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HOI4 Dev Diary - Scout Planes and breaking the Enigma - and Stream premieres today at 16:00CET!

Hi everyone! Today we are going to start talking about changes to Intel and present some of the tools you will have at your disposal for gaining it in La Résistance. We will also go back to the Agency and talk about code cracking.

Scout Planes
Scout planes is a great way of gaining intel on your enemies. This is a new plane type that comes in two tech levels
planes.png


These new planes are not capable of fighting or giving air superiority, but they have a new mission “Air Recon” which can also be performed in peace time. This mission will give you intel on nations under its area of operation, or their navy if covering trafficked naval regions. It also does spotting of ships and divisions so its a great way to figure out what the enemy is up to.

upload_2019-12-4_9-55-11.png


Other planes types can not do the air recon mission, although in war time other planes will be gaining you intel as well during regular operations.


Code Cracking
One of the things in WW2 that has always fascinated me was the allied efforts to break the axis codes, particularly the work done at Bletchley Park. When reading about this work you usually are told about the tough choices that had to be made, because after the enigma codes had been cracked and german messages could be read the allies were forced to only use this knowledge in limited ways. If they had not it would have tipped off the Germans that they knew and made the whole thing moot. Basically, to save the punch for when it was most needed. This is something I wanted to make sure that we captured when we started designing the new code cracking system.

To interact with code cracking etc you need to form a new department in your Agency. Under it are upgrades both for creating and breaking enemy ciphers.
upload_2019-12-4_10-8-23.png


The higher your decryption power the faster you can break enemy codes and the higher your crypto strength the tougher you in turn are to break.
upload_2019-12-4_10-16-13.png

In the above screenshot I have cracked Germany's current cipher. If they end up upgradign to a higher level I would lose some progress and have to continue the work. The 25 shown is your total decryption power and will be shared among all active projects. Right now Denmark is the only active one so gets the full attention and fastest possible code breaking.

Having a cracked code gives you some passive bonuses that are not possible for the enemy to see and confirm, such as air interception. To take full advantage you will need to commit and fully activate. Doing that gives you 30 days of full intel on the enemy as well as an assortment of other bonuses.
upload_2019-12-4_10-22-19.png

A perfect time to use it when launching naval invasions or starting fighting somewhere because when activated the enemy will know and ciphers will reset within 30 days. After this time you will need to crack their code again,, which probably will have had its strength upgraded.

Outside of just having a bunch of mathematicians working day and night on breaking the enemy codes you can also help them out though clandestine operations
upload_2019-12-4_10-41-11.png


This diary showed you more ways of gaining intel, next week we will be getting into the details about the intel changes. See you then!

Today we start streaming La Résistance!
Tune in to twitch at 16:00CET to watch us talking about Updated Garrison and Resistance Mechanics! The stream will be available on Youtube later.

steam_800x450.png
 
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I thought the same thing. It's stupid how much the devs are ignoring defense and national security. IF I HAD A SPY PLANE OVER MY COUNTRY I WOULD SHOOT IT DOWN. IT WOULD BE CONSIDERED AN ACT OF WAR.

Every week there's a new dev diary, and every week it has you loudly and rudely complaining in it.

Give it a rest already.
 
Will the save files receive encryption and other treatments to prevent easy save scouting?

WIll other faction members be barred from ones classified stuff to prevent easy human based spy planting?
 
Scout Planes
Scout planes is a great way of gaining intel on your enemies. This is a new plane type that comes in two tech levels


These new planes are not capable of fighting or giving air superiority, but they have a new mission “Air Recon” which can also be performed in peace time. This mission will give you intel on nations under its area of operation, or their navy if covering trafficked naval regions. It also does spotting of ships and divisions so its a great way to figure out what the enemy is up to.

Other planes types can not do the air recon mission, although in war time other planes will be gaining you intel as well during regular operations.
1. Can spy planes be intercepted in peacetime?
2. If so, what are consequences.
3. Does the air recon give tactical advantage to the ground combat in the area? Historiclly the Fw 189 was correcting artillery fire and spotting strafing targets.
 
