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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #3

Hi everyone, today it's time for another bag of tricks diary (the previous two can be found here and here). Let's jump straight in!

Attachés
Sending a military Attaché is a new diplomacy action coming in Waking the Tiger. It’s something you can only do while you yourself are at peace and the receiver is at war. It requires good relations and ties up a lot of your command power. In exchange you get army XP back as well as intel so you can see the receiver nation’s war. This is a pretty good way to get XP if you are a nation that isn’t able to send volunteers for example. The receiver gains also benefits from the attaché:
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Sending attachés will make any country the receiver is at war with dislike you, and they may issue a diplomatic protest that can seriously hurt your standing with them as well as cause a stability loss depending on the relevant ideology (so if you refuse a demand from a communist country, you will lose stability depending on the strength of communists in your country).

Extra ground crews
Another good place to spend command power when you don't need it for your armies is by prioritizing strategic air areas to receive extra ground crews. A prioritized area get +10% efficiency for planes operating there which can be great in certain areas to allow your planes to fly more effectively. Prioritizing ties up 20 Command Power per area while active.
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This ability as part of 1.5 Cornflakes and thus available to all.

Historical Army Insignias
As part of the effort to make the game feel a little more immersive and allow you to better recognize your armies, we have added Historical Army Insignias to Germany, France, Britain and the US (the Soviet Union and Japan didn’t really do Army Insignias). They can be assigned to any army like any other army insignia but won’t take the army color. All told there are 18 German icons, 11 British icons, 8 US and 3 French ones as well as 10 shared icons that are available to everyone else (some of them are locked to certain ideologies).
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If this is a popular feature, we might consider expanding it to include historical division insignias also in future DLCs.

Volunteer Air Wings
In Waking the Tiger will be possible to send volunteer air forces. Where before you could only lend-lease planes and hope the AI knows how to use them, you now get to control them yourself (you can still lend-lease planes as well, of course). This means you can have the Condor Legion or The Flying Tigers and help out your own volunteer forces.
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Rather than being sent to another theater like with regular volunteer forces you simply get access for a certain amount of planes to base in and operate in the receiver nation and you can just transfer them as normally. The amount of planes you can use depends both on the size of your airforce and the receiver airbase capacity.
Speaking of Flying Tigers, they actually get a special decision. China can invite the Flying Tigers which will unlock a decision for USA where they can decide to respond. This will both give fighters to China as well as increase their volunteer cap allowing them to send more wings over to assist.
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I’m home with stupid winter influenza so today we got @Da9L and @Archangel85 playing historical Japan in World War Wednesday, so tune in at 16:00 CET if you want to see how that looks or want in-depth info about focus tree design!

Next week we will be taking a look at a hopeful little empire on the rise for Waking the Tiger…
Best possible use of the new Historical Army Insignias:
Capture_ggez.JPG
 
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Historical Army Insignias
As part of the effort to make the game feel a little more immersive and allow you to better recognize your armies, we have added Historical Army Insignias to Germany, France, Britain and the US (the Soviet Union and Japan didn’t really do Army Insignias). They can be assigned to any army like any other army insignia but won’t take the army color. All told there are 18 German icons, 11 British icons, 8 US and 3 French ones as well as 10 shared icons that are available to everyone else (some of them are locked to certain ideologies).
View attachment 326434
If this is a popular feature, we might consider expanding it to include historical division insignias also in future DLCs.
Does the color slide at the bottom mean we can change the color of the insignias as well as the shields etc.?
Will modders be able to add additional ones?
 
WOOHOO! TIGERS FOR THE WIN! CHENNAULT < STILWELL!

Attache will be fun. And I'm so happy you added historical insignia too!

Erm, is that operator sign the wrong way round? :confused:

I like the new stuff. But I was hoping about a dev diary about some naval changes. I love naval combat and ships. And I usually start all my games by disbanding all the ground units (almost all) so I can make more ships.

I was hoping for some info on chain of command changes to admirals maybe. Some change to make subs more scary against everything except destroyers. Or some way to get more info from the naval battles. Like what fleet did my lost ships belong to.

Thank you.

The devs have already said that 1.5 won't contain naval changes. Hopefully the big naval rework will be 1.7.

If a Chinese conquers Tokyo... why should they kept calling it 'Eastern Capital'? It only makes sense if it's still a capital.

It depends whether you take the Nationalist view or the Communist view. The Nationalists followed your line of thought, so when Nanjing/Nanking was their capital, the big city in the north was renamed to Beiping ('Northern Peace'). But the Communists have been happy to have Beijing and Nanjing at the same time.
 
