HoI3 1.4 and the future

[unmerged(50895)]

All that would be wonderful, but I do think there is a simpler solution available for the short term:

- Have theatres calculated/defined for the alliance; in other words, run the theatre algorithm just as it is, but treating the whole alliance as if it were a single "country"

- All alliance members use this theatre 'map'

- Add a (diplomatic) option for an ally to cede command control in a theatre to a member of the alliance. The ceding partner then passes all its forces in the theatre to the controlling partner as expeditionary forces and ceases to operate in the theatre while the agreement remains.

- Unit requests by a theatre that is ceded to an alliance partner are considered as expeditionary force needs (I'm presuming there is an existing algorithm for assessing expeditionary force needs).

I think that would go a long way to permitting alliance coordination with a minimum of overt or complex changes. Even this may, of course, be too involved to code in a patch - and it is far from perfect even if it is - but it might offer a 'staging post' until a thorough rework is possible?

This sounds like a good intermediate solution. I understand a 'real' solution will be something for an expansion, but a stop gap solution is badly needed for vanilla. This is a real gamebreaker in my book; it leads to silly situations.

I also hope PI give as much info and access to modders as possible. They can do a LOT to bring Hoi3 to life, pending the expansion.

The main focus of an expansion IMHO, should be on making Hoi3 an actual WW2 game. No need to explain that any further, all has been said on this matter.

Oh, and ofcourse I like threads like this, contact between the devs and the fanbase is really a good thing. Kudos PI!

 

[Johan]

+A trigger for checking which law is in action to enable us modders to play with the political situation of the country much better

Just checked the code.

<lawgroup> = <law> is a trigger that already exists.

 

[Johan]

My only question is : did you try playing a hoi3 1.3 game and were you satisfied by your experience?

Yes, i played several and had great fun.

 

[plasticpanzers]

Playing US in 36 scenario. Brits are being pounded in N. Africa. Its early 1942 and i sent
8 divisions (inf, mot, and armor) to help. tried to get the Brits to accept them as an
expeditionary force. refused. now i have to run them myself to save the Brits. This
is again one of the glaring issues of non-cooperation within an Alliance that kills the game.
Even when you try using the current system as designed it does not work in the game.
Everybody is fighting for themselves and won't even accept help! This has got to be
addressed sometime. I don't understand at all the reasoning behind this bizzare system
where you cannot fight as an alliance at all!

 

[Black Guardian]

Just checked the code.

<lawgroup> = <law> is a trigger that already exists.

Interesting, then it might help to add this to the pdf-file with the trigger-list that you provided, so everyone knows about this

Apart from that, I second the request for a law-changing-effect command, if that does not exist yet as well.

 

[wolf1455]

Playing US in 36 scenario. Brits are being pounded in N. Africa. Its early 1942 and i sent
8 divisions (inf, mot, and armor) to help. tried to get the Brits to accept them as an
expeditionary force. refused. now i have to run them myself to save the Brits. This
is again one of the glaring issues of non-cooperation within an Alliance that kills the game.
Even when you try using the current system as designed it does not work in the game.
Everybody is fighting for themselves and won't even accept help! This has got to be
addressed sometime. I don't understand at all the reasoning behind this bizzare system
where you cannot fight as an alliance at all!

You can fight as an Alliance, you must buy the expansion first. Time and money we have lots of, eh.

 

[plasticpanzers]

ppppfffttt! lol!
Its absolutly bizzare by any standard to have a game set up where all the nations fighting
on one side totally ignore one another! how to fight the battle of the N. Atlantic when
each navy is on its own? I can see DDay now....do drop by and join in if your in the
neighborhood! LOL! perhaps in future games i should hold my massive US
army in transports and wait until Canada invades the coast of Germany and
try to land them and give them as an expeditionary force AND then have the
Canadian's refuse to take them! LOL! death or glory boys!

 

[wolf1455]

ppppfffttt! lol!
Its absolutly bizzare by any standard to have a game set up where all the nations fighting
on one side totally ignore one another! how to fight the battle of the N. Atlantic when
each navy is on its own? I can see DDay now....do drop by and join in if your in the
neighborhood! LOL! perhaps in future games i should hold my massive US
army in transports and wait until Canada invades the coast of Germany and
try to land them and give them as an expeditionary force AND then have the
Canadian's refuse to take them! LOL! death or glory boys!

Canada D-Day ? probably more Dieppe when they not allowed to accept your forces, lol.

 

[dermeister]

Yes, i played several and had great fun.

Say I was wondering: is the ENG tag hardcodded to be the leader of the allies?

In my 1989 mod I'd rather the USA tag be leader, but I can't get it to be... By every metric I can think of the US is the "better" country, yet ENG remains the leader.

