HoI4 DevDiary - Tank Designer
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During world war II the Russians, and later the Germans, made their tank engines out of aluminium to save on weight, resulting in faster tanks then their contemporaries, but required the use of large amounts of aluminium which could have been used up in other projects, i.e. aircraft. Will this be modelled in game in any way, for example, higher engine classes requiring the aluminium resource?
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Good points. Engineer companies also already have terrain bonuses as well, so perhaps an armored engineer company would make more sense.
My point was primarily that it seems like using amphibious tanks as a proof of concept would help manage the workload that @Archangel85 mentioned in the dev diary, since amphibious tanks already show how a specialized type of tank can be applied to a specialized battalion and thereby grant terrain bonuses. Plus, they've had to already figure out a way to make amphibious tanks compatible with the new tank designer, so using that same concept for flame tanks should work.
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Why not? We have already motorized ART/AT/AA whit the designer whe can make mechanized too
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that is actually a very good point to discuss. hungarian tank production was divided into 4 workshops, and i call them workshops for a reason. They often didn t even produce a tank a week, and had no real production lines. The tanks they produced: toldi from 39-40, was a swedish l-60 slightly modified, welded!, with advanced optics, and equipped with radios. for 39-40 tanks, they were actually really good, but after that not so much. turáns were riveted, modifications of lt 35 (t21) skoda tank, produced from 40. zrínyi 1 assault guns were actually an indigenous riveted design, designed at weiss manfréd factory, csepel. the last tank the tas, only existed as protoype, was an indigenous design too, inspired by panther, welded and designed at weiss manfréd. So basically hungary had one "normal" tank production factory, the wm, and that's it, the others were more like workshops.
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Of course you have a point and basically you are right, problem is the following one:
You say yourself: Country leader can give the direction of what should be researched, that was BTW always possible in HOI series. Let's now say you want to research better tank guns. How that should now translate into a tank?
The results, when you for example see "medium tank XIVb" popping up, might be completely immersion breaking. How you make sure you only see historical design if you want that?
Let's take the previous system, where you cannot develop single components. Everybody ends up having the same tank, also immersion breaking. So for immersion's sake it's rather an improvement to have the designer.
Anyway I don't see myself in the position of a country leader when I play HOI. I mean the country leader can change over the course of a game. It's more like being a disabstracted entity of the country itself, difficult to describe. Seeing it lile this, also makes you feel better when you e.g. select traits for a general.
One thing I am looking forward too is the possibility of having M7 Priests with 105mm Howitzers and 90mm guns in the same battalion.
Why so many players here want to make tons of completely specialized types of tanks and then put them into one generic battalion?
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Well, you know that very badly!Have you heard of Nicholas Straussler's tanks and the AC series armored cars he designed?Both were manufactured and developed in Hungary with the consent of the English government, specifically for English exports.
Straussler tanks
V-4
The V-3 prototype was completed in 1936 and successfully crossed the Danube on 18 August 1936,you can also see a picture of this on the first link (yes, the V-3/4 is an amphibian in armor).
Csaba armoured car:
Csaba
the first mass-produced Hungarian armor:
Toldi
Turán
40M Turán
Production was delayed due to the redesign of the original Skoda T-21 and the construction of the corresponding production lines. But after all the necessary conditions were created for production (construction of production lines, purchase of tools, training of workers), the production of vehicles went to an extremely high standard in terms of mass production.
As for the armored construction experience of the Hungarians, even a fairly modern heavy tank was designed.
Tas
Yes, they really started from scratch and were nevertheless able to build a high quality military industry. Plus, if you look at which countries were able to mass-produce tanks at the time, you'll be amazed. Apart from the great powers, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, if we look only at Europe.
But you know what's right. Instead, look at how many hours of work the riveted armor costs more compared to the welded armor?
Making riveted armor is extremely labor-intensive compared to the other two, which is a fact and it doesn't matter what kind of foot we look at.
I'm sorry but you're wrong about that.
MÁVAG, Ganz Works, Magyar Vagon és Gépgyár ( or RÁBA ) they are all major industrial enterprise, and not workshops. In addition, each of them has built up a production line for the production of armored vehicles. When concluding the production contract, it was a serious criterion to build all this, which was met by all four factories (including WM).
MAVÁG
Ganz
RÁBA
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I think it would be more like a panzer 1 body mounted on top of a maus turret; the other way around and something goes splat.
