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HoI4 Dev Diary - Tech Changes

Hello, and welcome back to another Dev Diary for Man the Guns. Today, we will talk about some changes we have made to the tech and research system.

The biggest of which is, of course, the new tech tree for ships and other naval equipment. It is quite extensive, adding over 50 new technologies. Smaller changes and additions have been made to the armor and infantry tech trees through the addition of amphibious armor and to electro-mechanical engineering through the addition of Fire Control Systems.

techtree.jpg


Many of these techs do unlock new modules, but some do not - ammunition techs, fire control methods and damage control training amongst other don’t, and instead provide passive bonuses. This makes them quite valuable as you don’t have to build or refit a ship to make use of them.

tech4.jpg


The industry tree has also been expanded to accommodate fuel refining and storage. As one would expect, the new technologies improve the ratio of oil converted to fuel, giving you more fuel for the same amount of oil. The oil branch of the synthetic refinery tree no longer increases the oil output of each refinery but instead increases the amount of fuel generated by each synthetic refinery (synthetic refineries are not required to generate fuel if you have natural oil production!).

tech8.jpg


Since this adds quite a bit of research to an already pretty full research tree, we have taken some steps to offset this increase.

tech7.jpg


The first is that we have made a 15% increase to research speed across the board. The second is that a lot of the research in the new naval tech tree (as well as all the doctrine research) benefits from the research with XP system that gives you a fairly significant research boost if you have enough XP of that type to spare. For things like fire control methods and damage control training, researching without XP is significantly more time consuming to represent the lower effort spent during peacetime rather than learning from, well, experience.

tech6.jpg


Lastly, we made some changes to how research bonuses are granted and how ahead of time bonuses are handled. Regular research bonuses are no longer reducing research cost but instead boosting research speed. A previous 50% reduction in cost is now a 100% boost in speed. Ahead of time bonuses have been changed to apply a flat reduction in years rather than a reduction to the penalty, so a 1944 tech with two years of reduction would be treated as a 1942 tech for the purpose of calculating research time.

tech3.jpg


That is all for today. Next week, we will take a look at some of the art and music coming in Man the Guns.
 
@podcat All these changes to the tech tree are amazing. I have some questions though.

1) How much fuel you will be able to produce with Synthetic Refineries compared with natural oil production?

2) How much can I improve a ship efficiency by researching better ammunition instead of investigating new models and modules?
 
Cool
 
@Archangel85
As an addition to this comment:
Scrolling around will be pain
Can we have the following options:
1. Clearly show to which year a tech belongs. Step 1 would be the introduction of a kind of table in the background art of the techtree with each year a column. Step 2 would be that the actual year is displayed somewhere regardless of scrolling position (think of Excel and locking the top line)

2. Condense the tree (same for focus trees). There is just sooooo much wasted space. I'd rather have smaller icons than so much empty space.

3. The posssibility to expand/collapse parts of the tree. In the example given above let's assume I don't want to research sub marines (for whatever reason). So I can just collapse the submarine part. If I want to research them at a later time I can expand that section again.

I really like all the additions to tech trees and focus trees. But the scrolling is a chore...
 
Can we expect changes in peace treaties with this big of a naval rework? Like limiting a countries naval or overall production in a peace treaty, or forcing them to destroy parts of their fleet. Also creating demilitarised zones and war reperations as in factories or resources would be a nice addon.

To addition, there is still the bug of the ''National focus currently has no effect'' in the previous DLC's focus trees. I hope this DLC will not include that, and the previous bugs will be fixed.

P.S.: I know you read it. Don't hang up on me.
 
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There was a mention some time ago that research time would be globally reduced, is this still the case?
It's been mentionned in the DD: -15% for everything, plus an option to use experience for an extra boost on many techs.