HOI4 Dev Diary - Air Improvements

[podcat]

Hi everyone, time for this weeks Death or Dishonor and Oak Update dev diary. Today will be all about the improvements to the air warfare coming in the update. Some of you who were at PDXCON this weekend might have had a sneakpeek, but here are the details Speaking of PDXCON, I had a lot of fun meeting fans (but yikes my feet after 3 days), and look forward to next years!

Issues with the old system
When we started looking at the air warfare part of the game we felt that there was two main flaws: Transparency and Control. The system only really showed you information over very long time with graphs so it was very hard to understand what was going on and what you could do to improve things. Control wise it was a lot of work to select, organize and move wings around, not to mention having to open lots of airbase windows everywhere.

So what did we do? Check out this screenshot, it shows most stuff we have at once:

First of all we decided to go with something we knew would work well, making airwings behave more like divisions. They are now on the map and you can move them between bases and assign missions in a similar way to divisions and it’s easy to give orders to many things at once. Secondly we made a new air combat interface that should be a lot more helpful and informative. Keep reading to check out all the details...

Air Wing Interface

The air wing interface has been overhauled. The air base window is now gone. Instead, when clicking on an air base, the air wings will be listed on the left, like army divisions would if you selected ground units. We also added the ability to drag a selection box over several air bases to be able to give orders to all of them at the same time.

The list of air wings shows relevant information about the air wing, such as its strength, type and missions it’s currently flying.

Relocating wings to a new airbase is easily done by just selecting them and right-clicking on a new airbase. We’ve added arrows to show that an air wing is relocating and its progress.

Assign Air missions
Above the list of air wings is the mission panel. To give an air wing a mission in the new system, click on the missions icons in the panel, and right click on the target air region on the map.

As before, wings will only fly missions that are suitable to them. This means that it’s possible to select both air superiority and bombing missions with a mix of air wings. The fighter wings will perform air superiority missions and the bomber wings will, unsurprisingly, provide bombing. This change should make it a lot easier to manage orders for several air wings at the same time and reduce the need to micromanage the air units.

Another thing you might have spotted in the first screenshot is that we now have special combat icons in air mapmode. These show by base color how it's going (sorry Germany) but also which side is getting air support, so a green plane with a + means they are getting help from the boys in the air.

Air Combat Window
As you may have noticed, selecting air wings does not automatically bring up the air region window. This is because we have changed this window into becoming the new air combat window.

The new combat window provides information on air combats in the past day, or from the last sortie. The top of the window shows the familiar information from the old air region window, but the bottom shows the new air combat overview.

The overview is divided into air superiority missions, where fighters battle against enemy fighters, at the top and in the bottom half we show you bombing missions and intercepts. This information can be filtered by mission type, and toggled between our missions and enemy missions.

In the top part you might recognize two new icons. Those are for Air Detection. It's such an important value that we felt it best to move from tooltips and show that instead of radar (which is just one of the factors affecting detection). We’ve been rebalancing a bunch of that stuff too, but don't look too closely on numbers as its in progress.

You may also notice that we’ve added some other useful information. A very important stat is the disruption. This refers to air missions that have been forced to divert back to base, for example due to taking damage from intercepting fighters.

Radar
You might have spotted a little green circle in the first screenie also. We've added more visible radar overlays that you can bring up either through a toggle or by hovering over one

Oh yeah, for those who want to see all the new on-map air counter icons here you go:

As is normal in game development you only end up having enough time to do half of the things you planned from the start, so see this as the first step on air improvements as well. More things are sure to follow in the future, but we are pretty happy with this progress

Next week we’ll be taking a look at Yugoslavia. See you then!

 

[podcat]

Air zones still too big, but I love the new stuff!

yeah we didnt have time to resize them unfortunatly, but we really want to. Maybe for a future patch

 

[podcat]

Looks great, but...

This is mainly an overhaul of the UI, right? Two things I was hoping that were going to announced were the fixing of the teleporting of air wings to the target province and back (eg you can't intercept bombers on the way to the target) and most importantly to me, the training of air wings/gaining of experience.

Is this something that is being considered for the future?

There is no new interception in-between zones no. The thing with that is that in almost all situations planes end up being able to come from all sorts of directions and its a really difficult thing to get right interaction wise with players. So it would require a huge effort to get right and have fairly limited end result, so we decided we didn't have time for that. Doesn't mean we never do it though.
As for training, yea that would be cool for sure. As I said see this as step one and we'll do more air stuff in the future.

 

[podcat]

One question, in that radar screenshot, I'm assuming those values are just the coverage of that one radar station. Is there a way to see the total coverage of an area from all radar stations? Even if it's just visual.

Also, in that same screenshot, what's that little blue flag next to the airfield in France? I don't see it anywhere else.

The little blue flag indicates that its an allied base. As for radar, no there is no way, you can see multiple now and tooltip the ones that overlap. Detection will summarize radar impact though when observing combats etc

 

[podcat]

Looks like someone trying to crash their plane into that ship. Or so I suspect.

its kamikaze

 

[Pallidum]

Is there going to be NATO- style counters of the new aircraft symbols?

