Not getting told that you are defending naval invasions is mind numbingly stupid not to include.
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People have played the game now, does HOI 4 need message settings?
- Thread starter Merrivale
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I never said "your opinion is hurting others", I'm not sure where that came from.
Your statement that "the game delivers all relevant information as is" implies you think that the player doesn't need to know the following (amongst others):
- A naval invasion is underway.
- They've lost a swathe provinces along the front.
- Air wings in combat have lost 90 per cent of their strength.
- Battle plan preparation is complete.
- Units have reached their offensive line in a battleplan.
- Units with a deployment location pre-set have deployed and a ready to be sent into action.
Now, I'm not suggesting that a played needs to know these things, when they happen, to be able to play the game (although I would argue it helps a lot), but I think arguing that none of this information is relevant is incorrect, although you are by all means welcome to make a case why these things are not relevant to a WW2 GSG.
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There is a notification on the right for naval invasion and a scary sound 
And the rest are quality of life things that i envision are hard to find a place in the current UI for.
Not important enough for a notification sound and a spot on the right and not really the right thing to put in the top "solve the issue" column.
Well maybe the deployed troops would fit in the top. But this issue is circumvented by deploying units to armies or by looking at your country from time to time.
With "relevant" information i mean information that is necessary to play successful or important.
The other thing to keep in mind is how that information is presented.
The information that your units will reach their offensive lines can be easily understood at a glance and you have the option to make aa offensive line that will be
executed after the first one is reached.
Some clearer information on ongoing air battles would be nice, tough. That needs a lot of clicks, especially if you have a good reserve.
Is everything perfect? No, but in a good enough place.
And the rest are quality of life things that i envision are hard to find a place in the current UI for.
Not important enough for a notification sound and a spot on the right and not really the right thing to put in the top "solve the issue" column.
Well maybe the deployed troops would fit in the top. But this issue is circumvented by deploying units to armies or by looking at your country from time to time.
With "relevant" information i mean information that is necessary to play successful or important.
The other thing to keep in mind is how that information is presented.
The information that your units will reach their offensive lines can be easily understood at a glance and you have the option to make aa offensive line that will be
executed after the first one is reached.
Some clearer information on ongoing air battles would be nice, tough. That needs a lot of clicks, especially if you have a good reserve.
Is everything perfect? No, but in a good enough place.
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There is a notification on the right for naval invasion and a scary sound
I appreciate your much more civilised response
.On naval invasions, there's a notification for being targeted for naval invasion, but is there a separate notification for the actual invasion itself? I had southern india targeted for invasion for like six months, so just set some fleets about the area and forgot about it, only to notice it in-action by good luck.
I'm also very much against sound notifications - easy to miss depending on the music playing at the time, and absolutely useless for someone who's deaf (not me, but I can't imagine that there aren't any deaf people that play HoI) or playing with the sound off. Many action games don't rely solely on sound for the notification of things for just these kind of accessibility issues.
That's the beauty of optional pop-ups - players can choose which pieces of information are more relevant to them. At the moment, I get top bar notifications that take up needless space (a permanent 'at war' icon is unnecessary for me, I generally know when I'm at war!) and miss out on a slew of information I would find very helpful without a whole lot of tedious UI micromanagement (ie, scrolling around and clicking through menus a lot).
Indeed - the main way around the lack of information made available directly to the player is fiddly map micromanagement. It's interesting enough when you scroll somewhere and something's happening, but all those map sweeps when the situation hasn't changed are just boring time-wasters, and the map sweeps a few days after they've cut your front in two with an attack are also frustrating!
Easy enough if your campaign fits on one screen, but what if you have offensives going on in multiple parts of the world? Playing as Japan, I had offensives in Australia, PNG, India and Madagascar, and invasions taking place on a few islands consecutively. On multiple occasions, my troops were sitting there awaiting more orders because I was off elsewhere - a case of the game playing (or, in this case, not playing) itself. There's also no way of knowing when a planning bonus has been maxxed out without clicking through to an army menu - a fiddly old exercise if running multiple armies. These issues would be easily solved by notifications that were standard in past and some current Paradox games.
