"Red Ball Express" (1.1 Patch) Released! [checksum: 5d33]

[jpinard]

Have a nice vacation Podcat and team!

 

[Harfyn]

Thanks for releasing the game- that was definitely nice of you guys. But you should have just called it early access or a beta, especially if you were planning on leaving it broken in several major ways and unsupported for five weeks right after release for a Swedish summer vacation. You obviously had to rush the release of the game to get it out in time to even get one patch onto the game before your relaxing getaway. Oh well! I already bought the game so what does it matter at this point? I guess I can leave a steam review and say not to buy until the Christmas sale. And I do have confidence you will make the game great in a year or two, but right now you gotta know it's not in a good spot. Good for some mindless fun staring at a world map but nowhere near grand strategy, or a WW2 Sim.

 

[Phocks7]

Spoiler: Click for details

"Red Ball Express" (1.1 patch) is now ready, check out the patch notes if you want to see details on what has changed:

Patchlog:

Spoiler: Click for details

Features
- It is now possible to set a command group to execute orders in different manners: carefully, balanced, and rush.
- Added achievements indicator in game setup telling you if you can get achievements or not
- Now possible to start from scratch with an empty division template by selecting New in the designer drop down


AI
- Tweaked deployment AI to not get crippled when their armies are taking damage.
- Air mission AI is better at prioritizing the most important regions in stead of getting stuck in local optima of groups of regions.
- Tweaked down AI desire for motorized a bit.
- Added scriptable AI strategy to tweak factory assignment to equipment types and SIGNIFICANTLY boosted fighter production.
- Tweaked up AI production balance for infantry equipment.
- Tweaked guarantee desire to go down the more enemies a country has. Should keep Allies from going guarantee crazy while in wars.
- Added a define for min steps for unit controller to strategically redeploy to front location and boosted it from 4 to 8 to reduce lots of small redeployments along fronts.
- Made AI capable of determining if a template was created by them or not. Germany should no longer replace their divisions with templates from Austria.
- Tweaked area defense and pocket handling AI to be better at handling coastal defense.
- Tied countries naval base IC fraction to their naval AI focus, primarily meaning Germany will not be building as many of them, at least initially.
- Improved unitcontrollers capability to recognize when units should join as support in a combat (effects both player and AI).
- The AI now launches naval invasions against the same enemy area at the same time rather than separately.
- Tweaked AI template designing
- Having a common enemy will now make AI very accepting to granting and accepting military access as long as both are democracies.
- Neutral countries now consider guarantees when deciding on which faction it would rather join.
- AI is now properly checking if having common enemy when looking at asking for and granting military access, and is also more eager to do
- Soviet and Germany should no longer bail from the Unholy alliance as soon as they can
- AI containment score no longer goes massively negative if a major is farther away than germany meaning Allies can guarantee vs soviet aggression if they are worse than Germany
- Made non-core states count as half compared to core states when deciding on number of units for area defense.
- Added Women in Aviation to historical focus list for soviet
- Moved Claims in Baltic up the historical focus list for soviet
- Improved AI naval deployment to strategic regions
- Tweaked front assignment AI. Should mean AI is better at multi front wars.
- Further tweaks to AI front assignment to attempt to reduce bad stuff happening in multi front wars.
- Further tweaked the AI front balancing, and made sure France does not completely mess up their Italian front and Germany pushes hard against Poland when war breaks out
- AI should now be able to respond to naval invasions with naval bombers
- Made sure fascist majors are much more likely to go for war economy
- Polish AI will no longer randomly change its ideology by picking ministers
- AI should no longer use garrison divisions as infantry.
- Changed trigger condition for UK focus Benelux Intervention to require a bit more fascist/communist support, preventing the AI from taking it immediately.
- Naval AI will now deploy all its fleets (previously it would generally deploy less than 1/3 of all its ships). AI will now split fleets it cannot find a mission for, allowing it to spread them out better
- AI is now able to set naval bombers to try to prevent others from sending reinforcements over water.
- Tweaked AI down prio of non war/dangerous fronts.
- AI will no longer guarantee against leaders of other naughty factions (like soviet) if there is a much much worse faction around doing bad stuff (Axis)
- AI nations will no longer spam you with requests for military access at game start and nations who would rather occupy someone than liberate wont ask for military access
- AI can now feed puppets/liberated/change government countries with states in peace conferences giving much saner outcomes
- Made sure unitcontroller does not interfere with retreating units.
- German 1939 OOB now lists the good armor template last so ai will prefer it
- Made sure that template design AI puts a motorized together with armored when making new templates.
- Made AI look more at fitness when picking template for designing, upgrading and deployment.
- Improved how AI calculates which is a garrison template (making it pick the proper one as infantry.)
- ai now avoids putting nations that have very small bottleneck borders as main enemy
- ai now prioritize fighters and medium armor more for research
- Countries at war are no longer automatically assuming war will happen with non neutral neighbors (the Germany putting everyone against Soviet thing.)
- ai no longer retains main enemies who have already gotten wiped out
- Germany no longer goes justification crazy on south america
- Romania and Yugoslav small armor templates on start no longer deathtraps for AI
- AI should no longer ping-pong between trade laws in edge case
- US AI now a lot more hesitant to join factions due to threat
- fixed add_ai_strategy effect and added strategies where countries are added in faction from event or focus
- AI will now prioritize better economic laws a lot more
- Fixed typo in polish AI focus