Afraid not. The NATO symbols for different aircraft types aren't very easy to distinguish on icons that size and they don't really cover all our use cases.

If you look at other wargames, both computer and tabletop, very few use NATO-style symbols for aircraft. In fact, most of them just use stylized airplanes instead.

 

[podcat]

@podcat could you make those attack bubbles totally different colours please? As a colour blind person they are not really that easy to read at a glance.

yea, its always a struggle with colors. Our color blind coworker said the "worked". The problem is it would require a big change to whole game as these colors are consistent atm

 

[podcat]

Also does the changes mean that CAS can now be intercepted and disrupted properly ?

Not gonna say yay or nay on that before we finish with testing because we are going over bugs atm. Looked positive this morning at least, but you may need to wait for full patchlog that comes before release for details.

Awesome! The air wings are now named? Can they be renamed also?

yes they can be renamed

Please make size of air wings irrelevant. If I want to devote 1000 airplanes to a region, I shouldn't "profit" by dividing them up into tiny squadrons. That was the case earlier at least. (You would do better with 20x10 airwings than a single wing of 200.) I figure in a grand strategy game, it isn't really my job to set up individual squadrons to best effect.

This was fixed with one of the 1.3 patches if I recall. There are cases for CAS where this is still true though, but with efficiency/disruption etc an optimal size is not as clear cut now I think there.

 

[podcat]

Setting aside the issues that this will likely cause for people who are colorblind, I don't think coloring the bubbles like that is a good idea. The normal, land mapmode trains the player to see a green bubble as good, and a red bubble as bad. By itself, that's a great bit of UI shorthand, easily conveying to the player how battles are going as they quickly pan around the map. However, in the air mode shown here, it appears at first glance that the player is losing all of their air engagements, or that the enemy is getting all the air support.

The player is in fact losing all those engagements (I said something like "poor germany" in the diary text), although some do get the green + for support (but its not enough to turn things around)

Looking good. Still sceptical about how it still uses air regions, though. Hoping for the day when you can just attach planes to armies, or have them work based on proximity to air bases somehow.

What I'd also love to see is a kind of "air wing template" and, as others have mentioned, air wings gaining experience . Hoping to see this happens somewhere down the road.

Thanks for the reply, @podcat, much appreciated. I understand that you can't do everything at once, but I'll admit I'm a little disappointed that there's not more to this air update. Still, its positive that it's on your radar and something you (may) get to in the future. One question, though - who do we have to nag to get you more resources? Sounds like with all the ideas you have you need another developer or three!

or five!

but yeah, you cant do everything or there would never be anything released. These UI changes are a huge undertaking and there is no way of changing other parts of the system without actually having updated interfaces that show you what is going on. As I said this is our first step, there are alot more changes we want to do to air.

New version Oak is going to be absolutely stunning. Congretulations dev team for all the good work on the version. Can't wait to buy DLC and play

thanks

 

[podcat]

So CAS is still being god? Killing tanks, infantry navies and everything else?

as I said earlier, that is a balance/bug. we are still testing so I cant say yet what we have/havent fixed but I think we may have solved it (question is if we also broke everything else QA process is always scary)

 

[podcat]

Can you add more than "last sortie" and "last day"? I think I would want to see last week and last month etc.

You still have the long term statistics thing to flip out like before for that. A lot of this data we show makes little sense over very large timespans, and also eats a bit of memory so we felt this worked quite well

Hmm interesting, one thing you need to do is reduce the planes on those airfield, each one hold 200 planes. Should be reduce like 30-50 at least. Playing on my mod with 30 planes each airfield seem about right to me.

screenshot is from a test scenario for CAS interception and the bases on german side are heavily stacking penalized, so its intended. If you mean from realism standpoints its because its too much of a PITA to manage small bases when playing.

Could you set the default air missions to 'Normal Operations' instead of 'No retreat' ?
Maybe have an ai_strategy for the ai when they are losing a war to change them to 'no retreat'

we had issues with beginner players not understanding why their planes didnt fly when this was default, so not sure. its easier to click "lets be safer" than wonder why nothing happens etc

 

[podcat]

No, I am not talking about dividing them into 20x20 wings, I am talking about how 1000 CAS slaughter fighters, tanks, navies, Carriers, battleships, and I guess even bombers. Why build fighters, if another 1000 CAS can murder them still?

in that scenario I get 3-1 losses for CAS vs fighters over time i think. its fairly realistic, but perhaps cas needs more nerfings, or higher cost.

Are land based planes ever going to be able to strike more than once in a naval battle?

yeah that one should be fixed. it had to do with a cap that filled up and never changed, so if you struck with a lot of bombers early no bombers could come help ever later. We now increase the cap every day a little so you can keep bombing

 

[Pallidum]

Could we get these in NATO as well?

