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A casement turret means you can put in a gun one size larger - it probably doesn't mean you have to. So just put a super heavy gun in. A casement will probably be cheaper than a turret so it will be one way of saving costs.
You could even do a super heavy chassis with a casement and the smallest light gun possible (or even a machinegun) if you wanted. It would be daft but I doubt anything will stop you.
2 I personally like very large trees in the style of mods because German rework in some issues leaves much to be desired, it feels a bit empty in some branches and I think that both in the last country pack and the Polish rework I love them in general and i hope soviet rework i dont know unless polish rework
Personally disagree, and I'm with not overbloating the tree. In my eyes, the recent push on development has been shifted to making the game and management less interesting while creating more artificial timers with the focus trees. The trees should never have become the main focus of the game, they're too shallow and don't reward playing the game a different way.
Even with the alternate history paths they add in, all you're really doing is changing your country aesthetic and leader, some minor buffs, near same amount of factories, etc. There's not enough game design focus on things like what we're getting with railroads imo, which I LOVE the idea of. Things that actually have to be managed, thought about, and planned going forward. I would love to see an economic overhaul managing production of equipment from resource gathering, to logistics, to factory creation in a more fleshed out manner instead of "Finish focus tree, get free 3 industry factories after 75 days of waiting". Trees just aren't intuitive to me, and have served the game in a less and less interesting manner as time goes on. BFB proved this to me, and from what I could tell others as well. I would love this game more if focus shifted away from the FTs.
A casement turret means you can put in a gun one size larger - it probably doesn't mean you have to. So just put a super heavy gun in. A casement will probably be cheaper than a turret so it will be one way of saving costs.
You could even do a super heavy chassis with a casement and the smallest light gun possible (or even a machinegun) if you wanted. It would be daft but I doubt anything will stop you.
I know, but the question is more what will happen to them, since they seem to be the only SH Tanks in the game without a Turret (i.e the 3D and 2D model).
it is completely possible to make both the German tank destroyers with fixed superstructures and the American ones with turrets and have them go to tank destroyer units.
Been proposing that years ago, I could also go so far as to have men/squad, squad/platoon, Platoons/company etc, with the respective loadout and Organisation. You could play around with a lot of stats and resources according to war Situation, as every country did.
HOI the factorio experience DLC, ’design the shit out off whatever you want and then produce it’. Modules for factories, modules for all.
HOI the haute-coutoure experiense DLC... modules for uniforms.... want to design your uniforms from scratch, how many pockets? and where do you want them pockets? Use the 'camouflage module designer' to really get your creative coloring persona out there.
You go Paradox!!!! You are on the right track....! to alienating the crowd who really love 'Grand Strategy Games'....
HOI5 will probably only be exclusively designed for mobile phones, to really catch the interest of the 'young crowd'...
HOI5 the 'Grand modules game' is just around the corner.... cant wait.
Paradox should in some way think about what kind of micromanagement to add to the game, I still hate that they removed the OOB that we had in HOI3. Microing equipment design doesn't really add to a Grand Strategy Game, but having a OOB actually does... How about priorities Paradox? You are 'complicating' a game in the wrong kind of way.
All I see is hype about no substance that actually adds to the game in the end...
Hello, and welcome back to another DevDiary about content coming in the 1.11 “Barbarossa” patch and its accompanying DLC. As always, keep in mind that the things shown in this DevDiary are still under development, so the numbers and UI might change before release.
Ever since we revealed the ship designer in Man the Guns, people have been asking about a similar system for tanks. We did, however, want to improve a bit on the ship designer. In particular, we felt that the ship designer was encouraging too many generalist designs. Part of the problem is that ships have a very long lead time before they become available, so it is difficult to iterate on the designs in a timely fashion. When your ship takes two years to build, you can’t really specialize it too much, because you can’t always accurately predict the situation in two years.
