Played five or so hours now, and here are some impressions/things noticed. General impression is a substantial improvement from 1.1, so congratulations and thanks to the team
. There's no doubt the game is more enjoyable, which is probably the best yardstick to measure it on. That said, there's still plenty to do, but can't have you all getting bored eh?
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Playing as UK, no mods. No observer mode, but some tag switching while paused to look at what was going on.
- Still getting convoy ‘battles’ with no attackers and no damage done (at least, according to the battle results – screenshot taken). All involved aircraft so far.
- Template updating is much, much, much better. I'm not convinced 20 width should be the target, but the mechanic looks to be working hugely better. The templates are better, and the AI uses them. Great work
. There was still the odd wrinkle (in Feb '39, FRA had made better light tank divs (with another support battalion), but was sticking with an older light tank div that was identical except for lacking support AA, despite having 300 AA in stockpile - I checked every french tank battalion, and they were all with the inferior model - they did swap out for a better INF template on a large scale though).
- GER isn’t building any SS (and hasn’t deployed any of its fleets). It’s possible to write an ai_strategy that encourages GER sub building (on top of the buff for trade interdiction, which isn’t strong enough to get sub building happening given the current hardcoded side of the way the game selects what to build), although I'm not sure what's needed to encourage them to use them.
- Convoy battles are happening, and a lot, but the two I’ve watched so far were stackwipes (whereas even unescorted convoys that got hammered usually had a few ships escape). There were some escorted convoy battles that worked out better, but still seemed a bit brutal. AI still doesn't path its convoys very well though - plenty of axis convoys sailing unescorted up the English channel and off the coast of Spain.
- Winter war didn’t end up with Finland in the Axis or Allies and Italy didn't get involved in the war in France right away, which worked very well
. Japan did jump in early though, which I don't mind in general, but is probably a bit out of place in historical mode, particularly as they were struggling in China.
- GER likes tanks. They really like tanks! Maybe a tiny bit more than necessary. They do effectively switch to medium armour, and are making good templates for it, but the ratio of armoured to other divs is far, far higher than historically. Didn't see a lot of Motorised divs either (why ride in a truck when you can ride in a tank?
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- FRA still a civilian economy three months after war started.
- GER aggressively contested skies of Benelux and Western Germany, but nary a Luftwaffe aircraft in sight over Northern France once the advance reached that point. Instead, they’ve largely gone to the Adriatic (in force!) and the Central and Eastern Med – not entirely sure why, Italy not in the war yet. Then, a little while later, they all went off to Asia in a similar fashion to Tom's post relating to it above. I know it's not something that this patch is trying to address, but it's not something I can recall seeing before either (although I wasn't looking for it).
- Fleets still maintain an action and don’t disengage until they're at rather ahistorical/implausible odds – for example, 1 CV, 3 CA and 4 CL kept plugging away at 2 CV, 1 BC, 5 CA, 2 BB, 13 DD and 7 CL. It ended about as well as you'd expect. The naval game is going to be ahistorically abrupt if every outnumbered fleet dutifully engages and gets destroyed. Assuming the patch hasn't changed them, there are defines that can be changed to make fleets far more survivable (and also succeed in getting smaller fleets to engage with parts of larger fleets and actually do more damage than they take, if they get lucky - which did happen historically but I've never seen in vanilla). Potski mentioned looking at tom_jones' mod - they're the kind of things I'm talking about. Deffo only look at if that's the way you want to go.
- Skull and crossbones symbol for naval invasions stands out well, and is useful. Would be even more useful if it fired at the start of combat, rather than just before, but a big step forward. Actual invasion repeats a lot (10+ times, 1 div vs Hong Kong, repeatedly failing), and the alert isn’t always followed by an invasion (and I’m playing slowly, so it’s unlikely I’m missing them, and I would have had to miss quite a few for there to be an actual invasion every time).
- Africa much, much better. Whatever you did worked a heap
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- The base speed of 1940 DDs is a bit quick at nearly 38 knots! There were a number of 1940-level classes with speeds of 35 knots, and none that can go as fast as a the 43 knots for 1940 DD with 5 points on speed - if not a balance thing, might be worth toning down a little. Haven't looked at the rest of the naval stats, just noticed that when I was doing a variant. Will give them a good look over the next few days.
- Japan successfully invaded New Zealand! Great to see and a resounding success for Japan's ability to invade things. Would have been handy to have some kind of notification though, only found out when they capitulated, and with combat in Europe, Africa, the Med and more than a few oceans, it's a bit much being expected to scroll down to NZ every week or two to check they haven't been invaded yet. The AI being better at naval invasions (and more capable in general) does highlight the UI's limitations a bit more.
Looking forward to playing some more, it's great seeing the game's AI improving over time
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There's no real evidence to support giving them special design companies - it was airpower that made the Med so dangerous for the Commonwealth navies (although German aircraft were more effective than Italian). That said, giving Italy (and France) a few special design companies so they're on par with the RN is a sensible thing to do. Italy's naval strengths were long range gunnery and speed, if that helps? German submarines and surface raiders in the Atlantic (and some in the Indian Ocean, if the mechanics can cope) should also make the RN have to spread out a bit more, limiting their capacity to concentrate in the Med.
Also worth keeping in mind that with the current limitations with convoy pathing, if ITA did get on top in the Med, ENG would be in a world of hurt if it kept sending its convoys through (I'll try and remember to play an ITA game and see if it responds to getting its convoys sunk).
Cheers for the info
. I did delete a bunch of stuff from there (the key stuff I thought), but being brutal (so brutal I almost deleted the last couple of days of my mod work by mistake, but thanks be for prompts for administrator rights!) and getting rid of everything still doesn't work (I still appreciate the suggestion though, it was a good one).
@potski - in case still interested - basically I deleted all of the Steam files, and deleted the local HoI4 folder (in my documents), and it still thinks I have a modded game/edited save (when trying to start a new game without a save, with no mods enabled, from a completely clean install). It's no biggy at my end, but it sounds like something that's not working that should be.
