For the Motherland Developer Diary 7 - Historical Elections and Foreign Ministers

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Couple of thoughts.

First on AA fire from passed over provinces. Bomber formations crossing the flak belts along the coast were fired upon going and coming. This was shown in the actual wartime AARs filed. It is true that flak downed few planes but it damaged a lot. During the actual raids most of the planes that were shot down were downed by the interceptors and most of the bombers that returned damaged were damaged by flak.

Edit: The ability to bypass flak was limited to a large extent by the fact that flying extra miles to avoid flak took extra fuel at the expense of bomb load. A B-17 could deliver a 17,000 LB bombload to targets close to the coast but only 3,000 LB to Berlin.

Second, most wartime intelligence was inaccurate to some degree. Perhaps the accuracy of the intelligence for each area of information is greater the more agents there are in that country and maybe a bonus if that area is the focus. There should be some level of intel on all countries you are not at war with since diplomatic posts function partly for intel gathering. The author of the book "Spy in the US" pointed out that all military attache's are, by definition, spies.
 
Couple of thoughts.

First on AA fire from passed over provinces. Bomber formations crossing the flak belts along the coast were fired upon going and coming. This was shown in the actual wartime AARs filed. It is true that flak downed few planes but it damaged a lot. During the actual raids most of the planes that were shot down were downed by the interceptors and most of the bombers that returned damaged were damaged by flak.

Edit: The ability to bypass flak was limited to a large extent by the fact that flying extra miles to avoid flak took extra fuel at the expense of bomb load. A B-17 could deliver a 17,000 LB bombload to targets close to the coast but only 3,000 LB to Berlin.

Second, most wartime intelligence was inaccurate to some degree. Perhaps the accuracy of the intelligence for each area of information is greater the more agents there are in that country and maybe a bonus if that area is the focus. There should be some level of intel on all countries you are not at war with since diplomatic posts function partly for intel gathering. The author of the book "Spy in the US" pointed out that all military attache's are, by definition, spies.

from podcat:
I agree AA should be able to damage bombers on their way to targets, but currently the engine doesnt really support it, mostly because the planes do not actually enter the province because of speed and when combats are checked. The changes in the dev diary were only for making them stronger for local defense.
 
I saw that. I was actually responding to the people who think it was not a factor.
 
not sure what I think about this. perhaps as a domestic mission to spread incorrect information. I dont think it feels right that your own spies dig up bad information. they can not find stuff out, but to get it wrong sounds a bit meh unless someone is feeding them bad intel.

perhaps as a future expansion idea or something. I'd like it tied in a lot with visible stuff on the map. could be a lot of fun in multiplayer

missed my point a bit - but as stated later currently the info you get is always 0 or 1 (what i posted about multiple times has a bad effect on this game). Dureing the war the inteligence service had to decide what was true what was not - sometimes bad info was fed further. Here this never happens. You always either know what the enemy stack has or what it doesnt or have no info at all. This has nothing to do with the spy screen but rather the decryption techs. You should ALWAYS have a chance to get bad information no matter if the enemy is intentionally doing it or not. Furthermore your own spies DID dig up bad/incorrect information or at best they gave estimates on enemy str and composition. It wasnt really easy to walk up and count a whole divsion and its exact brigade formation. In this game all u need to do is fly a plane over, pause and see exactly whats underneath them..

My major pet peeve is that i always know what the enemy fleet has and esp its name - in mp i usually change the name of 1st Carrier task force - all the enemy has to do is read that and know what the fleet is- whilst this is mostly for my information so i know whats where. The also always see the cv icon and know that there is a cv there even though there are 4 bbs in that stack too.
 
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not sure what I think about this. perhaps as a domestic mission to spread incorrect information. I dont think it feels right that your own spies dig up bad information. they can not find stuff out, but to get it wrong sounds a bit meh unless someone is feeding them bad intel.
Never underestimate the capability of Mister Fuckup to come to a party! ;) Even when people are not trying to keep things hidden or secret it's very common for businesses and military units alike to get wrong information and base decisions on it. Add to this that there were wonderfully complex projects undertaken to deceive the enemy (look at the exploits of this fellow here, and consider that among Rommel's first orders in Libya was one to "build me some tanks - you have trucks and timber and canvas, no?") and misinformation is almost guaranteed. Heck - look at Iraq pre-2003.

