Semper Fi - Development Diary #6

[Sangeli]

I think these guys need to take a lesson from Stardock . . .

http://forums.elementalgame.com/

Go through the forum and you can find lead developers regularily talk to their customers/beta testers.

They ask for ideas, get them and give reasons why they choose to go certain routes. In the end everyone knows why they chose to do this, and is satisfied.

Besides, Stardock is one of the few companies that can actually put out an AI that is as good or better than a human player without cheating. Now that is saying something.

Honestly it beats me why Paradox doesn't take more advantage of the community they have. How often do businesses have costumers that can not only give suggestions but give it in a meaningful way? The people on the forums are just as capable of coming up with good ideas as any of the game developers. Instead Paradox simply chooses to ignore us in the development process, which frankly is the only thing that matters. If they asked for ideas like they do for Stardock I can gurantee you that simply by how the forum work they would get a good result. If they asked us to solve a problem 10+ people would come up with practical solutions, people then debate them and the best ideas evolve and become better, and by the end you are left with a handful of very good solutions. On the other hand if Paradox ignores us like they do now, we are left in the dark in what they want. The result is that eiter they come up with their own ideas or that they sift through lots of pretty much random suggestions and pick the best ones. It would be so much easier if they gave us essentially a question prompt so we know exactly what they want.

 

[Modo]

Honestly it beats me why Paradox doesn't take more advantage of the community they have.

Time spent arguing with people is time spent not coding.

On a serious note, there was a very long thread before 1.4 came out where Johan specifically asked for expansion ideas, and even talked about them. I think this alone shows a good level of involvement. But at some point people really do have to get to the coding part. And in the end it's their decision what's feasible and what's not. If you don't like this approach, don't buy or wait to buy a more polished product at the same or lower price—when [insert the game you want] gets bundled with an expansion or two. This works well for many games, not just from Paradox, provided you have the patience.

 

[Edward D.G.]

. . .wait to buy a more polished product at the same or lower price—when [insert the game you want] gets bundled with an expansion or two. This works well for many games, not just from Paradox, provided you have the patience.

My new Paradox purchase plan. Feel kinda bad it's come to this tho.

/Still bitter about having paid full freight for HOI3 "Inchoatus"

 

[thomaha]

For example, if you have a very experienced artillery brigade, you might want to upgrade it to a self-propelled artillery brigade. Well, now you can. The downside is that the brigade is taken from the field and moved to the production queue, though when the upgrade is complete it will automatically deploy back to the division it came from.

I hope the refitted brigade is sent back with some organisation? If not, if it is reattached to a division that is in combat, that division would immediatly retreat from that combat since it contains a brigade with zero organisation.

Also, when doing uppgrades of single brigades like the example Art -> self prop art, it is unlikely that the brigade should be placed back where it came from. An artillery brigade would most likely be attached to an infantry formation, were a self prop brigade would be wasted.

Hopefully, you will include a method of upprading all the brigades in a division, as that would make more sense and require less micro management. Having the posibility of adding additional brigades in that uppgradescreen would also be nice. As long as the whole division is put back on the map as one unit.

 

[xtfoster]

I think he's talking about the May start.. The war always starts in May.. I don't want the war to always end like IRL, but I'd sure like it to start like IRL

If you want it to start like In Real Life, then you should start the 1 SEP 1939 scenario not the 1 JAN 1936 one. After all, with over 100 different countries making different choices (especially you as the player, and them in response to you) why would you expect things to stay the same?

 

[Birken]

Woo, i suggested the upgrading of divisions a couple weeks ago. So happy to see it. Quick question though, if the division is taken off the map, and that province was then captured by the enemy. would they pop back into that province and retake it and possibly be surrounded?

No, the are redeployed to their old division, if that division is no longer active, they'll just be deployed as any other newly built brigade.

I can foresee many potential problems here. If I upgrade all 3 Arm brigades of a 3 Arm Division, wouldn't the division disappear?

