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HOI4 Dev Diary - Officer Corps #2

Hello there C0RAX, here!

For my first HoI dev diary, I’m here to show you the second part of the Officer Corps, a new way of personalising your military that will be included as part of No Step Back and the Barbarossa update.

In the last dev diary we explained how we want to allow you to specialise your military branches with the leadership and advisors. Today we bring to you some new features that allow you to customise how your military operates, and act as a further use for the new sources of branch experience that were hinted at last week.

You may have been wondering what all those shiny boxes with emblems were for. I'm here to tell you they are the new Officer Corps Spirits.

Spirits are a new way to specialise your military, generals and even help your division designs. Each branch has multiple categories for its spirits that affect different aspects of the way they operate. Here I have shown you the spirits of the army which provide bonuses to designing divisions or operating armies. Of course this category has analogs for both the air and navy branches.

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Now we have the more direct combat effect level spirits that let you improve specific parts of your units to best match your strategy. These also let you conduct some historical moves that previously were quite hard such as using your capital ships as surface raiders without screens. And for those keen eyed readers, yes the division spirits provide tactics weight increases if you also have them selected as your preferred tactic which we will get to shortly.

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Finally we have the final category for the army and navy branches, the academy spirits. Previously generating commanders was a purely random chance. Now with the academy spirits you can tailor this toward specific personality traits along with helping you generals progress in a particular direction. For the above image you can also see the new engineer officer personality trait that provides bonuses to xp generation for the engineer trait. This works in tandem with the advisor promotion mentioned last week, and adds another dimension towards tailoring your officer corps from the very beginning.

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With the new spirits some are limited by either your political ideology or doctrines and so you will have to take this into account when deciding the strategy of your officers corps.

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The final part of this week's dev diary brings us to preferred tactics. This new feature provides you with a tool to influence the likelihood of a specific tactic being used in combat allowing you to increase the chance of getting that favorable matchup in battle or possibly the perfect counter.

This simulates a doctrinal emphasis on doing battle in a specific way; but can also provide a tool that can be used to counter a strongly themed force.

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The new window will help show you all the tactics you have unlocked from doctrines and see what effect they have on the battle. If you combine this preferred tactic with your division spirit bonus you will double the effectiveness of the tactic preference so unifying your strategic direction will help you get the most out of the officer corps.

Well that's all for this week comrades, see you at the front. C0RAX
 
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This looks awesome, many new ways to make nations unique outside national spirits. But this spawns many questions.
1. Will any National Spirit from current country turned into this army/command/academy spirits?
From a modding perspective
2. Will there be a modifier to make this spirits cheaper?
3. Are these spirits into categories? Ej: a national spirit that makes all spirits related to engineers cheeper.
4. If doctrines also cost xp and they will receive discounts by effects, will there be something similar to this spirits?
5. Are these spirits ideas?
6. The new modifiers look very interesting (more tactics preference, cheaper engineers design, faster xp gain for certain trait), are these unique to these spirits? Or they will be available to national spirits and advisor?
 
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You can prefer one tactic and the base weight is doubled, if you also have the corresponding division spirit the base weight will be tripled. So if a base weight is 4, it will be 8 when preferred, and 12 with the spirit and preferred. commander and battle specific weights are added on as normal.
But in the 3rd image, it shows that tactic chance only have a 10% bonus? Is that a mistake?
 
But in the 3rd image, it shows that tactic chance only have a 10% bonus? Is that a mistake?
It may be a good idea to consider all numbers in these screenshots to be somewhere between "placeholder" and "work in progress" until the patch/DLC actually drops.
 
looks good? Yes. Some questions:

Of course this category has analogs for both the air and navy branches.

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Why are there only 2 possible spirits for the Air Force? The Army and Navy have 3.

There are a lot to cover, so we might show some off in future. For today, you can see the glorious USA unique spirit:

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Why should any player keep this one and not get rid of it ASAP?
 
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looks good? Yes. Some questions:


Why are there only 2 possible spirits for the Air Force? The Army and Navy have 3.


