Hearts of Iron IV - 24th Development Diary - 11th of September 2015

[Johan]

Hi everyone, and welcome back to another development diary

Some aspects have already been mentioned regarding trade before, but we will repeat them here to have it all clarified for you.

First of all, there are no stockpiles of resources, as all you have are assumed to be used every day. There are six different types of resources that are spread around the world.

• Oil - Ships, Tanks & Planes.
• Rubber - Tanks, Trucks & Planes.
• Aluminum - Planes & Support Equipment
• Steel - Tanks, Ships & Guns
• Tungsten - Heavy artillery, Anti-tank guns and Jet planes
• Chromium - The most modern tanks.

If a production line lacks resources, either from not enough domestic resources, or traded for, there is a penalty of up to 100% on its output efficiency.

Trading for a resource locks civilian factories for its trade, which limits the amount of constructions of other buildings you can do, but if you export resources you will gain use of foreign civilian factories.

You have no control over who you export to, except you will not trade with anyone you are at war with. The amount of resources that are assigned to export depends on your trade laws which let your government demand resources for your own production. Embargos can be placed through certain national focuses as well to block trade.

Getting resources from another nation requires convoys, and it is always the buyer of goods that has to provide the convoys. Of course, this is all done automatically.

Each nation has a trade influence with another nation, which is depending on distance and relations, but can also be modified by placing troops on their borders to threaten them to trade to you before other nations. Any puppet nations are always forced to give up full trade rights to their masters.

Next week, we’ll talk about changes to laws and politics since last winter.

And now, todays receptionist says goodbye!

 

[podcat]

There seem to be some confusion about how things work
1. you can't decide who is exactly buying your stuff (its a free market)
2. you can decide who you buy from, very important because
- trades over longer period of time become stronger and let you trade more (so like a relation boost)
- trading with people across the sea or who may not like you due to political and diplomatic happenings puts a lot of choices on player. Having to use convoys open you up to them being sunk or blockaded and you want to have long term partners.

A lot of design choices in HOI4 are there to combat hindsight. Stockpiles for example serve little purpose if you know for sure war is coming and then you cant really get the player to have to deal with the same issues as leaders did historically. Nobody stockpiled 10 years worth of oil in the real world. people built up their military from the start, not all in one go later when they had the resources. HOI4 ships you into stockpiling equipment isntead which is much more realistic compared to HOI3 and the choices put to the player much more similar to what historical leaders had to work with rather than being gamey (as I think a lot of hoi3 choices was).

By not having a generic precious metals rather than specifics like in HOI4 we can create interesting (and realistic) strategic gameplay where many areas become important to control, not just oil for example.

Why can't we embargo someone we don't like?

There are two answers. From a gameplay standpoint its because, well, why wouldnt everyone just not trade anything to germany at the start then? everyone has perfect hindsight and knows what will happen. Usually in HOI3 this forced house rules on you so it wouldnt be exploited.
From a realism standpoint this is not something a head of state has an easy time with, you need good reasons (if I recall my reading the US was still exporting fuel to japan in small quantities despite its embargo for example). Reasons are there through focus trees and relations. its just a scale now rather than binary for the most part if and how much someone can trade.

One question.
Can we add more resources?

yes its very moddable

It's maybe the first time I don't agree with the dev' :

1. Why using civilian factories to export resources ? I don't see the link...
2. I don't agree with the point that you can't chose who buy resources from you. So it's impossible to sell resources to another countries as long as he doesn't ask you for trade ? 3. If Britain is at full war with Germany, I can't propose them to sell/give them a lot of resources (if I play USA for example) as long as they don't ask ?

1. its an abstraction, they are treated as consumer goods or what have you being exported (basically non military stuff). Think of it like smaller nations giving up precious resources and in return they get factories they can use to build up their nations .
2. yea, its a more Victoria like market in that sense (some focuses let you set up trade treaties sort of though)
3. I'd imagine they would ask, but your primary job here would be producing different equipment and sending it to them as lend lease

I'm not sure I'm getting this. Could you give a concrete example?

Sure, Brazil has 10 rubber for sale. Both Germany and USA want to buy ALL of it

(reason/value)
Germany has good relations with Brazil: 200
Germany is fascist, Brazil is democratic: -50
Germany has been trading for a year already: +10
Total: 160

USA has ok relations with brazil: 100
USA is democratic, like brazil: +50
Brazil is under influence from monroe doctrine: +10
Total: 160

they have the same end value, so end up being allowed to buy 50% of the exports. if there was no competition and only one buyer they could buy 100%, but with this particular competition case they are guaranteed 50% at least.

Make sense? (also basically what Poh said above)

 

[podcat]

From what I have read over the years the lack of a resource never stopped the productions of war materials; slowed it down or made it more costly or both but never to a dead stop, production was put on hold in favour of more strategic production (subs instead of a battleship) , in fact the lack of a resources spurred the development of alternatives (necessity is the mother of invention). only three resources stopped an army, food, fuel and men. eq. Germany at the end of the war had lots of planes, but no fuel or men to fly them.

it only stops if you have NO resources. if you are producing airplanes and that airplane needs rubber and aluminium and you have 0 rubber but 100% of the needed aluminium that line will run at 50% efficiency. if you had no aluminium at all either it wouldnt run. Most lines require some basic stuff like aluminium or steel which you will have at some quantity.

