• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Developer Diary | Division Commanders & Unit Medals

image (9).png
Greetings all!

Welcome back to today’s feature dev diary on a series of interconnected subsystems being added to the game in By Blood Alone.

One of the major points in my first roadmap dev diary was that I felt quite strongly about the inclusion of further roleplay and immersive elements in Hearts of Iron. What I’ll be showing off today is intended to fulfill a small part of this bullet point.

Those of you with keen memories will recall an early teaser I posted here. Some of you guessed correctly, and in BBA, we’ve introduced a dynamic system for naming battleplans. For many major nations, battleplan names can be provided through a list of locations, resulting in a historical series of operation tags which will be applied when plans are created:​
image4.png

Of course, the war does not always proceed historically, and battleplan names can also be generated from several component lists for instances where a historical variant cannot be found. These name lists are fully moddable, and can be unique to countries. In some cases (ie; Soviet Union) a different naming convention can be utilized to represent the somewhat uninventive approach to naming operations that was used in reality:​
image3.png

Naturally, in the spirit of roleplaying, these operation names can be modified in-game, and you can replace the text with whatever operation name you desire. This will apply to any sub-orders derived from the initial drawn line:​
image7.png

If unset, naval landing and paradrop orders will have a unique pattern to remain unique.

This system however, goes further than a simple naming convention, and ties into another addition being made to BBA.


Division Commanders

In BBA, we’re replacing the standard method of recruiting new generals out of thin air. Instead, every division will be created with a commanding officer upon game start, or when they are trained:​
image1.png

These are predominantly generated from country-specific namelists, however in some cases we have set these individually for starting divisions. When a new unit is created, they will be provided a randomly generated character name and portrait. To accommodate the increased use of generic portraits for these, we’ll be adding a large quantity of additional generic portraits for owners of BBA. The work involved in creating these is not insignificant, so for now we’ve limited ourselves in adding portraits to major nations only.

You’ll be able to get an overview of all division commanders in your army within the officer corps screen:​
image5.png

In an effort to avoid unnecessary micromanagement, we’ve made a few important decisions. Division commanders themselves will not directly confer bonuses upon the divisions they command, however the divisions they command will now earn and log a record of important actions they may perform during the natural course of a campaign:​
image6.png

Important actions such as taking a capital, securing a high-value victory point, and more, constitute actions for which a unit can be awarded a medal. It is expected that over the course of a campaign, many units will qualify for receiving medals, often several - the system is not driven by scarcity, as we do not intend for players to micromanage individual actions, rather to manage the macro-level step of choosing when and what to award their units.​
image2.png

As mentioned above, division commanders will not explicitly confer bonuses, however the medals awarded for action will. Medals are intended to act as a pp sink for the mid-late game, as we find a lot of players tend to end up with a significant amount of this resource as decisions, advisors and focuses begin to dwindle.

Units can receive multiple medals, however the cost for each will increase as more are granted to any given unit, and the effect of stacking specific medals will decrease per instance of the same effect.

As you will note above, medals can be specific to countries, and we’ve included a series of generic medals based on alignment, as well as unique medal sets for each major country. A medal’s effects will only extend to the unit it belongs to.

A medal’s name and description will in most cases be dynamic depending on what action it was awarded for, and extreme valor while on a specific named operation can also result in receiving a medal for that action.

To further streamline the process of awarding medals, you can perform quick actions to do this through the officers entry in the corps screen:​
image13.png

As mentioned previously, we’re removing the old method of recruiting generals by means of reaching into the void and plucking out a fully qualified officer. This means that your army generals will now be directly linked to your field of divisional officers, and their capability directly linked to their actions in the field.

Divisional officers will store experience based on the experience gain of the unit they are commanding, as well as receiving a lump-sum when a medal is awarded. While active as a divisional officer, this experience will have no meaningful effect, however, when in need of a new army general, you can promote divisional commanders out of their divisional role and directly into their new role as a general.

Any medals awarded to the division will be retained by that division, however, the newly created general will keep a reference to their awarded medals as a means of remembering their accomplishments in the line of duty (albeit with no direct effect on their new army - although we’ve elected to support this behavior for modders should they wish):​
image9.png

When a divisional officer is promoted this way, the experience they have earned during the course of their field command will be applied to their experience level as a general (up to a maximum cap). Promoting someone with field experience can prove a lot more valuable than hiring another pen-pusher, after all. If they have earned at least a certain quantity (as yet undecided) of field experience, they will also begin with a personality trait corresponding to the type of division they were commanding (armor officer, infantry officer, etc).


Unit Cohesion

You will also note that my roadmap included a wish to improve the battleplanner. While this is likely to be a slow, iterative process, BBA heralds the inclusion of a new frontline parameter intended for advanced users.​
image8.png

The Cohesion parameter can be set on any root frontline order, and will affect how the unit controller places divisions across that frontline. The default setting of ‘Flexible Cohesion’ functions as you have grown to expect - all units will be evaluated for placement suitability and potentially relocated to fill perceived gaps in frontline cohesion.​
image14.png

Balanced Cohesion’ will only successfully evaluate units that are within a defined distance from the target (distances are moddable). In practice, this results in less unit shuffling along frontlines, but should still ensure that frontlines respond to changes in size and shape.​
image11.png

The final setting, ‘Rigid Cohesion’ is intended primarily for long defensive lines, and will only successfully evaluate unit positions that are within a very short distance from the target location. In practice this results in relocations only taking place to neighboring provinces, and can result in gaps being created in frontlines if left unattended. It is expected that this setting will be used by players who primarily rely on micromanagement of frontlines.

