Hearts of Iron IV - Dev Diary 13 - Conscription & Training

[podcat]

Dev Diary 13 - Conscription & Training

Hi everyone, time for a smoking fresh diary! This time I am going to go through some of the things we showed in the PdxCon stream in more detail.

One of our important design goals for HOI4 is to make you feel like you are growing and nurturing your army as well as putting more focus into pre-war production. We have showed how its important to build up stockpiles of equipment for your army prior to war and get efficiency up for your production lines and we have talked about how you need to gain and spend experience to modify your divisional templates for the army. So whats left? The soft part of the division - the guys who actually does the fighting in the divisions! We wanted you to be able to affect them more as well, and have the effects be more visible.

Conscription and manpower

Manpower will see some big changes in HOI4. Rather than controlling only how much it ticks up per month your conscription laws now control what percentage of the population you can recruit from the full population count. Conscription laws also come with trade-offs in that recruiting more will impact efficiency of your industry and as you dig deeper and starts scraping the barrel of recruits their quality will drop requiring more training time to reach the same level of proficiency. The idea is to make it less clear cut than in hoi3 where more men was always best at all times.


Off-map training
In HOI4 we have a new screen we call the Army Planner. Here you can manage your division that you want to eventually deploy as well as all of your division templates they are built from. You may queue up as much as you want here and as you produce equipment each division will start to fill up. A division that has gotten some equipment will start training its soldiers but training level is limited by how much equipment you have. 10k men having to share a single Panzer II tank is going to have a tough time learning anything . This also means that there is good reason to build even early tanks right away since they can be used for training.

You are free to deploy any division as long as it has 10% of its equipment and manpower, but at least in peace time it is best to wait until they have all the equipment they need and have trained as much as they can.

Speaking of that, experience is now separated into several levels: Green Soldiers, Trained, Regular, Seasoned and finally Veterans. Training off-map while in the deployment queue can only bring your troops up to a maximum of Trained, and simulates training in barracks etc. To get higher you will need to do more.


On-map training
You can train units on the map when deployed as well and this basically simulates large-scale exercises and war games. Soldiers trained on the map can reach up to Regular status. For Seasoned and Veterans you need to see actual combat. To get these more well trained troops you will now start looking at some trade-offs. Training on the map costs equipment for every day of training as rifles, tanks and other stuff breaks down, so if you are trying to build up a stockpile of arms for an offensive you might need to hold back on training to keep your storage filled. As a side bonus training on the map give you Army Experience (See Diary 6) which you will want if you plan to restructure any of the division templates it is built on. As an example, as Germany, if you want to start using medium tank divisions as well light tanks you will need to run some training exercises to unlock enough experience to either create a fresh new template or modify the existing one to use medium tanks rather than the old light Panzer Is etc. This also gives nations like the USA a way of restructuring their army before the war assuming they want to spend the time and equipment on exercises.

Pushups make you stronger!

At war
When fighting units will continue to gain experience like if they were training (just faster) but will take casualties. For each division the game tracks experience as how many of its men are experienced soldiers and when casualties are removed during combat there is a higher chance that the fresh recruits were the ones who got taken out. This is both realistic and makes it easier to keep your divisions up in experience even when soldiers are lost.

Enjoy your weekend everyone, and I'll see you with another diary in a month.

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Hearts of Iron IV PDXCon Livestream with Lead Designer Dan "podcat" Lind

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Here is the list of Hearts of Iron IV hands-on previews from Pdxcon15, enjoy
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...on-iv-hands-on-previews-from-pdxcon15.837917/

 

[podcat]

very nice. i like the ideas and that your army has something to do during peace time.

in the first picture i see upgrading in the army planner. but now that you dont upgrade existing equiment what does this do? upgrade old templates to new templates? and isnt this 'just' swapping out equiment?

yes, its say swapping out panzer Is for panzer IIs in healty divisions. old equipment goes back in storage.

What if you use up your manpower pool while using scrapping the barrel and then move back to a more industrial efficiency law?

it will deduct men from active divisions, but this is still an area we are working a bit to iron out the details.

