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Developer Corner: Reinventing Faction Dynamics - Part 1

Generals!

Continuing from where we left off last week, we have another briefing from command. Find a comfortable chair, settle in and read on!

Briefing: Reinventing Faction Dynamics (Part 1)
Written by: @Wrongwraith

Hey all,

Dev corners are back. What are they and how do they differ from the Dev Diaries we normally do? The key difference is probably the scope. Dev corners are usually shorter. Here we discuss things that are sometimes very early in development, whereas Dev Diaries are usually about describing and explaining the new features that come with an expansion. So less details, and also a lot less pretty screenshots. And above all, a lot more Work in Progress - the things we talk about here might not even make it into the game in the end - at least not in the shape they are presented.

But enough of that, on to what I was supposed to talk about. Today’s subject is Reinventing Faction Dynamics…

Not much has happened to factions since release, so we figured it was time to take a look at them. The main difference is that there are more of them as more countries can, and do, create factions now. But in general they are all very similar, and you don’t feel any difference playing as the Axis as opposed to the Allies, the Comintern, or the Chinese United Front - for example. The goal here is to change that. To make factions feel more unique, and immersive at the same time.

Before we continue I should reiterate that this is very early stages - so not much in terms of final UI is implemented, sometimes you can’t do things except by commands, and in general things are constantly changing - so don’t expect pretty pictures!

But look at it from the bright side - you get to see very early UX mock ups - and some beautiful “coder art:)


Core Concepts

Today I will try to run you through the core concepts of what we are doing with factions. Later on I will dive deeper into details, but for now, I’ll try to keep it relatively high level and give you the big picture of what we are working on for this feature.


dc_factiondynamics1_001.png

Early mockup of Faction Window Header - showing the Manifest, the Faction Icon, and the Faction Power Projection

Each faction has a manifest. The manifest is about what the faction wants to do. Conquer new land, Stop the spread of fascism - or similar longer term purposes.

Each manifest will have a percentage of fulfillment - that can go up or down during gameplay. If the fulfillment is high enough, some bonuses will unlock - depending on the type of manifest.


dc_factiondynamics1_002.png

In-game view of the Faction header with manifest for the Allies - this is as raw as a screenshot will get. Placeholder art, no tooltips, no graphics added, and no attention to placement or final elements. But it is there, and it is working, and as the Allies, we want to defend democracy


Faction Goals

In addition to the Manifest each faction will have shorter or longer term strategic goals. These can be things like conquest of specific territory or control, or instigation, of resources..

These goals, once completed, will give the faction members rewards that they can use to modify their faction in various ways - as well as more standard rewards like Army Experience.

Together with the Manifest, the Goals will give the faction a direction. A direction you need not follow if you don’t want to, but if you do you will be rewarded.


dc_factiondynamics1_003.png

Example Goal set up for the Axis. Again please note that the screenshot is an early prototype.


Rules

Each faction comes with a set of rules. These generally relate to a specific action type. Like for example who can join the faction or who in the faction can declare war.

Some examples:
A rule for joining can be based on the ideology of the joining country. For example, the rule might state that only non-fascist countries can join. (It won’t prevent a country from turning fascist later though). Another Joining rule can be based on Geography, saying that only countries from a specific region can join.

Other types or rules relate to things such as:
Peace Conferences - Giving you bonuses to certain types of actions
War Declaration - Who can declare war and what are the requirements
Call to war - Who can call to war, just the faction Leader, anyone, or Just Majors etc
Dismissal - When can you kick someone from the faction
Contribution - What are the minimum requirements for contribution to the faction
Leadership Challenge - What are the requirements for taking over leadership

There will probably be a few more, and some of these might not make it, but you get the general idea.

These rules can be changed during gameplay, if the Faction leader, or any other member country, has Faction Initiatives available to do so.


dc_factiondynamics1_004.png

UX mockup for changing your Rules (in this case the Join Faction Rules)

Speaking of Faction Initiatives - lets move on to:


Faction Initiatives and Goals Rewards

Initiatives are what you use to change things in your faction. These Initiatives are gained from completing Goals. Most goals will give one Initiative to the faction leader when completed. Some might give to other members as well. And if you have an Initiative to spare, you can change a rule. Or you can remove one. Or add one - it is basically up to you to decide what to spend your Initiative on, and how to modify your faction. But choose carefully, for initiatives will be few. (Which also means you won’t be spammed with decisions to make - which is something we want to avoid.)

Other ways to spend Initiatives
Apart from just changing the rule set for the faction, you can add specific upgrades to your faction to make it more unique.

Example of upgrades you will be able to do are:
Adding or improving Research Sharing
Adding or improving Military Doctrine Sharing
Adding a Faction Supreme Commander
Start up joint research sites


dc_factiondynamics1_005.png

UX mockup of the research part of the Factions screen.


Influence and contribution

The last thing I want to talk about today is Influence and its close relative; Contribution.