UI
- Division designer difference indicators now have tooltips showing how much
- Added open air base button to the air mission entry
- Now shift+click on the category in the production will make visible only that category
- Interface tweaks so long texts in other languages does fit in several places
- Added buttons for airwing limit to make easier to adjust values in big steps
- Now navy commander can now also be assigned while fleet is not in the port
- Added tooltip and toggling icon to indicate if current settings let you unlock achievements
- You can now merge fleets that are not in the same location, the merging fleet will then travel to its merge target and then merge with it.
- Now it is possible to assign airplanes to a mission area before the arrive to the new base
- Division template window has now better tooltips for equipment, manpower, training time.
- Clarified "no trading while fighting"-tooltip
- Added yellow highlight to deployment date for units
- Changed string format for convoys in topbar to prevent overflow
- Opinion in interface will now also return a value capped between min and max values
- removed useless decimals in logistics screen
- Logistics screen now show 1 decimal when over 1k
- Intel viewing of airplanes don't show fantasy numbers anymore
- Now air base icons shown non empty only if there are players air wings

Bugfixes
- Fixed issue when sometimes frontlines was not updated after occupation.
- Now Nation A liberates Nation B if Nation B is friend or giving military access to Nation A, otherwise occupies
- Fixing quiting to menu achivement bug
- Fixed some focus that couldnt be aborted
- Fixed issue where it was impossible to do naval transfers where you have the theatres. Also player couldn't RMB on some naval ports but the systems allowed for the transportation (GUI issue).
- Building cosntruction triggers checked for owned state/province. Now checks for controlled instead
- Added on_action to the add_to_faction effect which should fix lack of achivements for faction joining
- Modified flags for Holland
- Fixed so equipment cost list doesn´t cut of 11th entry in div designer
- Efficiency retention techs now actually help (no efficiency loss at max all techs now!)
- Fixed spelling error in FRA, BRAZ for "Ottowa"-class ship
- Intel overview of nation now also lists airplanes in stockpile
- The political advisor type "Ideological Crusader", which are supposed to increase same ideology opinion with 20%, now has an effect.
- Added custom trigger description depending on type of idea for better tooltips
- Border occupation now account situations when you attack trough the country which is from the same war, but not in the same faction, plus border flip afterwards also account for countries from the same war.
- The game option "Pause on Notifications" now also pauses NF/research.
- Proper data cleanup when kicked, banned, connection lost, server lost.
- Fixed glitch in the front sections calculations, causing sometimes the fronts to be split/malformed.
- Skybox is no longer visible when you toggle UI off
- Changed font on animated map text so it show cryllic and polish characters
- Fixed fighter icon for polish dlc
- Fixed text on Mod tools button in launcher that didn't fit in Spanish
- Kick and ban buttons in mp lobby should now be aligned (important!)
- Maldives now looks a tad better, changed the heightmap, made some of the islands smaller and nudged unit positions
- Fixed script error in Pearl Harbor Gambit focus
- Carrier deck size now matches everywhere.
- No longer allowed to declare war on someone you are fighting a war together with.
- Convoy count in topbar now can show 5 digits
- Fixed Issue where long air region names goes out of dedicated area
- Added triggers to block multiple news event options
- Fixed issue when take all states action did not changed the price when other country puppet the loser
- Drawing offensive orders now takes better choice which def.line to attach the arrow to.
- Added ability to disable debug saves and made them turned off as default
- Added bypass to Pearl Harbor gambit focus for USA
- Fixed malformed frontlines against master/puppet for countries being in faction with the master.
- Disabled the system_debug.log when not running with "-debug" launch option.
- Fixed pausing of the game on the fullscreen
- Patched mysterious issue when airbase was lost and the air wings still remained in void space. Now they are send back to the warehouse.
- Fix for flickering airbase icon in the airbase view
- Nations who are done in a peace deal will no longer give remaining points to anyone in faction, just people with same ideology
- Parts of unit map icons will no longer "trap" the zoom-in with mouse
- Fixed artillery starting with 0 defense
- Now peaceconference saves will happen only with -debug while start up
- Now occupation breakdown updates properly after exiting to main menu
- Fixed occupation rules
- Fixed a bug where you could avoid civil war by inviting back trotsky
- Warscore from bombing is now saved in save game.
- Warscore from bombing is now much lower + added monthly falloff.
- Fixed issues with country rules not clearing properly and not updating every day
- Added special case for showing shortcut icons "," and "."
- Changed price calculation for new divisions so now it does not add up cost for group if it is first group
- Increased modifier that prevents spain from joining axis early
- Fixed bug where a country without the rule of occupying neutral countries could occupy them.
- Fixed the bug when airings manpower was not updated
- King G now only dies once
- Browser now remembers last page
- Naval strikes can now also hit navally transfered troops outside combats
- Added event that allows merges of 2 communist chinas
- Fix for peace conference turns not taking scor einto consideration properly
- Fixed bug where it was possible to send a single unit as exp.force twice!
- Changed a lot of popus to use the definite article
- Fixed a bug that gave USA extra PP for certain NF
- Warscore is no longer added from dropped countries in war merging.
- Trade routes over land now get correct tooltip on day 1
- Factories from trade now used to fill construction and trade first
- Fixed join faction achievement not firing. Fixed scope from add_to_faction effect
- Fixed Soviet civil war triggering multiple times. Fixed 2 outcomes of not purging happening at the same time.
- Leaving a faction no longer broke the entire supply system until save reload
- Fixed issue where merging ships would reduce manpower
- Removed EU4 hints folder.
- Fixed the bug when Britain couldn't declare war on other democratic countries despite having a wargoal from focus


