Hearts of Iron IV - Development Diary 5 - Production Lines

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I like the idea to tie production lines to specific areas (regions). That neat little tweak would mean

- 1 line can't have more than 15 factories (or whatever the max per region is)
- practical gains are focused/shared in one region (e.g. when you set up a monster 15 factories/1 region panzer line, it will be very efficient, but also very vulnerable to start bombing)

My 2 cents.

Snoopy
 
Sounds very good so far, but not being able to stockpile 'Strategic reserves' of fuel, steel or other tradeable goods sounds weird, because a lot of nations did so (and are still doing today) ...
I would speculate that you will not be able to store "oil" but you will have to use "civil" factories to produce "fuel" that you will be able to stockpile. That would represent quite well pre-war stockpiling I think, as well as to add additional dilema (use the production to have fuel to maintain war machine longer, or use the production to have larger equipment pools to stomp your enemies faster?)
 
I like the idea to tie production lines to specific areas (regions). That neat little tweak would mean

- 1 line can't have more than 15 factories (or whatever the max per region is)
- practical gains are focused/shared in one region (e.g. when you set up a monster 15 factories/1 region panzer line, it will be very efficient, but also very vulnerable to start bombing)

My 2 cents.
Snoopy
Well, but it's not very realistic at this level of abstraction. If you are producing e.g. plane it's quite allright to have parts manufactured all around country. What is important is that each factory has particular production item tracked, so if you bomb it, appropriate item gets affected.
 
.. and Portugal

"During World War II, the Portuguese Republic was an authoritarian political regime under António de Oliveira Salazar and the Estado Novo, often regarded as pro-fascist. Although Portugal was officially a neutral country, it exported goods to the Allies as well as Germany and other neutral countries.[1] The most exported goods were sugar, tobacco, and tungsten"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal_in_World_War_II

And Switzerland as a man in the middle.
 
I really like the concept so far.

My only two concerns are:

- The abstraction of production lines across the country - so industry isn't inclined to concentrate to key towns, ripe for bombing. I'd like to see a choice between spread-out, safer, but inefficient, industry vs concentrated, efficient, but vulnerable to attack, industry. Along with this, I'd have liked to have seen unit-types tied to factories (so if you found out where the enemy's tanks where being built, you could destroy those factories, or you could bomb the coast to destroy their shipbuilding).

The lack of stockpiling resources - I'd have liked to be able to stockpile lots of resources before the war, while my supply lines were safe, so I could last a bit longer once hostilities were declared, or in any brief moments where the enemy convoy-hunters are disrupted (for example).

However, overall, I think the system's looking great!
 
Brilliant system

Blecky said:
While I understand that adding new factories will reduce the overall efficiency, how does removing a factory increase the efficiency of the production line?
In game terms? Generally it allows some more rounding up. In realism terms you could say some experienced men transfer to keep working on what they know :)

What prevents someone from starting each line with 200 factories and then remove 190 of them to get a high boost of efficiency?

Edit: Oh the max is 15? It seems I failed at reading :) Then the question is what prevents someone from assigning 15 and removing say 10 of them right away for 3 times as much initial efficiency?
 
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What prevents someone from starting each line with 200 factories and then remove 190 of them to get a high boost of efficiency?

They would all have the same efficiency. You raise efficiency by removing factories that you added later, because they gained less than the ones that worked on the line from the beginning. This doesn't mean that the line produces more, because you would still have less factories in it than you had before.
 
What prevents someone from starting each line with 200 factories and then remove 190 of them to get a high boost of efficiency?

Most likely the difficulty of getting 200 military factories.

The US or maybe Soviets could conceivably do an "IC-bomb" strategy like this but it would require cutting all other production nationwide while you wait for the first models to roll off the line. Maybe you could make use of this in Jan 1936?
 
There's no quality level to resources, if you have what you need everything is hunky-dory, if you are short it is assumed the slower production is you scraping up the resources someway-somehow so you still end up with the same final result.

It's easy to abstract quality through using quantity though, that's how manpower works in HoI2/3 for example for where militia cost significantly less then elite units.

It works good enough for most materials since you can refine them (lost IC efficiency) to raise the quality of higher amounts of low quality material to match your needs of small amounts of high quality material.