Each member Country has an Influence rating in the faction. This is basically an internal power level - how important a member are you within the faction?
Countries with high influence get more things from goal completions. Meaning they will also have a say in how the faction evolves - as some of these rewards can be Initiatives.

Additionally, in order to take over leadership of a faction you need to have a minimum level of influence.

You gain influence by War participation, Contributions, Industrial might, and from “Events”. Events can be various things depending on the faction and the content - but can include things such as executing daring Raids, or from focuses or decisions.

Of these, Contribution is probably the most interesting to talk about. Basically whenever a country delivers something to the faction, or to other faction members they gain “contribution score” - which is directly reflected in their influence rating. Whenever someone receives contributions, or “withdraws” from the faction pool, they lose contribution score - thus lowering their influence.

This means that Influence will build up and fluctuate over time.

Another use of influence is in peace conferences. When your faction is on the winning side, all member countries will pool some of their war score, and this will be given to the most influential countries in the faction. Similar to the game setting where the Faction Leader can get part of other members’ scores. But here it is not just the faction leader, so if you are an important part of your faction, you will get more say in the peace deal even if you are not the faction leader.

What are contributions then?

Generally they are things you can do to support your faction or your faction members - such as sending expeditionary forces, pooling manpower for use by the faction, producing industrial goods, Lend lease to faction members. Those kinds of things. Some of those we already have in the game, but the goal is to streamline them a bit. Others are new - but regardless of whether they are new or old, they will contribute to your contribution score - thus making you more (or less) important in the faction.


Some Final Words

Another thing we want to add when working with factions, is the ability to tell your fellow allies where you want them to focus their efforts. Similar to how you can create pings to multiplayer allies, you should be able to tell your AI allies that I want you to focus on this region. It shouldn’t mean that they abandon everything else, but rather just increase their attention here.

That was all for this time. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and I’ll do my best to answer questions, but do bear with me, I won’t be able to answer everything - party from a time perspective, but also based on the fact that there are quite a few things that are as yet undecided, or at least relatively untested - so I might not know what the end result will be. If it doesn’t play out fine, or smooth - things will change. But I will do my best.

Additionally, I hope to be able to give you a few more details in a few weeks time - because as you can see if you look at the draft schedule presented earlier, I do have yet another slot for this.

And as I said, what you have seen here will most certainly differ from what will eventually make it into the game. It takes many iterations, and a lot of feedback to get a feature completed. But I hope you enjoyed this little peek into what I/we are doing at the moment.

/Wrongwraith
 
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Im kind hoping for a joint focus tree for the 3 main factions similar to what we got on some of the previous dlcs. Right now the only ones we have are alt history.
From a modding perspective, it would be an inconvenience at this moment to have to account for the focus tree placements of all members of a faction. It works fine when you script certain countries to have these focus trees such as the Nordic countries, but if all faction members are to have access to this joint focus tree, it becomes troublesome to account for. Not to mention, some of the more recent focus trees are incredibly long. The German focus tree is already quite long as is. Adding an Axis joint tree would be too much.

Unless there is a completely separate UI for a faction joint focus tree, I do not see this as practical to implement. Besides, the faction goals and other interactions presented so far would be a better option for simulating internal faction diplomacy instead of enlarging the focus tree in a case that is not really reasonable to do so.
 
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You said that you can also gain influence through events. So, do I understand correctly that, for example, the USA gains so much influence after World War II that it takes over the Allies? (And then an event occurs that renames the Allies to NATO, since you also talked about post-war content.) Or what are the events supposed to be? If my example is wrong, could you give another example?
 
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If joint Special Projects are added, does it means that most of the Projects would be longer/more expensive? We definetily don't want to see ICBMs in 1938 just because faction members decided to jointly research it. Or those joint Projects work in other way?
I think maybe the way to go about it is to have diminishing returns with each faction member you have, which would make sense because it would be hard to stay organized IE too many cooks
 
This faction system rework could be a good opportunity to rework China including that faction against Japan but really, that’s just a pretext, because China’s focus tree is terrible anyway.
 
Interesting, though I hope the "more standard rewards" are not going to be the main draw. There is a tendency to have every mechanic add some +% bonus, these simply cause inflation over the DLCs without changing the way the game is played in practice. Restricting the conditions to join a faction or influencing the peace conference sound far more interesting as rewards than army experience.
 
Wondering how non-aligned will fit in here. Obviously there is confusion as to what non-aligned was meant to mean originally - countries that weren't in the big three factions or countries whose governance didn't align with the big ideologies. A few countries have default non-aligned parties who are basically just alt-democratic parties (Ireland and the Scandis come to mind). Now there are loads of alt-history paths with monarchism, who should really have a way to coalesce outside of focus tree factions imo, while not including alt-democratic non aligned or anarchists etc. i know what I'm thinking about is more about that idea on the old roadmap for more detail for subideologies but I do think a faction rework should contribute to making non-aligned more functional.
 
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Exciting changes! Better faction management like preventing join war spam will be an awesome improvement. Focused AI attention on certain fronts will be great. Historical faction goals will make sense, but how will all the ahistorical faction goals work? Does the faction dictate the goals, or does the faction leader get to select specific goals from a list, and as those goals are finished, add new ones?
 