Thankfully, tanks require a somewhat smaller investment (although our QA certainly has tried to make designs that rival ships in cost), so you see a new tank design in the frontlines much sooner than a new ship, allowing you to react to new situations much faster.
Another thing is that ships usually had trade-offs between different capabilities, in the sense that the space (or module slot) taken up by a torpedo launcher could also be taken up by an AA gun, making the ship better against one or the other type of enemy. But rarely did you want a ship that had no AA or no way to defend itself against surface targets, so you always wanted some AA and some ship attack.
Tanks, on the other hand, don’t usually have trade-offs in the same way. You don’t usually design a tank, wondering if you should put on another AA gun or a second gun against surface targets (unless, of course, you are German and it's 1944).
But Tanks still have trade-offs in their design, and we wanted to represent those. Traditionally, tank design revolves around three aspects: Mobility, Firepower, and Protection. A well-armored tank is slow, a fast tank can’t carry a big gun, and a big gun requires a large tank, which is difficult to armor. During the war, different nations tried different approaches, and learned different lessons from their observations - it is no surprise that the last German tanks of the war were heavily-armored vehicles carrying massive guns, but the first post-war design was the comparatively lightly armored but well-armed and quite nimble Leopard 1.
So we wanted to make you think about these three aspects, and have it be a trade-off between them. However, in a grand strategy game, other aspects also matter more than in the typical comparison of tank designs - the best tank in the world is useless if it breaks down on the way to the battlefield (Panther fans take note), and it is even more useless if you can’t afford it. So we wanted cost and reliability to also matter when designing a tank or armored vehicle.
In contrast to ships, we wanted to make you think more about specializing your designs to fill a certain niche, and optimize it towards a specific role. While you will probably still want to have a somewhat middle-of-the-road design for your main production medium tank (one might call it “the Sherman”), there is a place for more specialized designs as well.
As part of this approach, we will be making changes to the reliability system and the armor system. The details will be forthcoming in a future dev diary (together with other combat changes), but the broad strokes are that reliability will not just affect the rate of attrition, and that the armor system will become less binary. As part of these changes, we also decided to give mechanized equipment some upgrades, so that it can keep up with tanks.
Under the new system, reliability is meant to represent both the likelihood that a given piece of equipment breaks down as well as the likelihood that it suffers catastrophic damage when hit and the effort necessary to repair it. In effect, reliability also represents the carrying capacity of a given chassis, so you effectively have a reliability budget for every chassis to work with. The more armor you put on it, the bigger the weapon etc., the more reliability drops. Heavier or more advanced tank chassis generally have more reliability (over 100% on the base chassis in some cases).
But enough of the basics, let’s talk about what you really want to know: What’s the Kampfwagenkanone Zweiundvierzig in game terms? Is the weird hybrid-electric drive of the Elefant represented? Do we get to set the exact angle of the front armor or just the thickness?
Much like ships, tanks are based on a hull (called a chassis) and a number of modules that define the actual stats of the final design. These modules act a little different from the way the ship designer works. While the main armament is fairly self-evident, other “modules” represent something like “design features”. These features are meant to be distinct enough that even someone who does not have an in-depth understanding of armor development during the war can at least understand that different armor types are good for different things.
Instead of scripting in a gigantic list of armor types with different thickness, armor is represented by a thickness and a production method: Riveted Armor is the cheapest kind, but also the weakest. Cast Armor is the strongest, but also the most expensive.
Welded Armor is a compromise between the two extremes, making it the most cost-efficient (arguments can be made either way between cast and welded armor since welding does require specialized equipment and training).
Armor thickness is changed through something much like the old, vanilla upgrade system, with up to 20 different levels. You start with being able to put up to 5 levels of armor (roughly equivalent to 50 mm of armor) on a tank, but research allows you to put more on. Higher levels of armor protection require more resources, such as steel and eventually chromium. There is no limit to the amount of armor you can put on a chassis as such - if you want to make a light tank with the armor protection of a Tiger, you can (it’s called a Panzer I Ausf. F). The amount of armor upgrades on the vehicle translates to an actual armor value based on the type of armor you have selected, so 5 levels of riveted armor are still weaker than 5 levels of cast armor - but much cheaper.
