleets AA and not damaging the fleet much. Seeing that your supply is being destroyed in Africa and convoys falling, you decide to ask your Spain player to send over naval bombers as volunteers to "bomb" the battles occuring in the Central Med. Battles still pop up, but thanks to this exploit your friendly Spain player (who is playing a neutral volunteer nation) is now ending all of your naval battles almost immediately as they pop up. You can now rebuild supply in North Africa and safely transport Germany medium tanks to Libya without fear of raiding.

 

[desphorin]

I've got the new patch, but i cant find the "browse nf" feature.
I cant even zoom in and out in the NF :/

What am i doing wrong?

The new focus feature will be in 1.9

 

[Hovelax]

Hey @podcat , @Archangel85

So there are a number of bugs/issues and problems myself and some others have encountered recently and were wondering if theres a list of bugs you have acknowledged because we have talked about it for ages and still none of them have been fixed so were wondering if you havent seen us? Could there be a 'known of' bugs list. To name a few:

- Mexico focus tree: 'Catholic Politics' focus - the leader doesnt use the portrait as 'GFX_Portrait_MEX_Luis_Maria_Martinez' uses a capital P for portrait but the actual GFX image uses lowercase p for 'GFX_portrait_MEX_Luis_Maria_Martinez'

- The British Malaya is always bugged so that only one side spawns and the other side exists as a non existant capitulated country causing an infinite civil war bug.

- Whenever any secondary tag (D02, D03) win a civil war and adopt the ideas of the predecessor the ideas localisation wont match up. e.g so the great depression can be called 'Bob Smith'

- India and 'Decolonized Asia' preset are very incompatiable - the entire diplomatic path being cut off - bypass options is neccecary for playability of Raj in its current state.

- Custim Game Rules: AI Behaviour - Machukuo - Independence = Mispelling of branch is now 'bracnh'

- Nikita Khrushchev can still run the communist party of Ukraine after being killed in Stalins Purge.

- And if I had to add one last thing. I'd say theres been a slight oversight, as I can see how to save time all the new country tags added in 1.15 were given the same advisors . (Captain of Industry, Smooth Talking Charmer, Prince of Terror). The issue is giving every nation, especially in africa, 'Prince of Terror' renders the entire continent entirely unenjoyable to play in as all war justifications take far longer. The A.I often beelines for this advisor and it has diminished the fun of playing this region entirely.

Thanks, for all the hard work for this early patch, I just want to help where I can!

 

[karigrandi7]

i find it quite annoying that the mods arent in alphabetical order anymore. Is there a fix for this?

EDIT: in the launcher, that is.

 

[podcat]

Could there be a 'known of' bugs list.

That would be the Bug Reports sub forum. If a thread has a comment it definitly is in our internal DB. We dont check it at all times though. More around releases.

 

[noobermenschen]

The main reason is that its a fairly involved process to do a patch involving a lot of people, and we dont have time to balance multiple games at once. In our internal dev version everything is really different because of resistance and garrison changes, so this kind of stuff needs to be done in isolation. HOI4 is a different animal than a lot of the other paradox games where doing balance changes will actually potentially break the flow of the game completely so we cant just toss things in on feel and see how it goes. I think there are ways we can have more patches but its tricky. We are usually fully focused on the DLC + big update we are doing after we release post-release patches that even doing something like this is quite disruptive. So it basically comes down to priorities on the stuff that needs to be fixed. In this case we took some time to pick safe fixes and balance stuff because we already needed to do a launcher update, and thus needed to go through all the processes anyways. We just dont have the infrastructure and manpower to keep on top of 2 versions of a game as complex as HOI at the same time. So I think what we got is a decent compromise. Perhaps we can try other stuff and rely more on open betas, but even there its tricky to deal with multiple versions.

Given that when 1.9 comes modders are going to have to do a bunch of stuff to make their mods up to date we didnt want to complicate stuff by also have launcher changes happen then, especially since mods will be backwards compatible right now technically, despite saying they are old, while for 1.9 they will need actual updates. So this should ensure things overall go much smoother

The team is actually growing at the moment, so we are bulking up. But just doubling the teamsize wouldn't by itself solve this problem. We would have to completely restructure our development and release process. It's not impossible to do, but it requires some measure of planning and thought rather than just hiring a bunch of people.

