HOI4 Dev Diary - Future and Cornflakes

[podcat]

Hi everyone, this week I'm going to take some time and talk future plans with you all.

Right now
With the "Oak" 1.4.2 patch out the door and the team back from vacation its time to start looking at the future. This week we started work on the next DLC which is going to be a full-sized expansion. A lot of people have been asking for more mechanics and larger changes, and this will be it. As normal the expansion will arrive together with a free update we've dubbed 1.5 "Cornflakes".

As for exactly what these will contain you will need to bear with us a bit. As I said with us getting started on it now we need some time to actually make and test stuff before we start showing it off to you. This will mean that the next two diaries (if all goes according to plan) are going to be covering other stuff while we get ready. My plan there is to get some guest writing in from people who can talk about the business and process side of the company and team.

The five year plan
Not actually a five year plan, but I want to share with you some form of roadmap on what to expect in the future. Some of you may have seen me talk about some of this in my PdxCon talk earlier this year.

Just to be super clear, this is not any form of exhaustive or final list and unless we have already done it we can't promise anythings. Priorities change etc. The point of this is to give you an idea of things we would like to do. The order of things is also not in any kind of priority order, or order we would do them.

• Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc.
• More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour
• A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals
• A logistics system with more actual player involvement (now you only care once stuff has gone very badly)
• Improved naval combat interfaces with good transparency to underlying mechanics (give it the 1.4 air treatment)
• Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare
• Long term goals and strategies to guide ai rather than random vs historical focus lists, visible to players
• Every starting nation has a custom portrait for historical leaders
• A way for players to take dynamic decisions, quickly. Something that fits between events and national focuses.
• Spies and espionage
• Changing National Unity to something that matters during most of the game rather than when you are losing only
• Improving peace conferences
• Update core national focus trees with alt-history paths and more options (Germany, Italy, USA, United Kingdom, Soviet, France, Japan)
• Wunderwaffen projects
• Properly represent fuel in some way in the game
• Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff
• Rework how wars work with respect to merging etc as its a big source of problems
• More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms
• More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China, South America, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Greece)
• An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.
• Make defensive warfare more fun
• Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc
• Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure
• Have doctrines more strongly affect division designing to get away from cookie cutter solutions and too ahistorical gamey setups

You'll notice that some of these are small and some of them are huge. I can't really talk too much details about this stuff though. That is stuff we will do once/if it makes it to dev diaries with feature highlights and has been implemented. Oh yeah, and before someone goes "why isn't improving AI on this list" the answer is that its not really something you can ever check off as done. We'll keep working on that in parallel with other stuff as we have since release.

There is no World War Wednesday stream today since the channel is all streaming from Gamescom today, but you can now check out last weeks episode on youtube to see me run the dev team as generals in a massive co-op.

 

[podcat]

It would be great if one of the next diaries could discuss the pipeline of bug squishing.

you mean say process, priorities, what gets picked etc? Can write about that for sure

 

[Archangel85]

It should be noted that this isn't a "this is what will be in the next DLC"-list. It is a list of things we want to do eventually, spread over several DLCs.

 

[podcat]

This list makes me a happy, happy man. What's really cool is how many of these ideas have been discussed here on the forums in varying ways, I hope you and the other devs can use some of the thoughtful discussions generated here to help guide or give a little smidgen of input into the ideas you mentioned.

We read a lot but dont always have time to comment

 

[podcat]

@podcat - for example when taking a look at the list you posted -

"Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc."

Do you still want suggestions, ideas concerning things you mentioned in that list, or you have things already more or less locked down when it comes to it?

stuff isnt locked down at all in this list. this is supposed to give you an idea where we are moving, so feel free to discuss and suggest stuff

 

[podcat]

Looks amazing, can't wait to see how you tackle some of those issues. Would also be interesting to see a dev diary on optimization, would be of great help to modders as well

Since you mention modders, do you mean like "what not to do" or how to structure triggers etc for better performance? Optimization is one of those things we also do in parallel like AI and we tend to bring up when solutions are interesting etc (Tomasz did a good diary for 1.3 if I recall right).

