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Hi everyone and welcome back to regular weekly dev diaries (if you don't count the april fools one last week). I know you are all super excited to hear what we have been up to since Battle for the Bosporus. The answers to that are going to take a few dev diaries to cover, so I figured I would start with a timeline for you:
  • We recently released 1.10.4 to fix various multiplayer exploits going on, but seems an important case was not detected at the time so we are working on a 1.10.5 to address that soon.
  • Pdxcon is coming up in May so expect to hear some more details there.
  • The yearly anniversary is coming in June so expect some cool stuff and a patch.
  • We are however spending most of our time on the 1.11 Barbarossa update as well as the unannounced expansion that will be released together with it. That's what we will spend most of our diaries on, as well as today!

‘Barbarossa’ and the unannounced DLC will focus on the Eastern Front and the core of Hearts of Iron, which is warfare - particularly land warfare. Historically the Eastern Front was without doubt the most important front for World War II. It was the largest confrontation in history and
is where Hitler’s expansion was first stopped and pushed back signaling the eventual doom of the axis powers. There are several areas we want to improve here. Weather does not feel impactful enough, while historically it had a massive impact. Logistics currently doesn’t have much player interaction and is mostly something you have to deal with only when problems appear, and finally the combat and division meta has been stable (with an emphasis on large divisions) for a long time - something we hope we can shake up. As you can imagine, these are all things that affect the game on a deeper level and take a lot of work to get right.

Today, I’ll give you guys a bit of an overview on the supply aspect, but fair warning: it’s early days and stuff may still change here before we’re done. I’ll probably spend 3+ diaries on supply over the course of the development to cover everything, but I figured it would be nice to hear about the overarching ideas.

The old system worked by having discrete supply areas pathing back to the players capital and keeping track of the bottlenecks. To simplify a bit ;) - those bottlenecks then decided how many units could fit into areas near the front without penalties. The areas themselves were unintuitive to players and required you to check multiple mapmodes to see if you stepped over an edge etc. I do like bottleneck systems though, because feedback is usually immediate, but it suffered from not having much scaling cost as distances increased, so it was hard to use it to limit snowballing. As I mentioned it was also a system you didn't care too much about until you had problems, while historically, logistics was a vital part of planning a campaign. This led to combining the issue with another gripe of ours - that the way fronts moved in WW2 often followed important railroads, but don't really in HOI4. We came to the conclusion that we should try and make a system focused on railways and with a truck based component as a way to get more out of it when away from the rails.

1617799554638.png


In our new system, supply flows from the capital (the total amount available depends on your total industrial base) through railways, where the level of the railway acts as a bottleneck. To transport more, you need a higher level railway (or a bigger port if it goes over water) so the railways are the current bottlenecks in a way. Depending on how much supply is transported you need a certain amount of trains for the rails to perform. Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P)

An important part of railways is that they are capturable, so as you push into enemy territory you will want to make sure to hold vital railways and capture railway hubs to supply your troops. There is a conversion time here to model the fact that there was usually some repair or re-gauging that needed to happen for attackers.

1617798271066.png

1617799689604.png

Mapmodes are still quite WIP ;)

Rivers also had a huge importance on the eastern front for transport and supply so they will work essentially like basic railroads now, where you need to control both sides of their banks to use them to ship supplies around.

1617798407335.png


Supply is drawn from what we call Supply Hubs now, which are either cities, naval bases, or manually constructed stations along the rails, which have to be linked into the network. Air supply works a bit differently but we will talk about this in the future along with some other supply additions...

The flow of supply from a Hub to a division depends on the terrain/weather etc, and ideally you want to have available trucks here (which is to say, motorized equipment) to increase the amount of supply you get as well as range. Cost of trucks and trains and losses to attrition and bad weather will be a limiting factor on your logistics.

1617798787102.png


Overall, this creates a system where it's strategically sound to fight over railways, prepare for large offensives, to try and bleed each other's logistics capability and to force care when advancing in bad terrain and weather. The result is a much more fun, historical and immersive Eastern Front as well as adding a new layer of invasion planning in the rest of the world.

See you all next week for the next diary!
 
