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Hi everyone and welcome back to regular weekly dev diaries (if you don't count the april fools one last week). I know you are all super excited to hear what we have been up to since Battle for the Bosporus. The answers to that are going to take a few dev diaries to cover, so I figured I would start with a timeline for you:
  • We recently released 1.10.4 to fix various multiplayer exploits going on, but seems an important case was not detected at the time so we are working on a 1.10.5 to address that soon.
  • Pdxcon is coming up in May so expect to hear some more details there.
  • The yearly anniversary is coming in June so expect some cool stuff and a patch.
  • We are however spending most of our time on the 1.11 Barbarossa update as well as the unannounced expansion that will be released together with it. That's what we will spend most of our diaries on, as well as today!

‘Barbarossa’ and the unannounced DLC will focus on the Eastern Front and the core of Hearts of Iron, which is warfare - particularly land warfare. Historically the Eastern Front was without doubt the most important front for World War II. It was the largest confrontation in history and
is where Hitler’s expansion was first stopped and pushed back signaling the eventual doom of the axis powers. There are several areas we want to improve here. Weather does not feel impactful enough, while historically it had a massive impact. Logistics currently doesn’t have much player interaction and is mostly something you have to deal with only when problems appear, and finally the combat and division meta has been stable (with an emphasis on large divisions) for a long time - something we hope we can shake up. As you can imagine, these are all things that affect the game on a deeper level and take a lot of work to get right.

Today, I’ll give you guys a bit of an overview on the supply aspect, but fair warning: it’s early days and stuff may still change here before we’re done. I’ll probably spend 3+ diaries on supply over the course of the development to cover everything, but I figured it would be nice to hear about the overarching ideas.

The old system worked by having discrete supply areas pathing back to the players capital and keeping track of the bottlenecks. To simplify a bit ;) - those bottlenecks then decided how many units could fit into areas near the front without penalties. The areas themselves were unintuitive to players and required you to check multiple mapmodes to see if you stepped over an edge etc. I do like bottleneck systems though, because feedback is usually immediate, but it suffered from not having much scaling cost as distances increased, so it was hard to use it to limit snowballing. As I mentioned it was also a system you didn't care too much about until you had problems, while historically, logistics was a vital part of planning a campaign. This led to combining the issue with another gripe of ours - that the way fronts moved in WW2 often followed important railroads, but don't really in HOI4. We came to the conclusion that we should try and make a system focused on railways and with a truck based component as a way to get more out of it when away from the rails.

1617799554638.png


In our new system, supply flows from the capital (the total amount available depends on your total industrial base) through railways, where the level of the railway acts as a bottleneck. To transport more, you need a higher level railway (or a bigger port if it goes over water) so the railways are the current bottlenecks in a way. Depending on how much supply is transported you need a certain amount of trains for the rails to perform. Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P)

An important part of railways is that they are capturable, so as you push into enemy territory you will want to make sure to hold vital railways and capture railway hubs to supply your troops. There is a conversion time here to model the fact that there was usually some repair or re-gauging that needed to happen for attackers.

1617798271066.png

1617799689604.png

Mapmodes are still quite WIP ;)

Rivers also had a huge importance on the eastern front for transport and supply so they will work essentially like basic railroads now, where you need to control both sides of their banks to use them to ship supplies around.

1617798407335.png


Supply is drawn from what we call Supply Hubs now, which are either cities, naval bases, or manually constructed stations along the rails, which have to be linked into the network. Air supply works a bit differently but we will talk about this in the future along with some other supply additions...

The flow of supply from a Hub to a division depends on the terrain/weather etc, and ideally you want to have available trucks here (which is to say, motorized equipment) to increase the amount of supply you get as well as range. Cost of trucks and trains and losses to attrition and bad weather will be a limiting factor on your logistics.

