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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 see great potential in Airborne Operations designed to cut off rail supplies.

On January 31, 1942, the Chief of the General Staff of the German Ground Forces F. Halder wrote in his diary:
The enemy continues to drop airborne forces (west of Vyazma). The highway and railway Smolensk - Vyazma are still not cleared of the enemy. The situation of the troops of the 4th Army is very serious! Supply difficulties are noted.
 
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Finally an eastern front DLC. I hope this deepens the economic side of the game, fleshes out the soviets, five year plan, and some of the communist paths generally, and adds more asymmetry between the ideologies.
 
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Fantastic addition! Been hoping for this for a long time, and it looks like a really nice implementation. All in all very happy here.

First of all very, very nice dev diary @podcat, looking forward to getting to play with the new logistics system.

Second, regarding the new Logistics Capacity tab (I'd actually hoped you'd do something like this!), any chance the new logistics network could be made to not only require trucks and trains, but men as well? This'd allow a big real-life manpower sink to be represented in the game. Of course the in-game manpower values might need to be readjusted (although from a historical standpoint there is currently too much manpower available to combat units in the game as is).

Abstracting some of the manpower back from the front would be a nice little change. Fuel usage by supply trucks and convoys would be even nicer (and I'm kinda hoping for the ability to modify cargo vessels if we're getting armoured trains and railway guns, tbh, shouldn't be that hard).

we may decide to add a few railways that don't exist in 1936 but would be complete no-brainers to build at the game start to fix glaring supply issues in various places (The Japanese-Chinese frontier is a bit of a problem child in this regard).

Glaring problems that needed to be addressed historically (Japanese logistics into/through China, Chinese logistics in toto) should be glaring problems that need to be addressed in game. Seems like bizarre logic that wouldn't apply in other areas of the game to remove them.



(P.S. please fix the Manchurian borders, talking of that front :) )
 
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@podcat This update does not address the main problem with the supply system, that is you just strat bomb a few railroads around the capital and the entire country is out of supply, no matter how large. This is neither realistic nor balanced. There are only two ways you can address that:
1. Dynamic or switchable center source of supply. The center source of supply by default is the capital, but should the capital be unable to be an effective center of supply, the center of supply is switched to a different city.
2. Diminishing effects of supply chain disruptions, the more upstream from the target the disruption. This is a bit gamey, but it also does the trick. Sea routes are treated as one hop, each region is treated as one hop. Supply disruptions 5 hops away are irrelevant to supply, 4 hops only 25% effect, 3 hops 50% 2 hops 75% and one hop at 100%. First solution is better for gameplay, second solution is easier.
 
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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.
Yeah, i agree, but waiting a 1 year for a new dlc, maybe in the next countrypack like Battle of the Bosporus, or maybe on the 1.12 there will be an Italian rework but only with fascist and non alligned trees(for decisions) but of you have the countrypack you can have the democratic and communist too
 
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This is going to be amazing so hype! When paradox gets to the wunderwaffe stuff i hope they add an offscreen dockyard for Germany's attempts at bases in antartica and i think it would be cool for giant monsters to appear after nukes are used, only for wunderwaffe settings on or whatver.
 
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How will horses fit into this system, since it's important to remember that the Wehrmacht, for example, was under-equipped in trucks that they relied heavily on supplies transported by horses.
 
Will it be possible to predesignate supply hubs? And to amass resources in selected supply hubs, when building up for an offensive? Tobruk comes to mind. Also lets say you, as the Italians, have not given up on Ethiopia in case of war with the Brits and are preparing to withstand their siege by hoarding supplies and spareparts in Italian Erithrea before the Suez is cut off, will it be possible?
 
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Oh boy, so now paradrops can be more critical to slow or even stop an enemy advance. Now rivers offer you 2 options: being a natural barrier but sacriface vital supplies or occupy both sides of the river and lose a vital defensive point. I wonder how the supply will play on the American continent (and I can't wait for how the devs will portay the south american situation with the Ecuatorian-Peruvian war of 1941).
 
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And any chance the Arctic campaign will be thrown in? As weather and the eastern front will be getting a makeover? I mean establishing weather stations etc on those islands over Norway(currently not in the map) would be quite interesrting
 
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