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I presume an Italy DLC will be coming with an Air Warfare rework. It kinda fits too as the Regina Aeronautica was one of Italy's greater strengths in warfare.
If that is the case, I suppose we will have to wait some years to see an actual rework of the focus tree. The problem is that italy is missing lots of generals ( that don't need an entire patch to be added) and a decent basic focus tree NOW. There are neither interesting events, nor non historical focuses, and lots of malus/bonus are missing (like it is not possible that an L3/33 has the same stats of a panzer 2). It would be nice to also have the possibility to develop the colonies( both in industry and resources), that at the moment have no value, and are always left by the player that doesn't see it convenient to protect them (when in irl was crucial). I hope we won't need an other year to see these little changes
 
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Great news! Logistics are the most important part of each war (let me build railways everywhere :D ). A rework of divisions and land warfare is also welcome! A really nice suprise.

But I can only support the other fellows who highlight the importance of Horse logistics during the war.
If USA army had an advantage over the others it was because it was the only one to have massive motorized supply trains.
Harsh conditions on the eastern front that killed many horses seriously hampered the axis effort.

Also, rivers and lakes could thanks to barges transport a massive amount of equipment. Are they expected to make an apparition ?

With the introduction of deep logistics can we hope for the addition of food matters? South America was a vital attic during both world wars and food concerns killed millions in Asia as well as Europe.

Whatever the response may be thanks for making this game better and better!

(Sorry for the English)
 
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Reading the news, I got afraid of the ability of the AI to construct useful traffic routes. >_<
Well ... somehow it worked in the game "Imperalism", but I wonder what it takes to build these routes? How many factories will we need to build one part of the route in a region and will there preconstructed railroard lines for the countries at the start of 1936? I don't want to start with zero ^^
 
If they do Malta, then they rework Italy too. But we will see more in the next Dev Dirays. I like the new Implementations and Improvements the new Systems bring in since the MALTA-Dev-Diray and the first Economy-Dev-Diray today. :cool:
 
If they do Malta, then they rework Italy too. But we will see more in the next Dev Dirays. I like the new Implementations and Improvements the new Systems bring in since the MALTA-Dev-Diray and the first Economy-Dev-Diray today. :cool:
Maybe I'm falling for the joke here. But A) Malta was a joke dev diary mostly and B) Podcat has already said they won't be doing Italy.
 
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I hope we won't need an other year to see these little changes
What you describe aren't "little changes" Additional generals require Art Time for portraits and CD Time for implementation, the same with what you describe as a "basic" overhaul would still require significant CD Time in scripting then QA Testing and so on which has not been accounted for as Podcat says due to Italy not being in the dlc. A Game Project is like a supertanker, you cannot suddenly do Tokyo Drifts and change tack.
 
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yes. its quite expensive because we generally want you to use cities and ports and fight for those. you also have new construction options for railways that you can draw etc
Talking about supplyl hubs, can we get an option for garrisons to protect our supply lines/hubs from paradrops as well? At least for Mulltiplayer I think this is really important to not break it completely. Maybe impliment it similar to coastal and port garrisons so you may select both.
 
Could be an April Fool with the Tourists, but not with the other important Parts like Army, Airforce, Navy and Economy. In every Fool is a small, medium or big Truth.
 
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I feel like I spoiled enough stuff for today feature wise ;D look forward to future diaries for more stuff

Tank designer is VERY high the list of features that would persuade me to buy a DLC, especially if there was a choice of inline or radial engine techs to tie into a future aircraft designer......
 
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If that is the case, I suppose we will have to wait some years to see an actual rework of the focus tree. The problem is that italy is missing lots of generals ( that don't need an entire patch to be added) and a decent basic focus tree NOW. There are neither interesting events, nor non historical focuses, and lots of malus/bonus are missing (like it is not possible that an L3/33 has the same stats of a panzer 2). It would be nice to also have the possibility to develop the colonies( both in industry and resources), that at the moment have no value, and are always left by the player that doesn't see it convenient to protect them (when in irl was crucial). I hope we won't need an other year to see these little changes
In fact there isn't nothing historical, so a rework in this update would be cool
 
Reading the news, I got afraid of the ability of the AI to construct useful traffic routes. >_<
Well ... somehow it worked in the game "Imperalism", but I wonder what it takes to build these routes? How many factories will we need to build one part of the route in a region and will there preconstructed railroard lines for the countries at the start of 1936? I don't want to start with zero ^^
In Imperialism, it wasn't all that hard.

