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HoI4 Dev Diary - Resistance and Compliance

Hello HoI bois and ladies, welcome to the second dev diary on our upcoming unannounced expansion and 1.8 ‘Husky’ update. This update features some big changes to how occupied territory functions. The biggest part of this is an overhaul of the game’s current resistance system into what we are calling the “Resistance and Compliance” system. This should help curb a bit of power from snowballing (Hello, Germany), remove gamey early war sniping of provinces, and put a bit of a clock on world conquest runs.

The old resistance system is rather simple. Each occupied state has a suppression requirement. If you meet that requirement nothing happens. If the suppression requirement is not met then you suffer from increasingly common sabotage to factories or infrastructure as resistance strength grows. We decided we could make this more interesting and use it as a way to further control the power of snowballing.

The growth of resistance is no longer stopped by having an adequate garrison. Resistance now functions with a target system. The resistance level will grow or decay towards whatever the current target is. The target is impacted by the development of the state, the core owner still existing and other factors. Resistance activities will still scale with the level of resistance, but the garrison will now work as a shield that absorbs these sabotages. If the garrison is adequate, the garrison shield will absorb the vast majority of sabotage attempts and take losses to manpower and equipment. Not having an adequate garrison means a higher resistance target and more resistance activity making it past the garrison shield to the state.

DD_RESCOMP_COMP.png


Compliance is in some ways the opposite of resistance. It is a rating of how willing the local state is to work with their occupiers. Compliance will normally start at zero and increase slowly over time. Compliance growth will generally be slow and several factors can affect that speed of growth. As compliance increases in a state, it will decrease local resistance and give access to more resources, factories, and manpower.

DD_RESCOMP_COMP2.png


Resistance and compliance also will have various effects that are unlocked. Resistance will gain the ability to more frequently bypass the garrison shield after it reaches a strength of 25%. Reaching 25% compliance means reducing suppression requirements for the current level of resistance.

DD_RESCOMP_UNLOCKS.png


The highest level of resistance unlocks include two levels of uprising. The first is a passive malus that is applied to the state, adding attrition, decreasing move speed, and slowing org regain for occupying forces in the area. The 2nd level uprising is a full scale organized uprising that functions somewhat like a civil war. The states that rise up will gain low-quality divisions and either rejoin their former master or if that no longer exists, reestablish themselves on the map. Both of these should be somewhat rare and will require the local resistance being supported by an outside source.

DD_RESCOMP_UPRISING1.png



In conjunction with these new systems, we have reworked how occupied states are handled. Colony states will be removed as a concept and every state not controlled by a nation with a core on the state will be viewed as occupied. Occupied states will now be less rewarding for the occupier. Access to the factories and resources of the state will by default be much lower than before. However, the conqueror can get more out of the state by cultivating compliance or adjusting occupation laws. This gives a bit of granularity between what was previously colony states and cores.

Occupation laws will also be updated to work with the new resistance and compliance systems and give the player more choice. Previous occupation laws were mostly a linear system of paying PP and increasing suppression need for increasing rewards. If you could afford it, harsher occupation would almost always be more beneficial. This was also a system not a lot of people interacted with as it was hidden behind several layers of the menu.

New occupation laws are built around trying to give the player choice based on playstyle and short and longterm goals. The new laws tend towards one of three objectives: compliance growth, resistance suppression, factory/resource exploitation. Compliance growth is a longterm reward, while resistance suppression and resource gains are more short term. These laws will, in turn, be bad at what they are not concerned with. IE focusing on resistance suppression will generally not be very rewarding in terms of resources or long term compliance growth. Cultivating compliance will mean that the player will have to deal with a period of low yields and maybe a more active resistance movement. Each of the big three ideologies will also get their own special occupation laws. These laws fit the themes of the ideologies and give them some unique choices

DD_RESCOMP_OCULAW02.png


That's all we got for this week. Next week we will update the good people of these forums on what is going on with France. Secrets and things hidden will be revealed!
 
Does resistance and compliance work at a state level or at a country level? If Germany occupies France, do all French states share the same level of compliance and resistance?

On an independent note, what are your thoughts about having ideologies for states and not just for countries? It would mix nicely with civil wars, resistance/compliance, democratic elections, etc.
 
