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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks

Hi everyone! The team is now back from the holidays and polishing on La Resistance. Today its time for a classic “bag of tricks” diary covering various small changes. The theme is quality of life here.


MEFO Bills
Ever forgotten to renew MEFO bills as Germany? Yeah me neither! But just in case someone does we got you covered. Now you can opt out or back in if you changed your mind, at any point during each cycle.
EOQK_waWoAYL_ue.png


Construction queue
We have changed the default behaviour for the construction queue. Now when adding say a new factory construction it will be placed just below the last non-repair entry (rather than at the bottom). This removes a lot of extra work with having to reprioritize things and still allows you to put specific repair jobs at the top of the queue with no issues. There are also new shortcuts in those rare situations where you might prefer sending to end of queue directly.
upload_2020-1-15_12-49-3.png



Exercise auto stop
Exercise now has 2 setting states so that you can either keep the old behaviour (keep training past max level and get XP) or hold shift when activating it and it will automatically stop when hitting the max level. This also works for ships and planes and its a nice relief not to have to babysit exercises when you aren’t after XP.
upload_2020-1-15_12-50-16.png



Decision Notifiers
Since we added decisions in Waking the Tiger the amount has been growing and we have been using them in more and more cool and creative ways. This has meant that the number of choices have gone up and some stuff has needed to change to make sure notifications are actually helpful for you. Firstly we have made notification numbers more visible and clear for both decisions and the espionage agency. Secondly its now possible to right click the decisions button to reset the available count. This means that after that only new ones will show up in the count. They can of course be switched on/off individually like before but if you are like me this saves a ton of clicking, and now it will impact what the notifiers show unlike before where it was only tied to separate alerts.
upload_2020-1-15_12-46-47.png



Allied Naval Invasion Alerts
Invasion alerts can be critically important for you to notice if an enemy is about to make a successful landing somewhere and you need to react. Previously it was difficult to help out nearby allies as alert were only for your own controlled shores. Now we have 2 new alerts mirroring the old ones for allies so you can bail out Mussolini when he's in a pinch ;)
upload_2020-1-15_13-3-10.png

This is me as Evil France with Netherlands and Belgium in my faction getting alerted about an invasion on my allies.


Civil War Surprises
During a normal war you have time to set up your plans and get units into place fast, but in civil wars this is not so. With the spanish civil war in focus this expansion we wanted to make sure we made this less stressful for players, so now if any civil war happens the AI will wait a short while to activate its plans giving a human player time to organize or pause if they want. Its not a long break but its enough where it feels a lot more comfortable to play against now.


Zoomable & Searchable Focus Trees
We already went into this in detail back here. But since then we have improved the UI to make filtering better and set it up for old trees as well to make finding things easier. This below is for Mexico and lets you highlight stuff related to rebellions and church authority as special filters on top of the regular filters:
upload_2020-1-15_13-20-1.png


Thats its for this week! Today we are also starting up streaming again. Me and Daniel (mah leaks) are going to show off as much as we can of the Espionage system at 16:00CET. See you then!
 
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DeadHeat16 said:
We’re in the endgame now boys.
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Haha I wish. First MTG Bag of Tricks was in August 2018, the expansion launched on February 2019.

Now that I think of it, HOI4 needs shorter patch cycles. One year for a DLC and eight months for a patch is too extreme for a game that is supposed to have continued support.

Imperator nailed it recently while still reworking large areas of that game, and the devs said the model is a success.
 
Dusty_dutchman said:
Will there also be an alert if a parachute dropping happened?
This might be handy for example britain or Germany as they have two or more fronts to focus on in a normal game
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No, but its not a bad suggestion :) Will keep it in mind

Dusty_dutchman said:
can we get an option to customise or delete the whoooooop
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it can be easily modded out but imo its pretty important and easy to miss without a sound

Enriador said:
What can we expect about performance in 1.9? With all this Resistance, Compliance and Espionage stuff, will there be a downgrade?
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Performance can be a very subjective thing so its hard to say. We have simplified other areas and optimized stuff too so my guess its going to be about the same with perhaps a bit better UI performance due to less divisions. Some of the optimizations liekly will help mods too so might be even better there. but tl;dr I dont think there will overall be a huge difference.

kimidf said:
Is there any possibility that we have to investigate any new technology for this dlc, such as the infantry tanks?

Will the Americans and the British have their own models and reconnaissance aircraft skins
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We have new techs for armored cars. Recon is just more unlocks on existign techs making them more important. Scout planes have 2 new techs you can invest in and both UK/USA have unique 2d and 3d art

Enriador said:
Now that I think of it, HOI4 needs shorter patch cycles. One year for a DLC and eight months for a patch is too extreme for a game that is supposed to have continued support.

