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HOI4 Dev Diary - Beta Batch Update II

Hi everyone, as the coronavirus apocalypse grips sweden the HOI dev team have reverted to to our baser instincts... no longer chained to our desks our programmers roam the streets stealing gasoline and lines of code from weaker gangs of programmers. The content designers have started worshipping stacks of photocopies of Rommel's "Infantry Attacks", and QA are now hunting bugs using spiked clubs.

Ok, not quite ;) But the team, as well as all of paradox, is currently working from home to help limit COVID-19 spread, also as many have pointed out.. less meetings and less pants! its a win-win situation :)

Today, like last week we have another update on the Beta patch.

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# Features
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- Operatives can be disbanded to free up operative slots and recruit different operatives

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# Balance
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- Increased minimum surrender limit to for a country to 20%
- Decrease Base manpower lost in resistance attack to 2.5% from 3%
- Increased compliance decay to give cap of 90% compliance to non democracies.
- Changed compliance loss on state changing hands to 25% from 10%
- Decreased fielded manpower requirement from German "Demand Sudetenland" to 725000 from 750000
- Improved Resistance Suppression when using "Brutal Oppression" from 65% to 75%
- Decreased compliance from collab regime operation to 20% from 30% on normal result and 50% to 40% on excelent result
- changing ideology now halves compliance
- Reduced the Compliance requirements for the Anarchist coring decisions to 50%, down from 60%.
- Increased the cost of Concessions to the Anarchists decision to 150 PP to bring it more in line with its intended purpose as an 'emergency' delay rather than a permanent one, and also made it require either of the Nationalist factions to exist. This means that once those are defeated, there is no stopping the Anarchist uprising anymore.
- operative gained from faction members now is reduced for counties that lacks industry

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# Stability & Performance
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- Prevent CTD when attempting to display the airwings of an airbase the player does not have access to
- Fixed abort to trigger on more cases where invalid map data is detected
- Fixed CTD on invalid naval terrain type for a strategic region
- Fixed CTD on invalid state definition
- Fixed CTD that could happen when re-ordering ship names
- Fixed CTD when displaying the tooltip of the join faction diplomatic action
- Fixed CTD when a autonomy_state has not been correctly loaded
- fixed unnamed gui objects possibly causing crashes and added an errorlog
- Blocked execution of white_peace before game start, along with error log explanation, instead of CTD.

##################################
# UI & Graphics
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- Fix infinite production of ships not assigning names properly in the UI
- Ensured the Abdication Crisis timed mission will now appear at the top of its decision category, for convenience.
- Fixed the Boost Ideology window to work with more than 4 ideologies
- The list of aces to pick from is now sorted to have compatible and free aces at the top
- Releasing puppet no longer creates a new operative slot that disappears again after unpausing
- fixed some graphical issues with frontlines
- fixed operative nationality flags not properly positioned when there are more than 2
- Reduced excessive digits in percentages in various occupation tooltips
- improved operative slot tooltips to see where you are gaining your slots from
- During peace conference, collaboration events are delayed until after and non-news events are hidden

##################################
# AI
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- allies no longer ask SOV for military access
- fixed ai not upgrading templates of existing units
- fixed some issues that resulted in ai preferring producing earlier ships
- ai ITA no longer releases Libya as a collaboration government
- ai will try not to pick closed economy laws if it has large allies

##################################
# Modding
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- fixed accessing variables using other variables not working ( such as var_name:var_name2 )
- added seed = var support for scripted locs random list & random list effect
- laws/ministers can be now modded to use list view instead by adding use_list_view = yes to their idea group
- fixed country_resource_cost_ modifiers not applying correctly
- fixed state resource cost modifiers not showing in tooltip if there were no other resources
- country total resources can go below zero now
- The game no longer aborts due to map errors if launched in debug mode, to allow access to the Nudger
- The game now displays a pop up when reaching the main menu if it detected invalid map data when launched in debug mode
- added on_operative_recruited & on_operative_created on actions
- fixed invalid error logs with tag aliases
- added army_experience navy_experience air_experience country variables

##################################
# Database
##################################
- Renamed Elastic Defense focus to Rebuild the Lines of Torres Vedras for better flavor.
- Fixed "Catalonian Occupation Zone" to properly refer to a "Catalan Occupation Zone", instead.
- Fixed decision requirements in the Abdication Crisis timed mission.
- fixed a number of issues with the French Legitimist Monarchist branch
- Fixed flavor text in the Spanish Independence War news event
- fixed some issues with Japan's head of intelligence advisor
- dismantling the Maginot Line now removes the "Protected by the Maginot Line" national spirit. The Extending the Maginot Line Focus now requires this spirit.
- fixed an issue with Yugoslavian Fighter/Bomber competition event chain having unlocalized strings
- Added missing name for Concessions to the Anarchists decision.
- Fixed Soviet Union seizing Spanish gold reserves even if the gold was never relocated.
- The French "Economic Devolution" focus now displays the correct effects after it is taken

