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Developer Corner | Military Industrial Orgs.

Greetings all!

Today marks the first occasion since the release of By Blood Alone where we take a deeper look into what is coming next. As you may recall from the BBA development cycle, we had an early set of 'Development Corner' diaries, which serve as an opportunity for us to reveal a narrow look at a specific mechanic or design without revealing too much about the wider context of future releases. Today's offering, as well as the next couple of diaries, will be in much the same spirit - you'll just have to wait a little bit longer to get the full picture. Scandalous and polarising, I know.

/Arheo

Hello there, it's me, C0rax. Now you can get all excited because it's time for some Dev Corners in which we will show you some WIP looks into the new features we have been working on. So without further ado this week we will be looking at…


Military Industrial Organisations (MIO's)

This is all very much a work in progress (WIP), you are going to see WIP mock ups, and some details are still being finalized as well

Feature Intent and Goals

Intent:
Create a sense of a living organisation the player can interact with rather than a static bonus as with current design companies.

Why is this important you ask? Well previously we had to provide static modifiers and sometimes change them via scripted decisions or focus rewards. By creating a more organic system to upgrade your design companies you the player can now decide what these upgrades are and tailor them to fit your playstyle. Additionally we can now reward the player for using a design company as opposed to simply having you save up a resource and click a button, rewarding you for putting effort into them.

Goals:​

  • Allow the player to define their designer direction.
  • Integrate design companies into production
  • Provide a framework for national specialisms that can be used on the world stage


Military industrial Organisations (MIO’s)​

So first here is a rough structure of an MIO

contains​

  • Name
  • Icon
  • Size (Level)
  • funds (XP)
  • Task Capacity
  • Departments

departments​

  • 0-1 Design team
    • 3 departments
      • Max 13 traits each
  • 0-1 Industrial manufacturer
    • 3 departments
      • Max 13 traits each

Each departments contains​

  • Name
  • Category’s
  • Trait tree
  • Trait icons

Task Capacity​

  • Size determines how many tasks a MIO can handle
    • Researching
    • Producing
    • Designing

Defaults:​

  • 2 task Capacity
    • + scripted increases
    • + trait increases

This structure allows us to represent MIO’s in a way that expresses the specialisms of the various organisations that designed and produced war materials during the period. You can now represent a company like Bofors AB who designed and produced anti tank, anti air and naval guns seamlessly and expand each of those specialisms as you see fit. Investing in the right MIO is critical to upgrading those specialist departments in order to gain the bonuses you need for specific stats.

Task Capacity:​

An MIO of course can’t work on a number of infinite simultaneous projects. For this we have task capacity that limits how many things your MIO’s can work on balancing. This is an important thing to balance, since producing too much equipment with an MIO will lock you out from using it for research or designing equipment. For ship production this is actually important for producing ships in parallel so you might want to invest in the manufacturing department for task capacity so you can really ramp up your naval production.


Levelling & upgrades​


Research cost and Production cost is used to calculate MIO funds that it gains when it is used.
An amount of MIO Funds is required to increase your size and pick a new trait.


image2.png

image (17).png


Skill Trees
  • Split roughly along the same lines as current design companies​
  • Possibility for country unique trees​
  • possibility for content prerequisites (National focus or decision locking etc...)​
image (16).png

image (19).png

image (20).png

Departments and Tasks​

Industrial manufacturers (IM's)​

  • Assigned to production lines (Task)
  • Skill trees provide production specific bonuses

Design teams (DT's)​

  • Applied to research (Task)
  • Applied to equipment both via equipment designers and normal variants
  • Skill trees provide Stat bonuses
  • Can be applied retroactively to equipment at cost
  • A move away from pay mana get reward


So that's a lot of high-level structural talk so you understand the core concepts of the MIO Feature and so I'll now show some of the WIP flows of actually using these structures and systems.

