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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!
 
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Secret Master said:
Does Germany even care about rubles?
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- maybe Germany doesnt care about rubles, but UK for example did cared about gold. A shiny thingies they received from soviets for their "land lease".

LiberiusX said:
Exactly this. I'm not saying the Russian people deserved what the Germans did to them, but the Politburo(Stalin and Molotov) was insane to feed the Germans raw materials in return for significantly outdated equipment, while the Germans used the raw material to build state of the art guns, tanks and airplanes. The Soviets were not very interested at all in Reichsmarks. As one author put it, The Soviets thought they could ride the German tiger and they got bit...and almost eaten.
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- not any more insane than western allies that fed Czechoslovakia and Austria to germans or Poland that was glad to take its piece of Czechoslovakia. Soviets tried to make anti-german coalition with both major and minor european powers for whole thirties but were refused, so what they should have done? Wait without allies for imminent German attack or try to post pone it while making themselves useful for Germany till their rearmament would be completed and Germany would bog themselves down in allied defenses. In the end it did not go well... for everyone.

LiberiusX said:
Not really supported by the evidence. Stalin shut himself up for a week because he refused to believe that Hitler had actually double crossed him(beyond the fact that Stalin ignored intelligence showing a German buildup of divisions in Poland well before Barbarossa was initiated). Also, pretty well documented that Stalin and Molotov's strategy was to let the Axis and Allies burn themselves out allowing the Soviets to pick up the pieces. Not a bad strategy...unless you are Stalin and refuse to acknowledge that you will be on the menu before Britain.
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- /moans meh, just old cold war times myths.

LiberiusX said:
Stalin being such an "avid" student of history should have known that the last time a European dictator got frustrated with trying to invade Britain, they attacked Russia. In fact...Stalin did know this, he just couldn't believe he was duped.
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- kek, that euro dictator attacked Russia because Russia refused to support his blockade against GB. Kinda completely different situation, dont you think?
 
Archangel85 said:
The team is split on the issue of money. 14 out of 15 people on the team want money in. @podcat thinks differently.

The issue is that money played very little role in the internal economies. The Reichsmark was essentially monopoly money during the timeframe of the war. Inflation was an issue, but price controls and rationing could counteract that. Manhours spent is a far better value to assess the "cost" to the war economy of building weapons. For the purpose of paying soldiers, the government could always just print money, so in this particular event the effect is simply that it costs more pp.

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.
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Have never minded that production was used as the actual currency in HoI3 and HoI4. It's simpler to translate into the things you actually need, but it's not as flexible as currency can be, you can't trade in future production capacity in a trade deal, etc... So maybe, instead of introducing money, you can work on the mechanics that use that currency, whatever it is.
 
Duke_Dave said:
Will this force democracies to demobilize after the hordes of fascism are gone? Revert their recruitment and industry laws back to peace time standard? Would be a neat feature and make world war three much more of a challenge...
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Yes. If you have mobilization or manpower laws that your population no longer supports because the war is over, bad things will happen.
 
Archangel85 said:
Yes. If you have mobilization or manpower laws that your population no longer supports because the war is over, bad things will happen.
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Most excellent news indeed :).
 
Archangel85 said:
Yes. If you have mobilization or manpower laws that your population no longer supports because the war is over, bad things will happen.
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Excellent!

Does this effect fielded manpower as well? So if you have many divisions/wings/ships and your manpower is sitting at 0 will you also get negative effects?
It would force the player/AI to disband some divisions/wings or mothball ships to avoid disgruntled soldiers.
 
Axe99 said:
Most excellent news indeed :).
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Indeed! No more USA fielding 1352 divisions then, or France constantly running out of manpower.
 
Archangel85 said:
Yes. If you have mobilization or manpower laws that your population no longer supports because the war is over, bad things will happen.
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Thank you kind Sir for your response. This is truely amazing.
 
So with this new change to have "war support", will it be more likely to fire events like Operation Valkyrie?
Once Germany had lost in Stalingrad, the war support was beginning to waver...
 
Archangel85 said:
Yes. If you have mobilization or manpower laws that your population no longer supports because the war is over, bad things will happen.
Click to expand...

If Paradox are considering any kind of late-game DLC (cold war even) they really need to optimise the game - specifically by nerfing micronations (El Salvador etc.) and their division spam. Maybe the countries could just go through the whole game with what they start with, without research and with some kind of simplified NF tree that gives them a factory after 210 days, a division after another 210 days etc.
 
pvt.conners said:
Excellent!

Does this effect fielded manpower as well? So if you have many divisions/wings/ships and your manpower is sitting at 0 will you also get negative effects?
It would force the player/AI to disband some divisions/wings or mothball ships to avoid disgruntled soldiers.
Click to expand...

It's still in development and we will have to see if we can make the AI understand that it should disband units in that case (but not in this case, or if that case and that other case happen simultaneously, unless yet another case also happens etc.).
 
Archangel85 said:
Yes. If you have mobilization or manpower laws that your population no longer supports because the war is over, bad things will happen.
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Will democratic populations/nations take into account the threat posed by, for example the ussr post war, in how mobilisation is viewed?

Also will there be a mobilisation/demobilisation similar to hoi3 so we can keep some reserve divisions that are only part mobilised rather than disband them all?
 
Why not use gold instead of money? Use realistic gold reserves as currency, but also take countries gold reserves when taking over, but maybe even also being able to mine it to a small extend and use money to buy stuff rather than always producing it yourself, could help minor nations with big gold reserves and gold mines to be able to use their NR in a good and effective manner rather than always trading for CF. :)

Also fuel would be a nice addition, since tank divs shouldnt be able to move without fuel etc.
 
CrazyZombie said:
In the late war women served there, just as Hitlerjugend and "hiwi". Also in USSR women were used for manning AA artillery as common practice.
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On that note, AA should be cheaper to build and to balance that it should take some manpower instead. Which in turn leads to having laws for introducing women into the workforce and for certain military duties like AA manning.
 
Good stuff!
 
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