##################################
# Bugfix
##################################
- Renamed Franco's old portrait to prevent it from being used unintentionally by the game.
- Units now correctly divide units into fallback orders that originate in friendly territory and pass through neutral territory.
- fixed another illusive gentleman being available when the first one is taken
- army templates with >10 terrain adjusters will now create a scrollbar in template editor guis so all can be visible
- Random generated female aces now get properly gender flagged
- Made ideas database loading more resilient to script error
- fixed a case where you can steal ships
- fixed sometimes not getting used factories back when canceling an operation
- Made the distribution of states for the Carlist and Anarchist uprisings more reasonable, especially when finishing the SCW early and therefore owning a lot of states before rising up as the Anarchists.
- Requesting Foreign Manpower Garrison support no longer overflows.
- Fixed an issue where territory wasn't assigned properly in the Japan surrender to China
- fixed a rare edge case where Communist China could attempt to infiltrate itself
- Lina Odena is now properly considered female when being referred to in text. Also updated her name to have the proper diacritics.
- fixed usa fascist party popularity being set incorrectly after civil war
- annexed countries will be removed from wars now
- fixed access relations getting cancelled after a while
- fixed factory tooltips in country occupation view
- fixed collaboration government not having a proper name in some cases

If you want to see past changes and full changelog, check out the Beta Patch thread here as well as info on how to start playing on it. Its pretty stable.

Some highlights
Due to popular demand its now possible to fire spies and put someone else in their slot.
upload_2020-3-18_12-39-24.png

The operative will be put back in the pool and you need to wait for a timer to get the slot back to recruit someone else (or get a previously recruited agent back).

We noticed that the code we had put in to stop people from loading broken mod maps also stopped modders from using the ingame nudger tool to fix those issues. That has now been fixed in this update and it will let people access the nudger again as well as making the warnings clearer. We have also added more detailed logging to help people fix their problems. On top of a popup we also have this info when attempting to enter single player.
upload_2020-3-17_16-41-39.png
 
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@podcat

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Still no fix to this? :(

Basically you can spam the "grow resistance" operation over and over again, and the defender can't do anything to either stop it or revert it. Given enough time, which is usually the case in longer conquest games, the enemy will bring up the resistance to 100% regardless of what you do. Maybe limit it so that this operation can give a maximum of 10-20% more resistance in total, and maybe also allow the defender to run counter-operations to remove those bonuses?

Also, can we please be allowed to bring the compliance up to 100% (without the collaborational government operation), and once it hits 100%, transform the state into a core state? IIRC EU4 has a "create-core" feature and it works perfectly fine. It would be very useful for longer conquest games so that we can eventually "secure" areas that we have already hold for a very long time and focus on more recent territorital gains instead.

Oh yeah I've been complaining about this since day one. Isn't it awesome that there's nothing you can do to defend yourself? Operations always have a 100% chance of success and this is what we get. A broken spy system.
 
So what does MAP_LOADING_ERROR_INTROMAP_LOADING_ERROR_GENERAL_MITIGATION_PRELUDEMAP_LOADING_ERROR_MITIGATION_STEAMMAP_LOADING_ERROR_GENERAL_MITIGATION_EPILOG mean?

unknown.png

are you running non-english? the beta is not yet localized.

Has the lend-lease bug been fixed? I do not see it in the list.
It was a bug which made the lend-lease button disappear since this update: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/lend-lease-bug.1345172/
was fixed last week if I recall

Are these beta batch updates incorporated into the beta patch on an as you go basis?

yes

Anyone know if the AI still spams collaboration governments? Haven't tried the beta in quite a while.
we changed several balance things in this patch that should reduce it

Basically you can spam the "grow resistance" operation over and over again, and the defender can't do anything to either stop it or revert it. Given enough time, which is usually the case in longer conquest games, the enemy will bring up the resistance to 100% regardless of what you do. Maybe limit it so that this operation can give a maximum of 10-20% more resistance in total, and maybe also allow the defender to run counter-operations to remove those bonuses?

its a bug, both that its possible to run it so often, but also that its not hitting diminishing returns. no fix yet tho
 
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are you running non-english? the beta is not yet localized.


was fixed last week if I recall



yes


we changed several balance things in this patch that should reduce it



its a bug, both that its possible to run it so often, but also that its not hitting diminishing returns. no fix yet tho
I had not realized that there was loc in core_l_english.yml, but I've moved that over. Would it be possible for the error message to tell us exactly where vital errors are? I understand that there's logging but it would be nice to know where the CTD is thrown.
 