You had the capital, in which all of your construction and resources were concentrated. And you had resources, which could be collected with ports (the lighthouse icon) and railway stations (the little hut icon). The latter needed a rail connection to your capital, either directly or through a port, which also had a railway station.

So, basically, you have two points on a land mass which need to be connected by rail. That's not a very difficult thing to figure out. Just google on 'path finding algorithm' ;)

Place your supply point. Route from there to the nearest connection point. Which could either be the capital, a port or another piece of railway track. What complicated it in Imperialism (at least in the early stages of the game) was that you couldn't build track in all types of terrain (you had to have the proper inventions first), and that you were chronically short on cash.
 
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Not for this DLC, but its a thing I want to do when we get back to looking at air warfare. its too microey on the defense now imo


My product manager is brazilian so there is not a day when he doesnt nag me for a south american pack actually ;D


oh pretty soon. i like to mix some mechanics diaries in between focus tree diaries, also this time we are probably gonna split some of the focus tree diaries into two because they are quite large this time around.

Also guys, there is no Italy in this expansion. It really doesnt fit in with the rest and I am a bit surprised that people expected that it would be because we try and keep to themes or close areas (mexico is in MTG because its a neighbor of USA and someone really wanted to make mexico). I had some plans to include it in MTG because of italys naval connections but that DLC got too big with all the other majors in there so there was no room. Italy needs and deserves an expansion with a theme and other nations that supports it imo
Why Italy doesn't focus on Eastern Front? In Italy all stories of war ar reference about the Eastern Front, Italy sent over than 200000 soldiers in Russia, but why don't rework, probably because you don't, but pls probably
on the next countrypack, about the mediterranean sea like Albania + Italy + Egypt + Palestine/Israel, probably like this, but i don't want waiting for another year, and spend more more money, the mods are sucks for rework focus
 
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Victoria 3 confirmed!!!
Hi everyone and welcome back to regular weekly dev diaries (if you don't count the april fools one last week). I know you are all super excited to hear what we have been up to since Battle for the Bosporus. The answers to that are going to take a few dev diaries to cover, so I figured I would start with a timeline for you:
  • We recently released 1.10.4 to fix various multiplayer exploits going on, but seems an important case was not detected at the time so we are working on a 1.10.5 to address that soon.
  • Pdxcon is coming up in May so expect to hear some more details there.
  • The yearly anniversary is coming in June so expect some cool stuff and a patch.
  • We are however spending most of our time on the 1.11 Barbarossa update as well as the unannounced expansion that will be released together with it. That's what we will spend most of our diaries on, as well as today!

‘Barbarossa’ and the unannounced DLC will focus on the Eastern Front and the core of Hearts of Iron, which is warfare - particularly land warfare. Historically the Eastern Front was without doubt the most important front for World War II. It was the largest confrontation in history and
is where Hitler’s expansion was first stopped and pushed back signaling the eventual doom of the axis powers. There are several areas we want to improve here. Weather does not feel impactful enough, while historically it had a massive impact. Logistics currently doesn’t have much player interaction and is mostly something you have to deal with only when problems appear, and finally the combat and division meta has been stable (with an emphasis on large divisions) for a long time - something we hope we can shake up. As you can imagine, these are all things that affect the game on a deeper level and take a lot of work to get right.

Today, I’ll give you guys a bit of an overview on the supply aspect, but fair warning: it’s early days and stuff may still change here before we’re done. I’ll probably spend 3+ diaries on supply over the course of the development to cover everything, but I figured it would be nice to hear about the overarching ideas.