1617798787102.png


Overall, this creates a system where it's strategically sound to fight over railways, prepare for large offensives, to try and bleed each other's logistics capability and to force care when advancing in bad terrain and weather. The result is a much more fun, historical and immersive Eastern Front as well as adding a new layer of invasion planning in the rest of the world.

See you all next week for the next diary!
 
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Will the sabotage infrastructure mission now disable railroads and make them unable to work?
 
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I think we can see a tunnel Icon is that correct ? If not what is it then ?
To me that reads like a roadblock or barrier. I assume it just shows the supply route ends there, without a supply hub. On the Alpine line, you can see French troops near the Swiss/Italian border are being supplied overland from Lyon, rather than from the railroad adjacent to them. The barrier icon seems to signify a rail terminus that does not give supply to nearby units.
 
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I noticed that in the screenshot of Germany invading USSR, the German player has a number of foreign allied troops assigned to their front line, with no allies overlapping fronts. Can Germany currently get expeditionary forces from the other axis powers, or is this something new? I know AI congesting supply lines has been a common complaint for a while, it would make sense for there to be a streamlined way to manage allied forces added as part of the supply rework.

Maybe that's how it works right now for Germany, I don't remember offhand.
Expeditionary forces can be called from allies, and puppet troops can be claimed, that has been around, yes. But then they'd have German unit counters.

So it's most likely still AI congestion.

EDIT: as they are highlighted as currently selected, at least some of them are expeditionaries.
 
Will the supplies be country specific? For the obvious example, could a country launch a naval invasion with their own supplies and not get poached by allies?
 
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Makes sense. Thank you Dev team. All warfare is based on the logistics. That's why Romans were building roads.

Some questions regarding the new concepts.

1. Workforces needed to be implemented? Distribution and concentration of the workforces will make sense on mega projects
2. Resources volume to be changed? Within railway you extract and transport 50 times more than a country road.
3. Maybe it's time to add the grain and livestock as the strategic resources along with oil and fuel? What other kind of resources you may plan to add?
4. Ports need some rework. Deep water ports are far more important than shallow beaches in terms of supply hub. Also Soviet Union far-east ports are frozen in winter.
5. Truck and motorcycle numbers are important in supply and logistics besides army combat purposes. Will you add trucks along with locomotives as transport capacity?
6. Bridges are strategically more important than any other infras. How do they will be built?
7. Please add some SS 3D models as well BMW sidecar with mounted Mg42 to the game. I think everyone will like and buy it.

Thank you again Devs, I was the most complaining in your silence and absence. Now I cheer your work.
Best regards
 
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We came to the conclusion that we should try and make a system focused on railways and with a truck based component as a way to get more out of it when away from the rails.
@Idhrendur Any idea how you'll deal with this for the converter? Converting Vic2 railroads over directly could get a bit silly.
Supply is drawn from what we call Supply Hubs now, which are either cities, naval bases, or manually constructed stations along the rails, which have to be linked into the network. Air supply works a bit differently but we will talk about this in the future along with some other supply additions...
So do these sources of supply give troops in associated regions access to all of the supply the tag/alliance or w/e has access to or some particular amount that radiates from somewhere? Like if an area is encircled and it has a supply depot will it be just as supplied as anywhere else as long as it has suitable infrastructure? I assume choking off an entire country by encircling its capital will be impossible now, but does every supply point work as essentially a magical vortex into a country/alliance or w/e's bag of holding?
 
Great news. Improving logistics is a very important factor especially on the Eastern Front.
Since you mentioned that the railways need to be adapted after being captured, it would be great if you made the following feature.
In Russia since the times of the Empire, the width of the railway track differs from the European one. It would be great if the USSR / Russia had a modifier that would slow down the conversion of railways when captured by the enemy and vice versa.
This would please many of us.
 
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This looks excellent. I have a few questions about how you expect these changes to impact the game more broadly:

Will these changes impact overland resource movement? It would be wonderful for Germany to be able to cut the Soviet Union off from lend-lease supplies by taking the Murmansk railroad, or be able to cut railways between Moscow and the Caucasus to deprive the Soviets of their oil.