 

[podcat]

Those white to green gradient filled icons ( helmet, mountain, horse , etc. ) seems out of place considering all of the other nicely done icons
Or are they just placeholders ?

nah they are used in a lot of different sizes so need to be pretty clean to work

 

[podcat]

How does reinforcement work. Say our 10k division lost 1k men (+some equipment with it). Does it get filled with green recruits or can we specify that we want to fill it with trained men? Also, do we need both men and equipment to start filling up the division or can it beginas long as we have either?

You can fill up with either, but obviously need both to train.

Reinforcement assumes green troops. but its not so clear cut because the division retains experience better than nr of men when taking casualties.

 

[podcat]

Can your divisions lose experience when their casualties are very high?

Can you train even if all your units got regular level to just gain more land combat experience?

This all looks very awesome, and all the choices will likely make pre-war US much more interesting to manage! Questions:
1. Will there be similar mechanisms for training naval units: i.e., both to simulate the difference between launch date and commissioning, as well as to simulate war games like the US Fleet Problems?
2. How about air unit training?
3. As a sanity check: I assume that launching naval vessels (and air wings) will require different rules than land units (i.e., a skeleton crew as opposed to "10% of equipment and manpower"), correct? Otherwise we could end up with funny situations like: "The Graf Zepplin has its keel and hull? Who cares if it has an engine, launch it! We need the Naval experience asap"
4. Will the reliability stat help reduce the attrition of those training Panzer Is?

1. Possibly not. We have it for army because its necessary for managing templates and such
2. ships and air only gain experience at war when doing missions atm
4. yes

Thank you for the Dev Diary.

What does the 'cat' View attachment 124309symbol stand for?

Its a work-in-progress planning tool for controlling axis of advance

You need 10% equipment to do anything. But what if the only equipment in the pool is artillery, because you have not been building small arms, or you queue up lots of Divs that empty the pool? Is it balanced, that each type of equipment needs 10%?

Can you see in a tool tip exactly how many tanks, artillery etc are in a Div, in the Army Planner and on the map?

Are horses an "equipment" for cavalry?

- its 10% to deploy. but well if you dont deploy any frontlien battalion equipment at all you are goign to die horribly. you can still train a bit tho.
- yes, Tooltips show stuff like that.
- No, you cant build horses.

Can your divisions lose experience when their casualties are very high?

Yes

 

[podcat]

On a trollish note, the only thing I really dislike in what you've shown us recently is the Cavalry icon. The horse on it, with his head down, doesn't give the feeling of a division of heroic cavalrymen perpetuating the old traditions. Rather, it seems they are riding Eeyore. ]

its intentionally sad looking because people kept harassing me about building horses and cavalry special mechanics ;P

 

[podcat]

Thanks for the dev diary!
During peacetime, if I'm training my units and they reach maximum allowed, do I continue to earn experience points if I just keep them in training mode. Or does the training just automatically stop when they've reached their maximum?

stops at max

 

[podcat]

It just seems like a small price to pay for literally better units ( granted I don't know how much equipment it will consume ) and the mechanic seems to heavily favour a nation like say the USA.
Was hope for maybe something like a big Org decrease while in "training mode" or something along that line.

Org gets nuked from orbit while training, so yeah it could be risky if enemy is nearby

Will the amount of on map training be affected by conscription laws?

not the amount, but how long it takes.