Personally I think having a permanent open beta like we do after major releases would help a lot actually, but @podcat makes that call.

It's fascinating getting an occasional peek at how the game is developed, instead of simply waiting for white smoke to waft from the conclave. Is there a team that works on updates like these for all games, or do other teams pitch in to help each other out?

And even though I don't use mods, I appreciate you considering the modders' hard work on these updates. Also I am waiting with great anticipation to hear how THIS patch will destroy the multiplayer community.

 

[Daelyn75]

As Wednesday is upon us so is a new dev diary! Next week we will be back with more espionage, but today is about a small surprise patch as well as improved Focus tree navigation.

1.8 ‘Fork’
Fork you say? I thought you said 1.8 was going to be Husky? Due to technical requirements having to do with updating to the new paradox launcher we had to jump a big number other than going to 1.7.2 like we had planned. This means that 1.9 will instead be Husky which is the big update coming together with La Resistance.

Lets jump straight into the changelog (I know you all skipped straight to here anyway, you can read the stuff above later):

################################################################
########               Patch 1.8.0 "Fork"               ########
################################################################

##################################
# Feature & General
##################################
- Added new Launcher
- Added "/mute <user name>" and "/unmute <user name>" chat commands


##################################
# Balance
##################################
- Reduced number of destroyers needed to cover convoy routes from 1 destroyer per 5 convoys to 1 destroyer per 10 convoys
- Convoys can no longer detect convoys as that just drags down the average detection when escorted
- The amount of convoys in a sub battle is now based on the length of the route, so longer = fewer in a battle
- Reduced total possible torpedo reveal chance reduction to 60% from 70% by reducing wolfpack by 5% and commander trait by 5%
- Slightly reduced sub reveal chance when firing torpedos to account for convoys no longer contributing to detection averages
- Slightly reduced passive sub reveal chance in combat to account for convoys no longer contributing to detection averages
- Added 2 sub detection to radar 4 to make t4 subs not so hard to detect when matched up against modern destroyers
- Aluminium Company of Canada focus now gets an additional 14 Aluminium
- upgraded t4 radar to have sub detection from 10 to 14
- upgraded t3 radar to have sub detection from 5 to 6
- increased IC cost for t3 sub hull from 270 to 320
- increased IC cost for t4 sub hull from 300 to 450
- increased IC cost for cruiser sub hull from 370 to 390
- increased number of convoys covered by each destroyer on escort from 10 to 12
- Lowered t3 and t4 submarine torpedo damage from 23 to 22 and 30 to 28 respectively
- slightly increased the speed penalty on depth charges


##################################
# Bugfix
##################################
- Fixed a civil war revolter not getting correct focus tree
- Fixed escaping or sunk convoys from inadvertently affecting damage calculations for the remaining convoys.
- Fixed Diminishing Returns now applying to party popularity changes.
- Fixed lend-lease sender having its convoy sunk instead of the receiver in naval combats
- Prevented subjects from giving units to their overlord as part of a request for expeditionary forces if those units are volunteers or expeditionaries from another country.


##################################
# UI & Database
##################################
- The open music player button in settings now has proper size
- Music Player now has proper spelling in tooltip/settings button
- Fixes for Japanese various names (ships, divisions etc).
- Fixed full name for Canadian general Percival John Montague.