Imperator nailed it recently while still reworking large areas of that game, and the devs said the model is a success.
Click to expand...
Its a side effect of the DLC model that it makes it difficult to release frequent updates aside from DLCs and while I know you guys would want to have more DLCs I am not sure you want to half DLCs at half the size so we can make them faster?
 
I know this isn't the topic of the dev diary, but is something going to be done about the AI overcrowding airfields and eating up all the supply during landings(or in general)?
 
@podcat I think the patch cycle is fine for HoI IV, since we get quite big changes per patch either way. I would just like some more Hotfixes, small bugfixes/balance changes after the big launch, before no other patches get released for a 3/4 year or so.
 
Now that we get alerts for naval invasions on our allies it is my sincere hope the suicide naval invasion AI has been improved (a lot i hope)? Otherwise it's going to drive me insane and most likely never aquire any allies and just go me vs the world in SP.
 
Enriador said:
Haha I wish. First MTG Bag of Tricks was in August 2018, the expansion launched on February 2019.

Now that I think of it, HOI4 needs shorter patch cycles. One year for a DLC and eight months for a patch is too extreme for a game that is supposed to have continued support.

Imperator nailed it recently while still reworking large areas of that game, and the devs said the model is a success.
Click to expand...
That might not be the case, there is a leak that LR will release between late january and early february.
 
Enriador said:
Haha I wish. First MTG Bag of Tricks was in August 2018, the expansion launched on February 2019.

.
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it's unlikely that LR will release later than Q1, that would mean more than a year for a DLC arguably smaller in scope than MTG. Even if it's not ready the suits will demand it to be released.

Pdx needs to really do something about the very slow development of HOI 4, the tricks in this diary are good but they are probably the result of a couple of days of coding (and some of it is copy paste of a mod).

Also, please open more of the AI to modders. Really. So many problems in the game could be addressed if modders who have much more time than the team could be able to tinker with the AI.
 
podcat said:
Its a side effect of the DLC model that it makes it difficult to release frequent updates aside from DLCs and while I know you guys would want to have more DLCs I am not sure you want to half DLCs at half the size so we can make them faster?
Click to expand...

Stellaris was released in the same Q 2 2016 that HOI4 and it had double the amount of patches/DLCS released since then... not saying that quantity is better than quality but more frequent updates are in the realm of paradox possibility...
 
valentin4 said:
Stellaris was released in the same Q 2 2016 that HOI4 and it had double the amount of patches/DLCS released since then... not saying that quantity is better than quality but more frequent updates are in the realm of paradox possibility...
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The Stellaris team is also slightly larger than the HOI team. I understand you guys want more frequent releases but with only 4 programmers on the HOI team, I can't realistically develop an entire DLC and frequent patches simultaneously :(
 
@podcat 1 good DLC is better than 2 bad.

HOI4 model is good.

Maybe you can add small content packs like music (Sabaton has added recently really good songs), cosmetics (uniforms to different units, models for colonial troops, autumn and winter camouflage...)
 
podcat said:
No, but its not a bad suggestion :) Will keep it in mind



it can be easily modded out but imo its pretty important and easy to miss without a sound



Performance can be a very subjective thing so its hard to say. We have simplified other areas and optimized stuff too so my guess its going to be about the same with perhaps a bit better UI performance due to less divisions. Some of the optimizations liekly will help mods too so might be even better there. but tl;dr I dont think there will overall be a huge difference.


We have new techs for armored cars. Recon is just more unlocks on existign techs making them more important. Scout planes have 2 new techs you can invest in and both UK/USA have unique 2d and 3d art


Its a side effect of the DLC model that it makes it difficult to release frequent updates aside from DLCs and while I know you guys would want to have more DLCs I am not sure you want to half DLCs at half the size so we can make them faster?
Click to expand...

I think once you finish with all the major country reworks it wouldnt be too bad to have smaller dlcs focusing on different areas of the game to be released a little more regularly. Rather than having to redo an entire major nation you can maybe tackle some new systems or smaller regions or gameplay mechanics or technologies.
 
VashTheStampede said:
The Stellaris team is also slightly larger than the HOI team. I understand you guys want more frequent releases but with only 4 programmers on the HOI team, I can't realistically develop an entire DLC and frequent patches simultaneously :(
Click to expand...
Isn't HoI4 played more ? Might make more sense to get more people on board. I don't know about numbers but country packs and graphic packs might pay for the extra devs and artists.
 
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