Database & Balance
- Changed German democratic party to Zentrum
- NF completion for Poland 39 start
- Fixed spanish communist crusader using male portrait
- Focus Lessons of War and Sov-Ger research agreement now give less armor research
- Added AFG leader portrait Zahir Shah, VEN leader portrait Lopez Contreras and 3 new middle eastern generic portraits
- Replaced incorrect japanese general
- Added Xi'an to PRC
- Added straits to denmark to make them more surrendermonkeys [Balance]
- Several name corrections in OOB files
- Province 3860 is now a part of state 527 instead of 328. (Manchuria/Korea)
- Added an event to move PRC capital to Beijing or Nanjing after Chinese Civil War.
- Added a requirement of more than 15% world tension to War Economy policy.
- Removed Hungarian claims from Northern Transylvania and Vojvodina
- Removed generic Tank Designer idea from Canada.
- Moved Sao Paulo to be part of the Sao Paulo state.
- Found a better Serbian fascist party leader.
- Adjustment to Paraguay and Nicaraguan political 36 and 39 starts.
- Republican Spain and Nationalist Spain now have the same National Unity
- Added more ai_choice triggers for Czechoslovakia's response to German demands.
- Added localisation for Libyan adjectives
- Changed names for neutral Nicaragua and Paraguay
- Fixed Finland starting as democratic in 1939
- Added ENG cores to French cores when Anglo-French Union happens
- If the Munich agreement can't happen (depending on various wars for GER or CZE) CZE will now get a different event about ceding the Sudetenland or giving GER a wargoal.
- Soviet now gets one armor research bonus and one land doctrine, rather than three armor research.
- Fate of Czechoslovakia now correctly adds claims and an annex CB if CZE resists GER.
- Fixed text overflow in Balearic Islands headline.
- Expanded the final event for RAJ's Azad Hind, and added several removal points for the Azad Hind idea.
- Removed eng core from state 687-British Guyana
- Added fixedsize to countrystate view state owner and foreign claims
- Fixed heightmap error on denmark
- Fixed so all building in the maldives are on land again
- German march order music now has correct path
- State name corrections.
- Added names for (unreleased) country tags.
- Lowered time for Demand Balearic islands for Italy
- Moved capital of Brazil to Rio
- Subdue the Warlords now requires that China does not exist or is a puppet of Japan
- Johnson Island Garrison renamed to Johnston Island Garrison
- Corrected JAP_1939 unit history.
- Fixed a bug where an achievement wouldn't fire because of it was using any_country trigger
- Soviet foci New Soviet Man and Women in Aviation have switched places
- Added general to Ireland
- Nerfed skill 5 generals for BRA AST AFG CAN
- Changed German Admirals traits for variety
- Bumped population of some of the smaller islands
- Changed ideology of country leader for DEN FIN FRA NOR SWE
- Changed start trade to use factories instead of specific amount of factories for trade
- Increased air range on rocket interceptors now that local coverage isnt always 100%
- Mass assault doctrine now gets -10% lower requirement on training for deploying divisions
- Political parties and leaders for Brazil. From forum.
- Great depression now limits faction joining at an extra 20%
- Human pause now has a superior priority to the automatic pause
- Fixed issue with fleet splitting failing because it forgot to assign base
- Now state controller switches properly after capitulation
- Added 3 new generic asian stateleader portraits and 2 new generic asian warlord portraits
- Added 6 new generic Arabian portraits
- Sheng Shicai got a minor facelift
- USA now gets a slightly different shade of blue to differentiate them from france
- Fixed inconsistent finnish flags
- Added additional flags for Jordan
- Fixed Israeli leader portraits
- Fixed bugs in event for china moving capital
- Lowered time for National focus "support nationalist spain" so Italy can complete it before the SCW ends
- Typos and political party fixes for Brazil
- around maginot line focus now a bit faster
- Rebalanced ships so that armor is more important and destroyer spam no longer rules the sea. Ships are also a bit cheaper to produce but require a little more manpower
- air battles should now be a lot less bloody and slower paced
- Fighters should now have an easier time vs enemy bombers without escorts


