As Wednesday is upon us so is a new dev diary! Next week we will be back with more espionage, but today is about a small surprise patch as well as improved Focus tree navigation.
1.8 ‘Fork’
Fork you say? I thought you said 1.8 was going to be Husky? Due to technical requirements having to do with updating to the new paradox launcher we had to jump a big number other than going to 1.7.2 like we had planned. This means that 1.9 will instead be Husky which is the big update coming together with La Resistance.
Lets jump straight into the changelog (I know you all skipped straight to here anyway, you can read the stuff above later):
To summarize, the big points here are: Stability, submarine balance and a new launcher
Submarine balance
Later tier 3 and 4 subs were simply too good compared to destroyers designed to hunt them. They have been nerfed a bit and increased in cost and destroyer upgrades improved. Large empires should now also have a bit easier time as we better control the amount of convoys in each battle and have fixed a bug where convoys would actively hurt the sub detection abilities of their escorts making it really tough in big battles.
New launcher
We, much like Imperator, EU4 and Stellaris have now also moved to the new launcher.
Since wargamers are a traditional bunch you might be asking why a new launcher is happening. There are several reasons:
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Go here to read details about the launcher changes and what the mean for modders and player.
The tl;dr for players though is that you need to start the game, run it to the main menu and then quit and restart. Without this your mods wont show up. This will clean up old mod configuration and prep everything. Mods will still show out of date until modders have updated the supported version, but we haven't made any changes that will break them so 1.7.1 mods should still be ok, despite them saying they arent - so no panic
If you do have issues please post about them in the above linked thread about the launcher rather in here (its still cool to discuss the launcher here though).
If you are interested in more details and plans for the launcher you can read all about it here in a post from the launcher team .
The patch itself releases later today (late afternoon). That is all about the patch, lets move on to highlight some neat stuff coming in 1.9 'Husky'...
Focus Tree Navigation
As our focus trees have gotten larger finding things in them or simply exploring them has gotten harder. To solve this we are adding several things to the national focus screen (btw UI here is still a bit WIP and may change)
This is me searching for industry related stuff in the Chinese tree. It also shows some of our default filters on the right. Several nations have special filters to help highlight specific mechanics. So China has "Inflation" as a filter, the commonwealth nations have a filter to help spot affecting independence etc. We hope this is going to make getting into new focus trees a lot easier!
Here is an example of zooming out about half way on China:
If I place my mouse pointer somewhere I can still see tooltips and zooming will zoom to the cursor.
See you all next week for another diary!
1.8 ‘Fork’
Fork you say? I thought you said 1.8 was going to be Husky? Due to technical requirements having to do with updating to the new paradox launcher we had to jump a big number other than going to 1.7.2 like we had planned. This means that 1.9 will instead be Husky which is the big update coming together with La Resistance.
Lets jump straight into the changelog (I know you all skipped straight to here anyway, you can read the stuff above later):
Code:
################################################################
######## Patch 1.8.0 "Fork" ########
################################################################
##################################
# Feature & General
##################################
- Added new Launcher
- Added "/mute <user name>" and "/unmute <user name>" chat commands
##################################
# Balance
##################################
- Reduced number of destroyers needed to cover convoy routes from 1 destroyer per 5 convoys to 1 destroyer per 10 convoys
- Convoys can no longer detect convoys as that just drags down the average detection when escorted
- The amount of convoys in a sub battle is now based on the length of the route, so longer = fewer in a battle
- Reduced total possible torpedo reveal chance reduction to 60% from 70% by reducing wolfpack by 5% and commander trait by 5%
- Slightly reduced sub reveal chance when firing torpedos to account for convoys no longer contributing to detection averages
- Slightly reduced passive sub reveal chance in combat to account for convoys no longer contributing to detection averages
- Added 2 sub detection to radar 4 to make t4 subs not so hard to detect when matched up against modern destroyers
- Aluminium Company of Canada focus now gets an additional 14 Aluminium
- upgraded t4 radar to have sub detection from 10 to 14
- upgraded t3 radar to have sub detection from 5 to 6
- increased IC cost for t3 sub hull from 270 to 320
- increased IC cost for t4 sub hull from 300 to 450
- increased IC cost for cruiser sub hull from 370 to 390
- increased number of convoys covered by each destroyer on escort from 10 to 12
- Lowered t3 and t4 submarine torpedo damage from 23 to 22 and 30 to 28 respectively
- slightly increased the speed penalty on depth charges
##################################
# Bugfix
##################################
- Fixed a civil war revolter not getting correct focus tree
- Fixed escaping or sunk convoys from inadvertently affecting damage calculations for the remaining convoys.
- Fixed Diminishing Returns now applying to party popularity changes.