It's definitely not a "must be fixed right away" issues - we're not saying "solve this first" (or at least I don't think any of us are, at least most of as aren't), just "put this on the roadmap". At the moment, though, when I'm playing HoI, a lot of the time it's effectively 'playing itself' (I don't know what's happening, and I'm not interacting with it), and one of the design goals of the game was to explicitly avoid having game systems that did that. The frustrating thing is that HoI4 tells us less of what's going on than any previous HoI in the series, or EU4, or CK2. The only game that's as limited in the information it gives to the player about what its units are doing is Stellaris, but Stellaris generally has far fewer units in play, so it's less of an issue (although something I still find painful when I play it).
Given all of the above, I think a case can be made for some kind of notifications (they need not be pop-ups, just something to tell the player what's going on, and pause if they so desire). Of course, it's the devs call, and I respect whatever decision they roll with, but I can't imagine they set out to make HoI4 harder to play than HoI3 (which, for me, it currently is - it's a better game with a less functional (if prettier) UI in terms of information transmitted to the player).
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As an addendum, I just fired up HoI4 and found in my "start of the game sweep" Britain's invaded southern India (through regions that I, according to the map, had naval superiority). I had no idea at all that this had occurred. I would consider this very relevant information!
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There is no good reason to NOT have message settings on a game like this, where timing is critical and there are so many moving pieces.
Message settings needs to be one of the first things added in a patch.
Message settings needs to be one of the first things added in a patch.
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Yeah, somehow i don't think the AI has the same rules to start a naval invasion. They seem a bit too complex for that.
As for the rest, my main point is that i have always found a way to improve and adjust my play and planning to the scope of what i am doing and the
information i need. For sure my offensive will go smoother if i focus on it. But splitting up my attention is part of the game.
Even as Japan which owns the SU i rarely found myself in a position where i thought the UI hinders achieving my goals.
I find telling what province has what terrain a much bigger problem and not being able to assign airmissions to undeployed wings.
If you want 100% efficient gameplay with like the goal of fastest ingame wc evaar it should be obvious that that takes a lot of pausing.
Right now i pretty much just pause to plan naval invasions or after i conquered a bunch of stuff and need to think about the next steps to take.
By the way the planning bonus has its own little blue bar so you can see it with one click on that army.
As for the rest, my main point is that i have always found a way to improve and adjust my play and planning to the scope of what i am doing and the
information i need. For sure my offensive will go smoother if i focus on it. But splitting up my attention is part of the game.
Even as Japan which owns the SU i rarely found myself in a position where i thought the UI hinders achieving my goals.
I find telling what province has what terrain a much bigger problem and not being able to assign airmissions to undeployed wings.
If you want 100% efficient gameplay with like the goal of fastest ingame wc evaar it should be obvious that that takes a lot of pausing.
Right now i pretty much just pause to plan naval invasions or after i conquered a bunch of stuff and need to think about the next steps to take.
By the way the planning bonus has its own little blue bar so you can see it with one click on that army.
Naval invasions need a popup, especially when coast is lost. Either that, or the garrison AI needs to be more self sufficient in dealing with them: auto create a frontline in a garrison zone if the enemy takes a province and the garrison AI will use excess troops to deal with it. If you are focused on micro in Russia for a few minutes you can lose half of France before you notice.
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there is no good reason to not have customizable popup messages. it will allow the players who don't care to continue with the lack of info. and the players who want more to get it. Its pretty simple.
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Yes popups with a pause option.... I want Grand Strategy not a mindless RTS. The more I play.... the more it feels like a RTS.
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Absolutely. It would be one of the basic things this game needs before I consider re-buying it. It's too stressful to keep up with every thing in real time. I need to micromanage with popups that can pause the game, just like in other major Paradox titles bar Stellaris.