That's a pretty awesome list, but I notice there's nothing more about the air war on the list. After the last expansion you said something about looking at the air mechanics again in the future - is this still the plan?

As I mentioned its not a complete list. We have a whole bunch more air stuff we want to do as well

Thanks for the diary and the list. I assume improving peace conferences is also somewhere on the radar, even if not the top priority. Would that be a fair assumption? And while not feature related per se, optimization of the game engine for smoother running too.

"Improving peace conferences" was on the list, you must have missed it That one is a bit tricky solution wise. I'm not a big fan of how it plays out in practice in the game (UI is cumbersome and hard to understand and work with and you cant contest others choices often leaving wierd results), but I also think its the system I want from a theoretical standpoint. e.g you need to do stuff to get rewarded, its not just all up to player (the player-led peace conference mod makes me cry on the inside) and there is competition for resuts even among the same faction in shaping the post-war world. However its clearly not that popular with the community, so I might need to do some soul searching here.

Operation Cornflakes was espionage related, which I think gives a hint about where the DLC is going (although most people including myself guessed espionage before anyway!)

well, in this case the patch name may have more to do with another reference you wont get until you see the DLC, but I'll leave ppl speculating

Good things . Do you consider adding some tools to coordinate with allies/dominions, give them some orders/objectives and manage their attitude (as for EUIV) ?

yea its something that the game needs (as I said above, its not a complete list)

How about you just delete all millitary high commands that way no one gets encuraged anymore to make one type of division armys? romanian and usa marine only armys and australias arty only army come to mind. or at least nerv the mill hq bonuses to 50% or less.

I ment a bit more than that. its sad that a good artillery equipped infantry army is say 7-2 no matter your doctrine. The high command you mention is almost like a bug we plan to change up and stop.

This is probably a stupid question, but are some of the items in that list things you are planning to include in the next DLC/patch or are they all for some more distant future?

The whole point is to be vague when showing off so many plans I would be very surprised if stuff from the list doesnt show up in next DLC though...

This all sounds really really good! Are there any plans to make it possible to refit ships? (eg. upgrading guns, engines, radar etc, or turning battleships into carriers).

eventually probably. capital ships are a big investment and its sad not to be able to modernize them etc

One thing I would like is more politics/interaction inside a faction. Just more than something of "click to join" and fight.

agreed, something that definitly fits in for the Allies (less so for the others I guess...)

But one thing I missed on that list that would help the game greatly. Adding multicore support.
HOI 4 has a ton of calculations that are not depended on each other, and could be spread around different threads, like combat calculations, supply for different nations, even AI for different Nations/Factions should be possible to spread around.

The game has multicore support, and in fact all those things you mention run threaded (except combats because of interdependencies, but those arent expensive). If you want to cry start the game with -threads=1 flag and feel the difference

@podcat In general it would be helpful if you had more options to customise certain features for Multiplayer, with respect to the wishes of the group that are playing.

Considering games range from 2 or 3 people messing around, to groups of 12 or 10 playing free for all, or as is the case for most forum groups or TS/Discord games, 20+ players trying to do Allies v Axis historical-esque games, the current Multiplayer set up doesn't help to accommodate for any of these. A lot of the time, especially for the latter, an external and complicated rule set has to be used.

Simple options like "no factions" (FFA) , "historical war start" (Historical games) , "AI aggression towards players" (3 friends trying to survive the onslaught ) etc. would help tailor the lobbies and attract the right people.