- Fixed lend-lease sender having its convoy sunk instead of the receiver in naval combats
- Prevented subjects from giving units to their overlord as part of a request for expeditionary forces if those units are volunteers or expeditionaries from another country.
##################################
# UI & Database
##################################
- The open music player button in settings now has proper size
- Music Player now has proper spelling in tooltip/settings button
- Fixes for Japanese various names (ships, divisions etc).
- Fixed full name for Canadian general Percival John Montague.
##################################
# Modding
##################################
- Added define to allow scaling of ship part of sub detection inside combats
- Enabled some console commands that had previously been developer-only but which did not really need to be locked.
- add_mines
- release (country)
- debug (toggle miscellaneous in-game debug utilities)
- debug_smooth (toggle within-game-tick frame rendering)
- instant_prepare (division preparation)
- reload_textures
- tag_color (set country color)
##################################
# Stability & Performance
##################################
- Fixed a crash when removing certain unit leader traits.
- Added checks to prevent CTD in cases where AI had sent invalid expeditionary forces
- Optimized game rule checks by finding the game rule in the game rule database more efficiently.
- Prevented a crash if a script tries to make a non-existing country declare war on another country.
- Fixed CTD on invalid set_politics usage by failing to set ruling_party, made it write an error instead.
- Fixed pointer truncation in 64bits in ProtectedMemoryAllocate
- Fixed crash reporter to correctly indicate if the program is built for a 64-bit architecture.
- Fixed a CTD related to expeditionary forces that could lock in saves
- Fixed game crashing in weird ways if a mod tries reusing an idTo summarize, the big points here are: Stability, submarine balance and a new launcher
Submarine balance
Later tier 3 and 4 subs were simply too good compared to destroyers designed to hunt them. They have been nerfed a bit and increased in cost and destroyer upgrades improved. Large empires should now also have a bit easier time as we better control the amount of convoys in each battle and have fixed a bug where convoys would actively hurt the sub detection abilities of their escorts making it really tough in big battles.
New launcher
We, much like Imperator, EU4 and Stellaris have now also moved to the new launcher.
Since wargamers are a traditional bunch you might be asking why a new launcher is happening. There are several reasons:
- Platform independence. We want to be able to exist on multiple platforms eventually and the current one is limited and not really capable of doing it very well.
- The old one is really limited in how we can communicate with you. Now we can link to multiple news post for example.
- It frees up the dev team (us). We never really had the time to work on the launcher and as the place setting up mods and such there have been a ton of requests for features (such as mod groupings and presets) that we just never have the time to do. With a dedicated team working on a unified launcher across pdx games they will have more time for stuff like this and we can worry about the game itself. I have great hopes for lots of cool improvements in the future and make sure to let them know in comments what kind of features you would like to see.
- We got a neat continue button now directly in launcher so you can save time getting back on your previous session
Go here to read details about the launcher changes and what the mean for modders and player.
The tl;dr for players though is that you need to start the game, run it to the main menu and then quit and restart. Without this your mods wont show up. This will clean up old mod configuration and prep everything. Mods will still show out of date until modders have updated the supported version, but we haven't made any changes that will break them so 1.7.1 mods should still be ok, despite them saying they arent - so no panic
If you do have issues please post about them in the above linked thread about the launcher rather in here (its still cool to discuss the launcher here though).If you are interested in more details and plans for the launcher you can read all about it here in a post from the launcher team .
The patch itself releases later today (late afternoon). That is all about the patch, lets move on to highlight some neat stuff coming in 1.9 'Husky'...
Focus Tree Navigation
As our focus trees have gotten larger finding things in them or simply exploring them has gotten harder. To solve this we are adding several things to the national focus screen (btw UI here is still a bit WIP and may change)
- Zoom - You can now zoom in and out to the mouse pointer much like on the map. Its a nice way to get around on big trees (*squints at the spanish focus tree*)
- Filters - toggling various filters can let you easily spot where industry is located, or things related to particular national spirits you are trying to get rid of or modify. These are tagged manually on focuses so its something modders will be able to use also.
- Free Search - on top of filters we also have full free search. It goes through tooltips automatically and picks out focuses. This is a more advanced and powerful version of Filters and quite nice for finding specific things fast when you know what you are looking for.
This is me searching for industry related stuff in the Chinese tree. It also shows some of our default filters on the right. Several nations have special filters to help highlight specific mechanics. So China has "Inflation" as a filter, the commonwealth nations have a filter to help spot affecting independence etc. We hope this is going to make getting into new focus trees a lot easier!
Here is an example of zooming out about half way on China:
If I place my mouse pointer somewhere I can still see tooltips and zooming will zoom to the cursor.
See you all next week for another diary!
