Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Hearts of Iron IV 45594 Bug Reports 15252 After Action Reports (AAR)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

HOI4 Dev Diary - Stability and War Support

Hello everyone! Today we are going to be talking about National Unity, or rather the fact that it no longer exists…

National Unity
National Unity first made its appearance in Hearts of Iron III, basically as a mechanic to make France surrender at an appropriate time (when Paris fell essentially). It was largely moved over to HOI4 unchanged. While it does accomplish what we wanted it's also a very restrictive currency to work with design wise. A player who is winning doesn't really care what their NU is, making a lot of focus choices meaningless in those instances (or almost, there is always that time your country gets blanketed in nukes and someone dropping paras on one of your big cities seals the deal in multiplayer). We wanted to model different nations better and make sure we could do more interesting focuses and events where picking a loss of NU wasn't always the better choice compared to giving up, say, political power. So what's the answer?

Stability and War Support
These are two new values shown in the topbar that replace National Unity. Stability models the people's unity and support for the current government. War Support on the other hand represent the people’s support of war and of fully committing to fighting that war. As an example Britain in 1936 would be a pretty stable nation, but with very low war support. A nation like France would be much more unstable and with equally low war support, while Japan would have high war support and also high stability (mostly due to the emperor’s influence).

Stability average is 50% and nations with higher stability than that gain bonuses to industry, political power and consumer goods. Once you drop below 50% there are penalties instead as well as lowering your surrender limit (although nothing as extreme as how NU affected things). Strong party support helps increase stability, but being in a war - no matter how well supported - is going to lower your stability. Stability also works to protect against coups against your nation as well.

War Support has several passive effects and also limits several of the laws. You can’t switch to full War Economy without enough war support for example.

Note that in the picture below France is getting +30% war support because they have been attacked by Germany. An offensive war on the other hand for Germany actually hurts their war support. This comes with some interesting balancing effects:
  • Democracies challenging Germany early over Rhineland etc would put themselves as attackers, forcing them to fight hindered by the war support penalty.
  • Fascist or aggressive nations will generally have more initial war support but are likely to be surpassed by democracies in a defensive war when it comes to war support.
  • Defensive nations will be able to ramp up army sizes faster due to mobilization speed while attackers need to play a bit more carefully. The return of “national pride” from HOI3 in the form of combat bonuses on core territory will help here too.
Speaking of mobilization speed, you no longer get a chunk of manpower instantly when enacting conscription laws or other changes to recruitable manpower. Instead how quickly the manpower is made available by the law change is controlled by your mobilization speed. The higher the war support the faster new manpower trickles in.
pasted image 3.png


The air war also affects things as successful enemy bombing (or nuking) will lower War Support. Shooting down enemy bombers will offset this somewhat, as people are seeing you fight back against the enemy.

Here is an example on what can happen in a nation with low war support and low stability in a war. The severity of these particular options depends on exactly how low your stability/war support are. Here it's pretty bad.
pasted image 2.png


For Germany a good way of raising war support is to pull off its diplomatic expansions without being opposed:
pasted image 1.png


War support is also affected by how your allies manage. If a major ally surrenders it will lower your war support, so make sure to keep your friends in the war. On the flip side successfully capitulating major enemies increases your war support.

There are also some new ways to affect War Support and Stability outside events, ministers and national focuses that we aren't ready to show off yet ;)

See you again next week!
 
Last edited:
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
I'm thinking of how this works for China which was not very stable, but had a ton of war support. (War support as in "Let's not surrender despite getting kicked in the teeth")

Also, money in the Chinese sense would be interesting as they did actually collapse after the war because of hyper inflation. (It would be interesting if stability and money were linked. So a stable country could go into more debt and spend more because the government has more control over markets and can enact measures like price controls.)

The other thing war support could do would be to make the NAtionalists more vulnerable to the Communists when the Japanese lose.
 
Couple questions for the devs:

1. Are you gonna add the ability to delete captured and produced equipment? Or the ability to lend-lease captured equipment? (I dont want 9 different types of fighter II in my stockpile etc.)

