Developer Diary | Division Commanders & Unit Medals

[Arheo]

Some Generals and Marshals that we have at the beginning of the Game historically had medals before 1936. Will these be implemented ? (For example Gamelin had the Legion d'Honneur since 1913, etc...)

No, as these would have no effect on army generals.

mod developers can edit the gender ratio of division commanders that are randomly generated? mod in a particular era (example: 21st century) may require female division commanders.

Not currently, our generic portrait system doesn't handle this very well, but it is on my todo list.

Has this has lagged the game in your testing? I can imagine the game struggling to keep up since it's calculating hundreds of new generals and their medals.

Any performance impact should be unnoticeable. These 'characters' are not actually characters until you promote them.

Can we get an example of one of these procedurally generated medals you're talking about?

To be clear, I mean the description of the medal will correspond to the action you awarded it for:

It is also possible to reference any of the location or string variables in the title of the medal, though we have not done so.

This is unironically my favourite stuff so far, the changes and improvements to RP factors are amazing! Some smaller questions regarding the commanders and medals however:

Do the new divisional commanders now exist in the characters folder for each nation? and how do medals interact with cross-ideology nations? The British medals depicting monarchs might look a little out of place for a communist run!

No, in the interests of performance, divisional commanders are not explicitly set up as characters until you promote them to an army general. As such, giving them specific portraits is also not possible at the moment.

Available medals can be arbitrarily changed based on gamestate conditions by modders. We have elected not to do so for countries with unique sets, mostly for balance reasons (effects differ).

Will some historical starting generals be demoted to division commanders?

We thought about doing this, but decided it would materially effect players' expectations at game start, as well as changing quite a lot of starting balance.

What happens when you delete a division? Does the field commander stick around for reassignment, or do you lose him unless he's promoted first?

if a division is destroyed or deleted, their regimental history and commander are both burned at a ritual bonfire.

Do medals mean it's functionally possible to have an "elite" division stays special even if it's ground down back to green?

Yes.

Great leap for battle micromanagement. As Divisional commanders are back in the game why not create Corps level OOB?

Divisions=> Corpses=> Armies=> Army Groups/Fronts

Thank you for bringing back the Divisional Commanders. Can't wait the release of BBA.

I.. becau... no.

What happens when a division is deleted or destroyed. Will specific officers be able to be taken prisoner at some point? atm an entire army can get encircled and then the officer pops back into existence in the home nation's deck of cards.

Division commanders can't be reassigned from division to division - they have no unique statistics, and allowing this would be a lot of extra micromanagement for no material gain.

will changing template reset the division's medals?

No.

Yeah, for example can I get the fuel use medal and then change an infantry division to an armor division to save on resources?

Theoretically yes, but armor divisions have access to the same medals, so I don't see that you'd gain or lose much doing it this way.

Will division commander portraits always draw a random portrait, or can they be assigned specific portraits? If not, will we be able to mod so that historical names can make their appropriate historical portrait? I ask because I think the 2d art in this game is phenomenal, but I find an overdose of 'attack of the clones' portraits immersion breaking. I understand that your artists can't make an Hoi3-number of custom division portraits, but it would be nice to reduce the generic ones and have more historic ones when possible.

Also, will No Step Back officer bonuses will be applied once generals are promoted to army commanders?

Interesting post and looking forward to seeing how it works out in the finished dlc.

As mentioned above, this is currently not supported. It is high on my wishlist, but due to the nature of how they're created, is not trivial.

NSB officer bonuses will be applied on any promotion (including have fixed a bug that didn't roll for extra stat gain when a general starts at higher than level 1).

Does this mean all mods will be retroactively forced to use the character system?

I'm not sure I understand the question.

@Arheo Does the new medal mechanics affect the way general can be grinded to obtain traits? If so, how does it impact the current known subsystem?

Not really, though this can be modded in, to an extent.

 

[Arheo]

This is perfect. I really love this. And feel that stuff like this is what this game has been missing.

will commanders be able to be killed? If not I’d like to strongly encourage y’all to consider making that a possiblity

It would be possible, but drawing attention to it in a non-annoying way would be difficult.

Looks exploitable - is it protected from abuse of taking and then leaving a city, again and again for farming awards?
And it strongly favors big divisions, since 30PP is pricey for 20-30 width, but okay for 60+. So making ultrawide panzers is in fashion again.
Still no corps level command tho.

