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Devildread

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Aug 6, 2009
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Hi everyone,
In this first Developer Diary, the Dies Irae Team, Danevang and I, Devildread, is proud to present: Stars and Stripes, a USA focused single player DLC.

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With Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes, you will be able to play the United States of America and only them, but like you never played it before in an Hearts of Iron game.
In this diary, we will talk a little bit about some features related to the Dies Irae serie and some other ones we wanted to include.

The features are listed below, and bold are the ones we will talk about in this diary. We hope that the titles will excite your curiosity.
+ A new face of war
+ Famous US divisions
+ The nerve of war
+ Awakening of the Giant
+ Lend-Lease
+ A-historicity
+ AI on steroids
+ Battlescenarios

A new face of war
As you might know, the particularity of Dies Irae is to offer a special country specific feeling from the start of the game to the very end. In order to achieve that, we created a whole new interface for the USA. The interface has been changed to some battlefield colors and typo we all recognize as being US Army and Allies Stars. Pictures will tell you better than me so here we are, click on them and admire the genious work of Danevang!




Lend-Lease
In Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes, due to the USA focus, we wanted to introduce an original law/decision/event mechanism for the Lend Lease and diverse help you can send to your allies during the war and before your involvement.
Along the course of the war, you will have to take several decisions leading to a greater and greater involvement in the weapons and materials to the belligerents of your choice. In DI:USA, you can select what you want to send and to whom, allies, comintern or even axis, based on your current government. Which means if you manage to have fascist in charge of USA, you can totally decide to send ammunitions and tanks to Germany, or ammunitions only and no tanks, or go the historical way and send help to the Allies and war material to UK. But if you think this is too much and Germany is overkilling everyone on earth, you can decide to stop the convoys anytime.



The whole thing is managed with a new law in the politics section of the game, allowing you to choose between nothing, supplies against cash, supplies only, light material (trucks and ammo) or heavy material (mech and tanks). If you ever choose to send units to your allies, the Lend Lease units have a special counter ingame so you actually see which ally division is equiped with your material and you can follow their exploit along the course of the war.
When you choose to send heavy material, you only send free units to the head of your faction (UK, Germany or Soviet Union) and supplies/fuel/supply throughput bonus to any member other than you.

Of course, choosing to send help will make your factories to run with better efficiency and will grant you several bonuses we will mention in the future diaries!

AI on steroids!
Put your allies or foes AI on steroids!
Something I wanted to include in the Hearts of Iron serie since the beggining is a clear distinction between the ally and the ennemy AI. When I want challenge, I usually play hard or very hard difficulty levels. But as the USA, with a late involvement in the war those difficulty levels could sometimes result in a situation I don't like. For instance The allies could have resisted in 40 and crippled Germany, thus eliminating any challenge in Europe for me. This is why I created for Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes a new feature: the Gameplay Difficulty settings.

At the start of the game, an event will fire asking you if you want to use that feature. The concept is simple: you decide to grant very hard difficulty bonuses to the faction of your choice. And since it could lead to several balance issues I mentionned earlier, inside those factions you can choose some more refined options. See yourself:





Suit your needs and play the challenge YOU want!

Of course, besides those events you will find some more challenge due to several events, modifiers and strategic effects we gave to the actors of WWII. Dies Irae team is happy to provide blood, sweat and tears to our beloved gamers.


This is the end of the first Developer Diary for Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes DLC. We hope you enjoyed it and let's continue next week with some more features explained to you!


Dies Irae Team, Danevang and Devildread

--bonus picture:

 
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Of course, choosing to send help will make your factories to run with better efficiency and will grant you several bonuses we will mention in the future diaries!
So you can actually build more units for yourself if you choose to send some of them to help allies? I Can't say I agree with that design decision since it seems totally backwards.


A IC efficiency of +15% actually mean you can build 1.15*1.15 = 32% more units then before for the same IC spent.

This is because IC efficiency reduce both time and cost, so you benefit from it twice so to speak.




Otherwise nice with some more info and really impressive work with the interface! looks Great!
 
So you can actually build more units for yourself if you choose to send some of them to help allies? I Can't say I agree with that design decision since it seems totally backwards.
A IC efficiency of +15% actually mean you can build 1.15*1.15 = 32% more units then before for the same IC spent.
This is because IC efficiency reduce both time and cost, so you benefit from it twice so to speak.