Extra ground crews
Another good place to spend command power when you don't need it for your armies is by prioritizing strategic air areas to receive extra ground crews. A prioritized area get +10% efficiency for planes operating there which can be great in certain areas to allow your planes to fly more effectively. Prioritizing ties up 20 Command Power per area while active.
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This ability as part of 1.5 Cornflakes and thus available to all.
Shoudnt that also make all air wings assigned to given air zone take up +X% more manpower? That would be more realistic and wouldnt make it just a flat out bonus which never happen in real life you have to give up on something to get something ( Like for example Germans cuting on land crews and send them to fight in Russia when they needed and so on )
 
I'm not sure I'll even have a wallet after this dlc and the Apocalypse dlc for Stellaris come out. I still haven't got Cradle of Civilization or Jade Dragon yet, or even the Humanoid Pack.
 
Jesus Christ what is this Final Fantasy Fifteen? Kingdom Hearts 3? Star Citizen?

Bc based on this ridiculously bloated development cycle it sure doesn't look like an expansion for a Paradox historical game. Those are released in a relatively timely fashion. This is going on eight months without any substantial updates IIRC.

You do realize that any hype that was built up for this game is being rapidly dissipated with each dev diary that passes with no mention of a release. You can be coming up with the coolest features in the world but if the devs are the only ones who actually get to play with these features then why should anyone else care?
 
Jesus Christ what is this Final Fantasy Fifteen? Kingdom Hearts 3? Star Citizen?

Bc based on this ridiculously bloated development cycle it sure doesn't look like an expansion for a Paradox historical game. Those are released in a relatively timely fashion. This is going on eight months without any substantial updates IIRC.

You do realize that any hype that was built up for this game is being rapidly dissipated with each dev diary that passes with no mention of a release. You can be coming up with the coolest features in the world but if the devs are the only ones who actually get to play with these features then why should anyone else care?

It's worth keeping in mind that there was no small amount of criticism that TfV and DoD were too small, and people wanted a larger expansion. However, larger expansions are likely to take a little more time (and there's clearly a whole bunch of content in the expansion from all of the dev diaries - I'd wager if I tried to list all the features in Cornflakes and Waking the Tiger combined, I'd miss a swag of them - I expect Waking the Tiger is the largest expansion in terms of content in the history of the franchise, even if in the post-CK2 world that perhaps sound a bit more 'grand' than it is, only really having DoD and TfV as competition). Also, June to January is seven months (which have included around six weeks of holidays in Sweden), not eight :).

More importantly, it's hardly in the devs interests to not release the expansion - while the wait is frustrating, I imagine the devs want it finished and released as much (if not more) than you (and I :) ) do and are working hard to accomplish that goal. Criticising the timeliness of the release on the forums (particularly in early January (when there really have been only about six months or a little less of actual development time) is unlikely to facilitate any earlier a release, and strikes me as a rather unproductive thing to do.
 
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It's worth keeping in mind that there was no small amount of criticism that TfV and DoD were too small, and people wanted a larger expansion. However, larger expansions are likely to take a little more time (and there's clearly a whole bunch of content in the expansion from all of the dev diaries - I'd wager if I tried to list all the features in Cornflakes and Waking the Tiger combined, I'd miss a swag of them - I expect Waking the Tiger is the largest expansion in terms of content in the history of the franchise, even if in the post-CK2 world that perhaps sound a bit more 'grand' than it is, only really having DoD and TfV as competition). Also, June to January is seven months (which have included around six weeks of holidays in Sweden), not eight :).

More importantly, it's hardly in the devs interests to not release the expansion - while the wait is frustrating, I imagine the devs want it finished and released as much (if not more) than you (and I :) ) do and are working hard to accomplish that goal. Criticising the timeliness of the release on the forums (particularly in early January (when there really have been only about six months or a little less of actual development time) is unlikely to facilitate any earlier a release, and strikes me as a rather unproductive thing to do.

Well said. People will complain no matter what they do with their expansions - if it's released quickly but unfinished, we'll see tirades about what a slapdash job they did. If they take time and finish it, we'll see tirades about how they took too long.
 
If this is a popular feature, we might consider expanding it to include historical division insignias also in future DLCs.

This, this, this!!!
Don't consider it - just do it!!!
(and take my money!)
 
For the attache system, could we perhaps get an option to choose a general or admiral to send on the attache, and have them gain experience during that assignment? Particularly in multiplayer, could be a good way to help allied countries build up some generals to counter the level 7-9 german, Italian, and japanese field marshals that are typically already on the board by the time the Germans invade France.

Are any changes being made to army xp in regards to exercising? Specifically, what about the "train 1 division" strategy for producing a pile of army experience? The way general/admiral experience, division experience, and army experience have worked in HOI4 has long been among the more exploitable systems in the game.

Division experience being broken up into "cliff" combat bonuses rather than a single sliding scale of combat bonus has always annoyed me. Oh, you took some minor losses in that first battle as a regular division? Now you're only 99% trained, so here's a full 25% combat penalty going forward.


I agree with this. Lets have an option on who to send to countries. Both naval and army.