HOI4 Dev Diary - Ally Down Under

[podcat]

So, last week we announced the name of the expansion we are working on: Together for Victory. A big focus of the expansion is fleshing out the commonwealth nations and first up last week was Canada. Today we will be showing off Australia!


Australia Focus Tree
Australia ended up with a really big tree actually (although much is mutually exclusive paths where you need to make a choice). We put extra effort into their alt history paths because we figured their location made them well suited for this.

Australia start with the national spirit Great Depression, which limits their production capacity during the initial years. This is modified through a number of wartime emergency foci that become available as tension rises and war breaks out.

On the political side Australia has a few choices. The main choice one is whether to stay with the commonwealth or break free.

If Australia decides that it is tired of fighting Britain's war, there are a few option. From here Australia can either focus on protection against the Japanese menace lurking next door, by trying to form an alliance with USA.

The fascist path features civil wars and, deceit and a glorious deal with Japan to split to South West Pacific between the two empires.

The communist path focuses on helping communist China by sending equipment or volunteers. Once Australia has proven it is willing to make sacrifices for the revolution Soviet will accept them as a member of the Comintern.

Like Canada we have also been adding extra leaders with unique portraits (magnificent beards make such a difference for admirals).

Technology Sharing
You might have noticed that the Canada tree presented in the previous diary as well as this one made references to mysterious technology sharing focuses. This is a new feature part of Together for Victory which is set up from focus trees or events. It allows nations to share their technological progress with other members of their sharing group (not necessarily limited to factions etc). The way it works is that the more members of your group have unlocked a certain technology the more bonus you will have to research and catch up. Some like the commonwealth basic one has no limitations on affected technology, but things like the Tizard Mission between UK and USA are limited to electronics, radar etc. You’ll have ways to improve your bonuses from sharing, and some nations will get less out of technology sharing than others, but we’ll get to that when we start showing details about how the new autonomy system works (in a future diary).

I expect some people here are new to how we work with DLC at paradox, so going to go over it again. Whenever we release an expansion there is also going to be a free patch coming out for players along with it with fixes and changes, and this is no matter if you buy the expansion or not. For Together for Victory this will be 1.3 Torch. I'll be holding off on printing bug fix lists until just before release, but I figured I'd let you know that we have made some good progress on solving the issue with small vs big air wings (and similar issues in naval combat) as well as done some rebalancing there last week.

See you again next week where we’ll be taking a look at South Africa

 

[podcat]

Cool! Australia might be my first game seen torch.

Tech starting sounds nice and making different missions have different bonuses will help add some good flavour.

Will existing NF trees get any changes in this is future patches?

We modified the Tizard mission focus. For others I am not sure the historical paths are so appropriate as it was mostly shorter or more limited sharing afaik.

Hi @podcat,

Thanks for the update. It was previously mentioned by I believe Steelvolt that one of the priorities when it came to the AI was tuning the War in the Pacific. Is that still the case?

Yea we have been working on invasion management and such as well as other ai things.

Can you please also add a notification system to let us know when a naval invasion is taking place.

There are two. you get a warning alert for when someone you actually detect is planning an invasion (this is less useful because quite often the AI will do this early). There is also a second level alert with a sound (the one that has a pirate flag skull on it) that appears when the enemy is about to land or is taking provinces as part of a naval invasion.

What happends if you try to join the commitern by focus but there is no commitern? Or deal with japan if japan is not fascist?

Generally focuses get bypassed where it makes sense so you can try on your own etc.

The way it works is that the more members of your group have unlocked a certain technology the more bonus you will have to research and catch up.
To be honest I have zero idea what this means. I want it to mean what you posted but I don't really read that from Podcat. I don't think anyway.

as an example, if you have 3 countries in your tech sharing group who have researched Fighter II you would get 30% bonus to doing so (you might get more if you have improved tech sharing as some focuses allow).

@podcat
Well, that's what I expected after the announcement last week. You'll have to surprise us a little more.