Great... all betas before works, now MAP_LOADING_ERROR_INTROMAP_LOADING_ERROR_GENERAL_MITIGATION_PRELUDEMAP_LOADING_ERROR_MITIGATION_STEAMMAP_LOADING_ERROR_GENERAL_MITIGATION_EPILOG

Vanilla Unplayable, beta Unplayable. Great, just great.
 
Great... all betas before works, now MAP_LOADING_ERROR_INTROMAP_LOADING_ERROR_GENERAL_MITIGATION_PRELUDEMAP_LOADING_ERROR_MITIGATION_STEAMMAP_LOADING_ERROR_GENERAL_MITIGATION_EPILOG

Vanilla Unplayable, beta Unplayable. Great, just great.
Are you trying to play with mods?
 
I had not realized that there was loc in core_l_english.yml, but I've moved that over. Would it be possible for the error message to tell us exactly where vital errors are? I understand that there's logging but it would be nice to know where the CTD is thrown.

There should be some errors in the error.log file in your user directory (usually at Documents\Paradox Interactive\Hearts of Iron IV\logs).
 
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Also the military aspect leaves much to be desired.It is not logical that the main disjunctive is between Gamelin or Weygand but rather that it would have had to be between the old guard and the new guard afterwards if there would be another disjunctive like this in the game, a more defensive or offensive in the branch of the old guard.
on the other hand the branch of the new guard if the disjunctive between a motorized or aerial approach would be fine.

Also missing is an approach to represent the French foreign legion which I think would have a spirit that would give the following benefits a small non-core population recruitment benefit, acclimatization and special forces name percentage
 
Can someone who has played the patch tell us whether or the AI spamming collaboration governments EVERYWHERE has been fixed yet? This is what, week 3 now? It's by far the most glaring issue in the beta patch and yet it seems Paradox are completely pussyfooting around the problem
Haven't played a game yet using only the current patch, but it seems the problem is delayed rather than outright stopped. The reduction in compliance gain (to the point that non-democracies can only get up to 90% during peace) will slow down reaching the 80% threshold for most nations, and the -25% on owner change and halved compliance on ideology change goes a long way towards dealing with the two biggest offenders (Vichy and ahistorical France along with ahistorical Britain). If the game goes on long enough though I think it'll still happen and there's apparently still a few weird cases like Italian Austria being released.
 
Continuing to like the changes made with the upcoming patch. However, I will say that some of these changes (such as the ability to fire Operatives) really do seem like they should have been in place at launch, and do give me the overall impression that LaR was a bit rushed.

With regards to the issue of collaboration government spam, perhaps make a rule that the AI will never create collaboration governments in territory it starts the game/scenario owning? At least as a temporary fix?
 
Aha, thank you for the reply ;) And what about the ability to core states? :p
I'm pretty sure the ability to arbitrarily core states is intended to be Global Defense Council only

Still, being able to core high-compliance claims (possibly only while not at war with anyone who owns the state, unlike the Global Defense Council's ability to core land away from countries they're at war with) sounds not-entirely-unreasonable.
 
I didn't open a suggestion thread for this, as I thought it was painfully obvious. Are you going to address the lack of ability for the allied powers to see the stockpiles of the Soviets? Perhaps a large intel bonus that kicks in only after Lend Lease has started. This would cover post-war cases where the allies would want to not LL to SOV, if they were planning to DOW them.

You need to be able to see a history of all the Lend Lease you've sent and received as well. Where's my Lend Lease improvement threads?...here they are:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/intel-ledger-additional-improvements.1345333/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...nd-lease-needs-a-lot-of-improvements.1310538/

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/lend-lease-convoy-sharing.1350402/
 
fixed ai not upgrading templates of existing units
- fixed some issues that resulted in ai preferring producing earlier ships

- ai will try not to pick closed economy laws if it has large allies

Really happy to see work being done to address those. Thanks !
 
- fixed country_resource_cost_ modifiers not applying correctly
- fixed state resource cost modifiers not showing in tooltip if there were no other resources
- country total resources can go below zero now

Thanks a lot! Ultra works again now, and thoses new modifier will be very usefull tools for every modders. Realy happy to see that Paradox listen to the modders and acts quickly when needed :)
 
Cheers for the DD Podcat, as well as all the work from you and the team on smashing those bugs :) I hope things are going as well as possible in Sweden, and take are as best you can (and same goes for everyone - noting that unless your local Gov't says otherwise, you don't need to panic buy - so much silliness going on in so many places on that front).

Am a big fan of being able to fire as well as hire intelligence operatives - as well as good for in-game, could add some narrative touches to espionage AARs as well :D

less meetings and less pants!

This calls for a pants-free naval pic :D (I'm aware of a few underpants-free ones as well, but I'll spare you those :eek: ) Here's a sailor getting a dental checkup on HMAS Nizam in 1945, in appropriate lack-of-dress for the Pacific.

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