Yes, this is protected against. Ultimately it is your choice to award medals to high width or low width divisions. Players tend to utilize some strong pushing divisions, and I expect this is where the majority of medals will land. I'm ok with that.

I am confused. You claim you didn't want to introduce micromanagement, and yet we have to manually assign medals to each and every single divison out there. How is that not a micromanagement hell? Seriously, am I missing something here? If my army consists of 200 divisions, how exactly will I not spend hours assessing who to assign medals to?

How am I not incentivized to relocate a specific division I want a medal for to a specific location, so they can earn a medal? Unless I am missing something, this seems like so much micromanagement hell, I am baffled, honestly.

And the bonuses are not insignificant. 7.5% breakthrough? Hell yes. I want that on my tank divisions. So what do you think I'm going to do? Exactly, I will micro every single of my tank divisions to partake in a special operation so they can earn a medal. I will manually go through all my tank divisions to see who has and who hasn't got a medal yet, and then send them off to somewhere special to earn a medal.

Seriously, tell me if I am misunderstanding this, because as it seems, you are doing the exact opposite of what you claim (as in not wanting to introduce micromanagement)

The button cannot hurt you. You don't have to click it.

As I pointed out quite early on, this system is not designed to be bottlenecked on medal availability. If you want to spend your pp on a medal for your pushing division, you will probably be able to, provided it has been engaged in combat for a little while. The bonuses these grant are subject to diminishing returns - once you've got a few for your main divisions, you likely don't need to keep coming back.

If this is still too much for your tastes, that's ok.

This looks really good! Some questions:

- How will some of the Officer Corps interact with the field officers? If I have the officer corp spirit "Academy Scholarships" will it be cheaper to promote my field officers to generals?

- Can we posthumously award metals to officers that have been "killed" off in an encirclement?

- Could we see some of the other nation specific metals and their bonuses?

Generals KIA will not be recorded currently. We've added a new military spirit for NSB & BBA owners that makes it cheaper to award medals, as well as reducing the division experience hit when a general is promoted.

 

[Arheo]

Some of the available medals (UI wip):

And my personal favorites from our superb artist:

 

[Arheo]

Very, very interesting!

I have some questions, if possible. Thanks in advance!

1. Will we get a "Modding Changes" dev diary similar to what we got for the NSB DLC?
2. Is it possible to make division commanders die/retire? Not necessarily in combat automatically, but through commands.
3. Can we assign and reassign division commanders? For example, if commander A is a monarchist and we want to assign a fascist, is this possible through modding?

1. There will be a modding DD
2. IIRC, yes via modding
3. In theory via modding, yes.

 

[Arheo]

In regards to there being no bonus for generals who have earned medals as officers, would it be possible instead, that any general who earned a medal(s) previously gain a small boost to exp gain, to represent their prowess and experience. Nothing too powerful or strong, but still rewarding players for using game mechanics

Awarding a medal to a divisional commander increases the experience they'll start with when they're promoted to a full army commander, in addition to any they earned in combat.

 

[Arheo]

This mean if we have 200 division we will have 200 officer! OMG late game will bemome nightmare for my cpu.

No

 

[Arheo]

This point doesn't feel all too convincing since they are retained on army generals promoted from divisional commanders as well despite having no effect on generals. They're already basically flavor that's meaningless mechanically.

I don't think all flavor has to come with stat buffs. The reason we didn't was because it was extraordinarily OP, but the option is still there if modders want to experiment.

 

[Arheo]

Clearly I've misunderstood something, but I was under the impression the medals became null flavor when a division commander was promoted and I was operating under that assumption.

On the general, yeah, it just remains as a record of what they did when they were a divisional commander. We could of course just... not do this, but personally I like to see my Generals' records preserved. The medals and the effects of those medals remain on the unit they commanded though, so you're not losing them by promoting someone.

Will promoting commanders to generals have the same cost as recruiting them currently does (i.e. scaling cost based on the current number of generals)?

Yes.

Is the cost of awarding medals moddable? A lot of mods already have a lot of ways to spend political power and it would be more fitting to have them either be of lower cost or use other resource entirely. Also can certain medals have a entirely unique cost? It would be nice to have some special medals that give unique bonuses but also require you to spend more.