Engine types are also meant to be simple to understand. Gasoline Engines are faster than Diesels for the same weight, but Diesels are more reliable. Beyond that, Electric hybrid engines are a very situational pick. We originally intended for them to be a joke pick - costly, unreliable, fuel inefficient - but on some further reading, the rationale behind them was that they offered better mobility in broken terrain. In game, this is represented by a small bonus to breakthrough and defense. Finally, there are gas turbines, which are unlocked from jet engine research. They are the fastest engine option, but take up a lot of fuel. Like armor, engines also have an upgrade system where you can set the level of engine power (up to 20). It should be noted that the speed of most historical designs is going to be lower than the stated max speed of the vehicle they are based on. This is because we represent the operational speed of a vehicle, i.e. how far the vehicle can get in 24 hours - tanks don’t drive around all day at maximum speed, they have to stop for refuelling, resting the crew, basic maintenance etc.
Turrets are split between different kinds and are meant to represent things like crew ergonomics. Early in the war, a lot of countries had tanks with one or two-man turrets, and one advantage the Germans had was having a commander who could direct the rest of the crew without also having to service the main gun. This is represented by bonuses to breakthrough with different turrets. A special type is the fixed superstructure. Main guns are differentiated by size (small, medium, large, super-heavy), which correspond roughly with the weight classes of tanks. Light tanks can only carry small weapons etc. - unless they have a fixed superstructure, which enables them to carry guns one size bigger, allowing you to mount a medium gun on a light tank chassis. Having a fixed superstructure also adds bonuses to defense while giving a penalty to breakthrough, making it a good option for vehicles meant to defend.
Suspensions affect mainly reliability and speed. The most basic kind is the Bogie suspension, which adds some reliability, while Christie suspension adds quite a bit of speed. Torsion Bar suspension adds more reliability than Bogies, but is more expensive. Interleaved Roadwheels - as seen on the later German tanks - add some breakthrough, but have reliability problems (the overlapping wheels add some protection and redundancy against fire coming from the side, but are difficult to repair and maintain). Light Chassis can also select wheeled and half-track suspensions, which make the vehicle itself quite a bit cheaper, but also drop reliability.
The main weapon has probably the biggest impact on the offensive stats of the vehicle. There are a lot of different options to choose from, but we have tried to give every weapon type it’s own niche, with realistic drawbacks and advantages, so for example the High-velocity tank guns (like the KwK 42 or the American 76mm) have worse soft attack but very good piercing and hard attack, while howitzers have very poor hard attack and piercing, but spectacular soft attack. This means that for example the early German tanks do struggle a bit against the French, which have pretty heavy armor (but suffer in other regards, mostly because of their one-man turrets).
A full list is included in the spoiler tag:
Weapon
Size
Unlock
HMG
Small
Basic Infantry equipment
Autocannon I
Small
AA Gun I
Autocannon II
Small
AA II
Small Cannon I
Small
GW Artillery
Small Cannon II
Small
Interwar Artillery
Close Support Gun
Small
Interwar Artillery
Medium Cannon I
Medium
Artillery II+ OR AT Upgrade
Medium Cannon II
Medium
Artillery Upgrade OR AT Upgrade
High-Velocity Cannon I
Small
AT Gun I
High-Velocity Cannon II
Medium
AT Gun II
High-Velocity Cannon III
Heavy
AT Gun III
AA Gun I
Small
AA Gun I
AA Gun II
Medium
AA Gun II
AA Gun III
Medium
AA Gun III
Medium Howitzer I
Medium
Interwar Artillery
Medium Howitzer II
Medium
Artillery II
Heavy Howitzer
Heavy
Artillery III
Rocket Launcher I
Medium
Rocket Artillery I
Rocket Launcher II
Medium
Rocket Artillery II
Heavy Cannon I
Heavy
AT Gun I OR AA Gun I
Heavy Cannon II
Heavy
AT Gun II OR AA Gun II
Heavy Cannon III
Heavy
AT Gun III OR AA Gun III
Super-Heavy Cannon
Super-Heavy
Super-Heavy Chassis
As you can see, we made an effort to not have a giant tech tree this time. The tech tree for the new chassis is about the same size as the old armor tech tree, and the other modules are unlocked primarily through the artillery tab.
