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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks 2

Hi and welcome to another diary! I am home sick today, so this gives me something to do (besides suffering)! Today it’s time for another Bag of Tricks diary where we cover a couple of features that aren’t necessarily connected. Two of these do fit quite well with the expansions sub-theme of fleshing out democracies. Lets dig right in!

Expeditionary Force Requests
The Allies are made up of many nations and coordinating them can be difficult. To help with this Man the Guns adds the ability to request expeditionary forces from multiple nations directly when organizing your forces.
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The AI will respond immediately and assign the troops to your plan if it approves. That means you can control how they get there, should you wish it.

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It is also possible to request expeditionaries straight from an empty army. To do that click the new expeditionary army button at the bottom of the new army button:
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Useful if you have no units in an area, but an ally i your faction does. Then you could draw a plan there and tell them what to do. AI will prefer picking troops close to the plan if they can.

The AI is pretty helpful, but will not give you more than it can spare and still ensure its home areas are safe. It will also be a bit watchful, so if you always send them ahead to die you might find that it doesn’t want to hand over as much troops anymore. Depending on what plan you draw up it will also try to send suitable units. So marines for invasions for example. This means that for the AI to know if and what it should send you must first draw up the plan before sending your request.

Note that I am talking about AI here. This action isn't available towards players. It's just a lot simpler to talk to each other and use existing expeditionary sending for that.

To be able to request expeditionaries, you must either be the faction leader (which with MTG can now change from whoever created the faction), or have subject nations as the action is also available for those. The action is available for all ideologies, but we think it fits the democratic theme the most considering the plethora of smaller nations banded together against the axis.


Supervised State
Supervised States are a new autonomy level in MTG. Designed to let democracies do puppeting in a way that suits them better, and ensures the targeted nations can't just turn around and go against them.

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West Germany is here a supervised state set up by the British. A supervised state is not particularly oppressive, but does come with restrictions.
  • The nation is locked into masters faction.
  • They will ideologically drift towards master, and can not use other ideology ministers to affect things.
  • The master will be able to get some cheaper trade and more trade access.
A Supervised state is essentially on a timer, as they will also slowly regain autonomy, so you can not really keep them a subject forever. They also do not have any other steps and go directly to Free once they are autonomous enough. At this point restrictions drop and they are free to leave factions etc.


On-map decisions
This one is something I’ve been wanting as soon as I noticed that people wanted to be able to do state based or decisions with location. Often the interesting part of a decision is where, and huge lists of states isn't all that nice to scroll through. We actually had to restrict some stuff for Waking the Tiger because the list of states would have become unmanageable otherwise. To deal with that the 1.6 Ironclad update will also make decisions available on map as long as you have the decisions view open. Some are simply mirrored, so you can pick them in either the list or on the map, and some are only on the map. A good example of the second type is the Blackshirt Marches when turning UK towards fascism. A lot of different states with different costs make for overwhelming choice, but on the map it is quite easy to see both where and how costly they are.

map.png


Here is one of the prospecting decisions, already activated, if you control Nigeria:
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And @Bratyn 's favorite, activating the flooding defenses of Netherlands, directly on the map!

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See you all next week and don’t miss out on the stream at 16:00 CET for more United Kingdom gameplay.

Rejected Titles:
- "Commonwealth, assemble!"
- HOI4, now with less giant decision lists of places you secretly don't know where they are but are too embarrassed to ask
- CLICK ALL THE THINGS
- What do you mean “A slightly less oppressed chess piece” isn’t clear art direction?
- FEATURE: Britain can now accurately represent the brilliant idea that was the Dieppe Raid
- Deliberately flooding your country is now 200% easier
- Click ~here~ to become fascist
- We are running out of chess pieces for autonomy level
- Winston Churchill has a BRILLIANT IDEA and only needs a few Colonials to do it..
- Clickbait
 
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I guess they can't all be as amazing as the Mexico dd...
 
Make sure to add options for the country to remove their own modifiers! "Align Hungary/Romania" has caused no end of problems.
Just make it a timed modifier. Seems to work fine.
 
So this basically allows you to commandeer your allies' useless AI-controlled armies? That's probably a cheaper way to fix AI issues but it puts the burden on the player to manage as many allied armies as possible. Will this game ever have a functionally competent AI? I'm so sick of rolling over every single poorly optimized division the AI throws at me, and every Dev diary seems to add more and more features which will only confuse them further.
 
@podcat Any chance you will change the name of Nonaligned UK From Great Britain, back to either the United Kingdom or The British Empire. Also could you add the option to have the Nonaligned flag of the UK to either be the Royal Standard Or keep it the Union Flag. I'm sure a lot of Brits like myself would love this!
Love the work you guys are doing, by far you are my favorite developer ahead of BGS and R* i hope you guys have played the new Red Dead!
 