Why not keep the brigades on-map, but just faded-out because they are in upgrade? Heck, give them an in-upgrade 40% combat malus, but let them able to fight! These shouldn't be in the build queue, they should just be figured into the upgrades category IMO. People will not use this to fiddle-around with their favourite divisions. As a Soviet player, I will probably be building hundreds of LARM-LARM-MOT-MOT-ART divisions which I intend to be ARM-ARM-MEC-MEC-SPART in time for Barbarossa. The UK will be converting it's entire field force of infantry to motorized divisions (at least they did historically). The ability to upgrade brigade type will completely change player build-schemes, and they will be counting on it to always have forces available.

I have a gloomy feeling that you guys went for the worst possible implementation of this long-requested feature. I hope I'm wrong.

Well, it's nice to find a global extreme once in a while.
The empty division stays on map. It will be destroyed if involved in combat.
The unit won't fight while being upgraded to a new type, the soldiers cannot be part time at the front and part time in "school".
It's not sensible to make a major overhaul of all your forces while in war. Upgrade some at a time and you'll be fine.

What if the division is destroyed, surrounded, disbanded, or otherwise not available?

Deploy to some other division as usual when building brigades.

I don't think it's as dramatic as "worst possible implementation". But I do agree that upgrading brigade-by-brigade would be extremely tedious. Just something with selecting multiple divisions and upgrading all of one type to all of another type, or making upgrades possible through the OOB editor, would be good. Or maybe you can mark, for instance, 100% of your inf for upgrade to mot, but not all of them are put in the queue right away (because they'd be stuck there for a long time, you probably wouldn't be able to do all of the upgrades at once).

We considered this. There was too many problems involved when the game was to decide what units the player prefer upgrade now and what units to do later.

IMO, a proper implementation would have been:

So many things are going to go wrong here...

Upgrades are not meant to be a new holy grail of unit building. Building a unit directly is faster and requires less resources than first building one unit and then upgrading to what you need.

Interesting Dev diary.

Is there potential for an exploit here - What if a brigade is involved in combat ? i.e. Surrounded and about to be wiped out - will a player be able to suddenly upgrade it to save it ?

No.

What happens if you cancel the upgrading unit from the production queue?

You'll lose it. There's no going back.

 

[Johan]

I think these guys need to take a lesson from Stardock . . .

http://forums.elementalgame.com/

Go through the forum and you can find lead developers regularily talk to their customers/beta testers.

They ask for ideas, get them and give reasons why they choose to go certain routes. In the end everyone knows why they chose to do this, and is satisfied.

Besides, Stardock is one of the few companies that can actually put out an AI that is as good or better than a human player without cheating. Now that is saying something.

And we don't?

- We have 1/10th of the team working 100% just answering emails and forum posts from people.
- We have our game designer spending 33% of his time just replying and discussing ideas on the game we develop. (see every single development diary we made for hoi3 and victoria 2)
- You see the programmers and scripters posting replies every week.
And this is just the public forums..

 

[nestorius]

I really dont get how someone is complaining that paradox doesnt listen, it seems to me virtually every idea of the community for EU3 were included in future patches or upgrades, many of the suggestions of the community are going to be included in SF.

Yes not everything is included but most things are, really you cannot say that paradox doesnt listen to customers I for one feel that my comments have had some impact no matter how small.

Frankly I am in shock that someone can even suggest that they dont do it?

 

[RedRalphWiggum]

I really dont get how someone is complaining that paradox doesnt listen, it seems to me virtually every idea of the community for EU3 were included in future patches or upgrades, many of the suggestions of the community are going to be included in SF.

Yes not everything is included but most things are, really you cannot say that paradox doesnt listen to customers I for one feel that my comments have had some impact no matter how small.

Frankly I am in shock that someone can even suggest that they dont do it?

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre given that this is a DD where HoI3 is basically being taken in the direction that fans have asked for... some people are never happy.

 

[Phelan]

Yeah, it's pretty bizarre given that this is a DD where HoI3 is basically being taken in the direction that fans have asked for... some people are never happy.

I too have the feeling that some members here are just upset that their "brilliance" and "knowledge" is not praised by the developers of the game.

