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

[agentgb]

Are you absolutely positive all newly added tags have full collection of flags supplied? The 'random change' in my experience happens when a graphic file (in this case, a flag) is missing as far as engine is concerned (wrong format, wrong assignment, plain missing etc) and the engine in such situation simply reuses whatever other graphics it used right before. Which leads to units which don't have "their own" graphics seemingly switching flag/type, because the symbol they receive keep changing, because the 'last used graphic' keeps changing.

yeah Killerrabbit knows how to fix that, not a bug with the game i don't think.

 

[billcorr]

Wait, Air Superiority applies a speed penalty to the enemy? Is that new?

It might be in some descriptive detailed tooltip also, but its a bit hidden

If an experienced computer gamer with more than 140 hours in the game (according to Steam) is not aware of one of the most powerful combat features in a game, then...there's a lesson or message there somewhere.

Something.

Sure, learning to play HoI4 is like drinking from a firehose. The ingame mouseovers and tooltips are handy. Mouseovers might be a new behavior for some gamers to learn.

Some considerations:

• Educate players about HoI4's feature somewhere outside of the game...a rotating list of tips during game boot-up, for example.
• If in-game mouseovers are a new form of learning for some gamers, then outline the "mouseoverable" learning features with a bright neon-lavender colored halo. Gamers then get points (or some other reward) by mousing over them and reading/learning -- the fluorescent halo then disappears. The idea is to motivate gamers to learn the behavior, "oh, I have a question about X, let me mouse over a related icon."

I agree that there are other ways to learn about the game and its features. Two teaching methods are described above, one for in-game, one for outside-of-game.

What are your ideas? (perhaps best if a new thread is started)

 

[OriginalTuna]

AI diaries - that's probably one of the biggest steps in the right direction. All kind of tech/focus tress music and icons are nice, but AI at the moment is a deal breaker. Most of the people understand that it can be fixed over night, but we would like at least see this as a priority and know that it is not beyond repair. I am quite afraid autonomy/puppets will cause additional AI breakdown as it will not know how to manage those.

 

[andersonm]

Thanks for the excellent dev diary. I have not been able to bring myself to play in over a month due to the severe AI problems... if everything looks good with the patch I'll probably grab the DLC too.

 

[Sleight of Hand]

@billcorr

In the old days we had these things called 'manuals', but apparently they're old hat now.

 

[billcorr]

In the old days we had these things called 'manuals', but apparently they're old hat now.

Ah ha. Manuals.

As in, "Read the Fine Manual" Always good advice.

 

[him_15]

One question, What is the autonomy of the Chinese warlord going to be? Independent nation? Domination? Puppet? Thx!

 

[Archangel85]

One question, What is the autonomy of the Chinese warlord going to be? Independent nation? Domination? Puppet? Thx!

Independent. Well, except Glorious Manchukuo, obviously.

 

[imvdm]

Independent. Well, except Glorious Manchukuo, obviously.

Shouldn't most warlord states be dominions to the KMT since they de jurely acknowledge them as their superior, or are you just waiting to do this in a Chinese DLC.

 

[xtfoster]

@billcorr

In the old days we had these things called 'manuals', but apparently they're old hat now.

In the old days we had games (and other software products) that were static (as in you get it and it RARELY changes), but apparently we now get games that evolve and would require a manual to be rewritten every time a new patch came out (which is why they created this thing called a Wiki).

 

[Caspoi]

Shouldn't most warlord states be dominions to the KMT since they de jurely acknowledge them as their superior, or are you just waiting to do this in a Chinese DLC.

But if they in practice don't care about the government in Nanjing and may even war amongst themselves not even Dominion covers them (it means "mostly independent ally", not "only technically subordinate rival" after all).

 

[Farquarsen]

Late to the party, I did review the video and I read through this entire thread. @SteelVolt, did you fix the naval AI? Do carrier planes now find the enemy first and not destroyers? You know planes give a carrier task force eyes about 200 nautical miles out from the carriers. They should be the first finders. It looks like the Destroyers find the fleet from carrier Task Forces. Tell me I am wrong. I really would like to be wrong, but the death toll on Destroyers when two carrier task forces meet in the pacific tell me I am right. I lose 50 to 75% of my destroyers in a carrier to carrier battle. In reality, when carrier task forces met, there were one to two destroyers lost and at least one carrier damaged on each side. For Example in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the us lost 1 destroyer out of 13 and a carrier was scuttled. Nippon lost a destroyer out of 15, one fleet carrier damaged and a light carrier sank. I do not see similar results in HOI 4. Is this fixed in the new patch or do we navy nerds have another release to wait for this to be fixed?

 

[OBRkenobi]

If you are an owner of the Expansion Pass you'll already get it (together with the next 2 expansions).

Wait, do we get 3 free expansions now?

 

[Gamengervi]

Wait, do we get 3 free expansions now?

Well, technically you paid for two of them.

 

[Super-Soviet]

The second one was also fairly clear.
View attachment 222802

None of those were (or should be) autonomous SSR's. An autonomous SSR actually has a far lower level of autonomy than a regular SSR, because ASSR's are subordinate to SSR's. That's means if Ukraine was made an autonomous SSR it would actually be downgraded to a mere part of the Russia.

 

[kauzer]

Awesome!

 

[TsuiIzumi]

How the new changes to the AI will affect late game performance?

 

[Gamengervi]

Can we get a thread displaying unit renders like there are in the EUIV and CKII forums? Or are you not doing that because there won't be separate cosmetic DLC?

 

[Admiral Boysen]

I never saw it clarified in the entire thread:

Are cosmetic tags patch material or DLC material?

 

[Sleight of Hand]

Are cosmetic tags patch material or DLC material?

It must be in the patch, because they're modding parameters that anyone can use. Not sure how they could be specified as DLC-only.

The DLC is: new focus trees/events, GFX, Spearhead command, and parts of the Battle Log.

(Have I forgotten anything?)