Why should any player keep this one and not get rid of it ASAP?
Left slots of the army and navy apply to the generals and admirals, which is why air force doesn't get them (they're both the academy stuff)

As for the bottom one, I'm in agreement though I guess it might just be having to replace something with naval XP you could use elsewhere? while -10% is bad, it's not game-ending, so you might just have to deal with it for a bit, as not like you'll be going to war early as the US
 
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looks good? Yes. Some questions:


Why are there only 2 possible spirits for the Air Force? The Army and Navy have 3.

No air generals/marshals.

Why should any player keep this one and not get rid of it ASAP?

Masochism? Roleplay? Masochist roleplay?

I'd make the cost to remove a fair bit higher, maybe to include political power as well. B-Ord was deeply entrenched in the Navy at that point.
 
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Just realized been playing hearts of iron since the first one was released I have no idea how these states on the tactics work. First time I ever even noticed them :S
 
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Very cool dev diary today. In my historical overhaul mod World Ablaze, we give each major nation a unique flavor by assigning them doctrines that only they can research (to represent their military specialties). Now with this system, we can do the same thing per major or ideology and it is much more organic. Really looking forward to the depth this can provide to historical mods like mine.
One question though, will we ever see an officer "resource" like in HOI3?
 
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Seems rather generous. Should that not be -90%? Or is there to be a -80% Explodes chance as well added in later.

Yeah, it should be a lot steeper. I don't know if it should be 90%, because it's my understanding captains eventually developed workarounds, but it was reeeeeallly bad. The torpedoes ran too deep (went under their targets), the magnetic trigger kicked in too early and the contact trigger failed to activate on contact.

On 24 December 1941, during a war patrol, Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs in Sargo fired eight torpedoes at two different ships with no results. When two additional merchantmen came in view, Jacobs took extra care to set up his torpedo shots. He pursued the targets for fifty-seven minutes[41] and made certain the TDC bearings matched perfectly before firing two torpedoes at each ship from an average range of 1,000 yd (910 m). The shots should have hit, but all failed to explode.[42]

A few days after he discovered the torpedoes were running too deep, and corrected the problem,[43] Jacobs detected a big, slow tanker. Again, his approach was meticulous, firing one torpedo at a close range of 1,200 yd (1,100 m). It missed.
By August 1942, the faulty running depth situation was resolved, and submarines were getting more hits with the Mark 14. However, curing the deep-running problem caused more prematures and duds even as more hits were being achieved. The number of sinkings did not rise.[62]
On 9 April 1943, USS Tunny attacked an aircraft carrier formation. ULTRA enemy signal intercepts disclosed that all three torpedoes fired at the second carrier were premature explosions.[64] The commanding officer stated, "The shallow [depth] setting thus caused the torpedo to reach the activating flux density of the exploder some fifty meters from the target."[65]
Early reports of torpedo action included some dud hits, heard as a dull clang. In a few instances, Mark 14s would strike a Japanese ship and lodge in its hull without exploding. [...] Ironically, a direct hit on the target at a 90 degree angle, as recommended in training, would usually fail to detonate; the contact pistol functioned reliably only when the torpedo impacted the target at an oblique angle.
The most humiliating failure by the U.S. submarine fleet during World War II other than the failure of the Asiatic Fleet in December 1941 was a daring raid by many submarines on 11 June 1943 that actually infiltrated Tokyo Harbor undetected and planned on sinking numerous ships. Every single Mark 14 torpedo failed and there were zero sunken ships. If they were able to sink some Japanese ships in Tokyo it would have been one of the greatest raids of the entire war. Because they failed to sink or damage any ships this daring raid is completely obscure and unknown by most people.[70]

10% fail chance falls quite short to what's been described there.
 
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Do the academy buffs also work on existing officers? Getting the chosen traits faster, given that many officers to back to military academy to take additonal course work or to teach (where they also pick up new knowledge)?
 
As I missed providing an example of that yes here is a communist only spirit
View attachment 734047

yes they show all the current modifiers for each branch
Does it make sense that this only gives a bonus? If you require ideological loyalty in your generals or troops, then that will restrict the potential pool for both It would seem that this should give the above bonus but also lower experience gain or reduce a random stat. Basically something to show that you're not recruiting on merit here.
 
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