Finally, every chassis has 4 slots for “Special Modules”. These can include radios, which give bonuses to breakthrough and defense; secondary turrets for all your T-35 needs; smoke launchers; extra ammunition storage and wet ammo storage. Deciding whether or not a tank uses sloped armor also happens in this area. Perhaps most intriguing is the Amphibious Drive, which allows you to designate a design as an amphibious tank for the purpose of amphibious tank battalions (MtG owners only).
Designating designs for certain roles ensures that they are used in those subunits. Some roles require certain characteristics - for example, you can’t have an AA tank that uses a fixed superstructure. But it is completely possible to make both the German tank destroyers with fixed superstructures and the American ones with turrets and have them go to tank destroyer units. The weight class of the chassis determines the weight class of the final design, so a design on the heavy chassis that is designated as a tank destroyer is treated as a heavy tank destroyer. This also means we can represent vehicles that changed roles during the war more easily, so you can have your StuG III equivalent with a high-soft attack gun go to your armored artillery battalions in the early war, but then switch out the gun to something with better piercing and have it work as a tank destroyer afterwards.
Since we want you to optimize designs for different purposes, we also wanted to make sure that you can easily decide where a certain tank design ends up. So for example, you can follow the British approach of having fast cruiser tanks to use in armored divisions, and slower infantry tanks that go to support your infantry divisions. To do this, you tag a design with a symbol. You can then quickly select from a list of symbols in the division designer to make the division only pull equipment tagged as such. Equipment that isn’t tagged (such as lend-lease and captured foreign equipment, or equipment not tagged at all) will still be used for divisions that don’t have a specific tag requirement set.
We also took another look at what automation features were necessary for people who don’t want to spend a lot of time fine-tuning their tank designs (weird and alien though that thought may be to most of us). We do, of course, have the usual auto-design functionality. It takes the design the AI would use and offers it for approval. This has gotten some love, and there should now be some national flavor in how the AI designs its tanks. It also takes the overall situation into account, so tanks will be up-armored during the war and so on. Beyond that, we also have added an auto-upgrade function, which keeps a given design current as you research new guns, chassis etc. You can either click on a design you made in the past and upgrade it with a single click to the newest components (so a Radio I becomes a Radio II etc.), or click a checkbox to do so automatically. You don't have to pay XP for an automatic design upgrade, but you won't get thicker armor or a better engine that way. Still, we think that the combination of auto-design and auto-upgrade allows players to interact with the system as much or as little as they like. View attachment 710383
To make the tank designs more visually distinct in the production view, we have added about 1000 new 2d icons to use for them, mostly stemming from combining parts of existing tanks in new ways (the gun of Tank A with the turret of Tank B etc.). The historical icons are, of course, still available. You can select the icon while making the design, as well as the 3d asset used to represent the vehicle on the map.
That’s all from us today for this feature. Before closing, I would like to note a few things on the subject of giving feedback. When I first started at Paradox, the direct line between community and developers was a major plus for me, because I liked the idea of talking to the community without having to run every post past three different marketing departments first. However, this kind of direct community access comes at a heavy cost for us. As many of you have noticed, we have gotten a little sparse in these forums in the last few months, or even years. The reason for this is that often we do face a debate culture that is not enjoyable to take part in, where it is taken as a given that the devs are either lazy or incompetent and where everything we do is viewed through that lens. Not only is it incredibly demoralizing to spend months of your life creating something, only to see the people you made it for tear it to shreds, it is also a debate that gives no one anything. We aren’t paid to wade through pages of abuse to find a few nuggets of useful feedback, and so that feedback is not acted on. A lot of you have access to sources in languages we don’t speak or have studied some detail that we weren’t aware of. Such feedback is very useful - just a few weeks ago someone sent me a plan of the Turkish railways in 1936 taken from an old Turkish book, so I was able to use that to update the Turkish railway setup at game start.