Perhaps the existence of a faction could be conditional on the existence of a specific enemy, just as the Little Entente was primarily focused on Hungary, causing the faction to disappear if the threat disappears.
Thus, if Germany disappears or is no longer fascist, the central element that allows the Allies to exist would disappear, forcing the creation of a new faction (historically NATO) to counter the new Soviet threat (and, of course, the whole thing could be scalable if the faction were ever to find itself at war with an enemy different from its original enemy).
This could also lead to a review of the system of guarantees by only allowing a guarantee to be directed towards a specific threat (just as the Allies didn't lift a finger when the USSR attacked Poland, even though they declared war on Germany for the same reason).
 
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1. YES.
2. You could have just said "Faction Reinventing", and I would have been sold.
3. This would tie nicely into a future, and totally hypothetical, Cold War game.
 
I do hope that irredentist claims/cultural unification can be a faction goal as that seems to have been the primary motivator for the axis.
Take Hungary, Germany, Romania to some extend and Finland.
 
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How deep is the pinging AI allies system going to be? Is it just going to be telling an AI to focus on a specific country or continent? Or will I be able to tell the AI instead of scattering 10 divisions from the North Sea to Switzerland it should focus on a certain frontage so it can make a concentrated push
 
Hi! I was wondering, with the upcoming update, will there be any options for customizing faction names? For instance, would it be possible to change a faction’s name once it reaches a certain number of allies?
 
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Diplomacy is absolutely the most lacking mechanic in HOI at the moment, so I welcome development in that area, but I think these plans basically move things in the complete wrong direction. This adds a lot of mechanics that will create at least as many problems as they solve and do nothing to enable the actual diplomatic manoeuvres that the game should model.

Factions should be conceived of as a patron-client relationship in which members give up a portion of their sovereignty in exchange for military protection and piece of the pie in case of victory. It's easy to see this if you ask yourself: could a given faction member be compelled to make a (serious, lasting) separate peace without the consent of the faction leader? If not, the faction member is not a fully sovereign country. If so, the 'member' is not actually a faction member in terms that the game understands. As a consequence of this, there are no faction membership rules beyond the faction leader's will and practical ability to project power. Any rules that do exist will be bent, amended, excepted or ignored as necessary when the faction leader's foreign policy requires. It's true that e.g. Czechoslovakia should not be able to join the Chinese United Front, but this is because China had no ability to exert military force in Central Europe, not because a piece of paper somewhere tells them that they're not allowed. Likewise, no faction has ever had any purpose other than advancing the foreign policy of its leader. That some appear more aggressive and some more defensive is primarily a function of whether the leader starts with a large empire to be defensive of.

Faction influence essentially duplicates war score. Faction members changing rules makes little sense because, as a consequence of the above, faction leaders should be able to amend rules at will. "Umm, sorry Mr. President, the Your Faction Name Here club charter won't let you do that." <-- This has never happened, ever. & without that, influence just adds a little extra bureaucracy to systems that already exist--if there are problems with those systems then amend them, otherwise lose the extra paperwork.

Summing up a little:
  • Despite diplomacy being extremely barebones, this adds new buttons to press but no new meaningful interactions.
  • Faction rules will create as many problems as they solve--already on the first page of replies people are naming several scenarios in which exceptions might be needed. I think not being allowed to do things in your own faction because the club charter sez no will be a major source of player frustration (as well as being unrealistic).
  • I think this system basically attempts to model the PR/propaganda of various factions as if it were all true, rather than modelling the underlying realities of those diplomatic relationships. Great powers have foreign policy goals and craft mission statements to align with those, not the other way around.
The one positive I will end on is that an ability to give objectives & focuses to the AI is an extremely welcome addition, so I'm happy about that.
 
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Would appointing a Faction Supreme Commander give the player any ability to control the units of other countries? Maybe the Faction Supreme Commander could be a general set aside which any country in the faction could add units too, basically volunteers but special. It would also be cool if there were effects for modders to give control of a country's army to another country like in previous games. I was once porting HOI2/DH content and got mildly peeved when I couldn't replicate it!
 
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This is all very interesting and promising, and I hope the final result will be refreshing and spectacular!

I want to stress a few points as a player that I think many will perhaps resonate with.

  • The AI should not join random factions (such as the Allies or Axis) and automatically enter all wars (as currently done by the call to arms request), so the player needs to go to war to take the said country for specific achievements/goals. This hopefully resonates well with the faction rule mechanic.
  • If the player plays a pivotal role in ending the war, such as capitulating a major nation, they should have some way to make many more demands in the peace deal. As you mentioned, I want to make more improvements. I still feel some pain when fighting alongside the Allies, in that I don't get to do enough of what I should be able to do in the end.

Overall, I want the faction mechanic to give the player more gameplay control. It should help, not harm, in controlling the war situation.

Please add on if you agree/disagree.