The old system worked by having discrete supply areas pathing back to the players capital and keeping track of the bottlenecks. To simplify a bit ;) - those bottlenecks then decided how many units could fit into areas near the front without penalties. The areas themselves were unintuitive to players and required you to check multiple mapmodes to see if you stepped over an edge etc. I do like bottleneck systems though, because feedback is usually immediate, but it suffered from not having much scaling cost as distances increased, so it was hard to use it to limit snowballing. As I mentioned it was also a system you didn't care too much about until you had problems, while historically, logistics was a vital part of planning a campaign. This led to combining the issue with another gripe of ours - that the way fronts moved in WW2 often followed important railroads, but don't really in HOI4. We came to the conclusion that we should try and make a system focused on railways and with a truck based component as a way to get more out of it when away from the rails.

View attachment 701614

In our new system, supply flows from the capital (the total amount available depends on your total industrial base) through railways, where the level of the railway acts as a bottleneck. To transport more, you need a higher level railway (or a bigger port if it goes over water) so the railways are the current bottlenecks in a way. Depending on how much supply is transported you need a certain amount of trains for the rails to perform. Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P)

An important part of railways is that they are capturable, so as you push into enemy territory you will want to make sure to hold vital railways and capture railway hubs to supply your troops. There is a conversion time here to model the fact that there was usually some repair or re-gauging that needed to happen for attackers.

View attachment 701605
View attachment 701616
Mapmodes are still quite WIP ;)

Rivers also had a huge importance on the eastern front for transport and supply so they will work essentially like basic railroads now, where you need to control both sides of their banks to use them to ship supplies around.

View attachment 701607

Supply is drawn from what we call Supply Hubs now, which are either cities, naval bases, or manually constructed stations along the rails, which have to be linked into the network. Air supply works a bit differently but we will talk about this in the future along with some other supply additions...

The flow of supply from a Hub to a division depends on the terrain/weather etc, and ideally you want to have available trucks here (which is to say, motorized equipment) to increase the amount of supply you get as well as range. Cost of trucks and trains and losses to attrition and bad weather will be a limiting factor on your logistics.

View attachment 701610

Overall, this creates a system where it's strategically sound to fight over railways, prepare for large offensives, to try and bleed each other's logistics capability and to force care when advancing in bad terrain and weather. The result is a much more fun, historical and immersive Eastern Front as well as adding a new layer of invasion planning in the rest of the world.

See you all next week for the next diary!
 
Yeah, ITA67 that´s sad and like Podcat said already it´s planed to upgrade it. It will come, but not now. So be patiant and happy that the Game get the first real big Refit for Economy, Supply, Buildup and Land-Warfare after the big Refit for the Navy-Warefare.

But there are much more important Job-Sites then the Italy-Focus-Upgrade which have to be done first. Like the Economy, Land-Warfare, Air-Warfare, Agency, Sea-Warfare, R & D, Supply, Peace Threatys, bring in Skandinavia, South America etc. with secrets we don´t know yet as well as not correctly working Spliting Focuses (example Tshech and Slowakia after splitting it as Germany).

And if that will be done in Patch 1.11 "Barbarossa" where 2 Teams from Paradadox incl. all Freelancers working on it´s fully OK. So I and the others can wait for the Upgraded Italy-Focusses. If it comes in 1.12 or 1.13 "whatever they call it", then it´s fully OK.

It´s not so often that 2 Paradox-Dev-Teams incl. all Freelancers work on a Game. Let them do their Job in getting the best Performance with the Parts they can do for 1.11 "Barbarossa" and the DLC. It´s a big Present for us Hoi-Players, so be happy about it. The Refits from the Base-Game are very very much (incl. to fix the old 32 Bit System to 64 Bit) as well as the other Parts we are playing with.
 
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the combat and division meta has been stable (with an emphasis on large divisions)
I really hope you're going to change the 24 division limit and 5 generals to a field marshal because no one is going to use smaller divisions without that. I play half my games with just 120 divisions because it's just not worth the hassle otherwise. It's not about the buffs, it's about the unreasonable amount of micro needed to manage multiple field marshals. Can you also fix the broken peace conferences in the base game where communists can't take occupied territory, and the issue with the frontline system where it keeps sapping away your troops to pointless new frontlines with people you're not at war with? And let us make frontlines against a whole faction, I hate having to manually split up a large front line because it's with two countries that would obviously invade me together.
 
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