##################################
# Modding
##################################
- Added define to allow scaling of ship part of sub detection inside combats
- Enabled some console commands that had previously been developer-only but which did not really need to be locked.
    - add_mines
    - release (country)
    - debug (toggle miscellaneous in-game debug utilities)
    - debug_smooth (toggle within-game-tick frame rendering)
    - instant_prepare (division preparation)
    - reload_textures
    - tag_color (set country color)


##################################
# Stability & Performance
##################################
- Fixed a crash when removing certain unit leader traits.
- Added checks to prevent CTD in cases where AI had sent invalid expeditionary forces
- Optimized game rule checks by finding the game rule in the game rule database more efficiently.
- Prevented a crash if a script tries to make a non-existing country declare war on another country.
- Fixed CTD on invalid set_politics usage by failing to set ruling_party, made it write an error instead.
- Fixed pointer truncation in 64bits in ProtectedMemoryAllocate
- Fixed crash reporter to correctly indicate if the program is built for a 64-bit architecture.
- Fixed a CTD related to expeditionary forces that could lock in saves
- Fixed game crashing in weird ways if a mod tries reusing an id

To summarize, the big points here are: Stability, submarine balance and a new launcher

Submarine balance
Later tier 3 and 4 subs were simply too good compared to destroyers designed to hunt them. They have been nerfed a bit and increased in cost and destroyer upgrades improved. Large empires should now also have a bit easier time as we better control the amount of convoys in each battle and have fixed a bug where convoys would actively hurt the sub detection abilities of their escorts making it really tough in big battles.

View attachment 525180

New launcher
We, much like Imperator, EU4 and Stellaris have now also moved to the new launcher.
Since wargamers are a traditional bunch you might be asking why a new launcher is happening. There are several reasons:

• Platform independence. We want to be able to exist on multiple platforms eventually and the current one is limited and not really capable of doing it very well.
• The old one is really limited in how we can communicate with you. Now we can link to multiple news post for example.
• It frees up the dev team (us). We never really had the time to work on the launcher and as the place setting up mods and such there have been a ton of requests for features (such as mod groupings and presets) that we just never have the time to do. With a dedicated team working on a unified launcher across pdx games they will have more time for stuff like this and we can worry about the game itself. I have great hopes for lots of cool improvements in the future and make sure to let them know in comments what kind of features you would like to see.
• We got a neat continue button now directly in launcher so you can save time getting back on your previous session

View attachment 525177

Go here to read details about the launcher changes and what the mean for modders and player.
The tl;dr for players though is that you need to start the game, run it to the main menu and then quit and restart. Without this your mods wont show up. This will clean up old mod configuration and prep everything. Mods will still show out of date until modders have updated the supported version, but we haven't made any changes that will break them so 1.7.1 mods should still be ok, despite them saying they arent - so no panic If you do have issues please post about them in the above linked thread about the launcher rather in here (its still cool to discuss the launcher here though).

If you are interested in more details and plans for the launcher you can read all about it here in a post from the launcher team .

The patch itself releases later today (late afternoon). That is all about the patch, lets move on to highlight some neat stuff coming in 1.9 'Husky'...

Focus Tree Navigation
As our focus trees have gotten larger finding things in them or simply exploring them has gotten harder. To solve this we are adding several things to the national focus screen (btw UI here is still a bit WIP and may change)

• Zoom - You can now zoom in and out to the mouse pointer much like on the map. Its a nice way to get around on big trees (*squints at the spanish focus tree*)
• Filters - toggling various filters can let you easily spot where industry is located, or things related to particular national spirits you are trying to get rid of or modify. These are tagged manually on focuses so its something modders will be able to use also.
• Free Search - on top of filters we also have full free search. It goes through tooltips automatically and picks out focuses. This is a more advanced and powerful version of Filters and quite nice for finding specific things fast when you know what you are looking for.

View attachment 525178
This is me searching for industry related stuff in the Chinese tree. It also shows some of our default filters on the right. Several nations have special filters to help highlight specific mechanics. So China has "Inflation" as a filter, the commonwealth nations have a filter to help spot affecting independence etc. We hope this is going to make getting into new focus trees a lot easier!
Here is an example of zooming out about half way on China:
View attachment 525179
If I place my mouse pointer somewhere I can still see tooltips and zooming will zoom to the cursor.


See you all next week for another diary!

So, you've listed some sub balances, but what about naval AI fixes? The Naval AI is way too passive. Since MTG, I've only had 1 carrier vrs carrier battle, in many, many games. Will this be addressed in 1.9?

 

[Ahmetasm]

When The Turkey Focus coming? Is it even gonna come?