Stability & Performance
- Will no longer overwrite ironman saves if writing of current failed
- Optimizations for air interface and mapmode
- Parser now handles large tokens without crashing on savegame load
- Optimization for releasing countries
- Fixed several memory leaks
- Fixed CTD for airwing transfer when base in invalid
- Fix for potential CTD in splitting navy when you have no home base.
- Fixed rare ctd when loading an old savegame from ingame with active naval combats
- Fixed several rare CTDs
- fixed rare CTD in alert manager
- fixed rare CTD in air gui
- Improved performance a lot when viewing a lot of unit icons in combat
- Fixed a possible CTD on fleet merging
- Fixed Extreme slow down because of sea locked fleets trying to get out.
- Fixed CTD in history writing when convoys shoot down aircraft and having lost their route


User Modding
- Added possibility to script in historical aces in name pools
- Moved dynamic country tags into a separate file
- Manpower in field trigger no longer counts expeditionary forces from other nations
- Fixed issues with tooltip for ships in port trigger
- Added defines to tweak unit assignment importance for different kinds of orders.
- Added possibility to script desired amount of factories to spend on a trade
- Fixed crash from default bookmark being later than 1936
- Added add_ai_strategy effect
- In debug mode the country flag tooltip will now show AI strategy values
- Fixed map icon crash from having more than 128 country capitals in view
- Fixed country unit names list being incorrectly initialized during modding leading to CTD


Multiplayer
- Supplysystem should now update for all players when changing country controller (OOS fix)
- Observers no longer get asked for co-op acces as well as main player

Known issues:
- Using "observer" mode from console in single player will break AI behavior. It should be fine for its intended purpose in multiplayer after having lost still as long as you observe players.

Enjoy!

Nothing about the justify war goal/declare war bug? If you're a democracy that converts to fascism, you still get the 'democracies can't declare war against nations that haven't increased world tension etc' notification.

 

[Shock360]

I feel sorry for everyone who worked on this. It has to feel bad, having such a high amount of people being so ungrateful. If you would have delayed, you still might not of found everything wrong with it before release, and people would have been outraged that it was delayed even more. You chose not to, but now people freak out. I just hope you know most of us appreciate you

 

[Harfyn]

I feel sorry for everyone who worked on this. It has to feel bad, having such a high amount of people being so ungrateful. If you would have delayed, you still might not of found everything wrong with it before release, and people would have been outraged that it was delayed even more. You chose not to, but now people freak out. I just hope you know most of us appreciate you

If they wanted to release it how they did they should have said it was not in an actual release state by calling it a beta or early access. That's my main point.

Edit: also, I'm not sure how much it hurts their feelings to hear that paying customers felt somewhat like they were misled. I'm not requesting a refund. They already have my $, and I will most likely buy their first DLC on release.

