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HOI4 Dev Diary - Cosmetic tags, art, gameplay and AI

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podcat said:
We've done some changes to how majors are handled so no longer can tiny members promote and keep the war going forever. it doesnt fix every case, but a lot of them. You'll get patch log for bug fixes next week.
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main problem for me in every party is Australia. You ALWAYS have to siege it. Waiting for endless naval invasions to commence. Even after dropping dozens of nukes you still have to land ashore, build a port, as capturing one is extremely hard and thenslowly advance through deserts to get last cities for capitulation.
 
Pyramid_Head said:
main problem for me in every party is Australia. You ALWAYS have to siege it. Waiting for endless naval invasions to commence. Even after dropping dozens of nukes you still have to land ashore, build a port, as capturing one is extremely hard and thenslowly advance through deserts to get last cities for capitulation.
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Not always. Only if they became a major countries, which happen only under certain circumstances (number of factories and some other thins AFAIK).
 
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Awsome DD!
podcat said:
First of all, working on a game like Hearts of Iron is a real adventure. So many interacting systems leads to butterfly effects all over the place, sometimes in unexpected ways. And in no other area is this more clear than AI. Fix one thing, and something else becomes a problem. I will be sharing some stories from the trenches over these diaries, And I thought I would start with one from when we were working on Sunflower. When working with the balance of units in Africa (I think we can all recall those massive wars being fought in the deserts of north Africa). Making the AI a lot less interested in sending units there did indeed make them not put all their troops there. What we saw in our hands off runs the following days was that Germany struggled really bad with taking Europe. A lot more than it had before. It turned out that when the Allies no longer cared about Africa, they would send almost all their forces immediately into France to help them push back Germany. This even included Australia.
So in a sense, I am playing a super complex game of whack-a-mole with the code.
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I love stories like that. Do post more!
 
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podcat said:
Hi everyone! As some people from the fan gathering already know I am happy to announce that Together For Victory will be released on the 15th of December. This means only 2 dev diaries left, and today's will be pretty big so we have time to present everything we have been up to! This diary will also start off a series of smaller mini-diaries about the AI from @SteelVolt.

Cosmetic Tags
Cosmetic tags are a new tool that we think modders in particular will like. While not being a full-on tag-switching or union-tag mechanic, it can probably be used to achieve most of the effects.

In the most basic sense, a cosmetic tag just tells the game to use a different name (and flag!) for a country while certain conditions are met. For example, the new countries of Malaysia and Indonesia start the game as integrated puppets of Britain and the Netherlands. Calling them Malaysia or Indonesia would make little sense historically. So they both get a cosmetic tag that sets their name to “British Malaya” and “Dutch East Indies”, respectively. They also get the historically correct flag (which is, of course, the most important part of this new mechanic!). The cosmetic tag gets dropped when they break free.

Cosmetic tags can also define which name pool and portraits a country will use - India will use European names and portraits for its autogenerated generals as long as it has its cosmetic tag. We are planning to extend this to at least include ship names as well, but that will probably not make it into the expansion at launch due to unforeseen issues.

Where it gets interesting is with auto-generated cosmetic tags, which allow for a lot of flavor. One type is tied to the new autonomy system, one type is tied to the overlord, and both can be combined. In effect, this means that we can specify what a country that has become a puppet of another country is called at each level of autonomy. For example, if Germany takes Indonesia as a puppet, they will be called “German East Indies” for as long as they remain a puppet (in fact, the way it is scripted means this works for any country - there may even be a Luxembourgian East Indies). Eagle-eyed viewers of the MP stream at the fan gathering may have already seen another instance of this happening.

The first use of this new option was fairly obvious.
View attachment 222801

The second one was also fairly clear.
View attachment 222802

[...]
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I didn't noticed before, but why isn't the Crimea part of the Ukraine puppet state? I mean, today this means nothing, because it was annexed from Russia, but after the second world war, it was part of Ukraine, wasn't it? Balance reasons?

Besides that, I am quite happy with these announcement. If I were a girl I probably would jump in some kind of cheerleader dress and give you some "hooray", but as a the guy I am, I can just give you a thumbs up ;)
 
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PsychoLold said:
@podcat How does the AA reduction bonus stack? Say, I have 2 "pew-pew the skies!" divisions active in battle, will the enemy get an 82.2% penalty on air superiority?
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You can see in the screenshot that the icon is located on the division modifier field (instead of the upper modifier field for all units), so it very likely only impacts the specific division the AA is attached to.

(Basically allows a division to ignore part or all of the negative impacts depending on it's AA strength)
 
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Nevrion said:
I didn't noticed before, but why isn't the Krim part of the Ukraine puppet state? I mean, today this means nothing, because it was annexed from Russia, but after the second world war, it was part of Ukraine, wasn't it? Balance reasons?
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Crimea was given to Ukraine in 1954 or something like that I believe in exchange for some Cuban territory, so by the time of game, it is not happened yet
 
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Cosmetic tags? BEST FEATURE EVER.
Can we have it too for EUIV?
raw
 
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Alex_brunius said:
You can see in the screenshot that the icon is located on the division modifier field (instead of the upper modifier field for all units), so it very likely only impacts the specific division the AA is attached to.

(Basically allows a division to ignore part or all of the negative impacts depending on it's AA strength)
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yeah this, its a division level thing
 
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Why you made commonwealth nations's tanks models same as uk? I understand that they're puppets of UK, but they can become independent or even become puppet of germany or soviets, it'll be weird that they'll research tanks same as uk. You could make fiction tank 2d art like you did with polish tank/airplane tech tree.
 
itadakimasu said:
Why you made commonwealth nations's tanks models same as uk? I understand that they're puppets of UK, but they can become independent or even become puppet of germany or soviets, it'll be weird that they'll research tanks same as uk. You could make fiction tank 2d art like you did with polish tank/airplane tech tree.
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They added dynamic country tags so maybe in the future we will have dynamic flavour equipment names?
 
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trivial question but does British Malaya/Independant Malaysia get any custom portraits and advisors? As someone whose family descended from Chinese immigrants from Malaysia it'll be nice to know.
 
Nice! But where is Egypt? They should exist even being an integrated puppet is okay as it will add extra troops to Britain arsenal in Africa. Also make the AI so they will try to avoid areas with low infrastructure and take the ones with higher ones first. This will simulate the north Africa campaign without it being the whole Africa campaign in a matter of months and still gives you a reason to position troops in Africa. This should also apply to China, Rural India, Northern Canada, Amazon Jungle, Mountain Ranges and Soviet Siberia.
 
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