We’re not looking for fawning adoration (although we will certainly accept it) or a forum in which our decisions can’t be discussed with a critical eye. We want to have your feedback, but there is no point to it if it can’t be delivered with a minimum of respect for each other. If you want to have a forum where developers are willing to go and answer your questions, then it is also your responsibility to build a place where we feel welcome, and where we can disagree in a productive and professional manner. It costs you nothing to assume that we were acting in good faith. None of us wake up in the morning and go to work in order to do a bad job.
Extra Secret Spoiler: here are some tank designs QA has made over the past few months while we were developing this. Please note that the numbers on the screenshots are several versions out of date and that the issues pointed out in these shots have been fixed since then.
View attachment 710391
Why use an engine when you have free continental drift to take you to the enemy?
If the doctrine tree was a bit different, yes. Right now, I cannot make out the point were the German army reduced the infantry squad from 12 to 10, later 9, and went with only 8 for late war Panzergrenadiere. Or how the mobile units get 2 lMG per squad and how that affects their stats.
Or that the decision to have more MG in the Battalion increases Equipment cost.
It's not urgent or game breaking, but I would like to react to manpower shortages by reducing squad size.
HOI the factorio experience DLC, ’design the shit out off whatever you want and then produce it’. Modules for factories, modules for all.
HOI the haute-coutoure experiense DLC... modules for uniforms.... want to design your uniforms from scratch, how many pockets? and where do you want them pockets? Use the 'camouflage module designer' to really get your creative coloring persona out there.
You go Paradox!!!! You are on the right track....! to alienating the crowd who really love 'Grand Strategy Games'....
HOI5 will probably only be exclusively designed for mobile phones, to really catch the interest of the 'young crowd'...
HOI5 the 'Grand modules game' is just around the corner.... cant wait.
Paradox should in some way think about what kind of micromanagement to add to the game, I still hate that they removed the OOB that we had in HOI3. Microing equipment design doesn't really add to a Grand Strategy Game, but having a OOB actually does... How about priorities Paradox? You are 'complicating' a game in the wrong kind of way.
All I see is hype about no substance that actually adds to the game in the end...
Ship, Tank or Plane designers have no place at all in a Grand Strategy Game. Looking historically if a tank was designed with feature X or Y mattered mainly in the individual combat squad level, less on a tactical level, almost nothing on a strategic level certainly did not matter at all on a GRAND strategical level.
Only delusional, megalomaniac or severely drugged leaders of a nation would meddle in actual design of equipment for these reasons. Is it fun to design a tank/ship/whatever? Maybe... but it is part of the development of HoI4 which is changing the games direction firmly away from a Grand strategy game and towards an ahistorical sandbox playground in a WW2 setting.
It would make much more sense to add features and detail to the things the leader did care about like if the nations shipbuilding industries could produce the 10000 landing craft needed for the invasion. To give a historical example of scale USA produced well over 100 times the Industrial cost of Battleships worth of civilian and invasion shipping during the war and Japan/Axis lost to a large part because they couldn't manage to do the same.
With a proper naval logistical system tied into airpower and balanced sub raiding the Pacific island hopping campaign and the defining actions of the entire Japanese/USA struggle in the war wouldn't be a joke that 99.9% of all players just skip because there is no point at all in doing it.
Although in the theme of this next patch / expansion probably it would make more sense to focus a bit more on Lend Lease mechanics like fixing the broken fuel LL that allows magical and instant teleportation of as much fuel as you can produce across the Atlantic and Pacific alike by just using the "once" option.