Will these changes impact overland trade? It's always annoyed me that any country in Africa/Eurasia can trade with other countries on the landmass without using convoys. At a minimum, it would be cool to see overland trade restricted by the number of trains you have available. Ideally I'd like to see overland trade only occur along existing railroads. (I'm thinking of Germany importing rubber from Siam in particular, along railroads through Central Asia and China that probably didn't exist.)

Will you rebalance the equilibrium in the Sino-Japanese War? I'd like to see a long-term equilibrium in which Japan can't push past the Chinese coastal plain because of the mountainous terrain and lack of infrastructure, and in which Japan and Britain are incentivized to fight over the Burma Road. I doubt Japan would be hurt too much by a stalemate in China due to China's lack of factories and strategic resources. (Japan mainly needs oil and rubber, which China doesn't have.)

Are you looking to introduce more strategic resources? Food and consumer goods seem like good candidates. Most of the land war was fought over agriculturally important areas (China and the western Soviet Union) and food shortages were sometimes important. Availability of consumer goods could influence stability and be used as a way to keep Democratic countries especially from shifting to wartime production and recruitment levels too early. Shortages of consumer goods and consequent decreases in stability could also make Germany's late game more interesting: Germany players would have to gradually shift from political stability and blitzkrieg to goods shortages, lowered stability, and a war of attrition.
 
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In our new system, supply flows from the capital
Are you fixing the exploit of surrounding the capital but not taken it so the entire enemy has no supplies in the hold front? if the capital still is the source of supplies, probably it will continue being a problem. i think it's easy to solve just adding a way to change the main source of supplies.
 
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Hi everyone and welcome back to regular weekly dev diaries (if you don't count the april fools one last week). I know you are all super excited to hear what we have been up to since Battle for the Bosporus. The answers to that are going to take a few dev diaries to cover, so I figured I would start with a timeline for you:
  • We recently released 1.10.4 to fix various multiplayer exploits going on, but seems an important case was not detected at the time so we are working on a 1.10.5 to address that soon.
  • Pdxcon is coming up in May so expect to hear some more details there.
  • The yearly anniversary is coming in June so expect some cool stuff and a patch.
  • We are however spending most of our time on the 1.11 Barbarossa update as well as the unannounced expansion that will be released together with it. That's what we will spend most of our diaries on, as well as today!

‘Barbarossa’ and the unannounced DLC will focus on the Eastern Front and the core of Hearts of Iron, which is warfare - particularly land warfare. Historically the Eastern Front was without doubt the most important front for World War II. It was the largest confrontation in history and
is where Hitler’s expansion was first stopped and pushed back signaling the eventual doom of the axis powers. There are several areas we want to improve here. Weather does not feel impactful enough, while historically it had a massive impact. Logistics currently doesn’t have much player interaction and is mostly something you have to deal with only when problems appear, and finally the combat and division meta has been stable (with an emphasis on large divisions) for a long time - something we hope we can shake up. As you can imagine, these are all things that affect the game on a deeper level and take a lot of work to get right.

Today, I’ll give you guys a bit of an overview on the supply aspect, but fair warning: it’s early days and stuff may still change here before we’re done. I’ll probably spend 3+ diaries on supply over the course of the development to cover everything, but I figured it would be nice to hear about the overarching ideas.

The old system worked by having discrete supply areas pathing back to the players capital and keeping track of the bottlenecks. To simplify a bit ;) - those bottlenecks then decided how many units could fit into areas near the front without penalties. The areas themselves were unintuitive to players and required you to check multiple mapmodes to see if you stepped over an edge etc. I do like bottleneck systems though, because feedback is usually immediate, but it suffered from not having much scaling cost as distances increased, so it was hard to use it to limit snowballing. As I mentioned it was also a system you didn't care too much about until you had problems, while historically, logistics was a vital part of planning a campaign. This led to combining the issue with another gripe of ours - that the way fronts moved in WW2 often followed important railroads, but don't really in HOI4. We came to the conclusion that we should try and make a system focused on railways and with a truck based component as a way to get more out of it when away from the rails.

