People have played the game now, does HOI 4 need message settings?

[Damorte]

If you played EUIV your probably aware that theres an ability to right click a nation to make that nation "a nation of interest".
I would like it if in a similair fashion i could right click on a battle in HOIIV and make that battle a "battle of interest" then whenever the battle ends i would get a message about it.
When i think about it, the ability to right click a province and make that province "a province of interest" telling you when you loose/gain control of it would be kind of cool too.

 

[schultz]

I feel message settings should have been in the release. Paradox has been including message settings for years. But with Stellaris and HOI 4 they seem to have fallen by the wayside.

I'd like to know when the Brits are staging an amphibious landing on the German coast.
I got caught up in a battle in Poland, and next thing I know, there are 8 British divisions in Bremen.

I'd like to get a message when my units finish a movement order, or finish combat.

I'd like to get a message when newly built units are deployed to the map.

And the auto-unpause after dismissing a popup is driving me nuts

 

[Damorte]

I feel message settings should have been in the release. Paradox has been including message settings for years. But with Stellaris and HOI 4 they seem to have fallen by the wayside.

I'd like to know when the Brits are staging an amphibious landing on the German coast.
I got caught up in a battle in Poland, and next thing I know, there are 8 British divisions in Bremen.

I'd like to get a message when my units finish a movement order, or finish combat.

I'd like to get a message when newly built units are deployed to the map.

And the auto-unpause after dismissing a popup is driving me nuts

You do get messages about naval invasions on the right side of the screen, right under the "theater" boxes.

 

[schultz]

I have noticed those on the side of the screen, but assumed they were all for naval combats.

Regardless, I would rather be notified by a paused popup. Something that sits right in the middle of my screen, so I can't miss it.

 

[mathers]

I have noticed those on the side of the screen, but assumed they were all for naval combats.

Regardless, I would rather be notified by a paused popup. Something that sits right in the middle of my screen, so I can't miss it.

I think all problem ties somehow together. For example lack of UI scaling and lack of battle outliner caused me to lead fights in a scrolled out manner where both battle running parallel fitted 1 screen. However due to lack of scaling and small letters I had to look at my huge screen from really close therefore I miss all notification popping up along the edges. I never had such UI issues with a pdx game. As if it were developed to tablet but switched to pc last minute

 

[Steiner3]

I would love to have the option to pause the game as soon as an alert icon pops up.
It is really annoying for me that clicking an event notification unpauses the game.
Its wait for the national focus is done - be quick enough to pause the game - than click the event popup (if there is one) - and be quick enough to pause the game again.
That is totally unessecary terrible usability IMHO.

 

[Cymsdale]

HoI4 also continues the proud Stellaris tradition of event pop-ups unpausing your game. And they always seem to sync up with my own national focus needing to be set (obviously) or research being assigned. Please don't unpause the game unless I tell you to.

This annoys me most of all. Research isn't a big deal because some gets stored, but I don't want to waste time not working on a focus since those are so powerful.

No matter how the game was paused, the only thing that should ever UN-PAUSE the game is me manually un-pausing it.

 

[dsteve3]

I do agree that when the 'pause message' option has been checked, the game should remain paused until I un-pause it.

That's all that's really needed.

 

[Karelian]

If the dev team feels that messages are not needed in HoI IV, just add by default-muted popup messages, please? Especially needed are ones informing the player that "Country X is storming our beach at region Y" and "We've lost province X to country Y".

I was stunned to discover that there literally isn't any way to make the game notice me that Nationalist Spain has broken through to Southern France. This is especially noteworthy for MP games, otherwise playing nations like Britain will be a real pain.

 

[DoctorDanny]

Yes, it needs message setting.

 

[Axe99]

Note - the comments below are purely about message settings. I think HoI4 is great - I think the UI has many really good elements to it - and I think the devs are awesome. I'm not having a go at the devs, or trying to put the boot in or anything like that, just trying to explain the perspective of one of your players (and someone who's player a lot of Paradox and other strategy games for decades).

Anyways, I've put at least ten hours in now, and playing with Australia (small country, so not a lot to keep track of) while I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't quite as bad as I expected, I'd still greatly prefer to have message settings. Things that have happened that I'd really liked to know about when they happened (with an option to click a button and go there) include:

- Land combat
- Units being deployed
- Air units seeing significant action. At one point, my air unit was 90 per cent depleted, and I wouldn't have known if I hadn't remembered to go and look. Would also be good to know when they're doing well with a lot of fighting, or breaking even.
- Units arriving somewhere (sorry seventh division, hope you enjoyed the 6 months you just spent in Singapore because I forgot about you....)

Without message settings, a lot of the game is effectively left 'to play itself', because the player doesn't know what's going on, and so isn't involved. My understanding of the design goals of HoI4 from the DD was to avoid this kind of thing, and improve player engagement. Optional message settings would be a great way of achieving this.