Currently the costs are fixed to PP, though the individual cost of medals can be changed based on type, as well as the scaling cost factor. You can also remove the cost entirely via modding if you wish.

 

[Arheo]

Would it be possible to disable this and use the old system for modding, Atleast as a temporary measure?

The old system will be present for players without BBA.

 

[Arheo]

It's not clear to me; are we awarding medals to generals, units, or both?

And divisional commander's stats don't effect the performance of that division at all except for the medals they've been awarded (or was awarded to their units)?

Why not let division commander stats buff their divisions?

This is intentionally vague, so I understand the confusion. Narratively speaking, they are awarded to the commander and the division, for a specific act. If we removed their effects when a general was promoted, there'd be really no reason you'd ever want to promote a general. Thus, the medals and their effects stay active on a unit when the general is promoted, and the general retains a reference to the medals they earned while commanding that unit (ie, not including any medals earned under a previous commander).

Division commanders do not have stats to apply to their division, so I'm not sure what you are referring to here. They are not army generals until promoted away from their unit.

 

[Arheo]

how about ships and planes? Will similar systems of individual squad leaders/ship commanders be introduced aswell?

Currently no. Not ruling it out for the future though.

 

[Arheo]

To clarify, what I thought you were responding to was the question of whether the game's default starting generals would have their historical medals from their past service at game start. Not about the divisions themselves at game start.

Understood. It might tehcnically be possible to do this, but at this stage I can't promise anything. There are a lot of starting generals.

 

[Arheo]

Very interesting.

If you are looking at battle plans and the like - please, please add a button or a setting or whatever to make units ignore the "I will stop now because moving forward and fulfilling my orders will create a low supply situation".

'Careful' execution status will respect supply in the way you describe.

 

[Arheo]

As a final note on the topic of micromanagement, this UI:

allows you to manage every aspect of the new divisional command system. If you want a new commander, it is the same number of clicks as previously. If you want to award medals to tank corps ie, you can sort by type, and 'quick award' to the first awardable entry in that commander's list.

You do not need to find specific units or look at their individual panels.

 

[Arheo]

Question - for unit cohesion, what is meant by 'only reshuffle units based on defined distances from the target'. What target are we talking about and what defines the distance from said target (specifically what is the difference in the 'defined difference' between flexible / balanced / rigid)?

Hard to explain this in player terms, but: every province along an order instance is evaluated periodically to determine if it needs more divisions. If it does, it'll iterate over the units in the armies assigned to that section of the order instance and evaluate if it a) is allowed to be reassigned to the potential destination and b) what its relevant scoring factor is in relation to that destination.

In the 'old' method (Flexible Cohesion), the unit with the highest (or lowest, I can't remember) score will then be assigned to move to the province in need of a unit. This meant that for frontlines without a zillion divisions, the 'best' scoring unit could still be absolutely miles away. In simple terms, the stricter cohesion settings apply a distance cutoff after which units will no longer be evaluated, and the weights for distance have been changed to be more impactful. There are some additional load balancing parts to it that encourage spreading out, but those are the broad strokes.

Distance in frontline terms is evaluated as a straight-line pixel-to-pixel approximation between two or more nodes. Full pathfinding is rarely used for high-frequency calculations like this.

Can you please revise the system so that historical divisions are first raised with historical commanders? Or at least make this moddable.
I am sure Paradox probably has no time to find all the historical "at creation" commanders for all division-size units of WW2, but the community probably does.

As I detailed, this is supported and can be added to with modding.

Some more questions:
1. Do I understand correctly that the only way to replace a divisional commander is to promote him or to lose the division via destruction or dessolution?

Yes.

2. What will happen if 2 or more divisions are amalgamated (not sure that I use the term correctly, but that situation where you click a button to make 1 stronger division out of 2 or more beaten-up wrecks).

Still to be handled.

4. Will units sent as expeditionary troops earn medals? BTW - please make deployment of units to SCW faster.

They can earn medals normally, yes. For a brief period during implementation, generals sent to the spanish civil war would become Spanish, adopt a Spanish name, and receive cosmetic surgery. We elected not to retain this behaviour.

 

[Arheo]

Will it be possible to turn off officer portraits? Will it be possible to turn off the Officers feature in the game options?

You can disable BBA to remove the feature, yes.