PI makes a game for all fans and customers out there, not just for us forum lurkers. If some of us have an opinion what is best for the game, this may not be the best for all (potential) customers out there. I think PI can decide better what is the best compromise for those game features, than us with our sometimes really special (and weird) interest in an area of the game.

 

[Lauri]

Upgrades are not meant to be a new holy grail of unit building. Building a unit directly is faster and requires less resources than first building one unit and then upgrading to what you need.

So if I build my future Airborne troops as Germany from the start of 1936, meaning Infantry, and upgrade them when I've gotten the Airborne tech, will the upgrade take longer than building a new division of Airborne directly? And will it be more expensive?

If that's the case, I'm only going to use it to upgrade Inf to Mot

edit: and about Paradox... Aren't the making Victoria 2 simply because the fans want it?

 

[Shabz]

The empty division stays on map. It will be destroyed if involved in combat.

Could it be possible for that division to be auto-redeployed to capital? Or at least put into redeploy queue, for the time necessarry to complete upgrade?

 

[Birken]

So if I build my future Airborne troops as Germany from the start of 1936, meaning Infantry, and upgrade them when I've gotten the Airborne tech, will the upgrade take longer than building a new division of Airborne directly? And will it be more expensive?

If that's the case, I'm only going to use it to upgrade Inf to Mot

No, it's not that bad. We haven't done all the balancing yet. But you get reduction of ic and time based on a percentage of the ic and time that was invested in the original unit (yes these values are easily scriptable). While this doesn't reflect what happened in real life, it keeps the system from being too exploitable.

 

[mbabbs]

Could it be possible for that division to be auto-redeployed to capital?

People would exploit that. If you are about to be surrounded, or are surrounded then you could just upgrade the division and teleport back to the capital.

Its better to keep the unit on the map - if you upgrade a brigade during war then that division is going to be weakened during the period of the upgrade. This will force a player to either upgrade before combat or to move the division from the front line. I'm happy with that myself.

 

[mbabbs]

The diplomatic AI is essentially rewritten, with many custom behaviours for different countries. (Expect Lothos to post an example of this soon.)

I'm looking forward to this. It sounds like the mod community will be able to get to grips with the Diplomatic AI.

 

[Surt]

We do not allow blanket upgrades since the brigades are taken off the map (which can be dangerous while at war). The feature is mostly intended to allow players to fiddle with their favorite divisions. The AI will not upgrade brigade types.

Will you make it possible for modders to make the AI upgrade too, having countries with zero manpower and 500IC building 2 AA and a coastal fort just doesn't seem right when they could upgrade their militia to infantry

 

[Bullfrog]

Good work PI!

Awesome features. I hope the naming thing is given to us though....individual brigade names? Is that even relevant to this DD?

 

[GrimReaper]

Semper Fi is like a box of chocolates

 

[dashstar1972]

And we don't?

- We have 1/10th of the team working 100% just answering emails and forum posts from people.
- We have our game designer spending 33% of his time just replying and discussing ideas on the game we develop. (see every single development diary we made for hoi3 and victoria 2)
- You see the programmers and scripters posting replies every week.
And this is just the public forums..

Absolutely. You guys are very engaged and I am sometimes embarrassed by the whinging of some of my fellow forumites.

That said, I think there is a fair point to be made that the manner which you engage is fairly unstructured. You obviously see that the community is a valuable resource (especially the modders) but I wonder if there isn't a more systematic way engaging, particularly on requirements and bugs.

E.g. why not have an online tool for guaging level of interest in proposed features? And why not have some sort of open-to-the-public bug tracking system - having been in SWD, I know transcribing bugs from customer-face to tool can be resource intensive and slow.

Just my two cents...

 

[SwordOfJustice]

And we don't?

- We have 1/10th of the team working 100% just answering emails and forum posts from people.
- We have our game designer spending 33% of his time just replying and discussing ideas on the game we develop. (see every single development diary we made for hoi3 and victoria 2)
- You see the programmers and scripters posting replies every week.
And this is just the public forums..

This is one area that Paradox absolutely shine in. You can rest easy on that score, Johan.

Cheers,
Sword