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HOI4 Dev Diary - Chain of Command

Hi everyone and welcome back to regular dev diaries. This and upcoming diaries will be covering stuff happening in the 1.5 "Cornflakes" update as well as the unannounced expansion that will come out together with it. One of the main focuses of those can be summarized as "making players care more about armies, leaders and troops" (our DLCs tend to have 1-3 main focuses or missions). The first feature that touches on this, and the topic of today's dev diary is adding a military chain of command to the game.

After Hearts of Iron III, where something like organizing the soviet chain of command could take about an hour of the players time we decided that we wanted something that was a lot less effort to work with for HOI4. We basically settled on a flat level with field marshals with no restriction on commanded divisions, and generals with a limit on division count but with a different set of traits. Over time we felt that we lost a bit too much of the WW2 military flavor with this abstraction, so we started thinking about how to do it in a more interesting way.

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What we have done now for 1.5 is that field marshals are now leading an Army Group, which is a certain number of Armies (what we had before) led by Generals. There are then places in theaters as before. Theaters are like before just a geographical organizational tool for the player and don't have a commander or the like to keep them as flexible as possible. This means that we have a Theaters->Army Groups->Armies->Divisions structure now.
While the Generals still come with a soft cap for how many divisions they can efficiently command, the field marshals will now have a number of armies they can efficiently command.

I also want to make sure to point out that this is still very early on in development, so stuff is very likely to change, and some stuff aren't completely working as it should yet. So we are showing you this in progress rather than showing a completely finished feature, and as always any numbers you see are extremely subject to change ;) Also I very sneekily hid the topbar for now ;)
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When it comes to controlling your troops the new system introduces some changes to the battle planner. You can either do a plan for each army in the army group, or have a central plan for the whole Army Group where each army has a part of the frontline assigned as its responsibility. You can also do a mix, in which case an Army will finish its plan and then fall back to executing the Army Group's plan. We are still iteration on this stuff though but I figured you all wanted to know how it would work in practice.

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Something that does not really come across in the images is that we are working on ways to streamline the process for setting up fronts using the new army groups. This should make at least the basic cases feel smooth to set up, even with one more command level and more armies without a ton of extra clicking.

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The sharp eyed reader will also notice that we have removed the skill level for generals. This is now replaced with separate skills of different kinds. Attack, Defense, Planning and Logistics. Attack and Defense do what you expect while Planning improves planning speed and Logistics lowers supply consumption. Field marshal stats apply together with army general stats at a reduced capacity, so you will always want to have a chain of command for best efficiency.

The chain of command feature is going to be part of the free update, although there is some cool DLC features that tie into it we will be revealing in later diaries. Also expect to read more details about the system itself like how things in combat are affected etc.

See you next week when we will be taking a look at national unity...
 
Leader need to have a political power attribute as well. Leaders with higher level attribute (plus political power) get automatically promoted when there is a empty higher level post opening up. If you want to dismiss or promote a leader, then you need to pay in political point to do so.

By the way, this may mean creation of high level commands may no longer be free, else it would have become a loophole for leader promotion.

Thanks, Ageod... :p
 
I have been watching the World war Wednesday's, and read the chain of command dairy again, and haven't noticed if you can hide your generals behind the field marshals. Hopefully I missed the bit about doing so in the diary and Daniel wasn't using the feature, I think it would tidy the screen up a bit especially as some of the more numerous military leader countries like Germany and such.
 
there will be a bonus for cas planes operating angaged to a unti with a leader with that capacity?
 
As I usually say, the hierarchy system in HOI3 was a good idea, just poorly implemented. If it was made more user-friendly, and it no longer required an hour of micro-management just to set it up, it'd be a very useful system.
 
I see this as a tool for prventin playes make micromagment atack tactics, more efectives than ai vs ai, but in fact no much realistic, that desitions based on datiled data werent avaible.

Please if a developer look at this mod http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1225267769

its a mod for reasing info for combat, i think its to extreme but would be interestin if theres a code supported gui update to have inspite a porcentage a 3 state indicator, lossing, winnig holding. This would even force more the players to dont micromanagment attacs on the front, or at least give this as an option.
 
@kaguravitro Paradox has stated repeatedly that obscuring mechanics and other information from the player only leads to increased criticisms (and by extension, unfounded complaining) from the players.

Furthermore, given that there's already a mod out there for this, there doesn't seem to be any rationale for this to be something for Paradox to work on. If a player wants to micromanage their fronts, that's up to them; if they don't, then they have the option of using that mod.
 
I dont want ban the mirco managment, but give and option in-game to get less information, the mod for limitation of scrpting/moddeable files gives all or gives nothing.

No info is also irrational, but a mid point should be avaible. But its a minor point compared with unbalanced naval combar and the continous naval invasion.

I have to say, i let ai vs ai, i tray to avoide the micromanagment ecxept very rare in cambat
 
Just curious regarding stratifying units:

Will it be possible to extend a similar mechanic to air wings and navies? I'm someone who likes to group my naval units, for example, into its smaller components such as a cruiser division etc.

However as the game currently is it is not possible to stratify naval units into smaller groups without merging all these smaller units into one big fleet. It becomes especially tedious when I need to separate my ships into different classes as well; would not have wanted to have to search out and detach my faster cruisers for an escort mission one by one from its previous attachment to a larger carrier task force. Some goes for air wings as well, though the new 'attaching air wings to armies' mechanic might mitigate this problem to some extent.

Not sure if this had been discussed somewhere within the forum (I'm not going to shift through thousands of posts to find a similar topic) but would love to hear the views of anyone, including the developers, here.
 
Just made a thread on corps-level support assets, in the spirit of this dev diary :p . Feel free to check it out :) .

I dont want ban the mirco managment, but give and option in-game to get less information, the mod for limitation of scrpting/moddeable files gives all or gives nothing.

No info is also irrational, but a mid point should be avaible. But its a minor point compared with unbalanced naval combar and the continous naval invasion.

I have to say, i let ai vs ai, i tray to avoide the micromanagment ecxept very rare in cambat
I have to agree with the others, it's better to have info readily available. It's an interesting idea to have to consult combat windows and "read" the battle to figure out for yourself how it's going, though, so I like that there's a mod for that for those so inclined.
 
442 agrees, and 8 disagrees. Seems like the vast majority of people consider this a step in the right direction. Personally I would love one more layer to it but this will work.
 
Will there be division generals as well? Also, corps commanders? I really miss those. They added so much flavor and historical accuracy to the game. I miss not having that type of OOB. Also, naval and air force OOB would be great too..
 
Well folks, I hope you liked HOI3, because you have it now. The amount of busywork managing those divisions and generals is horrendous.

Look closely at the screenshots on the first page and see how few divisions there are on the frontlines. When you're talking about 240 divisions as Russia on the German border, you need two Field Marshall and 10 generals. The entire bottom section of the screen is filled with portraits! Then, if you lose a division, you need to manually reallocate the replacement to each general.
 
How does the bonus system work when assigning Field Marshall > General > Division? Did the stats add up?

Field Marshal when leading army group provide 50% of his attack/defense/logistic/planning bonus to divisions in armies. 50% of the earned traits and general traits he posses. 100% of Field Marshal Traits.