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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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1. Please give an option to disable the unit behaviour where they refuse to perform orders if it can cause low supply.

2. Are there any plans to tie availability of commanders to their RL year of promotion?
 
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The whole officer corps mechanic seems well thought out and i guess it will gamewise enrich customisation options to roleplay / min-max in an attractive manner.

@C0RAX a few questions come up of course:

1. Is the officer corps mechanic part of the NSB DLC or part of the general update?

2. As fas as i understood, deskjobs and possibly other beneficial actions are being limited to commanders have a level 5 skill or higher. If it were that way, these functions would for a large part of the game be mostly limited to UK, USA and USSR who even start the game with many level 5 commanders - and thus to nations whose military leadership showed clear signs of long term incompetence. Only mid- and late war these nations had overcome their initial weaknesses. The initially aggressive nations instead (especially GER) would be locked out of the beneficial stuff for quite some time. In effect, the mechanic would do the opposite to history and once again only buff the Allies per se. Is there any chance that starting commander levels will see a balance overhaul?

3. As we are at customisation: Will NSB or the update allow players to more customise the chosen DLCs? As an example a player wishes to play NSB and MtG but does not want to hassle with tank and ship designer - will the game in the future allow for this?

4. Can Italy please finally get a few more generals? It's saddening to see especially Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey easily overpower and laugh at Italy just considering the numbers (i am not even talking about the skill levels here).
 
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The strategy options from this is pretty incredible, I really like this. I think this is going to be the best expansion released, theres just going to be so much content.

So we get this.

1. Spirit of Army/ Spirity of Navy
2. Spirit of Divisional command/ Spirit of Naval command/ Spirit of air command
3. Spirit of Army Academy/ Spirit of Naval Academy/ Spirit of airforce academy

Each with 6 buffs to choose from (roughly) I guess.
 
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Small request but CAN we utilise the bigger general/admiral portraits that are used for sickness when clicking the generals and admirals button at the top?

Would be a nice QOL change so we can see the portraits in more detail.
 
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Yeah, it should be a lot steeper. I don't know if it should be 90%, because it's my understanding captains eventually developed workarounds, but it was reeeeeallly bad. The torpedoes ran too deep (went under their targets), the magnetic trigger kicked in too early and the contact trigger failed to activate on contact.







10% fail chance falls quite short to what's been described there.
Maybe it is a debuff that you have to get rid of as the US in intervals of -10% Torpedo hit chance? Like the Army Reform as China.

Say it starts at -60 or -70 and each time you change it you get the next lesser debuff as a spirit until it reaches net 0

Might be a hint as how they redo The Purge, Army Reform etc maybe they are adding more military debuffs like that?
 
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You're being very generous to BuOrd there (also, if you're handing out torpedo debuffs, don't forget Germany - not as bad as BuOrd, but they had some serious issues). From the book Torpedo (which is great book on said weapon, although it somewhat bafflingly leaves out any discussion of the Mk 24, despite mentioning a section about it in the text):

"It was estimated that of all US torpedoes fired up to the summer of 1943, 70 per cent were duds"
Upon further review, making the B-Ord/Mk14 historically bad, only makes sense if the USA can make up for it with its historical ship numbers.

i.e. if the USA navy has to play on HO scale, so should any debuff it receives.
 
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Upon further review, making the B-Ord/Mk14 historically bad, only makes sense if the USA can make up for it with its historical ship numbers.

i.e. if the USA navy has to play on HO scale, so should any debuff it receives.

I don't think it should be the full 70 per cent, at least in the vanilla game - I expect most players not familiar with just how bad the US torpedoes were, would be a bit put off. I expect (hope) the devs will have a way to remove it as well (requiring PP perhaps? Historically BuOrd dug their heels in and needed a fair push (and some clear test results) to acknowledge that there was a problem*)

*iirc it was something solved broadly in two stages, so even when BuOrd first came clean, they weren't ready to admit to everything.
 
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The strategy options from this is pretty incredible, I really like this. I think this is going to be the best expansion released, theres just going to be so much content.

So we get this.

1. Spirit of Army/ Spirity of Navy
2. Spirit of Divisional command/ Spirit of Naval command/ Spirit of air command
3. Spirit of Army Academy/ Spirit of Naval Academy/ Spirit of airforce academy

Each with 6 buffs to choose from (roughly) I guess.

I think you get "Spirit of Airforce" but not the "Spirit of airforce academy". There are no general / admiral types for the airforce so having an academy for them wouldn't make sense.
 
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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.

View attachment 734000

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.

View attachment 734001


View attachment 734002


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.

View attachment 734003

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.

View attachment 734004

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.

View attachment 734005

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
its so great
 
Normally torpedo hit chance starts at 10% and then is affected by speed and profile of target right? If US gets -10% I think that is huge... but I really don't know the equation in detail
 
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You can prefer one tactic and the base weight is doubled, if you also have the corresponding division spirit the base weight will be tripled. So if a base weight is 4, it will be 8 when preferred, and 12 with the spirit and preferred. commander and battle specific weights are added on as normal.
Come to think of it: won't this turn MA right into an absolute meta for holding the line? >.>
 
In reguards to the surface raider spirit, hopefully they won't teach the AI to put a single submarine on convoy escort.

Actually, now that I think about it, no-screen bonus is gonna have to be massive for it to be worth it, since screens give a pretty sick +hit change to capital ships
 
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