 

[Archangel85]

Much clearer.

 

[podcat]

Awww, I am so happy with the new air war system. Unfortunately Podcat didn't show a screenshot for naval war and aircraft carriers and how that system affects that kind of air war, but I am positive it will be fine

yeah forgot to show carriers. I tossed out a tweet about it just now with screenshot so check it out: https://twitter.com/podcat_paradox/status/865166975294742528

So if I understand this correctly if I have say 90% radar coverage of an area the only way for me to find out where to build a radar station to cover that last 10% is to check each radar station I have built and remember what provinces they cover, isn’t that a step backwards from what we have now? I can understand not wanting to clog up the interface with a ton of overlapping radar ranges but couldn’t you maybe make it show all stations on holding say Alt like pressing Ctrl for suppressing the tool tip or something so that we have it for the few times we actually need to see total radar coverage.

Edit: Or just show total radar coverage when building them.

you can toggle them all on (bottom right button). they also show in construction interface

UI changes are welcome and needed, just like the paint job on a totalled car needs to be fixed, but you dont start by fixing the paintjob - you fix the engine first. Paint job is kinda pointless with no engine yes?

Why does this community love to compare everything with cars? It's a really shitty comparison honestly.

A more accurate comparison would be that there is no reason to spend all your time on the cars engine if it has no windows to look through when driving.

btw @Archangel85 did some kebab fueled air zone work last night. we'll show it off later

 

[Pallidum]

This is how Eugen Systems does it in their Wargame series. A similar principle could be applied to HoI4, perhaps with bigger letters.

The symbols we use are on unit/organization level. We use them because they are appropriate for showing division types, are the ones common to other wargames, and thus the ones most known to our target audience. The symbols used by Eugen are Equipment level symbols, which is appropriate for the scale of their games. We could use them, but it'd be inconsistent with our other symbols and few of our players would be familiar with them.

In this case, usability for our target audience supercedes MIL-2525.

 

[Archangel85]

Big props to Archangel and those air zones . Just another sign of how dedicated you lot are .

It's less dedication and more "Stop complaining about the air zones, here is a chicken wrap now go fix it."

The chicken wrap was very good, so I fixed it.

Does anyone know wether the "upgrade to better variant" feature of the upcoming dlc will include upgrading warships?

No. The way the system works is that it removes an old vehicle from the stockpile and adds a new one. Warships never go to the stockpile so we can't use it. It's on the list of future improvements.

 

[Pallidum]

Aye, but what were the symbols for the various period-specific types? I can find the land symbols looking around quick as you like, but the air symbols for things like CAS, NAV, heavy fighters and TACs look like they wouldn't mesh well with what I could find (after more searching, and only on one site, which I then forgot to bookmark - d'oh ). At the very least, if we're suggesting Paradox should include a particular set of symbols, we should probably actually post up the symbols we're suggesting they use . The Eugen symbols were a start (although they weren't actually NATO symbols, as far as I can tell, but a new symbology based on the NATO air unit symbol), but what would you suggest for the full range of aircraft?

IIRC (And I'm not an expert, I'm "just" an enthusiast game developer), the NATO-style symbols we use in wargames are based on symbols used for land warfare. Many of these symbols have been used for far longer than the existence of NATO, but NATO standardized the symbol usage. Since they were primarily used for land warfare, there is less distinction for air and naval assets.

There are also different symbol sets for unit types (Infantry, Armored, Artillery) and equipment (Light howtizers, mortar trucks, attack helicopters). For example, an artillery unit would be indicated with a small black circle (cannon ball) and an infantry unit would be an X (crossed swords). On the equipment level, however, different types of artillery are indicated by arrow-like symbols (similar to WW2 German style unit symbols).

I belive Eugen uses the correct equipment level symbols for different types of airplanes. The letters on their symbols are modifiers to specify equipment type in detail. With our icon sizes, those letters would be too small to easily read.

You are doing well as it is now. It is consistent with classic Avalon Hill and SPI board games, which is sort-of a de-facto war-game standard.

That is exactly what we were going for.

 

[podcat]

There are some folks who think that the agility stat or some others are broken/not working properly. They argue that better planes are worse at dogfighting than 1936 light fighters with no upgrades.

I can't confirm if this is true, as I haven't tested it myself. I've had some mixed results using 1940 and 1944 planes against lesser fighters (using the UK to get 1944 planes by 1940). I hope that it's just my inability to play well, but if it's not, it really needs to be fixed.

some stuff was pretty wonky there. I had cases where speed was actually detrimental due to wierdness. that one is fixed at least. It wasnt the stats so mucha s how combat resolution was done

 

[Archangel85]

I seriously hope that Madagascar being part of the east African zone is changed this patch. It should be its own zone as it huge but also it really screws up efficiency in places of shouldn't. @Archangel85 was this part of your kebab spree

Yes. Africa in general has been much improved, even if it meant taking some of my favorite air zones out behind the woodshed.