View attachment 701614

In our new system, supply flows from the capital (the total amount available depends on your total industrial base) through railways, where the level of the railway acts as a bottleneck. To transport more, you need a higher level railway (or a bigger port if it goes over water) so the railways are the current bottlenecks in a way. Depending on how much supply is transported you need a certain amount of trains for the rails to perform. Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P)

An important part of railways is that they are capturable, so as you push into enemy territory you will want to make sure to hold vital railways and capture railway hubs to supply your troops. There is a conversion time here to model the fact that there was usually some repair or re-gauging that needed to happen for attackers.

View attachment 701605
View attachment 701616
Mapmodes are still quite WIP ;)

Rivers also had a huge importance on the eastern front for transport and supply so they will work essentially like basic railroads now, where you need to control both sides of their banks to use them to ship supplies around.

View attachment 701607

Supply is drawn from what we call Supply Hubs now, which are either cities, naval bases, or manually constructed stations along the rails, which have to be linked into the network. Air supply works a bit differently but we will talk about this in the future along with some other supply additions...

The flow of supply from a Hub to a division depends on the terrain/weather etc, and ideally you want to have available trucks here (which is to say, motorized equipment) to increase the amount of supply you get as well as range. Cost of trucks and trains and losses to attrition and bad weather will be a limiting factor on your logistics.

View attachment 701610

Overall, this creates a system where it's strategically sound to fight over railways, prepare for large offensives, to try and bleed each other's logistics capability and to force care when advancing in bad terrain and weather. The result is a much more fun, historical and immersive Eastern Front as well as adding a new layer of invasion planning in the rest of the world.

See you all next week for the next diary!
Wow. The idea is GREAT. Very good job paradox.
 
It sounds like it does. If units draw supplies from supply hubs, then when you do your naval invasion, you get a supply hub at the port. If I am reading it right, there are no more supply zones, just the question of how far you are from the hub (and how many other units are trying to pull from that hub). So you can expand, but until you capture another port, you can't support any more units. Actually expanding away from the hub might decrease the number of units you can support since you have to move the supply further to get to the units.
Yeah, I get that. But was something changed about the way each individual hub (previously - suypply zone) is supplied form the capital? or will 3 hubs still triple your port supply throughput?
 
Are you fixing the exploit of surrounding the capital but not taken it so the entire enemy has no supplies in the hold front? if the capital still is the source of supplies, probably it will continue being a problem. i think it's easy to solve just adding a way to change the main source of supplies.
Podcat will explain in a later DD how this will be fixed
 
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Are you fixing the exploit of surrounding the capital but not taken it so the entire enemy has no supplies in the hold front? if the capital still is the source of supplies, probably it will continue being a problem. i think it's easy to solve just adding a way to change the main source of supplies.

Podcat said this:

the system still depends on shipping from capital but there are some ways to deal with this I will talk about later


yeah thats the idea. they arent needed, but unlock more potential

I especulate we will be able to change our "supply capital" if it's surrounded (I hope the AI will know how to do that). That'd be an easy solution, to keep the system from breaking.
That or have multiple supply capitals in case you are surrounded
 
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There will be the Italian and Soviet reworked focus tree?
I don`t think Italy is coming in this DLC. Given that 1.11 and the next DLC is focused on the Eastern Front I would assume that the countries getting a Focus tree rework will be the Soviets, Poland and Finland.
 
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Hi, just wanna notify you that the Norwegian Rail network only extended as far north as the Elsfjord station, south of Mo i Rana, by the time of German Occupation in 1940 (not counting the Narvik line to Kiruna). So you guys don't place any rails further north than this, as any rails further north than this was made either during or after the occupation. Look up Nordland line on wikipedia for reference
 
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