Very disappointed by the lack of terrain modifiers on the new tank designer

[LordSkorpio]

Well the game would have to be more focused on making a wealthy/prosperous because map painting is very boring. This would require a massive rework I don't see them doing. Its better to make WW2 more interesting then focusing on ahistorical BS which just ends of being a joke currently cause they ai sucks and in mp it just turns into a meme game that ends in 1939.

Sadly, I have to agree, I don't see them doing anything about that neither. That's why I went back to HOI 3 recently.

 

[Haresus]

The flamethrower tank idea is still viable, Paradox (or modders) just have to create a new battalion/support company type specifically for light/medium/heavy flamethrower tanks with terrain modifiers that make sense.

Having a certain engine increase terrain bonuses in swamps or something like that is probably not possible though, and I don't really think specific tank designs would have significant differences in most terrain types. At the end of the day, a smaller and lighter tank (abstracted as "light tank battalions") will be more useful in difficult terrain while a bigger and heavier tank (abstracted as "heavy tank battalions") will be less useful in difficult terrain. The specifics of what's actually in that tank is not very important for terrain bonuses.

 

[cac579]

Sadly, I have to agree, I don't see them doing anything about that neither. That's why I went back to HOI 3 recently.

yeah i went back to hoi3 for a bit too while still playing hoi4 mp. Problem with hoi3 is it has way too much tedious micro and ai is still not very good in sp. In my opinion they should have stuck with hoi3 as a base template and just made it less micro intensive and iron out all the issues. But memes make money.

Hoi4 definitely has less micro but i think it was simplified way too much instead of keeping the depth but making it easier to manage. The production/equipment system is one of the best improvements in the game and it seems like the devs are trying to bring back the hoi3 like features in a decent way.

 

[goodcigar]

Just add it to the list. HOI4 isn't going anywhere. Extremely poplar game.

 

[Gyrvendal]

Just add it to the list. HOI4 isn't going anywhere. Extremely poplar game.

The older the game gets, the more unwilling the devs become to make code changes, just look at EU4. Besides, how many times have DLC-exclusive features gotten a rework beyond tweaking a couple numbers? Almost never! No, it is really now or never I think.

 

[kardwill]

You want to retake Gibraltar as Spain? have fun conquering the whole British Empire. I just don't understand how none of the developers thought that maybe people would like to play limited wars instead going all or nothing everytime. Even the focus trees stories are written as if wars were limited sometimes.

There are already limited wars for the control of a single state. Japan VS soviet border incident, China vs China civil war, Mexico VS US for the control of Panama. They are pre-coded for only a few nations, very small scale (the AI just takes control of 6 divisions in the two neighboring states, and have them duke it out until one side has lost) and the player has very little control over them (escalate them to full-blown war by investing PP into them, or bow out of the war), but they're kinda there. They could be used as a basis for other limited conflicts, like the Gibraltar dispute you talked about, or a war of independence that doesn't turn into WW3 against the entire allies.

 

[Simon_9732495]

That's why I'm not worried about this.

It's not like terrain has no impact on tanks. It will still have the same effects it has now (if I understand the DD correctly). There just won't be a -1% terrain penalty for river crossings if you put a second machine gun on a light tank or something.

"We can't use sloped armor on the Tiger!"

"Why not? We can afford it."

"Yes, but adding sloped armor will penalize the Tiger 0.0067% in marshes. That will ruin our master plan of blitzing through the Pripet Marshes with amphibious Tigers!"

I agree, it's a "nice to have" feature at best.

It can't be very powerful, because otherwise it would be OP. So we are talking about a 1% to 5% modifier at highest, I'd guess.

And the flamethrower tank with high attack in city tiles is a meme. How many city tiles are there?

And I think it will be moddable, right?
Add a new tank type, call it "flamethrower tank" give it high attack in cities. (And maybe make a new module flawethrower and allow only this module on this tank...)


/edit: And why is there a discussion about diplomacy and peace deals in this thread?