 

[Crosswire]

Have only had a brief play with it so far but the AI really does a much better job at fighting against being pocketed. I mostly play Poland (as the majors are just too easy and the other minors don't have to deal with two juggernauts both aiming to kill you). My plan is mostly to take out Czechoslavakia prior to the Germans as well as Romania. Previous I used to do both at once as guarantee happy nations would slap down one if due to the WT you generated. Given how think Czechoslavakia is in the east it was easy to drive a force south and split the country in two.

Not any more. The AI reacts like crazy to stop it, mostly by throwing constant 1-2 DIV attacks against your lead elements so they can't advance while hammering at the flanks with larger forces. The pre-patch lighting campaign has turned more into Great War-esque attritional warfare. Which I guess is kind of appropriate given both Poland and Czecholsavakia were using almost pure inf forces.

 

[Meglok]

I'm pretty sure irl you'd use a ship to transport bulk materials even from Munich to Paris for example.

Land transport makes zero sense when you can essentially float it on water for a bit.

Umm, you have heard of railroads?? Russian trains loaded with raw materials supplied under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were still crossing the border on June 21st when the Germans walked into Russia. Europe had a vast rail network that shipped raw materials between countries from the 19th century onwards. Krupp got it's start making rails.

 

[bdodig]

Well, there are some definite improvements with the AI. Tactically it fights a bit better. The divisions seem more reasonably composed although I did not play to late war with the new patch to get a clear picture.

There are still some strategic downfalls of the AI. German AI will generally at some point in 1940/41 move all troops away from French border and move them to Soviet border. That is a bit silly. At least now it manages to take Denmark, Belgium and Netherlands - definite improvement.

A big problem I saw was the AI moving troops by ship through contested or hostile sea zones, resulting in many losses. For instance German AI tried to attack me from Spain (I was France), which did put a big strain on my army. However they lost many divisions in transport because Allies had control over the routes.

The AI is still prone to sending divisions away from their homeland for an African tour.

That said, overall an improvement

Enjoy your holidays, guys!

 

[malkys]

Enjoy your holidays guys! You deserve it!

 

[Lennart Stek]

I think i got rid of the massive lag finally, but i have to play more to be sure. If so, a huge thank you Paradox.

 

[Guenni]

Umm, you have heard of railroads?? Russian trains loaded with raw materials supplied under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were still crossing the border on June 21st when the Germans walked into Russia. Europe had a vast rail network that shipped raw materials between countries from the 19th century onwards. Krupp got it's start making rails.

+ show we the waterroute from Munich to Paris.

 

[Dalnar]

Thank you for the patch Paradox and enjoy your holidays.

 

[Edgars]

I am creating a mod and have set Latvia's research slots amount to 0, started the game and everything worked as it supposed to (Latvia don't have any research slots available), but after saving a game and then restarting it and loading my save (or by simply loading save without restarting the game) Latvia have 2 research slots available...

This must be a bug! Hope it will get fixed!

 

[Stuckenschmidt]

Does Japan still send Divisions of Volunteers to Spain?

 

[Gort11]

My game is still lagging horribly around 1946, but this was a game I started under a previous patch. Maybe new games are better.

 

[Shireknight]

Is this patch compatible with save games from older version? Will it break save files?

I had a save from my very first German campaign which I abandoned when the "friendly" Russians swarmed into my regions however when I tried it after installing the beta patch all the Russian divisions marched out of the regions they shouldn't be in and I was able to continue it

 

[duderino77]

Awesome, just before I was about to start a new "Ironman" campaign. Keep them comming!

 

[DeveronMagi]

wow. started a new game as germany with the new patch. and the game already feels different. the AI handling of fronts is improved a lot and i need to do less micro (good!), love the update and the changes to Air wars and the tweak to war economy was desperately needed and makes a higher warscore for germany more interesting than before.

way to go paradox!

especially like the tweaks to the frontline AI, it creates pockets better and then mops them up correctly!

only feedback i would have it is make the highest frontline stance (the reckless one forgot the name) even more reckless and it should not worry about the flanks at all. this because i play with motorized/armor armies and infantry armies seperately, giving the infantry armies a wide front to advance on and using the motorized armies for striking deep. now i still see my tank protecting the flanks of there front while the infantry army is handling that already.

 

[immortal4o]

The game still lags terribly for me in war times!

 

[wolf1455]

Very good and welcomed patch. Especially the empty Division and that the game actually pause on popup msgs. Now I will see how the AI will perform, production focus and war plan especially. And that maginot head butting is a past thing.
Well done.