2. AI division template name changes. It really breaks the immersion when i fight against eg. a division called '15. Infantry Type 7'. Or just add events when AI unlocks some new tech it will change their existing templates so no more of these immersion breaking names.

Otherwise this patch is looking good so far
 
Can you please limit fort construction to lvl5 and if you want to go above that only way is with national focuses?
 
What about alliances and guarantees ? Who will be attacker / defenser ?

For example :
France guarantees Poland - Germany attacks Poland - Now France is at war with Germany as attacker or defenser ?

--------------------------------

Other situation :
Germany attacks Poland
Italy attacks Germany.
Germany will be attacker and defenser. How will this be represented (or calculated).
 
If war economy is more difficult to get, shouldn't the player get a reminder at the top of the screen? "Your mobilization level can be increased"

Second thing that is a bit more related to modding, if I have a national unity modifier left, will the game crash or tell me that there is an error somewhere.
I have used quite a lot of time in the previous days hunting an insightful CTD and I don't want to do that again.

Otherwise it seems really great and already gave me potential ideas to include the proposed revised belgian drafting plan of 1936. It wasn't fitting anywhere but could be seen as a huge bonus to mobilization.
 
Archangel85 said:
80% of VPs occupied, but we are experimenting with low stability/literally being France lowering that threshold
Click to expand...
That makes the historical Italian situation impossible, though - shouldn't it be tied to War Support instead? I mean.

> Italy starts with low-ish War Support. Player Mussolini invades Ethiopia to prop it up and is successful, but that does alienate his allies, thus he moves to Germany instead. So far, so good.
> Germany starts gobbling stuff without shooting a bullet, and that's good for his War Support. Mussolini watches and decides to try it himself in Albania - it's not bloodless, but close enough. So far, so good.
> Germany starts a war. Italy's War Support is still very low, but the war might end soon, so he declares on France. No plans prepared at all, and mostly clicking garrison units with garrison units, results in embarrassment. War Support shudders.
> Needing a shining victory to prop up War Support, Mussolini invades Greece, but it backfires horribly; losses mount and mount and mount, and in the end Germany is the one that wins the war, resulting in a net loss of Support for Italy. Losses in the African theater do not help, either.
> The Allies invade Sicily. This is not 80% of Italy's VPs occupied, by far, but Italian War Support is now hovering at 0 or so, and the taken VPs in Sicily (core VPs, not even colonies) are the straw that breaks the camel's back. Italy surrenders, Mussolini is deposed, allies with the Allies, and is counter-invaded by Germany.
> BUT NOW Italy is invaded, rather than the invader, which gives a hefty push to War Support - while the RSI, being a puppet, doesn't care for such tiny problems. Partisans, though...
 
Last edited:
I am very happy to say this is something that goes beyond what was in HoI3 & is very good to see in HOI IV!

HOI IV in some ways much more deep than HoI3, like production of equipment, resources & division designer, and in others it is not as deep, like CoC, supplies & fuel, government. It is very good to see the direction HOI IV is taking with this! As a modder I want to dig into this & make government deeper, like ministers that add or subtract to stability or War support.

Good Work!
 
MSIOCGenie said:
That's not what I said. Will France and Great Britain also start a defensive war with the Soviet Union, or does it only apply to Germany then?

I was just curious how it would work in terms of game mechanics, no need to get upset.
Click to expand...
It is a suicide for them. Declaration of war not only to Germany but to USSR creates the joint German-Russian alliance, which makes victory in WW2 impossible.

Ofc, later that alliance can be broken and former allies can attack each other, but that already won't be the problem to be worried about for the West. Paris and London won't be able to worry about anything in that time.
 
What about a gold mechanic instead of money ? That would be interesting. Because most countries tried to hide their gold reserves from the nazis. And tons of gold bars were captured by the wehrmacht. Also countries could generate/mine gold bars to use them for "buying" or leasing technologies. Gold bars also could affect trading.
 
Archangel85 said:
Personally, I would love to get money back in the game at some point, but it'll probably be focused more on international trade where you actually had to pay in hard cash.
Click to expand...
I fully agree that money should be in and only for international trade type things. Looking at domestic elements of the Soviet Union money is not a consideration.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back