HOI4 - Development Diary - September 2nd 2016

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podcat

Game Director <unannounced>
Paradox Staff
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Jul 23, 2007
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Hi everyone! Friday means its time to give you all a fresh update on Sunflower (1.2 patch) progress! Its starting to come together nicely now, so without further ado, here is what's been happening...

GUI improvements
Managing a lot of divisions training in parallel can get hard to get an overview of so now it’s possible to compact the entries. As an added help we now color training that is blocked by lack of equipment making it much easier to manage your queue size.
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As a minor improvement to support the work on next section naval battle and port strike reports now give a quick summary over damage to survivors as well so you know how much was done in total and naval invasion alerts are more relevant and accurate.

Naval Balance
There has been a bunch of reports about the submarine game not working so well, so this week we fixed bugs and tweaked submarines and convoy raiding. The big bug was that raiders would attack empty routes (supply convoy routes to places with enough local supply, so that they weren't used), this meant that they would be attacking non-existent convoys in a bunch of places rather than real ones making it appear as if it was impossible to catch anything there. General detection was also too low and has been tweaked up. The way sunk convoys affected efficiency of transport also had problems and have been tweaked for much stronger impact now. Starving out islands with a lot of defenders work a lot better now and raiding convoys can be pretty potent!
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The AI’s use of fleets and missions have been improved a lot for Sunflower, but it’s still an area that needs more work to be really competitive with players. It’s something we will put effort into in the future.

General balance-wise we have been working on stuff to promote mixed fleets better and discourage light cruiser spam and lowering the impact of evasion in combat, meanwhile torpedoes have also gotten stronger. It’s going to need some more tweaking before the patch is out, but naval balance is now already much better!

Script update
We feel it is a shame that so many of the Soviet loving players chose to avoid the fiery alternate history path that picks Leon Trotsky. It simply has not made sense from a pure gameplay perspective. We’ve added a focus to address the issue that Trotsky is a much weaker choice than Stalin.

After winning the civil war, a Soviet player will be able to pick the focus ‘Permanent Revolution’, which unlocks parts of the same tree that ‘The Great Purge’ does.
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Once the focus is completed, Trotsky’s trait will change to ‘Triumphant Revolutionary’. This will remove his Political Power penalty and make it much cheaper to help fuel more righteous worker revolutions across the globe.

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”- Trotsky
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The focus trees have long been a source of many weird, funny and frustrating bugs.
The exiled government of Germany would demand Memel from Lithuania, who would then lie down flat and hand over the territory. Countries would welcome their invaders by building infrastructure and factories in the occupied territories. Diplomatic pressure on Turkey would make them a puppet of the exiled Germany. The USA would view a democratic Germany as still being ‘The Fascist Menace’ and jump at the first chance of war with them. Japan would go for war with the USA, despite being pushed back to the islands by the Chinese.

These and many other issues with the National Foci have been addressed in the upcoming patch.

I’ll mention a few of the general changes here:
  • As a general rule foci are blocked when a country has capitulated. We’ve added an option in script to unblock it for when the foci still make sense to complete.
  • Adding buildings via focus should now look for control of the state before building.
  • Blocked some of the foci leading to war if the nation has the same ideology.

At the moment there are some AI issues left to deal with, but if all goes well I hope we can get the Sunflower patch wrapped up during next week, at least as an open beta for public testing. Thanks for being patient!
 
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Oh, and we forgot to mention what is going on with the AI. This week I have been working hard on follow up issues of last week (especially things like encirclement avoidance and AI avoiding overruns, not to mention template design capabilities and scriptability), which means that the AI is progressing steadily towards greateness, or at the very least better...ness...isch.

I am looking forward to get the patch into your hands and see what you think :)
 
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first! Is an oob overhaul coming soon? And any news about the first expansion, stellaris is getting one so the HOI one is in the works, right??????
once the patch is out the door my first diary will be about the future.
 
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After winning the civil war, a Soviet player will be able to pick the focus ‘Permanent Revolution’, which unlocks parts of the same tree that ‘The Great Purge’ does.
Completely unnecessary. The problem with civil war is that you lose half your troops...
 
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Nice!
Have you changed how you could place a single submarine in enemy waters which is impossible to kill and thus trapping their fleet? That's probably one of my biggest annoynances with the current naval system.
 
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What about the feature @Da9L showed of in the latest WWW regarding unassigning divisions from an order? How does this work in details?
When assigning divisions to a frontline which already has an order, i find it frustrating that they also get assigned to the order and (in the current version of the game) cannot be unassigned easily. I guess the feature will solve this, which is f.... great !

This new focus on assigning units to an order, will this also make a division move from one part of the frontline to the place where the order is. Eg. if i have a 50 province frontline and make an order on the 4 provinces most south and assign a division which is in a northern province. Will it then move towards the order in the south (same army, same frontline)

@SteelVolt I also noticed in my game yesterday, that when attacking from a province with all divisions in it. The AI frontline sees this province as emtpy and starts moving divisions from other provinces to this province, which is bad.
 
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What about the feature @Da9L showed of in the latest WWW regarding unassigning divisions from an order? How does this work in details?
When assigning divisions to a frontline which already has an order, i find it frustrating that they also get assigned to the order and (in the current version of the game) cannot be unassigned easily. I guess the feature will solve this, which is f.... great !

oh yeah, I forgot to write about that. It basically just unassigns selected divisions from the order (but keeps them in the group). it has a neato shortcut Ctrl+H so its like the Hold command on steroids. very useful.
 
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Will we be seeing any changes to the China sphere before the end of the year, e.g A white peace if Japan is forced off the mainland or a peace that doesn't involve invading Japan fully?
 
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Cool.
Thank you for giving focus to convoy raiding already. From past DD I had feared that any changes on that regard would not be implemented with sunfower, but had to wait for a later patch. Making Trotzky a viable option is also very appealing. Great! Can't wait to BETA next week. :)

Edit: I also like to improvements for the recruitment GUI. This is helpful in low resolution settings!
 
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oh yeah, I forgot to write about that. It basically just unassigns selected divisions from the order (but keeps them in the group). it has a neato shortcut Ctrl+H so its like the Hold command on steroids. very useful.
By group you mean Frontline? There is already a CTRL + H shortcut in the game the completely removes a division from the Battleplan (but not the army). Has this been scraped? I think i still need to unassign units from a Battleplan without removing them from the army.
 
once the patch is out the door my first diary will be about the future.
It would be nice to give a Field Marshall command of a theater with generals commanding individual armies. Possibly with ways to do plans for entire theaters with sub plans for armies. This would keep the system still relatively simple while also utilizing a deeper OOB system.
 
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And any news about the first expansion, stellaris is getting one so the HOI one is in the works, right??????

Stellaris announced it last week right? HoI4 still was released a month later so I wouldn't be surprised if we will have heard about their DLC/expansion plans within a month from now!
 
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It would be nice to give a Field Marshall command of a theater with generals commanding individual armies. Possibly with ways to do plans for entire theaters with sub plans for armies. This would keep the system still relatively simple while also utilizing a deeper OOB system.
Agree 100%. Field Marshalls should give bonuses to groups of armies.
This said, there's no need to restore hoi3 OOB system, which was a mess.
 
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This DD is much better than the previous one.

About the naval improvements have you sen the behavior of fleets with the automatic split ON ?
The problem is that the split and damaged fleets automatically decide to use fire at will ON, so the weak fleets that must go to the port to be repaired, decide instead engage in suicidal combats.

automatic split ON must be a tool to remove the micro, still this behavior doesn't help.
 
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