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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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1) you can capture them, but its mostly to spread you access. which is like the core gameplay here - capture routes into the enemy land. We dont have any plans right now for say captured supply
2) there is no "supply goods" thats tockpiled its abstracted and produced by your collective industry
3) A good question, its more complex but the old one was also quite costly so we will have to see once its done


Infra drops down to max 5 levels and some stuff comes from rails instead. they do a bit different things now. More details in future. it doesnt use the building slots so there is no competition


mostly but with artistic freedom, it also need to look good and make sense for gameplay
Thank you very much for the answers, looking forward to next week's DD.
 
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Very happy about the inclusion of trains and railways to fight over, with improved logistics. Hopefully this makes the Soviet Front, but also the Chinese/Asiatic Front for Japan much more interesting after the system is properly balanced.
yeah it makes a lot more sense now to follow the historical path of the japanese invasion to hold the rails

Also, the most important question from me.

Will there be modelled trains slowly chugging along the map? With smoke. Possibly the odd whistle and chugchug sound if you zoom in close enough.

It is Needed.
yes. they are... disturbingly bright pink atm so we will talk about those later when we have proper art for them

I'm guessing these are primarily intended to use in areas lacking in urbanization, such as... Siberia... or Central Africa..?
yes exactly

Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P) So big armored trains and artillery trains incoming or not ??
;)

Will railroads connected to recource locations increase the amount of recources you get?
sortof yes. more details in future tho
 
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I'm still not sold on the idea of railways. Having on map models is unexpected and good, but how much clicking is it going to be to actually go into the interface and build them? Also as people have pointed out in the past, a lot of places, especially in western Europe, were practically paved with rails; almost no province sized area was without at least one. Is it going to feel weird that there is no rail a single province away from Paris (for example) when there obviously would have been?
 
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^^

If I see correctly, if a VP does not have adjacency to a rail or a river (southeast france screenshot), it is connected by motorized?

I wish overland transport used not just motorized, but was split into trucks/horses, but I guess the abstraction of horses and motorized into motorized altogether makes some sense
A good abstraction would be that you had some supply flow even if you didn't have enough trucks, to simulate supplies transported by horse.
 
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Holy this is so beautiful, finally a real war of attrition and strategical points. I also really wonder about how you will shake up the current division template and combat meta... its torture having these every wednesday, I can't wait for more of this.
 
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2) there is no "supply goods" thats tockpiled its abstracted and produced by your collective industry
Do i understand it correctly that the hubs dont stockpile the equipment that you see on your logistics screen, but are just generall "supplys" that are disconnected from the equipment you produce for your divisions?
 
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OMG after years of TIK History and Military History Visualized, the big L for Logistics is going to be more meaningful in HOI

I hope the devs don't take inspiration from TIK for the logistics system. He argues that armies should make the soldier pay for their ammo and supply to use free market magic or stuff like that. TIK is widly out of his depth when he steer away from battles proper.
 
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Did I get it right that just cutting off the capital with a naval invasion or paratroopers is no longer a viable tactic to starve all enemy units quickly?
the system still depends on shipping from capital but there are some ways to deal with this I will talk about later

A good abstraction would be that you had some supply flow even if you didn't have enough trucks, to simulate supplies transported by horse.
yeah thats the idea. they arent needed, but unlock more potential
 
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Will the trains run on a new resource: coal? Also, will units move slower in normal territory now that there are train tracks or will the speed be the same as before?
 
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Well, the railroad mechanics make me very excited about the new DLC already. I can't wait to see the DD about trains and how they will work.

Also, I can't wait to see if the very much unintended legacy of George Washington Whistler, namely a wider railway gauge than its neighbors translates into anything meaningful for the Soviet Union in game terms.
 
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Will the trains run on a new resource: coal? Also, will units move slower in normal territory now that there are train tracks or will the speed be the same as before?
you mean for strategic redeployment? I am hoping we can tie it together so most of the speed buff comes from rails but we havent done that yet
 
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