Minister traits regarding decay seemingly not working

[Hadhod]

Hello all,

I started playing HoI3 again and I couldn't help but notice that the traits of my ministers seem to not work properly.

As Canada my Chief of the Navy gives -25% Destroyer Practical decay and yet my Destroyer practical decayed at the same rate as my Light Cruiser practical did.
Same for the Chief of the Airforce: I chose the minister with -25% Heavy Aircraft Decay and it still decays at the same rate as my Light Aircraft practical.

What gives?

 

[Dr. Intolerance]

Are you really sure you were seeing the heavy air numbers and not medium?

 

[Graf]

This is a longstanding bug in TFH.

 

[Hadhod]

Are you really sure you were seeing the heavy air numbers and not medium?

100% sure. I also didn't build any planes yet.

This is a longstanding bug in TFH.

Well that's unfortunate. Does it only affect practical decay stuff?

 

[Graf]

Both practical and theoretical decay in minister traits are bugged.

Just in case, don't confuse this with decay modifiers from theory techs, these work as they should.

 

[Kovax]

The minister traits appear to half-work. Occasionally, if I have the appropriate minister assigned, I'll see one situation where they appear to be working, and a couple months later they seem to have no effect again. Then again, it's a modest enough effect that it might just be rounding errors that I'm seeing. The same appears to happen with other minister effects, where I'll see sudden fluctuations in Consumer Demand, IC efficiency, or other things in peacetime, with nothing else to account for the sudden change besides a minister with that trait, and then a few days or weeks later, it changes back. Strange.

 

[Graf]

I got annoyed with this bug and went looking for the cause. So, someone forgot to type '+' where '+=' should be.

If you are technical enough, you could patch the exe using a hex editor:
000DD7ED: 89 01

That is:

1. Make a backup.
2. Open hoi3_tfh.exe in a hex editor.
3. Go to offset 000DD7ED.
4. Verify that you have byte "89" there.
5. Modify it to "01".
6. Save and play.

This will change MOV instruction into ADD, this is what overwrites minister's decay modifier value with technology decay value when they should be combined.

 

[Paglia]

I got annoyed with this bug and went looking for the cause. So, someone forgot to type '+' where '+=' should be.

If you are technical enough, you could patch the exe using a hex editor:
000DD7ED: 89 01

That is:

1. Make a backup.
2. Open hoi3_tfh.exe in a hex editor.
3. Go to offset 000DD7ED.
4. Verify that you have byte "89" there.
5. Modify it to "01".
6. Save and play.

This will change MOV instruction into ADD, this is what overwrites minister's decay modifier value with technology decay value when they should be combined.

Can you point out which line in the attached picture ?
My cursor is over the 89 slot of 000DD7E0 (not "D"... think you had a typo)
Details are on the right of the picture

 

[Graf]

Yes, that's correct. That "D" is in the header of the column.

Hex editors usually split the data into 16 columns for convenience (16 being "0xF" - the maximum digit in hexadecimal), so the last digit goes into columns.

Spoiler: A picture worth a thousand words.

Original file:

Patched file:

 

[Kovax]

Nice detective work there. Thanks for turning an only vaguely understood problem into a clear solution.

 

[Paglia]

Yes, that's correct. That "D" is in the header of the column.

Hex editors usually split the data into 16 columns for convenience (16 being "0xF" - the maximum digit in hexadecimal), so the last digit goes into columns.

Spoiler: A picture worth a thousand words.

Original file:
View attachment 381821

Patched file:
View attachment 381822

THANKS !


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

Stupid question but... how did you find that ???




-

 

[Graf]

Stupid question but... how did you find that ???

Used a debugger to find what happens with the decay value.

 

[Wraith11B]

I doubt they would given that it's an old game, but perhaps @podcat could see that and just do a quick patch on the LAA .exe so that these things aren't broken?

 

[Paglia]

I just edited my .exe
Will run a game to see how it fares

Thanks

 

[Mordred]

Thank you.
I was wondering if it would be easy to fix the air defense bug aswell...

edit: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/pds-this-is-pathetic.766339/

 

[Dr. Intolerance]

Thank you.
I was wondering if it would be easy to fix the air air defense bug aswell...

I don't know if the values can be put at zero, effectively having purely recon planes, but increment slowly upwards from that until the damages seem appropriate. From what I have read, the air attack values are calibrated to the bugged toughness-defensive values, so you'd best leave the attack values at the earliest tech - or just "one" - and increment the tough-defense numbers.

 

[Kovax]

Thank you.
I was wondering if it would be easy to fix the air defense bug aswell...

The air defense "bug" can be changed fairly easily in the text files, a simple change in the values between decimal fractions and percentages (0.75 versus 75, because HOI2 used one and HOI3 used the other, with some of the code reused between games not having been updated).

Unfortunately, the rebalancing of air combat after the change is a bigger can of worms. As it stands now, the game only gives a trivial fraction of a percent increase in defense with each tech increase (a stated 5% increase is in actuality only 0.05%), but air combat was balanced around those wrong values, so any changes to it drastically alter the pace of air combat. I initially tried a direct conversion (0.05 becoming 5), but that made air combat somewhat ineffective, and I vaguely recall that it led to some sort of imbalances between INT, CAG, and FTR. It's been a few years, so I'm a bit hazy on the details. I then tried increasing it by "only" a factor of about 20 (so the effective 0.05% increase became 1.0%), and it might have been a small improvement over the original values (it brought the aircraft techs up from "useless" to "hardly worth researching but not TOTALLY useless"), without too much of an impact on air combat otherwise. I figure that changing the impact of the offensive techs (such as aircraft weapons and AA techs) was needed to compensate for any higher defense values. Eventually, I reverted to the vanilla values, hoping that someone more familiar with the workings would tackle it (It's been about 40+ years since I took a class in FORTRAN programming, and I haven't used that knowledge for anything practical since).

 

[Wraith11B]

It really just sounds like a whole bunch of little things need to be chased down and sorted to ensure that they get properly fixed to get everything working properly (or as properly as it should). Then an overhaul of how the AI handles units/hqs.

Perhaps someone might come along one day to do a Darkest Hour style revamp of the system.

 

[Mordred]

The air defense "bug" can be changed fairly easily in the text files, a simple change in the values between decimal fractions and percentages (0.75 versus 75, because HOI2 used one and HOI3 used the other, with some of the code reused between games not having been updated).

IIRC, the nature of the bug is same than the defense/toughness old bug. If so, the fix should aim the .exe file too. Do you remember what values did you try to change? Maybe unit&tech statistics, or basics combat mechanics (LAND_COMBAT_STR_DICE_SIZE etc)? That wouldn't work IMO.

 

[Graf]

I was wondering if it would be easy to fix the air defense bug aswell...

Unfortunately no. From what I can tell, air defense for ground and naval units and surface defense for air units are not used at all. Didn't want to dig too deep, but It seems like defensiveness/air defense/sea defense are used instead. So, it's a deliberate design, it will require a lot of work to rework this.