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HOI4 Dev Diary - Officer Corps #2

Hello there C0RAX, here!

For my first HoI dev diary, I’m here to show you the second part of the Officer Corps, a new way of personalising your military that will be included as part of No Step Back and the Barbarossa update.

In the last dev diary we explained how we want to allow you to specialise your military branches with the leadership and advisors. Today we bring to you some new features that allow you to customise how your military operates, and act as a further use for the new sources of branch experience that were hinted at last week.

You may have been wondering what all those shiny boxes with emblems were for. I'm here to tell you they are the new Officer Corps Spirits.

Spirits are a new way to specialise your military, generals and even help your division designs. Each branch has multiple categories for its spirits that affect different aspects of the way they operate. Here I have shown you the spirits of the army which provide bonuses to designing divisions or operating armies. Of course this category has analogs for both the air and navy branches.

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Now we have the more direct combat effect level spirits that let you improve specific parts of your units to best match your strategy. These also let you conduct some historical moves that previously were quite hard such as using your capital ships as surface raiders without screens. And for those keen eyed readers, yes the division spirits provide tactics weight increases if you also have them selected as your preferred tactic which we will get to shortly.

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Finally we have the final category for the army and navy branches, the academy spirits. Previously generating commanders was a purely random chance. Now with the academy spirits you can tailor this toward specific personality traits along with helping you generals progress in a particular direction. For the above image you can also see the new engineer officer personality trait that provides bonuses to xp generation for the engineer trait. This works in tandem with the advisor promotion mentioned last week, and adds another dimension towards tailoring your officer corps from the very beginning.

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With the new spirits some are limited by either your political ideology or doctrines and so you will have to take this into account when deciding the strategy of your officers corps.

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The final part of this week's dev diary brings us to preferred tactics. This new feature provides you with a tool to influence the likelihood of a specific tactic being used in combat allowing you to increase the chance of getting that favorable matchup in battle or possibly the perfect counter.

This simulates a doctrinal emphasis on doing battle in a specific way; but can also provide a tool that can be used to counter a strongly themed force.

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The new window will help show you all the tactics you have unlocked from doctrines and see what effect they have on the battle. If you combine this preferred tactic with your division spirit bonus you will double the effectiveness of the tactic preference so unifying your strategic direction will help you get the most out of the officer corps.

Well that's all for this week comrades, see you at the front. C0RAX
 
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new Officer Corps Spirits.
Spirits? Necromancy dlc confirmed
I guess it's fitting that they are acquired by Experience Mana then

inb4 plantoids and lithoids are added before Italy focus tree
 
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I cannot explain how cool all of this is! couple questions regarding it all though - anyway we could see all the new spirits and what they do? And which ones are ideology locked/doctrine locked, if that's not going to be touched on in the future of course?

There are a lot to cover, so we might show some off in future. For today, you can see the glorious USA unique spirit:

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How will this impact modders' national spirits? Will we simply have to flag them as army/navy/academy spirits, or something else entirely?
This is a separate system actually so regular spirits still work
 
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Considering what you mentioned last dev-diary about the changes to XP gain and seeing that in this dev diary there are even more things to spend it on. What will you do about air xp or naval xp where it seems like it will be much harder to get the amount of xp needed to use these new features?
 
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Will there be a German Rework that adds the Communist Branch?

Probably not but since I am curious I'll ask.
In my opinion this is pretty much needed as the german tree is already looking old to today standards, they run out of decisions really fast, they don't really have a lot to do when it comes to their historical branch after a while and they lack interactions with Barbarossa, I hope devs answer your question, I'd like to know it too.
 
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There are a lot to cover, so we might show some off in future. For today, you can see the glorious USA unique spirit:

View attachment 734035
so there's country specific ones too?! that's really neat :) Would there be a reason to ever take this outside of RP, or is it (more likely) something you start with and have to replace in this specific example? And, as a modder, would it be relatively easy to add new spirits into this system ala current national spirits or is it harder behind the scenes? 'Cause I've really been enjoying the moddability for lack of a better word of the newer expansions.
 
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Another dimension opens up; allowing more direct control. Me like! :cool:
 
This reminds me EU4 system: wait for mana, click a button and have an instant bonus. I feel no immersion, but of course I've to play the game to judge.
 
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Could we perhaps get to see the air spirit that was teased in the twitter teaser yesterday? You can't just tease us like that and not show anything about the air spirits :p
 
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can you show us examples of the ideologically locked spirits?
As I missed providing an example of that yes here is a communist only spirit
Screenshot_1.png

Do the little icons with numbers show all army buff (and/or debuffs) from stuff like spirits, doctrines, and the new army spirits?
yes they show all the current modifiers for each branch
 
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Finally, I get to actually choose Blitzkrieg.
 
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As I missed providing an example of that yes here is a communist only spirit
View attachment 734044
The picture isn't showing up for me.

Could we see the effects for each of these spirits? I'm really curious to see what they each do. Also, will there also be country specific spirits?
that will be included as part of No Step Back and the Barbarossa update.

Could you clarify if this is apart of the DLC or the free update? Or will portions of this be free, and some apart of the paid DLC?

Overall this looks really good, I cannot wait to see how this affects my standard Greece meta.