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On the issue of armour types and costs, there's a few other things that I'm not sure have been mentioned yet.
Riveted or bolted armour does require a lot more man-hours to build a tank, but those man-hours are cheap. It's quick to train people to be riveters, and there'd already be a substantial labour force that knew how to rivet things, because it was a method used in a great many industries, especially railway engineering. A lot of tanks were built by locomotive works, because they had the workforce there already. Riveted vehicles would tend towards a boxy shape.
Welding was a relatively new method, and while it used less man-hours overall, those man-hours were more expensive, as individual skill was a lot more important than it was for riveting. Welded vehicles would be less boxy than riveted ones.
Casting things was expensive, and required a high industrial technology level, to make a casting that would have consistent properties. It could produce a lot of shapes that were hard to do any other way - curves and rounded forms could be easily cast, whereas they were difficult to do in other ways. Cast tanks would be more likely to have rounded shapes.
But I'm not sure you could model this in HOI4, not without including riveting/welding/casting as strategic resources, because IC cost alone is insufficient, I feel.
Riveted or bolted armour does require a lot more man-hours to build a tank, but those man-hours are cheap. It's quick to train people to be riveters, and there'd already be a substantial labour force that knew how to rivet things, because it was a method used in a great many industries, especially railway engineering. A lot of tanks were built by locomotive works, because they had the workforce there already. Riveted vehicles would tend towards a boxy shape.
Welding was a relatively new method, and while it used less man-hours overall, those man-hours were more expensive, as individual skill was a lot more important than it was for riveting. Welded vehicles would be less boxy than riveted ones.
Casting things was expensive, and required a high industrial technology level, to make a casting that would have consistent properties. It could produce a lot of shapes that were hard to do any other way - curves and rounded forms could be easily cast, whereas they were difficult to do in other ways. Cast tanks would be more likely to have rounded shapes.
But I'm not sure you could model this in HOI4, not without including riveting/welding/casting as strategic resources, because IC cost alone is insufficient, I feel.
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You could a) use tech as a threshold or b) some abstract "industrialization level" (eg, average infrastructure, factory count etc) to determine which methods are available to a given Economy.
@Archangel85 would be nice if we could chose hull and turret with different methods, like Porsche King Tiger. Wouldn't bother with stats, really, but for cosmetics?
Major on hungarian scale. nowhere near the possibilities of the russian tank factories, many of them individually being able to develop tanks, while clearly only the wm could do this in hungary. And nowhere near the advanced production lines of russian or other western tank factories, like the nibelungwerk in austria.
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A few weeks ago a Dev mentioned sth about EA and Red Alert in a reply. With the tank designer now, can we design the Apocalypse tank? Or Tesla tank? Prism tank? Asking for two friends.
Cannot wait to play Poland with wings attached to horses!
Agreed. Mid-construction changes should be possible (only reset if it changes the hull). Like, the Japanese did convert their would-be battleships into carriers a few times there, and the final one was definitely mid-construction.
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The limit is whatever enough players are still willing to put up with, which seems to be quite a lot. From the first dev diary:
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People like the customization because it's fun. At the end of the day it's a game meant to provide entertainment and I for sure am one of the people that gets entertainment out of customization.
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@Archangel85
I am very excited for this update and expansion! I love the game, have had much fun and the work you and your team are doing is just incredible.
I'm sorry you've felt so drained by the trolls and the fans, I think everyone that complains should be required to be a DM for a week to understand and appreciate the creative process.
I also really appreciate you taking the time to be so candid with us and explain what you guys are doing.
Every game has glitches and screw ups, but I know you guys are working your butts off and I love this game.
Thank you kindly and looking forward to the release date! (It's tomorrow, right /jk)
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You have to remember the people who read and comment on dev diaries are usually the players most invested in the game. This means a very significant portion of the people you've seen comment here are in the top 20% of players, maybe even the top 15%. Of course the players who are best at the game will want generally want more complexity, but we aren't most players and Paradox knows this.
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Speaking only for myself, it's that I like to "personalize" my forces, and build a strategy around a force I've created myself. It's one of the reasons I haven't quite gotten into War in the East, to be honest. Just being handed a force and OOB by the game feels a lot less personal. I don't know if I'll spend too much time with the tank designer, and I never spent too much time making tank variants, but it's fun to make ship designs in MtG, so who knows.
As for one generic battalion, the division designer allows you to fine-tune what vehicles and equipment to allow in each division template.
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