You should ALWAYS have a chance to get bad information no matter if the enemy is intentionally doing it or not. Furthermore your own spies DID dig up bad/incorrect information or at best they gave estimates on enemy str and composition. It wasnt really easy to walk up and count a whole divsion and its exact brigade formation. In this game all u need to do is fly a plane over, pause and see exactly whats underneath them.
Indeed - I think the ability to deploy "dummy units" could be quite cool, but only really useful for multi-player games and not essential for that. Making an AI respond plausibly to dummy units would probably take more effort than it would be worth (although, I guess, you just have them be treated as real units are?)
 
i wouldnt go as far as make it possible to actually build dummy units as that would be far too much micro in already a hell of a micro game (partisans in the exp is gonna add more to that), so just make it abstract in makeing the info not so black and white..
 
(Havent read beyond page 1)

I was just thinking, that this ´foreign minister´ thing might not quite cut it, yet. I´d prefer, if there were arrow (or a drop-downlist or whatever) in the politics screen, allowing you to browse through other nation´s portfolios just as your own - except you wouldnt be allowed to change anything. This way, you could also check
- what other ministers would be likely to come into office after the next election goes this or that way,
- which occupation policies the various nations impose on others,
- what kind of laws they have enacted,
- if they are mobilized (disable the tooltip for the button, though, maybe, to not show how many men are needed to fully mobilize)
...

I dunno, if the strategic warfare values should be shown, though... maybe they should go to the intel-screen?
 
Can we PLEASE, for the love of god FINALLY get some improved UI, namely decent handling of leaders?? I honestly don't know why PI can't and so far didn't implement a simple filter system when selecting app. leader for your divisions, so the player would symply select which traits/ranks/skill levels he wants to include/exclude in leaders list (f.e., exclude all old guards and show only mj. generals with offensive and trickster traits). It really wouldn't take a lot of effrt and work on your side, but it would improve the UI (and thus the game) immensely. While we are in 2011 the game still uses leader select system from HOI1, which is a 2002 game.


Oh, a button to unassign ALL curently assigned leaders would be nice...

I agree. Also, is it just me, or does the game seem to love to put your best generals in charge of some garrison unit or the like while your elite troops get a skill 1 old guard with no traits?
 
I agree. Also, is it just me, or does the game seem to love to put your best generals in charge of some garrison unit or the like while your elite troops get a skill 1 old guard with no traits?

Best General gets picked first by AI.

I really, really hope that this new "Theatres" tab turns out to bring us some of these options mentioned by Spricar.

- One button to clear all officers from a command chain. I have the Army Group selected, and I press the "clear all down" button. This removes ALL leaders in that command chain.

- Sortable officers. In the officer menu, there are boxes along the top that I can click on or off that have all of the various bonuses. I would like to add that "old guard" should NOT be one of them - only BONUSES should be listed. This way, if I'm desperate for an Engineer, and my only engineers left are "old guard" then that's my only choice.

- (( I love the new officer tree that came with Semper Fi - great improvement; I use it all the time, but ... )) MORE! I full-screen flow chart of the command trees. Also, I'm having problems keeping the command trees readable after I have incorporated navy, air and 30-40 'garrison' divisions. I used to create separate commands to organise those (navy, air, garrisons) but it was just too cumbersome, and sucked-up too much manpower. What would be nice is if I could have an over-lapping command trees that allowed me to organise navy and air into separate commands but assign individual units to specific land commands as well. This would make it much easier to put an army or army group on AI control and allow the AI to coordinate air and navy support.
I do find that the AI is better at organising my air factors than I am - it would be even better if I could put JUST the air on AI control while I control my land forces.

This is quite the laundry list, and I hope I'm not 'off-topic' but this would really improve my game experience.
 
@ podcat and the devs in general: Might I humbly request that you post some more of the 'small' changes on the game? These are certainly most interesting and since you are still in a development process, there might be something useful coming from the discussion. (As opposed to new features which the players will just have to see first before being really able to comment on them).