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

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podcat

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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
dd_13_conscription_laws.png

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.

dd13_off_map.jpg


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.

dd13_on_map.jpg
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.

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

+
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/
 
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Cool. I'm happy to see a trade off between manpower recruitment and industrial potential. On and off map training seems excellent as well.

3InpHEj.jpg
 
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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?
 
Yay!
 
Dev Diary 13 - Conscription & Training
View attachment 124303

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 ?
 
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.
 
Looks good!

*edit

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



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

Can you also scrap old equipment if you need materials?
 
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?
 
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
 
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.
 
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?
 
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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?