Grow rubber plantation, yesss !

Still happy about small changes to rubber ressources made in patch 1.3.3. after I provided some historical figures.

All these details is what makes Paradox a great historical games developper rather than just a good one.
 
"HOI4, now with less giant decision lists of places you secretly don't know where they are but are too embarrassed to ask"

THAT'S SOO TRUE
 
I wonder about other minor nations joining allies, especially Nepal that joined right at the beginning of war, but also bunch of Latin/South America countries that joined US after Pearl Harbor, any plans for those?
 
@podcat Do you believe the request expeditionary forces could be based on war score as well? That way if I, Canada, want to naval invade Italy, I can have backup from the UK due to my 25% warscore and their belief that my plans will work. Maybe they might listen to me when I am holding Brittany from the Germans....
 
Cheers for the DD Podcat, sorry to hear you're feeling rough, hope you get well soon :). Some great features - that expeditionary forces mechanic looks like it'd be super-handy for a UK or US (after taking charge) playthrough, and I imagine it would also be quite handy for GER and JAP as well (I definitely agree it fits the Allies best, but coordinating Axis minors in Russia, or Japanese minors in China, is something this mechanic could do well :)). Supervised State also sounds tops - will make Allied peace conferences feel a bit more 'Allied' and a bit less 'Winston and Truman's evil twins', and on-map decisions look like they'll mean Google Maps will get a lot less work from HoI4 players :D.

Naval pics for this theme are a little trickier, but fortunately the Allied minors also contributed ships to allied naval squadrons - here's HMAS Australia, who sailed in squadrons under both British and American command during the war :).

Australia cropped.jpg


- What do you mean “A slightly less oppressed chess piece” isn’t clear art direction?

lolololol, love it :D.

yeah, but I also wouldnt ask for my D-day divisions from Malaysia in 1936 in a real game.

Your current illness clearly isn't addling your thinking enough then :p.
 
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@podcat This is bloody good stuff mate! Questions: is there any chance you will be adding Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning and Major General Roy Urquhart for the British, Major-General Maxwell Taylor and Brigadier-General James Gavin for the Americans, and Brigadier-General Stanislaw Sosabowski for the Polish as they were very important and were the main leaders of Operation Market Garden (along with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks)? Will you be adding a way for nations in the Democratic branch that are actually Constitutional Monarchies to puppet countries and be able to annex them? I know this isn't on topic but I would like to know if the fires are still going on over there and if you think you lads are safe since from what I heard through my Swedish family and media (not sure if I can trust the media) that there are major fires over there that can't be put out until winter?

EDIT: I asked why you didn't add those generals as they were very important and I have also been watching a lot of "A Bridge Too Far" lately. "A Bridge Too Far" is a great movie for those history buffs out there that like movies that try to stay as true to history as possible (and also some of the men that took part in Operation Market Garden advised for the movie like sir Brian Horrocks, Roy Urquhart, and Joe Vandeleur.
 
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Questions: is there any chance you will be adding Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning and Major General Roy Urquhart for the British, Major-General Maxwell Taylor and Brigadier-General James Gavin for the Americans, and Brigadier-General Stanislaw Sosabowski for the Polish as they were very important and were the main leaders of Operation Market Garden (along with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks)?

That might be problematic.

If I remember correctly circa 1939. Browning & Sosabowski only held the rank of colonel, Horrocks that of lieutenant colonel, Urquhart that of major while Taylor & Gavin were only army captains. There are of course many inconsistencies in the game when it comes to RL ranks figures actually held with those represented in the game. But when considering that as a rule, divisional commanders and those holding ranks below that are usually not represented in the game (only lieutenant generals and up) - it would be quite odd placing such figures in command of a formation like that of a field corps, let alone an entire field army (gods forbid :O).

A good compromise would be to allow such figures to be unavailable in the commander screen at start but serve as potential candidates that are recruitable as new commanders should the need arise.
 
That might be problematic.

If I remember correctly circa 1939. Browning & Sosabowski only held the rank of colonel, Horrocks that of lieutenant colonel, Urquhart that of major while Taylor & Gavin were only army captains. There are of course many inconsistencies in the game when it comes to RL ranks figures actually held with those represented in the game. But when considering that as a rule, divisional commanders and those holding ranks below that are usually not represented in the game (only lieutenant generals and up) - it would be quite odd placing such figures in command of a formation like that of a field corps, let alone an entire field army (gods forbid :O).

A good compromise would be to allow such figures to be unavailable in the commander screen at start but serve as potential candidates that are recruitable as new commanders should the need arise.
That would cost too much political power and also Brian Horrocks is in the game and I have his portrait right now.
 
Will democracies be still able to puppet other countries the old way or are they locked to the Supervised State option? Also, how will this affect say, the UK's puppets at game start?