HOI4 - Dev Diary - June 17th - Patch 1.1 "Red Ball Express"

[seattle]

@podcat
You should seriously reconsider the African theatre. This mod makes the game so much better for the a.i. with impassable terrain in the Sahara: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=699397350

 

[AEhere]

@podcat Are AI research weights being looked into? So that it researches aircraft models after 1936, for example.

 

[Syntalynder]

View attachment 189949
Invasions and Naval bombers
When it comes to invasions and ease of reinforcing invasions into Germany we have now made Naval Bombers able to attack troop transports (before only fleets could stop them...)

@podcat
Hi Podcat!

Just a thought - shouldn't all aircraft with the 'Naval Strike' mission be able to attack troop transports ? This would be more real. Great update!

 

[JamesJameson]

Any way to stop people from joining wars so much? or even better, not able to join a war at all, ever, no matter the tension, same with factions.

 

[Mef]

• The AI doesn't seem to change it's economic laws at all throughout the game. This gives it a massive penalty if it starts 1936 with a civilian economy (like the USSR does). The mod author changed a few settings and now the AI will at least change to war economy when it goes to war. The Mod author was unable to get them to change to better economic laws during peacetime when they had the ability.

No no no no, that's not what it is (note that the author of the mod used my trade law fixes that I posted on reddit, so I know what I'm talking about).
The AI does switch their laws around, but it doesn't have enough scripting that tells it which is the best law. Economy laws aren't the biggest issue (not switching to war economy when not at war seems to be hardcoded), the real issue are trade laws.

The AI will randomly switch their trade law if it has PP that it has no other use for, which causes crazy stuff to happen like Germany switching to Free Trade and losing most of their production in the middle of the war. Considering how simple of an issue it is to fix it's really gamebreaking.
I hope the HOI4 scripter adds some ai_will_do modifiers to trade laws to fix that (look at the mod for inspirations ).

Edit: Or "Content Designer" or "I give states a confusing file name" or whatever you are calling them at the moment.

 

[adlerchen]

Hi everyone and hope you are enjoying Hearts of Iron! The team has been busy working on the 1.1 path that we have decided to name "Red Ball Express" (since we thought it was a cool idea from Stellaris team to use names, we will be doing the same for major patches).

You should be naming the patches after famous military operations for maximum flavor.

 

[SuperSixFour]

The ability to give air wings custom unit names when?

 

[Darkath]

Did you fix the change government bug in peace deal that would only release a few states with the new government while some minor got to annex the rest of it ?

 

[GBPƎmıl]

Thank you for the peace conference thing

 

[Dude27]

Paradox, have you considered that mod with AI tweaks that has ben put on reddit yesterday? (since links aren't allowed I can't describe it otherwise)
It makes very important yet easy to implement changes. Those changes should've been part of the game to start with, especially division templates. Right now AI doesn't build tanks and other vehicles properly. Also AI doesn't modify already existing divisions, but creates new template.

Also what about stopping divisions strategically redeploy when executing battle plan? AI does that very often and this "feature" doesn't allow to use battle plans properly because you are forced to micro so your divisions don't lose org from redeploying.

 

[Afinati]

I'm not sure any country or even side of the war should be able to demand the entire Soviet Union in a peace deal. It sounds like now the entire world will be able to be redrawn after the war. The deal needs more refining; it is the culmination of most campaigns after all.

 

[Mindmeld_me]

Looks like a good list of improvements coming right before your holiday which I will be looking forward to. Should make a difference in my current play through as Italy I suspect. I am hoping the access issue is fixed. It's September of 42 in my game and Russia has Hungry surrounded but we have not launched Barbarossa, I suspect because Russian troops are within Italian (I control Romania) and German territory. Looking forward to the continued improvements to a fun game.

 

[Luckschaden]

Awesome.

Can you add a forth AI mode "Don't strategically redeploy unless given permission; don't redeploy from a stack I made unless ordered/there are gaps in the front line"
Or something like that? Until then, I won't use frontlines personally.

 

[Nuklearius]

#

 

[Sleight of Hand]

I'm not sure any country or even side of the war should be able to demand the entire Soviet Union in a peace deal. It sounds like now the entire world will be able to be redrawn after the war. The deal needs more refining; it is the culmination of most campaigns after all.

As I recall, HoI II had a 'Bitter Peace' event in which a good chunk of western Russia went to Germany, the USSR became Russia, and a number of smaller states (Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, etc) were released. This would be great for a German victory, and a similar version (with parts of eastern Russia going to Japan) could work for a Japanese victory. Essentially, a victorious Germany in WW2 would impose a somewhat similar setup to Brest-Litovsk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk

There is already a somewhat similar event for Vichy France, so it can definitely work.

Something like this would be ideal for a defeated USSR, rather than the entire thing being gobbled up into weird, random gorder bore blocs.

@podcat @SteelVolt ?

 

[Be-Like-Water]

@podcat

Looks great and yes, I'm loving the game! Keep up the great work team!

I was playing as Japan recently and had this thought, but especially with the allowance for naval bombers to attack transports (which I think is a good idea), I was hoping naval invasion transports could be fleshed out just a wee bit more.

Basically I feel like having only 10 allowed transports until the 40 (years later) is pretty limiting. Maybe increasing the number or adding a 20 transport availability half way through? Now that they'll fail landings more often due to the air threats I feel that a few more available would be balanced.

Either adding more or at least allowing for divisions to be given naval invasion orders (in order to prepare) despite the transports being used elsewhere. I get that the troops couldn't get "on board" of transports that are physically elsewhere, but they could at least be preparing themselves in port so when the transports do arrive they aren't starting their invasion preparations from scratch?

Hope these made sense! Also don't know if AA should then be an added research made available to transports? Not much, but a .50cal gives the invading troops some morale support that their transport isn't "dead in the water"...

 

[Denkt]

Also don't know if AA should then be an added research made available to transports? Not much, but a .50cal gives the invading troops some morale support that their transport isn't "dead in the water"...

Warships provide AA. They maybe could make ship AA more deadly but giving transport AA seems a bit strange as they are ment to be completely defenceless.

 

[Hanswurstkenobi]

Thanks for Patch, changes sound great. Next Goal...better Performance for Endgame please....

 

[Fenxis]

Come on that bug is extremely obvious and happened in almost all of my playthroughs....k

I assume they want the savegame, not because they don't believe you, but because they want to load up the save in debug mode and see why the AI is doing what it is doing.

 

[sabasNL]

Sounds great, but I believe there's another issue that I think can be resolved easily!

Currently, Convoy Raiding is designated as naval combat, just like a fleet-vs-fleet situation. This means that you'll constantly get alerts when, for example, your submarines succesfully intercepted a convoy. As there is no danger involved for your fleet, there's no reason to get an alert for this. Unlike fleet combat, where you might want to watch how the battle progresses and may end up manually ordering your fleet to retreat if things go south.

Especially for Germany, this is a major inconvenience, as every time you see yet another naval alert, you don't know whether it's one of your many submarines doing their job at little to no risk, or one of your surface fleets is being sunk by the Royal Navy.

Therefore I would like to suggest:

1. Convoy Raids should no longer give you alerts at all, unless enemy combat units (warships, airplanes) are involved. The notification about unreviewed convoy raids reports is completely sufficient.
2. Naval alerts not only show where combat is taking place, but also with how many ships. This doesn't even need to be under a tooltip, a simple "XX - XX" (just like the naval combat counter on the map) on the alert button will be sufficient.

This would be a major UI improvement with very little effort needed.