Researching​

image8.png


image (18) (1).png


image10.png


Equipment variants​

image13.png

image (13) (2).png

image1.png

image (14).png


Production​


image (15) (1).png


Well that wraps things up for this week, I Hope you enjoyed it and as always please leave questions and comments below and I will do my best to answer them. Join me in two weeks for another dev corner showing another feature coming to you in the near future.
 
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what meaningfull improvement over the old system has the plane designer brought us
  1. An opportunity to enjoy exploring new game mechanics, testing different strategies, heatedly arguing them on the forum etc. Isn't this what a game is meant to be?
  2. How does plane designer prevent you from having a pre-defined set of plane designs you consider "immersive" and producing only them? Or just disabling DLC and playing without it?
 
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  1. Exciting!
  2. Am I correct to think only one stat-improving designer can be attached to production line / equipment variant?
You can mix and match. so you can design/research a tank with Porsche (giving the variant unit stat improvements ) and then have it built by MAN (improving the production related values on that line) for example.
 
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You can mix and match. so you can design/research a tank with Porsche (giving the variant unit stat improvements ) and then have it built by MAN (improving the production related values on that line) for example.
Ok, got it. Is it correct to say that:
  1. There will be MIOs that speed up research and/or improve stats on the researched equipment and there will MIOs that cut production costs, right?
  2. Will there be more than one MIO of each type available to a nation?
  3. If yes, then will we be able to simultaneously apply more than one MIO of each class thus reaping the benefits of all or the idea is it should be a choice / trade-off?
I understand it's a WIP so many things can change after all the parts of the puzzle are put in place and tested end-to-end. It's just interesting what is the current thinking.

PS I truly think the idea is great. Extra flexibility adds depth.
 
Ok, got it. Is it correct to say that:
  1. There will be MIOs that speed up research and/or improve stats on the researched equipment and there will MIOs that cut production costs, right?
  2. Will there be more than one MIO of each type available to a nation?
  3. If yes, then will we be able to simultaneously apply more than one MIO of each class thus reaping the benefits of all or the idea is it should be a choice / trade-off?
I understand it's a WIP so many things can change after all the parts of the puzzle are put in place and tested end-to-end. It's just interesting what is the current thinking.

PS I truly think the idea is great. Extra flexibility adds depth.
  1. MIO's can do both the design team affects unit stats and the industrial manufacturer affects production values on a production line
  2. you might have multiple MIO's with some overlap but it depends on the nation. so you might have light, medium and heavy tank MIO's plus a general tank MIO as a simple example but you could do much more complex specialization combinations
  3. each equipment variant and production can only have 1 MIO attached respectively so you need to pick and choose.
 
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I have a moddability request: could you please make it possible for modders to adjust the amount of Funds required to increase a MIO's size/skills? And specifically, please make it randomizable during a game (not just at game load), so if we want to it can make MIO growth times unpredictable. This adds replayability because you don't know if your new aircraft research lab will become available in 1938 or 1939 etc, just as in real life they was uncertainty about scientific discovering and when new facilities would be ready.
 
@C0RAX

Brilliant idea. Definitely will appeal to casual players.

Here are the problems you may face:
1. Minors will suddenly become "research hubs" while majors will become "production hubs". AKA minors like Sweden & Switzerland specialize their MIOs to research variants while majors focus their MIOs on producing foreign licensed variants(if the achievable production bonus is higher than that of licensing cost).

2. Majors like Germany & UK have already a lot on their plate to play at speed 4. When war starts a good player already has issues juggling research, armies, air & navy. You've just added to the complexity which becomes boring after the first 2-3 playthroughs.

What you should do is: give the ability to queue researching techs, national foci and upgrading these MIOs. Make it orderable from 1936, so that I don't have to worry about it later.

In general if something is running non-stop through the entire game with limited paths(like national foci, research) make it possible to setup from the start.
 
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@C0RAX

Brilliant idea. Definitely will appeal to casual players.

Here are the problems you may face:
1. Minors will suddenly become "research hubs" while majors will become "production hubs". AKA minors like Sweden & Switzerland specialize their MIOs to research variants while majors focus their MIOs on producing foreign licensed variants(if the achievable production bonus is higher than that of licensing cost).