How is it decided? Are we in fact dealing with hardcoding to stop the USA from being leader in the Vanilla CGs?

Thanks

 

[Lord Martin]

Thanks for opening this thread Johan. An open discussion about the future and your thoughs and plans for HoI 3 is very appreciated.

Anyway,
even if it´s lots of work, do you plan to make any battle-scenarios á la HoI2 for an expansion or DLC?
My believes are that the HoI3 AI would manage a limited front (Barbarossa, Spanish civil-war et c.) pretty well.

 

[unmerged(148617)]

What about MOD Support ? When will you start to add the old triggers from HOI2?

Many MOD´s are faild coz so many triggers arent there. Like Day Triggers, Thechnologie Trigger, Unit Trigger and many more we had in HOI2.

 

[podcat]

Johan, as a developper I understand your choice to limit the 1.4 patches perimeter to bugs and not to new features, that's ok. I also understand that AI minister enhancement is more extension than bug hunting. This unfortunately imply that the mod importance will be prominent for die hard players, until the release of new extension. Yet again, I understand and won't argue about that.

In this state of mind i'd suggest Paradox Interactive to ship 1.4 patch with all tools needed by modders :
1- Redirection for lua's STDOUT to game log or console. So that people can use "print(myvar)" to debug their scripts.

2- As promised, put LUA's debug info in system.log after a game crashed induced by LUA.

3- Please provice hints when a mod function encountered an error and that HOI3 engine has now fallen back to vanilla functions !

4- My main request is that you bind much more object methods into lua. For instance, only intelligence minister has a getCountryTag() method available for us ! The more option we have, the more enhancement can be done.

5- If possible, give modder the opportunity to store data in savegame. This would allow us to construct really complex AI scripts that imply real long term strategy (eg. persistant memory of germany sea strategy : sub or surface).


Thanks a lot

1 - I didnt want to just change the standard print and have been using the Utils.LUA_DEBUGOUT method instead as it gives more control and was easier to get going when we started out. I roll dual screens so when I develop lua scripts I always have the log updating on the second screen (refresh notepad, or a tail logger unix style). I agree being able to output on the ingame log would be nice, but it was never anything we needed during development so it didnt get done.

2 - Sorry about this one, it was supposed to be in 1.3 and was working for betas, but we accidentally disabled it for the release. Its working right now in 1.4 and writes to system.log

4 - I have had a sticky thread up in the mod forum where you can do requests for stuff you want accessable from lua. A bunch suggested there has made its way into 1.4 already.

5 - We have discussed this and it never made it into the game due to a lot of problems managing it over multiplayer games, its still something I'd like to see implemented. For single player you still have the lua language to fall back on so you can store country variables in savegames (this is new in 1.4. You could say store a filename and have lua write this separately to disk once in a while from one of the tick methods to control long term strategies. or if you dont need to save stuff between games you can store strategies in a global table indexed by country tag for example. its not as simple as it could be without proper support, but should be doable with some extra work like this)

I would love (though it seems a bit too big for a patch) to be able to combine multiple map layers. I would love to have weather on the top of simplified terrain map but a ton of other combinations (ressources + political + infra).

this is a good idea, and something we have been thinking and discussing for the future.

 

[Buh the Ghost]

To be honest: I bought this game without looking at any pre- or review in early september. I was a great fan of HoI2 and when someone said in the chat of Company of Heroes he just played some HoI3, I immediately went to amazon and ordered it. So I started the game with 1.1c and the first game was fun, though the serious issues with supply to that point. Now, after some time of 1.3 I played HoI3 really long, much longer than I played some other games I payed even more for than for HoI3 (which were great in another way. For example more like a interactive film which you finished after 20 hours). So I don't and can't say I regret the decision to buy this game.

Therefor, I will buy any expansion that you will release for HoI3, because I see all that potential and you and your team listening to the community. Even though I know that the first (or second) expansion could be called "HoI3 final RC" . So in the end I will pay 80 € for this game and it will be worth the money.

Until then, do as much as possible.
Did I mention that I'd like more "random" things (which fit into the historical frame, of course)? For example a random chance of a "last standing" for nations which are near to be annexed. A bunch of volunteers pop up in the last victory-point-provinces as militia. Or a revolution against the losing government, which will leave their faction and try to negotiate peace with you (like Russia in WW1). There are many internal factors and possibilities you can abstract in some way and put them into the game to add a bit more "interacting with the player feeling".

 

[Buddy3101]

I really would like to see new command structures for naval and air forces.

The new counters and sprites could look like this:



-The sprite on the pic represents a "new" Navy HQ with an anchor in the middle of the rank (stars) above.