I have a question about promoting generals from unit commanders;

Let's say I have a "1st infantry division" and I do a bunch of fighting with it until it and its commander have quite a lot of xp and a few medals; then I promote this unit's commander to a general which will let him start at a higher level than normal thanks to the xp he gained while commanding the division.
Will the division lose xp in the process?

Currently yes, losing their commanding officer will reset the division's field experience to 0. Jury's still out on this, as it is perceived that this is quite a harsh penalty, although it can be offset with a new Military Spirit for the NSB officer corps system. In practice we'll probably tune this down to be a bit less absolute.

If it does then does it depend on how much xp the unit reached? Let's say the unit reached Veteran level and then I promote the division's commander to a general; does it lose a certain fixed amount of xp? or does it go back to regular?

As above.

 

[Arheo]

will there be a similar system for ship captains?

No, this was sadly well beyond the scope for this release. Not ruling it out for future.

 

[Arheo]

But that's the issue. If I have a bunch of important divisions, then this system incentivized me to micromanage these divisions, so that every single one participated in some event so I can give them medals. And if I don't do that, then I am worse off.
If I want to play this game optimally, then I have to micromanage these divisions to get these medals.

This is something, for example, that happens in MMOs like World of Warcraft. If there is an optimal way to play the game, then players will play the game like this, even if it is an objectively worse experience, more boring or tedious, than the devs intended. Happens all the time.

Sure I can play without medal micromanagement, I can also play without a navy if I don't like it, then my experience would be objectively worse with paratooper spam everywhere for example.

It's not that any system forces me at gunpoint to use these medals, it's that this system exists and using it is objectively better, thus passively forcing me, if I want to play optimally, to use it. For multiplayer games, this will be a micro-nightmare, I can guarantee that.

I would note that it also isn't a problem that MMO developers have found a solution for. You're right, of course, if there's an optimal way to play, some will search for it - that might even be why they play. Many won't, however. You can't truly avoid a 'meta', because at some point, metas and strategies or optimal vs sub-optimal play becomes self-reinforcing. I know of no game which is perfectly balanced, and I know many of our fans take joy in searching for optimums.

What you can do, is mitigate. Accepting that while some players might use features tangentially to the way they were intended, and mitigating the effects of that. We have done this in large part by adding quick actions, batch actions, resource & time bottlenecks, etc. In effect, you're complaining that we haven't made it easier to take advantage of the system, and I think you'll find after using it that the resource bottleneck is actually the most significant anti-micro thing there, despite being a footnote. Awarding medals simply isn't an action we expect players to be taking every 2 minutes. Save them up and do them in batch at some point the same way you apply general traits... use the military spirit and make it the core of your campaign... there are options.

It is not, as you say, an 'objectively worse experience' unless you set your bar so high that it becomes that. We've provided mitigation, and I'm absolutely not above adding more if this becomes something that a significant number of people find genuinely consider arduous.

I wonder, is it not somewhat more practical to make these portraits randomised in their components as well, say setting a few different poses, same with outfits, same with facial hair/colour, same with presence of glasses, same with skin tone, etc? Literally thousands of new quality portraits would be generated out of, my assumption, a relatively simple system to program that would require less time and resources than creating hundreds of individual portraits alone, and would be applicabile to each and every nation in the game. I know nothing about coding so there's that.

We tried that with the LaR spy portraits. Mixed results, and in each case these had to be stitched together by artists rather than done procedurally.

 

[Arheo]

@Arheo Earlier [much earlier] there was mention of something akin to a theater reserve system - I'm not sure if it was one of the first Developer Corners for BBA or perhaps it was back at the start of the NSB Developer Diaries - but the idea [as I understood it] was that there was to be a way for a theater to retain a reserve of units that could be reassigned by the battleplanner AI to fill gaps in lines as well as to reinforce against invasions.

I realize I may be mistaken about this but I was wondering if that idea [or whatever was similar to it] was still something being worked on or was it canceled? I recall there was a screenshot of unit deployments with a lot of units being held in some manner of strategic reserve - all of which was displayed as red dots on the map

This was added in NSB, but needs a lot of expansion to make a noticeable difference. We haven't forgotten it

 

[Arheo]

You said that units whose commanders are promoted will retain thier buffs from medals, but does that mean that the new commanding officer starts with the same medal? Afterall the division has the buff, if I understand correctly.

No, the new commander will not inherit old commander's medals, however the old medals will still exert an effect upon the unit.