The AI will make use of flexible and balanced cohesion settings depending on the ratio of divisions:frontline length, but will avoid the use of rigid cohesion.

It is worth noting that units that are not placed directly on the frontline (having been left behind or recently added to an order instance) will not be subject to the same cohesion restrictions, and will make use of strategic relocation to find themselves a new place on the frontline. Additionally, the cohesion setting will be respected regardless of whether an order is being executed or not.


Modding

For those of you interested in modding, the addition of these subsystems also comes with some new tools regarding units. It is now possible to iterate over unit arrays in states and countries by condition, and apply a series of effects, including the awarding of medals, history entries, and other basic parameters such as affecting org, strength, and more. For performance reasons, units do not currently support storing or being stored as variables, though we will monitor the need for, and performance implications of doing this in future (I SEE YOU EaW).

Predefined divisions can be set up with lists of historical commanders that they will draw from when their current commander if replaced, should you wish to opt for extreme historical fidelity.​
image10.png

The visual display ranks of divisional commanders correspond to their gained experience, and are fully customizable, though confer no gameplay effect.

Medals themselves can be added to the medal array based on arbitrary conditions, and support a variety of modifiers, not all of which are represented in our vanilla use-cases.

Name combinations can also be split from various random lists, if you have a particular penchant for randomly generated names.
image12.png



That’s all for now, tune in next week for a second look at how peace conferences are progressing!​
 

Attachments

  • image7.png
    image7.png
    1,3 MB · Views: 0
  • image12.png
    image12.png
    18,5 KB · Views: 0
  • image (7).png
    image (7).png
    374,4 KB · Views: 0
Last edited by a moderator:
  • 133Like
  • 96Love
  • 10
  • 8
  • 2
  • 1Haha
Reactions:
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.
 
  • 18
  • 2Like
  • 1Love
  • 1
Reactions:
Love the addition of named operations and the cohesion mechanic. Looking forward to seeing operational warfare be fleshed out even more in the future.
 
  • 2
Reactions:
Will it be possible for modders to automate the awarding of medals, i.e. through a periodic event that looks for a division_earned_medal trigger and uses an award_medal effect to give them out?

Also does the AI use the medal system and will it preferentially promote division commanders that have medals/experience?
 
I'm sorry if this has already been covered, but when promoting an officer from a division to your pool of generals how are his stats determined?

Also - I love your commitment to adding more flavour and RPing to the game. The changes already sound awesome, but I was wondering if in the future you would consider allowing divisional patches to be added to divisions or squadron badges to air wings. A lot of divisional badges already exist on the workshop and IMO this would be great for the purposes of immersion.

In a similar vein - I'd gladly pay for an artwork DLC that featured more historical general portraits, divisional flashes etc. Would this be something that could be considered?
 
I like medal system because its adding some content without being OP.

But I still want to have same system with regular commanders. I understand your concern researching every other general for their historical medals would be too little to gain for effort paid - but at least, please create a pool of general medals and let us reward our generals that accomplish great things. With even more minimal buffs than officers.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
I love this. I love "The button cannot hurt you. You don't have to click it." even more!

So if I promote a Division Commander to an Army General, the Division will receive a new, presumably generic Division Commander - correct?
 
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.
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.
 
  • 10
  • 3
  • 1Like
Reactions:
These are predominantly generated from country-specific namelists, however in some cases we have set these individually for starting divisions. When a new unit is created, they will be provided a randomly generated character name and portrait. To accommodate the increased use of generic portraits for these, we’ll be adding a large quantity of additional generic portraits for owners of BBA. The work involved in creating these is not insignificant, so for now we’ve limited ourselves in adding portraits to major nations only.​
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.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Ah, the changes and improvements all pretty nice.

These name lists are fully moddable, and can be unique to countries. In some cases (ie; Soviet Union) a different naming convention can be utilized to represent the somewhat uninventive approach to naming operations that was used in reality​
While I'm sure that this is just an example for the variety of naming conventions, I do hope that the very many named Soviet operations make it in by default (eg: Mars, Uranus, Saturn, Iskra, Star, Ring, Bagration, Suvorov etc)
 
About expeditionary units gaining medals: will they receive medals from the original owner or the current controller?

It be awesome to flavour to have your expeditionary units return home with some medals from whoever you sent them to. That's historically accurate too.

Same question applies for Volunteers. Can they receive medals from their host countries?
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Wow. this is super exciting!

One suggestion though, do you think its possible to have a separate text category for the division's Nickname?

Example:
Name: 4th Division
Nickname: 'Ivy'

If you want to separate these I'm sure it would be easy to give division's nicknames for actions they do and honor's the receive too. It could be great for added roleplay.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Maybe i misunderstood (I wish) but are only going to be unique medals for major cuentries? Minors countries like Spain, China, Poland, Hungary... are gonig only to use generic medals?
If I understood right answer is no right now for non major countries.
But I think dlc countries should have couple of unique medals through next patches. I like Country specific content personally.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
It's not the awarding I am concerned about, it's the assessing and microing divisions to be aligible for medals. Like I said, what do you think will happen? I will micro all my tank divisions to get that 7.5% breakthrough. Because of course I want 7.5% breakthrough on my tanks, why wouldn't I micro them to be eligible to get medals, when I have the PP?
Yes, but that isn't being forced to micro. That is choosing to game the system by micro'ing.