Development of synthetic resources was confirmed last week.

yea

I'm guessing this replaces the old way of doing it : selling supplies for money and using the money to buy energy/steel/rares.
Now you directly dedicate some civilian IC to the importing process.

yeah

 

[podcat]

sooo HI and Thanks

1. If there i no Stockpile of ressources, the AI "ships" every day ressources and if u boats kill some of them i lack this ONE DAY on ressources it had delivered?
2. Can i manually change or adapt the Harbor/Traderoute?
3. What was the Reason to let stockpiles go? Its somewhat historical and more realistic to stockpile stuff, i have to say this is the 1st thing i am a little bit sad about.

1. it averages it out actually so there are no quick jumps, you slowly start drainign the resource (so there is a slight hidden stockpile actually behind the scenes)
2. not right now
3. read my reply on last page about stockpiles

Will tanks/planes/ships need oil to move, or just for production?.

Just production.

 

[podcat]

I do have a question actually....

If your industry is in full swing with lots of production lines but you suffer a slump in resources for some reason, can you prioritize which production lines get the resources? Example 15 Stug factories have the resources they need but your 15 Panzer IV are short. Or are the resources split equally between your production lines and the only option to streamline production would be to downsize?

you can prioritize your production lines and so control who gets what resources

that is good. Why you need an extra "fuel" if you can have it all under "supplies"... no need for more micro, one word says it all. It doesnt matter what is low.. if you have no Fuel OR no "supplies" your soildiers/tanks cant drive or starve... same sh*** other package

well, not exactly, it depends on what gets to the units. but we'll talk about this when we get to the supply system

 

[Darkrenown]

Why Aluminum, and not Aluminium?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Different_endings

Most countries use the ending "-ium" for "aluminium". In the United States and Canada, the ending "-um" predominates.

We use US spelling ingame.

 

[podcat]

I found Hoi 3 trade a black box, just left it on AI.

I think I am liking this new system... If I am understanding things properly .... this means that "some Dr Evil" in another country, (which shall remain nameless) is buying top quality Soviet resources ... and therefore the Soviets are getting access to more civilian factories ... which they are using to build more military factories in the Urals?

Yes what you say could happen. So if you are a country such as Germany you may try to avoid importing resources from Soviet.

Yeah exactly, although chances are you'll need those soviet resources

every developer diary makes me more excited for HOI4 and addresses every concern i have. keep up the awesome work podcat and paradox!

Thanks

Turkey traded it`s chromium and was a large supplier of Germany. No need for invasion of any kind, Germans already had enough of those on their hand.

At least until say turkey joins another faction at which point germany would need to invade. Its something neutral nations need to keep in mind (this goes for swedish steel as well as a famous example)

And if it's something like 160/170? Winner takes all or they get proportional quantity?

proportional. so here here they would get 48% vs 52%

 

[podcat]

I'm intrigued by the lack of coal as a resource requirement... is the reasoning that just about everyone had or could import sufficient coal; or is it subsumed under 'oil', or is there some other reason I haven't thought of? There must have been some thought put to it?

if everyone has it there isnt much interesting gameplay about it. Same reason we dont have you build socks for your soldiers.

 

[Darkrenown]

Ah, so... you mean the wrong spelling?

I'm from the UK, so I entirely agree. Them's the rules though! *cries*

 

[podcat]

American spelling is usually shorter and makes more sense.

there, I said it.

 

[Darkrenown]

Only if you're not English.

Come on, PDS quashed that crillic font because so many people who used it complained.

People who use & understand English object to stupid non-English miss-spelling all the time.

The two issues are exactly the same.

Why is your view more valid than those of the many Americans or non-native-but-American-influenced-English-Speakers?
(Hint: It isn't)

 

[podcat]

Podcat's mentioned that these were trashed. Presumably somewhat replaced with the combination of population and infrastructure limits on IC.

yeah we cut raw materials when we added population and infra caps on industry. But raw materials was never a tradeable resource, it was simulating local coal and such and giving you an incentive to conquer neighbors (which wasnt needed due to other strat resources)

 

[podcat]

I think he meant steel, aluminum, rubber, oil, chromium, tungsten was already there as an incentive.

yeah, also taking enemy factories

 

[podcat]

So instead of making a functional economy in the game, we'd rather remove the feature that can be exploited. That's not only logically fallacioous, it's ill conceived. What's the game to do? Have a better economy system. It's a pretty straight answer to a straight question. The economy system would be a lot of work, but it's completely wrong to assume it would be for nothing.

- HOI4 is a strategic war game not an economic simulator
- We could spend 1 year working on better economy in it instead of making it better for the reasons people like it (war). Compared to the other stuff we could do with the game I think it would be a complete misuse of resources and waste of time
- Better detailed simulation doesnt really create a better model of something. in fact its usually the opposite that a more abstracted system can better simulate something.

 

[podcat]

No doubt HOI is a wargame with added bits, but I think you might be surprised about the reasons people like games.

I've been a forum member for 14 years and I don't actually ever remember being polled as to why I buy a game. Must be my luck, missing the market research.

Thats true, and who knows, a complex economic simulation in HOI4 could perhaps be great, but HOI2 and HOI3 didnt have deep economic simulations so its not really one of the reasons people play hearts of iron games. Not saying it couldnt be a good game, but its not what HOI is about and would be a different game (I think an economic focused game in the interwar years would be very interesting, but again, its not really HOI).

Oh, and "respectfully disagree"?

yeah whoever changed the name of that button is a genius ;D