-The second improvement you can see on the pic above is the golden "three". This 3 shows you that the stack contains 3 Units. The blue outline of the "3" means that this unit belongs to a selected command. So you would have the same informations and overview as you have with the counters.

-An overview how many convois the enemy still owns (maybe throug spies)would be nice to see in an expansion too.

-A Window where u can see the cabinet of the other countries (like Hoi2) would be nice

-A mainmenu like EU3 with the option to play historical (more event scripts) or less historical (events like now...)

- New "Elite Units" like SS, Guards, Rangers, X-mas....

 

[Tegetthoff]

Just checked the code.

<lawgroup> = <law> is a trigger that already exists.

Is it possible that you have undocumented triggers? Could you post an updated event trigger and command list (1.3)?

Thanks

T.

 

[warchlak]

[...]

Well, I have spent the entire day trying to download the Star Trek Online beta, and I'll be damned if I go to sleep before I've at least tried it once just 20 mins left of patching.

If you could use a cd of the beta...

 

[Guibod]

1 - I didnt want to just change the standard print and have been using the Utils.LUA_DEBUGOUT method instead as it gives more control and was easier to get going when we started out.

Ok, i'll suggest you to check my current devel branch on AIIP (will be soon merged into 1.3 branch). I introduced log4lua package in order to provide better log support (one file per minister, ability to filter log through country whitelist).
What I thought it that print() is pretty simple and way more accessible for modders (who are not all developpers like you and me ). This is of course not at all an important matter. I agree with your statement.

4 - I have had a sticky thread up in the mod forum where you can do requests for stuff you want accessable from lua. A bunch suggested there has made its way into 1.4 already.

Didn't know that, i'll try to contribute. Thanks !

5 - For single player you still have the lua language to fall back on so you can store country variables in savegames (this is new in 1.4).

Thanks for 1.4 addition, all we need is coding primitives that allow us to build complex system.
Regarding multiplayer I have no experience at all and admit your point of view. From your point of view, using global and save informations in savegame is compatible with multiplayer ?

 

[vertinox]

I'd like to see paratroopers who only paradrops, garrisons who only sit garrisoning, marines who only perform sea invasions, MP who only face revolts. Can theaters be able to do all above, with an expansion?

Historically German paratroopers fought along ground troops without ever jumping out of a plane after the battle of Crete. Also... Soviet Marines fought along ground troops during the Siege of Leningrad.

 

[lambrf]

All that would be wonderful, but I do think there is a simpler solution available for the short term:

- Have theatres calculated/defined for the alliance; in other words, run the theatre algorithm just as it is, but treating the whole alliance as if it were a single "country"

- All alliance members use this theatre 'map'

- Add a (diplomatic) option for an ally to cede command control in a theatre to a member of the alliance. The ceding partner then passes all its forces in the theatre to the controlling partner as expeditionary forces and ceases to operate in the theatre while the agreement remains.

- Unit requests by a theatre that is ceded to an alliance partner are considered as expeditionary force needs (I'm presuming there is an existing algorithm for assessing expeditionary force needs).

I think that would go a long way to permitting alliance coordination with a minimum of overt or complex changes. Even this may, of course, be too involved to code in a patch - and it is far from perfect even if it is - but it might offer a 'staging post' until a thorough rework is possible?

Actually, I think touching the theater is one of the issues and reasons why it can not be changed/added in a patch. It would be a heavy changed and would impact the game too much?
I agree with points 3 and 4. A nice workaround would be to extend the exp forces use. It looks like the suggestion I made in the part of my message you did not quote, doesn't it?

But I just thought about a little workaround (don't know if it has already been suggested), which, in my opinion, would not be that heavy. Since exp forces is already in the game, why not using that? You could select an allied unit (land, air or naval), right click on it, and request it as exp forces. And if it is a hq, request all the units attached to it. It would then behave just as if the AI was sending it as exp forces.
Success chance could be set as an option defined at startup: always or random/diplomatic relation dependant.

 

[sodoma]

Hello, johan, the first thing to say to you that I am a user of Spain, so I hope that you should forgive my English.
I have read the new post on the future changes of hoi 3. I have to say that I am infuriated, have worn out 40 € for a game incolpleto.
I ask you please to solve the topic of the yield and that the game aprobeche more than one nucleus.
These it is outrageous, with my 1000€ computer it is impossible to move the game from the year 1940. I wait for a solution
Also, from the patch 1.3 is impossible, that medium countries or porqueño like Spain or hollanda, they create theaters po if alone if they have conquered another country, like for example France.
As legal user and buyer of this game waited for a solution since you accepted of good taste my money
Thank you