1. Can spy planes be intercepted in peacetime?
Podat said they are toying with the idea that they can be intercepted or shot down by provincial AA.
If so, what are consequences.
No consequences apparently - this is based on historical arguments that the Hindenburg and other German Spy-Civilian aviation planes took photos on their strictly prohibited civilian routes prior to war breaking out.
3. Does the air recon give tactical advantage to the ground combat in the area? Historiclly the Fw 189 was correcting artillery fire and spotting strafing targets.
From today's dev stream, it seems "Intel" is a crucial role. Daniel wasn't allow to use it or counter it, and nearly got his arse handed to him with Germany attacking France. It wasn't until France got desperate and openly used their Intel Decrypt, and once GER's encrypt reset, the attack numbers all went from red to green.
 
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If not shooting it down SOMETHING must be done. No sovereign nation would allow this. Why else would you send a spy plane? Any reasonable person would figure it out.
You would need diplomatic event popups or something that rapidly puts your country on a war stance.

Germany did extensive recon of Western USSR before Barbarossa and was largely unapposed since Stalin did not want an escalation and a war with Germany. Pre-war a lot was done as aerial mapping, although Sidney Cotton did some strategic recon just before the outbreak.

I think the thing to consider is
1. it is not always easy to determine a recon plane from another plane
2. The major powers during pre-war ww2 did really not want a ww2 after ww1, and tried to avoid escalation for a long while, so even if a plane was suspected or doing recon work, it was probably hard to gather enough evidence to accuse said power of doing recon. Even if evidence was gathered it isnt clear that the western powers were willing to stamp their foot down, even after Czechoslovakia and Poland they were still kinda hesitant to commit fully for a while (see phoney war)
 
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I thought the same thing. It's stupid how much the devs are ignoring defense and national security. IF I HAD A SPY PLANE OVER MY COUNTRY I WOULD SHOOT IT DOWN. IT WOULD BE CONSIDERED AN ACT OF WAR.

During the Cold War the USA sent U2 spy planes (among others) into the Soviet airspace many times, but they did not start WWIII. Some were shot down by the Soviets, most escaped unharmed. In the 1950s some air battles were fought in neutral Finnish airspace when the US spyplanes headed West, followed by chasing Soviet fighters. So it can be done, and has been done against a nuclear superpower, without declaration of war.
 
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Hi everyone! Today we are going to start talking about changes to Intel and present some of the tools you will have at your disposal for gaining it in La Résistance. We will also go back to the Agency and talk about code cracking.

Scout Planes
Scout planes is a great way of gaining intel on your enemies. This is a new plane type that comes in two tech levels
View attachment 530126

These new planes are not capable of fighting or giving air superiority, but they have a new mission “Air Recon” which can also be performed in peace time. This mission will give you intel on nations under its area of operation, or their navy if covering trafficked naval regions. It also does spotting of ships and divisions so its a great way to figure out what the enemy is up to.

View attachment 530127

Other planes types can not do the air recon mission, although in war time other planes will be gaining you intel as well during regular operations.


Code Cracking
One of the things in WW2 that has always fascinated me was the allied efforts to break the axis codes, particularly the work done at Bletchley Park. When reading about this work you usually are told about the tough choices that had to be made, because after the enigma codes had been cracked and german messages could be read the allies were forced to only use this knowledge in limited ways. If they had not it would have tipped off the Germans that they knew and made the whole thing moot. Basically, to save the punch for when it was most needed. This is something I wanted to make sure that we captured when we started designing the new code cracking system.

To interact with code cracking etc you need to form a new department in your Agency. Under it are upgrades both for creating and breaking enemy ciphers.
View attachment 530132

The higher your decryption power the faster you can break enemy codes and the higher your crypto strength the tougher you in turn are to break.
View attachment 530135
In the above screenshot I have cracked Germany's current cipher. If they end up upgradign to a higher level I would lose some progress and have to continue the work. The 25 shown is your total decryption power and will be shared among all active projects. Right now Denmark is the only active one so gets the full attention and fastest possible code breaking.