I've wanted these types of changes for so long now :D

This should go a long way to making Allied guarantee trolling less terrible since getting an early peace conference won't be so hypercritical to the amount of options you have. Some questions about the system as proposed:
  1. How will manpower be handled? This is the number one concern for small nations, and it'd be nice to be able to tap into a greater portion of occupied manpower reserves even if it means a rather severe penalty to factories and resources.The current occupation system rather unrealistically lets you get 100% of the factories and 100% of the resources, but you could only ever get <1% of the population under the most generous occupation settings. I'm hoping this will be smoothed out.
  2. Will we be able to release puppets in occupied territory even if we haven't gotten a peace conference yet? I certainly hope this will be the case, and I think it's implied by the screenshots posted, but the dev diary didn't say explicitly.
  3. If #2 is a yes, how will that work with partially occupied nations, or nations that still exist. Would we be able to release a puppetted Italy if we only control half of it, as happened in history?
  4. Will anything be done to keep a cap on micromanagement?
 
Does resistance and compliance work at a state level or at a country level? If Germany occupies France, do all French states share the same level of compliance and resistance?

On an independent note, what are your thoughts about having ideologies for states and not just for countries? It would mix nicely with civil wars, resistance/compliance, democratic elections, etc.

From what we've seen, it's on a state level
 
France rework,
Resistance rework,
80th anniversary of the beginning of WW2...
And polish resistance was the biggest one in the whole Europe...
Will this mean we are finally getting the polish tree rework? Can this possibly be true???
 
It always struck me as somewhat odd that a country could have massive resistance movements across your occupied territory while you were waging war but the moment you make peace they go "Okay boys, they've made peace and we no longer have a nation to fight for. Time to hang up our rifles and go be oppressed under the new regime". The new system of perpetual resistance makes a lot more sense and I am SO glad that's going to be a thing now.

Agreed that this is a great change. I wonder if there will be some sort of resistance or legitimacy mechanic for setting up puppets. Would be a shame if setting up a puppet government just gets instant full compliance due to having cores. IMO it should be easier than just occupying the territory, but puppets should still have legitimacy problems.
 
Will this mean we are finally getting the polish tree rework? Can this possibly be true???
no poland this time. I expect it makes most sense to do together with soviet honestly
 
Can we support by arming rebels via lend lease method?
There are ways to support rebels. We will cover them in the future when more is revealed :)
 
How will manpower be handled? This is the number one concern for small nations, and it'd be nice to be able to tap into a greater portion of occupied manpower reserves even if it means a rather severe penalty to factories and resources.The current occupation system rather unrealistically lets you get 100% of the factories and 100% of the resources, but you could only ever get <1% of the population under the most generous occupation settings. I'm hoping this will be smoothed out.
New laws and compliance system should be a lot nicer for this kind of thing. Its one of the main goals of the system to get away from "non core is garbage"
 
From what we've seen, it's on a state level
For resistance, probably based on what we have seen. I seriously doubt they will have ideology at that level though. That is more related to the country (or countries) that have claims on the state, not sure what they will do about states that have multiple claims on them (i.e., china, spain, a few border areas in Europe (Alsace-Lorainne))
 
This all sounds awesome!!

But, good grief, could you please rename 'compliance' to 'cooperation' or 'collaboration' or even 'sympathizers'?? 'Compliance' makes it sound like a GDPR exercise... Collaborators was a common label given to people who collaborated with the occupying enemy.
 
Very nice, can't wait to see it in action.
Streams of the new expansion when?

The 2nd level uprising is a full scale organized uprising that functions somewhat like a civil war. The states that rise up will gain low-quality divisions and either rejoin their former master or if that no longer exists, reestablish themselves on the map.
Will be possible for the nation that's reemerging on the map to have a different ideology from when it capitulated?
A good way to go about it might be for the nation who's giving the most support to the rebels to decide on that, or at least make it chance based, with the probability proportional to the support (ex: if the rebels receive 80% of their support from democracies and 20% from the USSR, it will have an 80%/20% chance of coming back as democratic/communist).
Yugoslavia comes to mind, it would be cool if they could reemerge as communist instead of NA.
 
If colony states are being removed, and are instead being treated as occupied, what happens to states with no cores? (That is, if there even are any...)
 
Exactly how will this work with the Governments in Exile? Will the full-scale division-level revolt give it's lands and divisions to the GiE? Will it be possible to have the GiE's and the rebellion's goals conflict and somehow have multiple governments emerge from one nation, one formed out of the GiE and one formed out of rebellion? I mean, we're probably going to need a way to divide a nation into seperate pieces at some point, just East and West Germany tags aren't going to work forever as alt-history begins to ramp up.
 
This is amazing. The new systems look beautiful: quite simple to understand yet incredibly deep in terms of what you (and modders!) can do with them. Full of exciting potential.

Let's hope you will find time to reasonably integrate them with older focus trees, especially China and European minors from DoD (resistance and uprisings were big part of Czech and Slovak history).

Also, I suppose that "Governments in Exile" from MtG should have rich interactions with these new mechanics.