Check the US industry before and after 1941. This is one of the several ways of "awakening the Giant" in Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes. The more factories you need for your allies, the more you build, the more efficient you are for your own production. :)
 
Check the US industry before and after 1941. This is one of the several ways of "awakening the Giant" in Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes. The more factories you need for your allies, the more you build, the more efficient you are for your own production. :)
Sorry but I still fail to see what who is getting the produced weapons has anything to do with it.

Keeping it all for yourself should result in more for you not less :p


That's just my opinion ofcourse, and from a game design perspective I can fully understand and agree with why It's more fun if the historical choice is more powerful for the player.
 
Ah your new DLC ! Wish it was for the Soviet, but anyway making USA fun to play is a good thing, love the AI on steroids ! :)
 
Wait, does this mean nobody is making DI:Gotterdamerung compatible for FtM?
 
Wait, does this mean nobody is making DI:Gotterdamerung compatible for FtM?

It's compatible since 15th of July. Check the DIG thread. :)
 
Glad to see another DLC from you Devil and Dane!
 
This is excellent news! US is a country that badly needed some attention. I hope the Pacific Theatre receives some of this attention (and I'm sure it will).

I'm sure I am in the minority when I say I hope the next Dies Irae (after Stars and Stripes, of course) will focus on Italy. I can see it now... Dies Irae: Mare Nostrum!
 
I'm sure I am in the minority when I say I hope the next Dies Irae (after Stars and Stripes, of course) will focus on Italy. I can see it now... Dies Irae: Mare Nostrum!

I would love to make Dies Irae for each major: Soviet, Japan, UK and Italy. Let's hope the sales are good enough to encourage PI on this road. ;)
 
to dd and danevang: as usual, top work... I will surely buy each of them, as I did with your previous products but ...

why do not you finalize dig for ftm on steam first?

to PI: good move the discount on vic2 ahd for old vic's buyers, it's time you do the same with hoi3 and dig or, even better, make it compatible on steam without forcing me to mess with files
 
It's compatible since 15th of July. Check the DIG thread. :)

i think he speaks about the still existing bugs and the missing things like the naval map. it might be compatible but not necessarily playable as it has been before. also the new features of FTM don't really fit in well but i think nothing can be done about that anyway.

:( i would like more to see you in ICE... but ok... seems ICE is dead :(

yes, too bad.
 
The moment you I read lend lease I thought of one thing The Battle of the Atlantic. Please could you properly simulate the importance of the northwestern passage supply route between the USA and the British Isles. It really disheartened me to see that the northwestern passage is only occasionally used for trade between the USA and the UK. Could you perhaps implement a tonnage system or something similar? Maybe slightly negating the effects of lend lease on Britain or maybe even Germany if adequate resources are not appointed to keep it patrolled. Im hugely dissapointed with the fact that The Battle of the Atlantic in Hearts of Iron is more like 'The Battle of the Coast Just West of Portugal'.
 
I love those new difficulty settings I hate it when Germany gets defeated by 1942 and I haven't gotten a piece of the action. Will the new bonuses be permanent if we use them or can we toggle them if we only want to give a short time bonus? Any chance of releasing the difficulty decisions as a general mod? Will you be extending the timeline by a few years since US comes in two years late?
 
I think he speaks about the still existing bugs and the missing things like the naval map. it might be compatible but not necessarily playable as it has been before. also the new features of FTM don't really fit in well but i think nothing can be done about that anyway.

Yes, my understanding was that it would load up without crashing but that was about it- it hasn't really been rebalanced for FtM.
 
I'm not trying to offend anyone with the following, as I really, really love the DIG mod. In fact, it's how the game should be, at least for every majors (and I hope that you guys will eventually do that). Anyway, I was wondering if it might be better to patch DIG and fix some things before moving on to a new big project. I mean, there are 139 pages of discussion for DIG, a goodly portion of those are questions about new features, but there are some moderately serious bugs scattered about in there also. I would just like to see a good fix of things before moving on.

Also, when FTM patches (and everyone expects there to be one last patch), will DIG get attention to upgrade patch as well?

Honestly, I love the work you guys have done on DIG and I would like to see more, I just don't want to keep moving forward without looking back once in a while.