 

[LordSkorpio]

There are already limited wars for the control of a single state. Japan VS soviet border incident, China vs China civil war, Mexico VS US for the control of Panama. They are pre-coded for only a few nations, very small scale (the AI just takes control of 6 divisions in the two neighboring states, and have them duke it out until one side has lost) and the player has very little control over them (escalate them to full-blown war by investing PP into them, or bow out of the war), but they're kinda there. They could be used as a basis for other limited conflicts, like the Gibraltar dispute you talked about, or a war of independence that doesn't turn into WW3 against the entire allies.

Yeah but as you said, it's not something the player can actually control, it just works through events or NF. I think the best way to make a sandbox would be by giving the player all the tools he needs to tweak history, not by clicking a NF but by doing that himself. HOI 3 had some of those features like influencing countries in order to get them in your faction and limited wars as a war option in the diplomacy menu. Ofc now I know it's not going to happen, but that's the game I expected to eventually get in the first place.

 

[Archangel85]

The DLC is still a long ways off. @Archangel85 you mentioned that you pushed hard on this. Is there any chance this could still be done?

I died on that hill. It was a good death. Like podcat said, it would require a rework of the unit modifier system from the ground up, which comes with a lot of risk. The more a project advances, the more risk-adverse things get because there is less time to put out any fires that spring up. It's not that we don't understand that it would be cool to have (hence my dying on hills), but at some point it becomes a question of whether it is worth it to potentially make the game unplayable for several weeks while we rework the modifier system - it's time QA and design planned to have to balance the supply system and teach the AI how to use it. Even if you keep it in separate development branches, it is also time before the tank designer itself is in a state where it can be fully tested, and you have to be very sure that you covered all the edge cases (what happens when a division has 50% tanks that are good in the desert and 50% tanks that are bad in the desert? What happens if it gets into combat and loses a bunch of the bad tanks? Do we end up in situations that are counter-intuitive, like attacking when you are at low strength because that's when the bonuses are strongest?).

We might still do flamethrowers though, people seem to really want those. I think there are ways to do it without having to touch the modifier system itself.

 

[Secret Master]

I'm sure flamethrower tanks would be pretty popular.

But...

 

[Gyrvendal]

I died on that hill. It was a good death. Like podcat said, it would require a rework of the unit modifier system from the ground up, which comes with a lot of risk. The more a project advances, the more risk-adverse things get because there is less time to put out any fires that spring up. It's not that we don't understand that it would be cool to have (hence my dying on hills), but at some point it becomes a question of whether it is worth it to potentially make the game unplayable for several weeks while we rework the modifier system - it's time QA and design planned to have to balance the supply system and teach the AI how to use it. Even if you keep it in separate development branches, it is also time before the tank designer itself is in a state where it can be fully tested, and you have to be very sure that you covered all the edge cases (what happens when a division has 50% tanks that are good in the desert and 50% tanks that are bad in the desert? What happens if it gets into combat and loses a bunch of the bad tanks? Do we end up in situations that are counter-intuitive, like attacking when you are at low strength because that's when the bonuses are strongest?).

We might still do flamethrowers though, people seem to really want those. I think there are ways to do it without having to touch the modifier system itself.

I do some programming, although nowhere near the level of a project the size of Hoi4. I'm a bit surprised by the stated difficulty of this. After all, if you take any of the other stats, like "breakthrough", it is defined at the equipment level, then can be modified at both the equipment and battalion level, and the game seems to have no problems handling divisions with a mix of high breakthrough and low breakthrough tanks, nor handling what happens when their relative proportions change. I don't really see how a terrain modifier would be mechanistically different from any of these other stats, but maybe I'm missing something.
I don't want to be offensive, just curious.

 

[Znail]

I do some programming, although nowhere near the level of a project the size of Hoi4. I'm a bit surprised by the stated difficulty of this. After all, if you take any of the other stats, like "breakthrough", it is defined at the equipment level, then can be modified at both the equipment and battalion level, and the game seems to have no problems handling divisions with a mix of high breakthrough and low breakthrough tanks, nor handling what happens when their relative proportions change. I don't really see how a terrain modifier would be mechanistically different from any of these other stats, but maybe I'm missing something.
I don't want to be offensive, just curious.

I don't think they claim it's impossible in anyway, it's just a lot of work and they simply couldn't fit that in the schedule.