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Msg settings, a log, a ledger and an outliner are needed. Especially the latter two.
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Please, for the love of whatever god(s) you hold dear, give me my message settings back! I feel like Gollum pining for the ring after Bilbo took it from him.
My precious, I needs it!
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I can understand the AI getting a hand with not having to tick all the boxes with naval invasions, but I'd think that would make it more important the game told me when troops were landing
.I agree - the game is playable (I'm having a blast), but immersion takes a huge hit from my angle (immersion's a personal thing, so I'm afraid this is the only angle I can comment on), when an offensive breaks down, or troops reach their objectives a couple of weeks quicker than expected and then just sit around for a couple more weeks because (in game terms) no one bothered to call up the chain of command to let them know they'd got there. These things would never happen during actual military operations, so having the kind of things happen that come about because of the lack of information provided directly to the player (as opposed to regular micro-managey and tedious 'map sweeps') through the UI is substantially less than someone in the position of the high command would actually have in that situation.
It's not about a 100% efficient world conquest, it's just about having the game feel like a WW2 GSG, instead of a more actions-per minute focussed clickfest with a WW2 theme (which it is not, by any means, but the removal of message settings pushes it further in that direction, and away from being a reasonable proxy of a more considered strategy title).
I'm not suggesting the game is 'broken' now (to the contrary, it's the best HoI by some margin - although could be even better had optional message notifications not been left on the cutting-room floor), but that there's a clash between the range of gameplay available and the UI to actually appreciate that gameplay, and the only ways around it are to play the game like a slap-dash RTS (which is a perfectly reasonable way to play it - Daniels infantry rushes in the WWWs are a great example - fairly implausible, but still fun for those that like that sort of thing) or to spend a lot of time pausing and map-scanning, when previous titles were capable of both approaches with a lot less pain for the more strategic option.
Aye, I know this, but when I've got 7 armies planning invasions (my current situation in North America, more or less), I could have the current experience of dropping in every week or so to check the blue bars on 7 different armies (around 10-14 clicks), or the game could just tell me what I need to know.....
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I think it needs some more popup. I made a post in the suggestions forum, and athesw are the ones O think are most needed, from my (still limited) experience:
Fleet has started combat (though not convoybattles), possibly only of capital ships are involved
Army has finished preparation of battleplan
Army has finished executing battleplan
Army doesn't think it can complete battleplan
Fleet has started combat (though not convoybattles), possibly only of capital ships are involved
Army has finished preparation of battleplan
Army has finished executing battleplan
Army doesn't think it can complete battleplan
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It definitly doesnt need more popups, but configurable message settings. Some messages are already dead annoying.
- naval alarm - esspecially when there is a single submarine, which refuses to die for like 5 years (seriously), but my navy hits it like 2 times a day. Naval alarm sucks donkey balls, I could almost puke whenever I hear it.
- uprising in provinces - even though garrisoned, it can be normal to have a province yellow without hitting red (uprising). So basically I get a messaged for a perfectly garrisoned province which happens to stay yellow for some time. A message every day... Seriously gimme a break!
- invasion alarm - funnily my allies sending me troops by sea are somehow also invaders
So by now I receive up to 50 divisions by almost each ally. A warning on app. every 3 divisions times 10 makes like another 250 alerts. Someones gotta kidding me???!!!??- .... (goes on forever)
And no, I dont want a viking determien my message settings - not at all
I plain have zero tolerance to anyone who even questions the need for message settings. Play a grand strategy game or go back to Wolfenstein.... seriously.
Definitely yes
Options could be "top screen icon"/"state icon"/"pop up" + pause/sound. For all existing alert plus :- Province lost
- New division trained
Popup may be bad wording on my part, what meant to say was that the game need better ways to tell you when things happen.
Also, a minimap would be nice. I miss that a lot.
Also, a minimap would be nice. I miss that a lot.
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