Also, while naval battles have the bar on the side, it's easy to miss, and the bar gives no indication (as far as I could see) whether your fleet has bumped into a couple of transports or half the IJN. I'd far, far prefer message settings here, and the icon on the side of the screen to be more informative (like, say, the outliner in HoI3 or EU4, at least as a starting point).

Without message settings, to play a game where I'm actually playing the game, rather than sending units off and forgetting about them, I need to play with a pen-and-paper and notepad (which isn't a huge issue, as I anticipated this and ordered a notepad for arrival on HoI4's launch day ). I can live with this, and I won't say the game is broken, but if a game's UI means a player is resorting to pen-and-paper, and regular pauses and scrolling around the map, to play, then I think an argument could be made that the game's UI could potentially be improved.

Also needs a minimap.

Although, to be fair, the minimap's omission is noticed even more by me because there are no message settings, so I'm scrolling around the map a lot more to check nothing's gone awry.

I'd love to have the option to stop the game when research comes up, but the chime and the tab at the top give lots of warning.

Chimes aren't terribly useful for people playing with sound off or (arguably far more importantly) the hearing impaired. There's a bit too much dependence on audio notifications at the moment in my opinion, if the goal of the UI is accessibility (if the goal is something else, then it's a different issue).

 

[Admiral-Canaris]

I'm here to give my support to message settings and Pop Ups. I didn't notice, because nothing clearly told me, that my ports were bombed. Noticed it when it said "1 Capital Ship needs repairs" or something. that was too late, I was already missing 2 Battleships and 4 Cruisers.

 

[Torakka]

Initially I was mostly interested in having the option to set any currently existing notification / alert to automatically pause and would still consider that as a decent, quick fix. However, having played more I'm also starting to find that the currently existing notifications / alerts are not enough (for me).

I have lost significant parts of my airforce and army while playing a minor nation and I only found about them when specifically checking airforce status window or happened to notice the little number showing army strength had dropped to 22/24 from 24/24. Without messages for unit arriving to province and such I also can't effectively manually control even that kind of relatively small army to avoid loosing my precisous divisions.

In fact, without messages I personally find microing that army of two dozen divisions more tedious than microing the whole German eastern front in HoI3. (Different kind of tedious though, HoI 4 version feels like annoying fight against the UI and the AI of my own army, while HoI 3 version is just terribly slow.)

 

[wundte]

@podcat promised to listen once players had actually played the game. So the question is simple, and only for people who have played (preferably at least 10 hours to get the hang of things): Does the game need customizable message settings (which would also allow you to turn off things you don't like, in addition to adding in things you want, basically what is in HOI III) or is the current system of notifications and alerts sufficient?[/QUOTE

I want to have pause setting for alerts, otherwise they are ok.

P.S. I would like to have some sort of battle summary to see how many equipment and tank i lost.

 

[Axe99]

I've started my second game with Japan, and I'm definitely finding it challenging keeping up with everything without pop-ups. In this case, get half my army surrounded challenging (it happened fairly quickly - I thought the front was fairly stable, but clearly thought wrong - first I knew about it was the supply warning, which was a warning a good few provinces too late) - which, granted is both embarrassing (for me) and a wonderfully positive sign for the AI (leaving a front like that for as long as I did and it wouldn't have moved an inch when I'd returned in HoI1-3).

 

[sumo0]

I would like the game to pause when an event pop up or a national focus is done. For research aswell.
But some people might find that annoying. And if i press "details" the game does pause.

 

[Cymsdale]

I would like the game to pause when an event pop up or a national focus is done. For research aswell.
But some people might find that annoying. And if i press "details" the game does pause.

It does, but then you click off some event that was under the research/focus popup that happened at the same time and clicking off the event triggers an un-pause.

REMOVE THIS UN-PAUSE! REMOVE THIS UN-PAUSE! REMOVE THIS UN-PAUSE! ***Stamps feet***

 

[sumo0]

It does, but then you click off some event that was under the research/focus popup that happened at the same time and clicking off the event triggers an un-pause.

REMOVE THIS UN-PAUSE! REMOVE THIS UN-PAUSE! REMOVE THIS UN-PAUSE! ***Stamps feet***

+1

 

[Axe99]

Not a big thing, but it'd also be handy to have a notification when a planning bonus has 'filled up'. A few of my armies have sat there for a few weeks (or so - obviously I'm not sure how long because I'd forgotten to check back in time) waiting for me to press the go button, but I was distracted elsewhere.

 

[Orffen]

Not a big thing, but it'd also be handy to have a notification when a planning bonus has 'filled up'. A few of my armies have sat there for a few weeks (or so - obviously I'm not sure how long because I'd forgotten to check back in time) waiting for me to press the go button, but I was distracted elsewhere.

Honestly rather than a popup/notification I'd just like a more useful army and unit list. Having to actually click into each army to see things like preparation, training progress etc. is a pain and the army list (O) could be better.