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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #2

Welcome to another bag of tricks dev diary for 1.5 “Cornflakes” and the unannounced expansion. Today we have several smaller features and improvements for you and all are connected to equipment in one way or the other.

Building your own stuff
Managing production lines is something you do all the time, and thus we want the interface to help you as much as possible. We have done several things to help out with this, like allowing you to collapse entries:
all_of_it.png


The UI now also has more filters, so its easy to just look at lines lacking resources, lines used for upgrade, lines going straight to stockpile etc. Its also possible to assign up to 150 factories to a line (not naval production lines) by using the x5 and x10 toggles.

boosted_line.png


Toggling on x5 lets you put down 5 factories with each click so its easier to manage big lines (this part is still a bit more work in progress than normal and may see changes before release though).

We have also added drag-and-drop to the production interface and the civilian construction interface too. It makes reordering and changing priorities a breeze. See the future! In moving pictures:
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Hopefully this will make it a lot easier to manage things for everyone and if it proves popular we may start adding this to other interfaces too.


Taking other people's stuff
At the end of combats it will now be possible to capture enemy equipment. The divisions involved will grab stuff depending on participation (higher level maintenance companies help a lot here if you want to take full advantage of capturing). If the equipment isn't something the division needs it goes back to your stockpile. This one will be available for people with the DLC.
Captured Equipment.png

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Getting rid of stuff you don't want

There are sometimes situations when you just want to get rid of some of your equipment stockpiles. Death or Dishonor added the ability to convert equipment, but that is not always applicable. For people who get the DLC we have now added the option of straight up cleaning out your stores of stuff you don’t need or want anymore. To avoid exploits around surrender where someone in MP would try to destroy things to keep them out of enemy hands these are held in a special “being destroyed” storage, and will be accessible to the conqueror if you fall within 90 days.
destroy.png


Also finally there is another way available to all. Lend Lease has been changed to allow to send equipment that isn’t originally yours. This means that you can give captured stuff to your allies etc.
lendlease.png


Sending equipment that isn't yours like this will however not give you any XP (you wasn't the one who did research and development after all).

See you all next week for more updates and details!

Also, do you need more friends to invade and annex? Tell them to take a look at our new stream starting later today, Blitzkrieg for dummies! As always on Twitch: https://go.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive .
 
I wonder if the Army and Navy primacy trees will become more fleshed out, actually. Intense and bitter rivalry aside, the IJA and IJN were the most powerful military forces within Southeast Asia, although they were certainly outmatched by America and Britain.

Also, it's a little funny that the AI rarely deploys or researches Super-Heavy battleships until late-game, so Yamato-line ships seems to be quite absent most of the time, despite being the most famous Japanese battleship in public memory. On the other hand, I've seen naval battles between the Allies and Japan as China that make Midway seem like a food fight, especially in terms of ships sunk.

At one point, I think one of the devs (pretty sure Podcat, but memory again doing what it does - could have been Archangel) talked about being interested in adding in a mechanic that could support internal tension (can't remember specifics, and it wasn't a very specific statement in any event), and some focus tree paths that interacted with this kind of mechanic would definitely be most welcome. Not that I'm greedy - I don't just want reworked focus trees, I want a whole new mechanic to go with them ;).

As for ships, there's a lot of room for the AI to manage its build queues better, and for there to be better scripting options to encourage different nations to go down different paths. I agree it'd be cool for the Yamatos to be more of a thing (and they could even tie into an NF-tree choice between quality vs quantity, or something else entirely). Lots of good options for sure :).
 
"You got me on the scroll."
That was what this reminded me of
Well, thank god much progress was made in this patch. Really hope this game can live up to the expectations of contemporary fans and can compromise with the veteran fans.

Also, the equipment from battles can finally allow me to play a Soviet game with more historical feel.
 
well, the new feature to drag and drop production lines in the production menu is nice, but it looks like the whole way it works now with the arrows up and down will be removed? this is sad and should still stay where and as it is and the new feature on top of it, for huge nations with lots of more and more production lines in mid and late game to scroll down, drag, scroll up and drop seems longer than the old way shift click arrow if i want the new lines on top of anything else
 
Question: If you currently have a full supply of all raw materials for all of your production, does it make any difference by to efficiency by changing the production order/priority?

Or is this only worth doing if you are short of 1 resource (eg Japan and rubber), and you put your least important rubber-demanding production line at the bottom of the queue?
 
Question: If you currently have a full supply of all raw materials for all of your production, does it make any difference by to efficiency by changing the production order/priority?

Or is this only worth doing if you are short of 1 resource (eg Japan and rubber), and you put your least important rubber-demanding production line at the bottom of the queue?

No, unless you think you will have an issue in the future (i.e. rubber/Japan or lack of convoys).
 
sorry raise this thread from the dead I have question in regards to damage factories. Are damaged factories still listed to the last item on the production queue? or are they spread out between all the production equipment?