They would all have the same efficiency. You raise efficiency by removing factories that you added later, because they gained less than the ones that worked on the line from the beginning. This doesn't mean that the line produces more, because you would still have less factories in it than you had before.

That's not what was described. The system description as I understood it was that all factories get a small initial efficiency when starting up, and that the efficiency can be transferred to fewer factories with higher efficiency if you remove some.

Most likely the difficulty of getting 200 military factories.

The US or maybe Soviets could conceivably do an "IC-bomb" strategy like this but it would require cutting all other production nationwide while you wait for the first models to roll off the line. Maybe you could make use of this in Jan 1936?

I never had anything in HoI2/3 preventing me from assigning more IC to the queue then I have running factories, and from the discussions so far regarding bombing reducing available factories below what you have in the queue this will not be a problem in HoI4 either.


I assume it will not work that way in the final game, just trying to point out a potential bug/game logic flaw.
 
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One question for podcat or Darkreknown:

Since apparently stockpiles being done away with, and resource deprivation apparently has immediate industrial production repercussions, isn't the UK going to be a bit too much at the mercy of a German blockade? As long as the blockade is successful even for a few weeks, UK's industrial output during those successful weeks most convoys are sunk, is grounded to a halt, or close to it.
 
I never had anything in HoI2/3 preventing me from assigning more IC to the queue then I have running factories, and from the discussions so far regarding bombing reducing available factories below what you have in the queue this will not be a problem in HoI4 either.


I assume it will not work that way in the final game, just trying to point out a potential bug/game logic flaw.

Huh?
 
That's not what was described. The system description as I understood it was that all factories get a small initial efficiency when starting up, and that the efficiency can be transferred to fewer factories with higher efficiency if you remove some.
You can, efficiency is actually stored per factory, so adding more will "dilute" your efficiency a bit, while removing them will increase it somewhat.
They just gain slowly in the beginning (s-curve) and that seperatly.
 
I like it! I've always preferred fiddling with production and tech rather than the actual warfare so any added gameplay there makes me happy :)

Will it be possible to have an IC production line that gains IC production efficiency?

I'm a bit sceptical about the "no stockpiling resources" thing though. That means that basically you'll waste resources if you don't produce fully? So it would make sense to just build stuff you don't need right now because equipment, unlike resources, can be stored?

Will it be possible to sell stored equipment?

Will it be possible to scrap old equipment to get a temporary gain in resources? Or to scrap it for cash?
 
It was actually invented during WW2 unless i remember completely wrong :)
Duct tape was invented in WWII? Really? If this is true it deserves some "special technological breakthrough" status.
And people say that penicillin was the most important thing to come out of the war. bah.
 
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Seems so much better then HoI3 but I hope there is some "complex" thing behind it.

Also, hopefully you can adjust production rate so that factoryes don't eat you're entire economy!
 
I've read this opinion already in different forms, I'd like to reiterate it. Industry wasn't that spread out, it was specialised to some degree and in the game we should at least have a better incentive to use strategic bombers on strategic provinces (and for the defender to make sure that those regions can withstand an attack). Maybe we could have this in the game still.

My suggestion is to have, at least, a stacking bonus to efficiency when building multiple units, it should be slight so it's not the preferred choice necessarily, but still a good enough incentive to build up industry in provinces that already have it.
 
It's easy to abstract quality through using quantity though, that's how manpower works in HoI2/3 for example for where militia cost significantly less then elite units.

It works good enough for most materials since you can refine them (lost IC efficiency) to raise the quality of higher amounts of low quality material to match your needs of small amounts of high quality material.



That's not what was described. The system description as I understood it was that all factories get a small initial efficiency when starting up, and that the efficiency can be transferred to fewer factories with higher efficiency if you remove some.



I never had anything in HoI2/3 preventing me from assigning more IC to the queue then I have running factories, and from the discussions so far regarding bombing reducing available factories below what you have in the queue this will not be a problem in HoI4 either.


I assume it will not work that way in the final game, just trying to point out a potential bug/game logic flaw.

A dev stated the the efficiency is tracked for each factory and the efficiency is a weighted average. If you remove the number of factories, their contribution to the efficiency average is removed. There won't be the possibility of gaming the system (in that regard anyway).