Having a cracked code gives you some passive bonuses that are not possible for the enemy to see and confirm, such as air interception. To take full advantage you will need to commit and fully activate. Doing that gives you 30 days of full intel on the enemy as well as an assortment of other bonuses.
View attachment 530136
A perfect time to use it when launching naval invasions or starting fighting somewhere because when activated the enemy will know and ciphers will reset within 30 days. After this time you will need to crack their code again,, which probably will have had its strength upgraded.

Outside of just having a bunch of mathematicians working day and night on breaking the enemy codes you can also help them out though clandestine operations
View attachment 530142

This diary showed you more ways of gaining intel, next week we will be getting into the details about the intel changes. See you then!

Today we start streaming La Résistance!
Tune in to twitch at 16:00CET to watch us talking about Updated Garrison and Resistance Mechanics! The stream will be available on Youtube later.

View attachment 530158
Funny that I advocated for actual scout planes in the game before it launched, and many people shot that idea down. Well, I get a bit of satisfaction that it's coming, even if it took 3.5 years!
 
1. it is not always easy to determine a recon plane from another plane

This implies that they should be single planes and not an air wing of 50 or 100 planes. So will that single plane do as much as 20, 50 or 100 recon planes in the same air zone?
 
Germany did it both to poland and ussr before attacks
Before radar, and if not intercepting those planes, how would they even know who they belong to? Did these airplanes fly with full nation markings on them? Or were they colored something to disguise who they belonged to?
 
This implies that they should be single planes and not an air wing of 50 or 100 planes. So will that single plane do as much as 20, 50 or 100 recon planes in the same air zone?

I am not sure how easily 20-100 recon planes over an area the size of say, Northern France would be to spot with early ww2 tech actual. Granted recon was mostly targeted at specific locations irl, so some abstraction is required for the game.

Even then I am not sure if they would be shot down either way, as the remifications of such an attack is questionable at best. Imagine giving the Third Reich a CB against Soviet for shooting down a "civilian" plane flying over USSR territory, a nightmare for most countries at the time

Then again as Podcat said, whether it does or does not makes sense to be able to shoot down recon planes during peacetime is still being ironed out so things might change
 
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Lots of good information in the new diary but I am worried that the cost of Factories in the spy game will cause the loss of growth to other areas of the game without an increase to available slots to regions. How will this be handled and I love the new Recon planes.
 
I think it should be possible to accidentally randomly capture an enemy code-machine. Because that's what happened in real life I think with the German Enigma machine. And probably other ones too.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/20/enigma-code-u-boat-u559-hms-petard-sebag-montefiori

Also, as for scout planes. I think you should also add Flying-Boat planes to the game. The very big ones were Transports like the German BV-222 Wiking and American Hughes H-4 Hercules built by Howard Hughes. The smaller ones however like the American PBY Catalina were used for scouting over water and anti-submarine warfare. Flying Boat planes wouldn't require an airfield - they could land and takeoff on the oceans or lakes or rivers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blohm_&_Voss_BV_222
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_PBY_Catalina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_boat#World_War_II

As for the Intelligence mechanics. In real life a country had multiple Intelligence Agencies - not just one. Each Intelligence Agency had different areas of responsibility. So it would be nice for realistic historical roleplay purposes to be able to have multiple Intelligence Agencies and split up the 5 different Agency Branches categories into whichever ones you want. So for example I could have 3 Intelligence Agencies and 2 of them would have 1 Branch. And the 3rd Agency would have 3 Branches. It wouldn't have any gameplay effect - it would just be for roleplaying purposes.
 
Couldn’t recon planes just as easily been done as an action like last stand or staff planing? It seems like a weird and tiny thing to control in a grand strategy game.
 
Couldn’t recon planes just as easily been done as an action like last stand or staff planing? It seems like a weird and tiny thing to control in a grand strategy game.

I was just thinking this. Did we really need an entire plane type to manage and build for recon? Feels like its bordering on a bother.
 
Every week there's a new dev diary, and every week it has you loudly and rudely complaining in it.

Give it a rest already.

yeah, and he should complain with Stalin about neglect german pre war air scout, not with the devs lolzzz.

"offtopic": Stalin neglecting the intels about imminent German invasion is still one of war's most debated mysteries.