Fine. next week will be all about Newfoundland and their nuke focused focus tree

@podcat are their any changes to the Australian and Canadian resources incoming? Both Countries to this day have some of the largest fuel, iron and other metal reserves on the planet. I could understand requiring focus development to get the resources, but something has to give.

Also what does adopt westminster do? Is australia now a puppet until that focus is chosen as it was historically?

it gives some PP, unlocks a minister and "affects your autonomy" (will need to talk details in future diary when its all done).

 

[podcat]

Cool news.
I didn't understand how the "tech sharing group" is defined. Is it defined by faction, national focuses, autonomy? A combination of those?

They are created from focus trees or events, so it can be a little bit what you feel like setting up. The commonwealth one (which you can see the icon of in the screenshot) is restricted to UK's subjects. Most of the other ones are set up as you join into the axis or comintern etc through focuses, but the Tizard missions (uk<->usa) is ok as long as you arent enemies.

 

[podcat]

That, and improved AI so it knows how important it is to protect its home soil.

we have done some nice improvements to ai garrison logic, but I am not going to call it fixed yet. Hopefully we can do more as well before 1.3.

 

[Havebeard]

The national focus tree for Poland added with the Poland: United and Ready DLC has the following line in it:

has_dlc = "Poland: United and Ready"

Based on this, I assume you can just add this line with the relevant DLC name to make a national focus tree file, and I imagine other files as well, dependent on a specific mod.

Something like that

 

[podcat]

Yes but what about fixing the heretical Australian state map? Its so bad.

States in game has nothing to do with what an actual state is in the real world. its just a convenient grouping of provinces with a name.

no where in his post does podcat even imply that the person he is responding to is stupid, he merely pointed out that there are alerts for naval invasions.

yes. I dont mind critique of how they work though. The base one is pretty useless I agree, but the skull&crossbones one we added in 1.2 should be working, so if it isnt I would like to know (as in bug report in bug forum)

Ireland adopted the Statute of Westminster quite early (or at least claimed that the powers listed their in were already in the state's position due to the treaty), hence it was able to remain neutral in WW2. They'll probably exclude it for that reason.

yea, we had to draw the line somewhere. There are cool stuff you could do with Ireland, but as you said their situation was different. Might flesh them out another day

 

[podcat]

I can definitely report this still isn't working very well. It's a tricky one to bug report, but I'm really, really surprised it hasn't been picked up in general QA testing. It's an issue for me every game I play, and my best estimate of the skull and crossbones alert actually resulting in a naval invasion would be around 25 per cent or lower (in my last game, as France, I left land in the far east I'd conquered off the USSR completely unprotected while fighting Japan. It took at least 4 skull-and-crossbones alerts before Japan actually got around to invading that little island off Kamchatka, which was completely undefended, with no fleets or aircraft around it (on the other hand, the UK actually successfully invaded northern europe, and then withdrew, without me noticing, lol - I scrolled back to see two provinces UK-coloured with no troops left there - they'd landed, then all gone home again!) Not trying to have a go, just providing more data (and I hope to provide a save before too long).

Ok, I thought it was working well. Then it would be a huge help if someone could point to some reproable bug report in bug forum and we can prioritize looking at it

You were never promised to have focus tree free DLC's, so you shouldn't get angry for it

I am pretty sure we were talking quite a lot about how we were going to do those before release. If you remember the Polish DLC it was something we managed to finish earlier than we planned and put in for free.

@podcat Will or would you consider having the national focus art be included in the patch so that modders can use it w/o making the DLC a requirement for a mod were it to use them?

the focus art will be in so that people playing in MP with people with the tree can see the icons.

 

[podcat]

Don't forget the Kiwi research into an artificial tsunami weapon or something of the sort - I can't recall where I saw it, but it sounded out there.

yeah this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami_bomb honestly sounds like it could work but not sure impact would have been worth investment

"Our troops have successfully landed in Australia and taken several key objectives, but are currently experiencing a -10% penalty from marauding emus. They outrun even our fastest vehicles".

"If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world... They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
despite this Emu Cavalry is likely not gonna make it in, every time I bring it up people look at me funny ;D