1. Does population grow enough to affect gameplay during the time period? 12 years is not a lot of time to see huge changes, but if we have timeline extensions it might be a factor.
2. Is population affected by immigration or refugees?
3. Does nationality play any significant (i.e. modeled ingame) role? Occupied/annexed territory, Foreign Legion(s) and partisans are what I'm most interested in.
4. Is population affected by social policies or civil improvements? Sadly, eugenics was pretty popular at the time. On a more positive note, the Baby Boomers are the children of the returned WWII veterans, a population boost which stimulated growth after the war.
5. Does experience retain when sending men back home after the war? I'm thinking of a WWII -> Korean War situation.
6. Is the role of women modeled somehow? A huge amount of factories were staffed by women and the Red Army had women volunteers.
7. Can we control the amount of allocated manpower in a brigade/division? Not all countries had the same number of men in a division, and I think adding fewer brigades to a template is not enough to model this.
8. Specialist divisions - how do they work?
8.1 Mountain/marine divisions - how does brigade composition affect bonuses? Can I add a super heavy tank brigade to marines and still have amphibious assault bonuses? (I hope the limitations are clear and logical)
8.2 Paratroopers - What brigades can I put and still paradrop them?
8.3 Special forces (Rangers, SAS, etc... ) - are they modelled/worth modelling? I can understand not having a specialised brigade of Rangers, but maybe you can make it clear that if I do a certain "recipe" of brigades I will get something with the end result as close as possible to a historical Ranger division.
8.4 Helicopters? - not quite in the timeline, but any special info on them?
9. Supply and transport planes - how do they work?
10. How do secret weapons/projects affect units?

Thank you for the information.

1. there is some small growth as well
2. no
3. yes. we'll go over occupation and partisans it in another diary
4. no
5. a disbanded division loses its experience
6. right now its not modeled, or is modeled abstracted. we might add something though, we'll see
7. no. I think controling battalion count is plenty of control and ok model
8. they have longer training times
8.1 tanks have huge penalties to amphib operations, you can mix them but it makes everything shittier at amphib
8.2 paratroopers only mix with other paras, if you add tanks they are not droppable
8.3 you can sort of make your own by designating elite templates and stuff. its some new things we have been playing around with that I might show at a later point
8.4 no helicopters during period as you said. maybe some time extension or advancement dlc some day?
9 + 10 sneeky, well you'll have to wait for later diaries

we are tryign to keep population simple. this isnt Victoria 2. we just need a roughly historical number for areas to base laws around.

Hey podcat can you comment on the upgrade mechanic in the screenshot? What kind of impacts on experience when switching from say panzer Is to panzer IIs? Can we upgrade a light tank brigade into a medium tank brigade? What impact does this have on training? What about changing existing divisions to conform to a new template?

right now there is no experience loss. generally new stuff operates a lot like the older or is just plain better, and people quite often train with older stuff, so I dont think its actually something worth considering as factor. From what i'v read people just welcomed new stuff and had little trouble adapting, these are experienced soldiers already.

Wow, this is like a lot of what we have been dreaming about here on the forums

Thanks We do listen and I thought you would like it.

Is Lee Marvin the leader of Podcat's Roughnecks?

of course, who else?

Hello,

Questions:

1) Does your officer/general gets experience too when training troops?

2) Can I disband a trained unit to re-deploy it green so I can train them again to get "infinite" army experience?

3) Can we see enemy units training on the border, or lets say without fog of war? It would mean a great time to attack...

4) Can we train nukes? Hehehehe...

5) Is it preferable to train units in highly infrastructure province to reduce reinforcement cost?

Best regards,

1. no, imo we assume commands already know the basics and some exercises wont really help one way or the other
2. technically yes, but while you waste all your equipment on training to get some XP the enemy is building actual tanks to fight you with
3. yes
4. yeah nukes gain experience, sadly it only has it for a fraction of a second as it detonates
5. no difference

"Training on the map costs equipment for every day of training as rifles, tanks and other stuff breaks down, so if you are trying to build up a stockpile of arms for an offensive you might need to hold back on training to keep your storage filled."

Some question about consumed equipments during training, and during real battles.

1) How much equipment stuff break down during training ? Its a small percentage?
2) During real battle percentage of equipments lost is more high?
3) There are factors, techs, or environmental conditions that change the percentage of lost equipment?

Nice DD.

1. yes, but over time it can become a bigger amound
2. yes, lots of losses of equipment in battles
3. yes. harsh climate or moving in tough terrain increase problems.

I guess the DD wasn't clear on what happens to recycled manpower. In HOI3, if you upgrade MIL to INF or MAR, it keeps its XP. What about HOI4? If I have an infantry division trained to regular, does it become green when it becomes motorized? What about going from LARM to ARM?

right now there is no xp loss. me might add one if it becomes a problem.