Looking historically if a tank was designed with feature X or Y mattered mainly in the individual combat squad level, less on a tactical level, almost nothing on a strategic level certainly did not matter at all on a GRAND strategical level.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if we are going to go by "historically how tanks are designed with x or y feature" that it becomes the strategic level once doctrine and logistics come into it?
Been proposing that years ago, I could also go so far as to have men/squad, squad/platoon, Platoons/company etc, with the respective loadout and Organisation. You could play around with a lot of stats and resources according to war Situation, as every country did.
The main argument against this is that it doesn't add anything the division manager can't do. It doesn't matter if you add AT at a platoon level or division level, it's the same trade offs involved.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if we are going to go by "historically how tanks are designed with x or y feature" that it becomes the strategic level once doctrine and logistics come into it?
Perhaps in a few ways but in that case we would need the ability to design after considerations such as the Sherman's smaller size to make it easier to transport overseas as cranes had weight limits to be taken into account in the designer as well, and nothing that I have seen in the DD so for has given me the impression that such strategic/logistic considerations have much importance.
When it comes to doctrine my impression is that this is more about how the Army can use the equipment it currently has available to best effect. There is some commonality but that is on a higher level like the US decision to use tank destroyers as the main weapon to knock out tanks with instead of their own tanks, and we already can do that without a designer through the variant system ( by building more TDs and upgrading their guns instead of the guns of the tanks to increase piercing that way ).
Perhaps in a few ways but in that case we would need the ability to design after considerations such as the Sherman's smaller size to make it easier to transport overseas as cranes had weight limits to be taken into account in the designer as well, and nothing that I have seen in the DD so for has given me the impression that such strategic/logistic considerations have much importance.
When it comes to doctrine my impression is that this is more about how the Army can use the equipment it currently has available to best effect. There is some commonality but that is on a higher level like the US decision to use tank destroyers as the main weapon to knock out tanks with instead of their own tanks, and we already could do that without a designer through the variant system ( by building more TDs and upgrading their guns instead of the guns of the tanks to increase piercing that way ).
Logistics is more to do that just whether or not ports can handle of the weight of xxx, being able to produce tanks in your factories and the ability to transport them all come under logistics.
Doctrine also comes into design as well, i.e the new tank designer and current ship designer, sure there are and will be meta loadouts, but you should be able to RP with it.
AFV designer? Or is the term too unknown for the casual audience? Could also go for armoured vehicle designer or just armour designer, since "armour" also means armoured vehicles. Though again maybe the latter could be confusing to the general public.
but I took the bite out of some of the historically more questionable calls. Germany for example will not be invading Russia with a fleet of Panzer IVs with 30 mm of frontal armor to go up against T34s. That would be suicide.
That's a shame. IRL the Germans overcame this issue with good coordination. I'd much rather that be represented instead, but I guess it's something that's difficult to get right.
Would certainly be possible, but maybe a little excessive, and the tanks wouldn't be interchangable. I'll put it on the wishlist and discuss with the design team.
Second thing: welding and Casting armour would require something like improved...machine...tools or something. Will these armour types be restricted through research?
Monetary cost is not the only factor in determining production cost. Like I said, there are arguments to be made for either interpretation. Riveting for example is cheap in countries with a developed naval industry, because it doesn't require very skilled labor and if you are already producing rivets in the millions to build ships, using them for tanks is pretty cheap. Casting requires you to have heavy industry capable of producing the casts at the scale necessary for mass production (but of you do, it is pretty cheap, yes). Welding was the new thing in the 30ies, required specialized equipment as well as training, and in some countries there was resistance from trade unions for example because a single welder could replace several riveters.
Real-life limitations are a concern to me and I am glad they've been brought up. I think they should be represented at least to a degree. Some may laugh now at the puny tanks and tankettes of the 1930s, but there were real limitations in place at the time which made the designs be what they were, and they weren't just doctrinal, they were industrial as well.