 

[Ridan Krad]

I died on that hill. It was a good death. Like podcat said, it would require a rework of the unit modifier system from the ground up, which comes with a lot of risk. The more a project advances, the more risk-adverse things get because there is less time to put out any fires that spring up. It's not that we don't understand that it would be cool to have (hence my dying on hills), but at some point it becomes a question of whether it is worth it to potentially make the game unplayable for several weeks while we rework the modifier system - it's time QA and design planned to have to balance the supply system and teach the AI how to use it. Even if you keep it in separate development branches, it is also time before the tank designer itself is in a state where it can be fully tested, and you have to be very sure that you covered all the edge cases (what happens when a division has 50% tanks that are good in the desert and 50% tanks that are bad in the desert? What happens if it gets into combat and loses a bunch of the bad tanks? Do we end up in situations that are counter-intuitive, like attacking when you are at low strength because that's when the bonuses are strongest?).

We might still do flamethrowers though, people seem to really want those. I think there are ways to do it without having to touch the modifier system itself.

Hi @Archangel85, I don't know if you saw my posts in the dev diary thread, but as I mentioned there I think using the amphibious tanks equipment/battalion as a proof of concept provides a way to implement flame tanks without a rework. Maybe that's what you had in mind already with getting flame tanks in without reworking the modifier system.

 

[Sourlol]

The game may be oriented towards war, but that is no excuse to not have at least a basic diplomacy system. After 5 years I still can't play a game without going full world conquest, even if my original idea was not that. You want to retake Gibraltar as Spain? have fun conquering the whole British Empire.

I can’t see a reality where the UK just gives up Gibraltar in the 1930/40s—hell even today—without it becoming a full on conventional war.

beyond the fantasy of Mexico declaring war v the US and taking back Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, CA, etc...I don’t see a world where that conflict doesn’t end in Mexico City or Washington DC in flames.

all that aside, war is just diplomacy by other means, the game absolutely needs a functioning diplomacy system. But I’d also argue that core to diplomacy in the 30s/40s is racial and ethnic lence through which nearly everyone (of any geopolitical significance, at least) saw the world. And paradox has made it clear they aren’t going to implement anything that has to do with ethnicities due to the obvious atrocity issues that are only 1 human life behind us in the past.

given that it’s ww2, there should be a full fledged economic (industry, labor, manufacturing, logistics, etc.), war, diplomacy, population, weather, internal government, terrain...simulator. But also given that it’s ww2, combat should be the first thing you get 100% right, and I’d argue that air and naval combat still needs work and land combat is only getting revised now, and the aggressors of the real ww2 wanted a WC playthrough, so maybe get the combat right first then expand other simulations.

 

[safe-keeper]

I can’t see a reality where the UK just gives up Gibraltar in the 1930/40s—hell even today—without it becoming a full on conventional war.

But would that war neccessarily end only with the capitulation of all of Spain or Britain? What if China retook Hong Kong, should they have to sail around the world and raise the Chinese flag over Buckingham Palace for the war to end?

In other PDX games, like EU, to retake one province you just need to start a liberation war, and then hold that province until the enemy grows tired of fighting you. In HoI4, every single war ends with total capitulation (except from those ended by band-aid events), which is just ridiculous.

I just don't understand how none of the developers thought that maybe people would like to play limited wars instead going all or nothing everytime.

I refuse to believe it's anything but a WIP thing. Especially given that HoI4 is built around alternate history. Not to mention how limited and broken diplomacy is overall. A proper war score, limited war, and diplomacy system has got to be something they'll add down the road.

Surely.

 

[bitmode]

I don't really see how a terrain modifier would be mechanistically different from any of these other stats, but maybe I'm missing something.

The short answer is that they are not stats. If you imagine the right side of the division designer to be an object - let's call it sub unit definition - then the values in the upper yellow box are a fixed-size member array of numeric stats and beneath them is a variable member list of terrain adjusters (along with night, fort, river & amphibious), each containing three values. They each have their separate methods for querying and updating them.
Refactoring that is neither trivial nor impossible.

