Some of my thoughts...
- Added custom difficulty settings
For me, its a very, very bad thing. As much as a single player game is too easy, giving bonuses to AI out of thin air is a bad practise. Of course nobody is forced to use this, but anyone who will tell me that's a good thing will get me triggered.
AI
All of AI improvements are really good, and there are some I have to comment
- AI is now able to remove factories and build nuclear power plants in stead. Also made the AI better at reasearching nuclear tech. Watch out, the nukes are coming!
OK, but nukes are not even that strong. Sure, they lower NU and deal some strategic damage but thats about it. At least I'll have some fun laughing at people playing germany, using all the buffs to USA AI and getting nuked in 43'...
- AI is now be better at noticing when they are about to get cut off from the front and react to it
This probably gonna have the biggest impact on game, at least sounds like it. I'm waiting to see it in action.
- Merged in Enhanced Peace Conference AI mod (for more historical ai peace behaviour), with a few modifications
The less border gore, the better.
- Historical France should no longer go early communism.
But communism stronk
- Now ai will be less careful in some attacks
(Previously it was SUPER careful)
Hmmm mayby it makes it act more like human, but we'll see
- More robust check for enemy capital area, fixing stuff like ITA abandoning ETH before they were defeated.
I guess that also means that UK wont leave Islands unprotected, yeaaah
UI
- Fixed some stats for ships showing navy stats instead of ship stats
I was actually wondering about that (does naval detection counts as a average of a fleet?)
- Added focus icon and national spirit icon for fourth international
Trocsky is a bit stronger now. But you still have to go through civil war (loosing factories and units)
- Added ability to assign groups to orders on the theater item
Not sure what that means, so now orders are theather specific, and multiple groups (with different generals) can have one and the same order? cool if thats so.
- Added visualization for stalled lines (icons and progress bar coloring) in the deployment interface
Really good, I'd like to see even more things to make deploying/training troops easier (button for "stop training automatically when reached regular lvl"
- Navy and army leaders have now better area for skill tooltip
Are all skills are working as intended now?
- Now when unit is not advancing because of too low str/org, the shoutmark with tooltip explains why
good one.
- Added damage info tooltip to survivors in naval combat
making naval combat better is a high priority.
Database
- Gotland is no longer considered a colony of Sweden. In the game...
I <3 you paradox
- Changed date triggers in UK focus tree to look for threat levels and war instead
UK tree always pisses me off because of that 5% wartension to get to research slot... Could you change that as well? :3
Balance
- Rebalanced some armor values for tank varaiants that were inconsistent with how the rest were distributed. 36 light tank AA armor 20 -> 10. 41 light tank AA armor 35 -> 25. 36 medium tank artillery armor 35 -> 45
I guess thats a good change for tanks. but....
- SPART now much more costly (almost 2x)
- Increased mechanized infantry supply use by 30% and increased cost to be in line with MARM (+20%)
- Armor gun soft attack upgrade on variants now goes up to +15% rather than +50%
- Increased xp cost of land upgrades a bit (+5 base)
Theese are utter bull poop. Mechanized units were already barely useful (only because of high hardness) because they cost as much as 7 normal infantry. And now that Self propelled artillery and variants of tanks are weaker, the only useful doctrine would be superior firepower for towed artillery spam. It was stronger than blitzkrieg and considered over powered even before, but blitzkrieg doctrine could defeat superior firepower with some fineese. Now it's going to be an uphill battle... Also some stats on medium self propelled artillery (M-SPG) were bugged and were not fixed (M-SPG 39' defence:12 breakthrough: 6 M-SPG 41' defence:6 breakthrough: 3 M-SPG 43' defence:14 breakthrough: 7 I assume 41' model should be half way between 39' and 43')
- Now regain of convoy efficiency starts after 7 days instead of 3
- Now regain base speed of convoy efficiency starts was lowered and has been changed to non-linear change
- Submarines are now much better at detecting surface ships
Thats what I was horrified when I was reading DD. Everyone was saying that submarine warfare is lacking and it's impossible to cut supplies? Well, I checked that in previous patch. Playing as germany, I focused on all submarines doctrines from trade interdiction (Massive bonuses, including 100% (!) more surface detection), submarine model 40' and some dockyards (I didn't totally neglected land or air mind you, just a tiny more focus toward navy). In half a year UK lost few hundreds convoys, and started to have problems with shipping troops, supplies and resources to mainland. Now that submarines stats are so much stronger, with all doctrine bonuses they might become ridiculous (model 40' sub with 100 surface detection or 44' model with 140 - highest value in the game ATM). I fear it might need some fixes soon.Fixing everything that was bugged before (attacking empty convoy routes etc.) was much needed, but I'm not so sure with sub stats changes.
Everything else that conserns naval warfare is superb though.
- Dispersed industry now gains 5% higher starting efficiency for new production lines per level
It's nice that you're trying to make dispersed industry more appealing, but honestly it still would be inferior to concentrated. I played with maxed dispersed industry and flexible line, and switching your production instantly with no maluses is amazing, but absolute death of that tech tree is one thing: Navy. Dockyards always works with 100% efficiency, so any bonus concerning production efficiency has no effect on dockyards. On the other hand, dockyards do benefit from factory output, so having concentrated industry is absolutelly nessecary if you want to have competitive fleet. Possible sollution: Dockyards should be affected by production efficiency, or they should not be affected by factory output. This way choise between concentrated and dispersed would be harder (which is good, as now its concentrated industry 100% of times)
- Signal companies now give more effect on planning speed and cost less
Yet to be seen if usefull, but might be
- Reduced Hitler's PP bonus from +50% to +25%
Never thought of it, but thats probably fine