2. Majors like Germany & UK have already a lot on their plate to play at speed 4. When war starts a good player already has issues juggling research, armies, air & navy. You've just added to the complexity which becomes boring after the first 2-3 playthroughs.

What you should do is: give the ability to queue researching techs, national foci and upgrading these MIOs. Make it orderable from 1936, so that I don't have to worry about it later.

In general if something is running non-stop through the entire game with limited paths(like national foci, research) make it possible to setup from the start.
What this game could really do with is saving "presets" e.g tank presets, air presets
Would save a lot of time
 
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Hey devs, I suggest also an overhaul regarding the war support and stability system. I think they didn't have the impact they should. In a war there should be a constant drain of war support and stability. Each dead soldier had a family and because of that dozens of people were affected and changed there opinion regarding the war.
The player should have the possibility to counter the constant drain through the use of civil factories to produce consumer goods and food to keep the people silent regarding the war. For example germany tried that to keep the people silent and docile, one of the lessons of ww1 and the kiel revolution

It would be an interesting system and the player would have a constant usage for civil factories apart from trade. It would made the decision how many military vs. civil factories more interesting.

There are mods that do that. They just are not popular, because people think that it is boring if you are forced to end the war...
I like them. World Ablaze has desent system for this. But it is not popular, because people don´t like realism... when it comes to the way of map painting.
 
1. Will there be option to push a button and game will chose the "historical" option.
Aka when you start MIO you can put it on "auto" mode and it will develop based on historical path, when it gets more XP. That would help RP players.
Same as with tank, ship and air designers. Push auto build button and computer would "design" a plan/ship/tank that is closes to your current tech level. Also good for RP players. The AI most likely use something like that?

2. You said that designer can be very focused or general aka for example light tank that give bonus to only light tanks vs just tank designer that gives bonus to any type of tank.
Can you open what benefits / cons specialised vs general mio has. Do they collect XP differently? Does the spesific gives better bonuses, but having tree different reguires more XP to level up than one general?
I can see that this can give choose options... what is the better choose in this situation.
 
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  • MIO's are still historical and pre defined just like current design companies
    • they can be unlocked later in the game and be can script them to because available at greater than size 0
  • We initially looked into this but it had some pretty serious problems and edge cases that would require significant amounts of works to other systems and assumptions made. because of this we chose not to have MIO's have a location and they do not transfer when you take over a country.
Tangentially will it be possible to integrate foreign ones where it makes sense if you meet certain requirements?
For example CKD/BMM and Skoda as Germany or Austro-Hungary, or similar situations if it makes sense
(I realise Germany might not need it but they did in fact provide competing designs on German request during the occupation)

Although I suppose perhaps they have to be hidden/locked away only unlocked when conditions are met rather than transfered per se
 
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Dang this looks really cool (rip coastal fleet designer though)
I wouldn't be so sure: designs and manufacturing are completely different things. Way I see this: you might be able to apply same IC reduction bonus on design, and have MIO produce that design for even more benefit (and while both are probably limited, how many variants would you realistically have?).
 
What do you mean? Each player saves a set-up and sends it to the host before the game starts?

You don't realize players switch majors quite often before the game, do you? Because for example, you need a UK and the only competent UK players wanted to originally play Italy.
You save templates for designs (tanks,air,navy whatever) on the client side, and you just hit a button and it loads them from your PC or something like that.....
 
You save templates for designs (tanks,air,navy whatever) on the client side, and you just hit a button and it loads them from your PC or something like that.....
Have you played a Multiplayer game with all majors as human players?

You sit around for 30-60 mins waiting for players to arrive. Then you still usually have 1 major not filled and you plead for someone competent to take it. Like Italy taking UK, while someone half-brained who was graciously allowed on a minor, taking Italy.

Rehosting = 2-3 players leaving the game and finding another one. AKA not a single host will rehost more than once or unless there's the game not showing in lobby bug happening.

In short: pre-game saved templates are not viable. Only in-game generation is viable in the current stand of things.