"rules" for multiplayer is something I'd love for office games and I think is needed for MP to shine for HOI for any public open games. I think it will happen eventually, but its a combination of a lot of work and only useful to a minority of the community since not everyone plays MP so it tends to get a bit lower priority

@podcat I think that more politically flexible focuses could be interresting too. Currently once a government is replaced by the allies he will keep +0.1 communism/fascism influence and sooner or later they will be back in power. If the communists are replaced the political commissars should be removed and other bonuses regarding nationalism or freedoms should be granted depending if the government is fascist or democratic (Yes I forgot about the neutrals because my perception of it depends if the leader is "moderatist" (doesn't seem too bad), "authoritarian" (I find this more problematic)

this is almost more like a bug, its our intent that these get removed if someone changes the government on a nation

How about adding that mad science you talked about during PDXcon to the list of potential avenues? That was a really good idea and we don't know what random seed we're in right now so it might work!

List does have "wunderwaffen" in it

This is a truly attractive to-do list, really looking forward to that!
BTW, any chance that you would fix the "Allied doing nothing issue" in the upcoming DLC?

its on our list of AI issues. its better than what we had before which was all nations thinking of the faction over themselves (italy sending all soldiers to german front vs soviets etc), but it does need more work to find a good balance.

I'd also suggest separate production screen tabs for land, air, and naval equipment. Would help keep things organized instead of just a long list you have to scroll through. Being able to click and drag equipment around the production queue would be amazingly convenient, as well.

We actually tested tabs in development and it has downsides. Improving the production interface for handling the past-midgame amount of production going on is definitly on our lists for sure though

dea: is there any way you could implement proper governments in exile that can coordinate resistance and raise "free" soldiers to continue fighting? For countries such as France who get forced into exile to their colonies when the homeland surrenders. That would be awesome, and a fun feature for multiplayer too if it could be figured out, allowing you to fight the good fight while still being "capitulated" in an attempt to support your allies to regain lost territory.

yeah, its not on our prio list, but its a topic that comes up quite often in discussions. For some nations to be more viable to play (netherlands say) it would be required.

It's good to see new national focus trees for China,Turkey and Spain. Many players waited for it, so good work! I believe in HOI4 will be greatest game in the next 2 DLC. ( with the hope of better AI )

with all the messages I get about Turkish focus tree possibilities I'd figure it would save me a lot of PM answering to show that its one of the ones we think are important to flesh out

 

[podcat]

@podcat More of a what not to do and how different things affect performance. We understand that larger mods will of course slow down performance; every extra unit, event and focus tree will slow things down, but understand which parts have the largest impact will help us move things in the right direction. For example, Kaiserreich has been adding events like mad, but most are fire_only_once = yes, so our current understand is that they are low on performance impact and as long as we stay away from MTTH events we should be okay there. We have done our own tests but they are no substitute for actual knowledge of the inner working of the game. Thanks for any help and we are so excited for the er... 'Cornflakes'!

(Also, and purely for curiously, it would also be interesting to see if you have any targets for performance and what (if?) sacrifices you made in the name of performance, game design is all about opportunity cost and I would love to know some of the thoughts and team discussions you have had on this topic)

Performance and Ai are usually at each others throats. A lot of AI logic is difficult and performance intensive and how often its run and updated directly translates to better AI, but also hurts performance. see: ai naval transport of units and frontline organization.

for events even if its fire only once its important to do fast triggers first in trigger lists as ai wont evaluate stuff after something has already failed, but I suspect most modders already know that (e.g check tag = GER before checking every state for division strength and the like). I havent actually profiled Kaiserreich, so not sure if your performance problems are different. Events and triggers show up very rarely in base HOI4 profiling tests. (if you PM me some up to date kaiserreich savegame where things are slow I could do a run and see if it looks different)

• An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.

• No clue what this means

examples:
- Kill country X before they join a faction so the war ends: now everyone living there doesnt mind anymore and there is no resistance
- you can never improve non-core territory compared to core.

• Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc

• My first knee jerk reaction is to get angry when I read anything about "limits." I'm not thinking I like this, but then again I know absolutely nothing about it. But I'm weary and am already 51% against

lets look at history: when ww2 ended what would have happened if all those conscripts were not allowed to go back to their homes and were still fully mobilised. For years?

 

[podcat]

I see someone else is looking for a little smoochy too? Well, sir, you just got one!
Thanks/changed

:-*