For once I'm siding with podcat here that it is probably not worth it when many use cases like flamethrower tanks could just use their own subunits.

 

[pro.gamer.69]

The short answer is that they are not stats. If you imagine the right side of the division designer to be an object - let's call it sub unit definition - then the values in the upper yellow box are a fixed-size member array of numeric stats and beneath them is a variable member list of terrain adjusters (along with night, fort, river & amphibious), each containing three values. They each have their separate methods for querying and updating them.
Refactoring that is neither trivial nor impossible.

For once I'm siding with podcat here that it is probably not worth it when many use cases like flamethrower tanks could just use their own subunits.

Exactly. To add to this, I'd compare them to amphibious tanks. They are only (fundamentally) different in that they have different terrain modifiers, yet they still are/will be a separate battalion type. You could do the same thing for flamethrower tanks, such as having a heat-resistant chassis or something similar (ik it's not super historically accurate, but still)

 

[Louella]

I don't know if flame tanks were ever deployed in large enough formations, to make them a full battalion, rather than as a support unit: i.e. as part of "armoured assault engineer"

It's one of the things about the British heavy SPG 2 being called the "Churchill AVRE", that kind of irks me a bit. Churchill AVREs, the Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers, were most definitely _not_ artillery pieces. The 290mm "Flying Dustbin" mortar, was for demolition of enemy bunkers and the like, with an effective range of only 80m. When the AVREs were used on D-Day, they were assigned as squadron-sized elements, a sub-battalion unit, to the infantry divisions.
The AVREs also carried fascines, track-laying equipment, mine-flails and other attachments that could be swapped around as needed.
Churchill Crocodile flame tanks were assigned to the armoured divisions though.

 

[Shaka of Carthage]

I don't know if flame tanks were ever deployed in large enough formations, to make them a full battalion, rather than as a support unit: i.e. as part of "armoured assault engineer"

Agree. The Soviets had sub units within there tank bn's that had them, but not a battalion of just them. I don't think they should be in the Tank Designer. Let modders deal with that.

Still want an Armored Engineer unit though.

 

[Sourlol]

But would that war neccessarily end only with the capitulation of all of Spain or Britain? What if China retook Hong Kong, should they have to sail around the world and raise the Chinese flag over Buckingham Palace for the war to end?

I think in the case of the British Empire having something like Hong Kong or Gibraltar taken from them in the 30s or 40s—yes, the only way you keep that is if you capitulate the British or make it completely untenable for them to fight1930s Spain and 1930s Maoist/Narionalist China weren’t exactly capable of projecting their will in any serious way upon the British...there’d be no reason for the British to not remain at war even if their first attempt at “liberating” their former possessions failed.

Now obviously, if we were playing a modern day mod and the CCP, for some reason, took Hong Kong by force prior to the proscribed handover date I don’t think the British are in a position to fight an amphibious urban land war with a major power 1/2 way across the world. And HoI4 should absolutely be able to model that.

but as it stands in “historical” 30s/40s I don’t see a way that the pro imperialist sentiment doesn’t win out in Britain and there isn’t a major war for retention of Crown Jewels of their empire being taken.

given it’s going to realistically be China taking Hong Kong , an Indian/Egyptian revolt, or Spain taking Gibraltar who takes their territory (after all when the Italians and Germans came for the Suez in real life we got the pro imperialist Churchill essentially calling for a Japanese level of fanatical defense of the home island of if came to that) I don’t see why the British surrender or sign a peace.

On the flip side, I do see a world where the Spanish take Gibraltar, get beaten back and sue for peace and the British accept, returning Gibraltar and earning concessions. Similar to, from what my understanding of the Japanese warplan v America was(except the Japanese were hoping for beneficial concessions like some of their conquered territory and resuming of trade particularly oil), take as much as you can early, defend vigorously and sue for peace assuming the Americans wouldn’t be willing to only accept unconditional surrender (I’m not a historian, I could totally be wrong on the Japanese strategy bit). However obviously the sneak attack rubbed Americans the wrong way and dramatically exacerbated racial hatred (which isn’t simulated in hoi4, but really ought to be in a game about 1930s/1940s geopolitics).