 

[Hermes]

Ugh, new launcher. I hate the new EU4 launcher. Its glitch and messy. This new launcher just seems to be a carbon copy of the EU4 one.

That's because it is the same launcher.

 

[WizT]

Ive updated to the new Launcher, and when I tried updating one of my mods it told me to "check the mod files and my steam account data." Im properly signed in, Steam is connected, and all the files are good and proper in the place where they should be. Is this a bug? Will this get fixed soon?

 

[Casko]

@podcat - just curious. really. but I thought I'd figure I'd bring this up since you were talking about minor naval balance changes, and I feel this is atleast partly related, but is the bug known by you all, and being fixed at any point soon that Battlecruisers, such as HMS Hood are Battleships, and not battlecrusers as they should be in game.

 

[Beagá]

Are submarines more useful now as capital ship counters?

 

[Deported Mr]

Why Is Hitler's face censored? Stalin killed about 5x more than him why is he not censored? I live in the UK and there should at least be an option to turn on censoring.

 

[Dan1109]

@podcat Fork you? No, FORK ME! lol

Well, disappointed about missing a dev diary for the DLC, to cover an admin patch and a few trivial bugs Fixes. I am surprised to say that I am looking very forward to Le Resistance, much more than I thought after the DLC theme announcement. So much, I've dusted off my Wehrmacht uniform to play Germany for the first time since HOI4 launch. Using EAI however, and I am fearing to launch Barbarossa...lol.

However....LOTS of bugs to fix, including needed improvements to the AI. Man The Guns was FANTASTIC, except a) carriers are BORKED, you know the complaint list b) Naval Pacific AI is horrendous. c) Repair AI is too trivial...you need to spread your fleet out to hardly ever have ships in queue....if not, you lose. This kills the AI, when after taking a pounding but doesn't lose a lot of ships, their queues get full and it gets to the point where you just have to moderately damage a ship in order to not see it for the rest of the war. d) Carriers can't be used for Invasion Support, during the invasion. BBs get shore damage, CVs, whose aircraft are on carrier mission, should have their Fighters and CAS provide passive bonuses to combat (fighters would reduce enemy fighter air superiority penalty, CAS can give a bonus similar to Shore Bombardment) while on an Invasion Support Mission....or, just do it for realz...any aircraft on a carrier mission are AUTOMATICALLY flown on Air Superiority and Ground Attack Missions once the invasion starts. And the Mission Efficiency mechanism should NOT be used for this mechanic...the CV is parked 50nm away from the beach, just beyond horizon, its a short hop, ALL planes can make it. This smart automation gives an AI amphibious group a chance against a human player that would swarm the air region with aircraft. And takes even more manual interaction out of the picture for human players.

Playing the US, one of the DLC's focused countries, is just boring because the AI is so bad, or missing mechanics . And no, I didn't care for "America's Civil War", who's premise is completely asinine. But, I guess there are plenty of fun loving American Fascists which own the game today, so you had to throw red meat out to your base.

Well, looking forward to the Intelligence Diary, specifically Naval Intel. I hope to G O D, that when you mentioned recon aircraft, this also applies to Naval Search Aircraft (carrier based done by bombers, float planes, a new naval recon plane type or simply allow Naval Attack craft to have a new mission, where it actively uses fuel all the time looking for target and has increased range as it has no payload, its just doing recon. Fuel use should be based on the size of the sea region, as it may require only a few planes or the entire wing. Then they will actually have something to do while waiting for a target...they will find it themselves!!! Based on wing aggresiveness settings, they would be allowed to RTB, reload, and return to the target with the entire armed wing for a naval attack.

This was SORELY missing from MtG and I hope it results in the last DLC being polished. Things like this, is a prime example of what to game needs to help close the AI-human difficulty gap. It makes me roll and laugh when I read an EAI post where someone who got bored because HOI4 was too easy, and now they can't win against EAI. And EAI doesn't cheat, it just addresses the huge landry list of problems HOI4 has. But it can't fix everything, and if you give the AI some good "Intelligence" features to use (pun intended), then it will make it harder for humans.