Developer Diary | Small Features #1

[Arthrodira]

Love the presets - like a lot. Historical presets + Denmark/Norway/Finland (sorry neutral Sweden) were at the absolute top of my list after China. This really feels (to me at least) to be the best dlc since WtT.

All I need now is to split New England and Maryland into the actual constituent states and you will have made the game I’ve wanted for years! I might even get greedy and push for an India re-work soon. Great stuff guys

 

[HmJ_JP]

BTW I have to say it: I'm totally fine that you propose to have NATO units icons. But, since we see that in the DD, let me express an opinion. To me, it seems not as good looking, but also it doesn't do justice to the HOI4 graphic designers who developed such a nice iconography for this game.
For that reason alone: I don't even want to learn what all NATO codes correspond to.

 

[ltccone]

BTW I have to say it: totally OK that you propose to have NATO units icons. But, since we see some in the DD, let me write it here. To me not only it doesn't look nice, but also it doesn't do justice to the HOI4 graphic designers who developed such a nice iconography for this game.
For that reason alone: I don't even want to learn what all NATO codes correspond to.

I learned them when I was 10 playing Avalon Hill board games. They aren't difficult.

 

[HmJ_JP]

I learned them when I was 10 playing Avalon Hill board games. They aren't difficult.

... and you're free to do so. I just find the original HOI4 experience more pleasant, but that's personal preference.

 

[blahmaster6k]

It feels a bit harsh on minors, since the amount of land XP required for adding that first artillery battalion is quintupled, which is a big deal for some of them.

I'm of the opinion that template changes cost way too much army XP already, especially now that doctrines cost EXP. If it were up to me I'd bring the cost down to 1 exp per battalion, 2 per support company, and 5 per category instead of 5/10/25 that we have now.

There just isn't enough army exp to get all the templates you want and get your doctrines in a decent amount of time anymore. The only real exception is navy if you have the oil to train your fleet around the clock or air if you have the ability to send air volunteers in the early game. Army you just have to slowly get from your advisor, a little bit from sending volunteers and/or lend-lease, but mostly you have to wait until the war starts. And if you're making a lot of templates you might end up having to start the war with almost no doctrine researched.

 

[eastcoastceojam]

I'm of the opinion that template changes cost way too much army XP already, especially now that doctrines cost EXP. If it were up to me I'd bring the cost down to 1 exp per battalion, 2 per support company, and 5 per category instead of 5/10/25 that we have now.

Love the idea of these reductions in Army XP costs. If this happens, I would also like the XP cost for removing battalions or support companies to be eliminated.

For example, Yugoslavia starts with Engineers on their basic Infantry template. Given their limited military industry at game start, having Engineers on every Infantry division is a luxury. But to drop the Engineers from the existing template, I have to spend 10 Army XP. That's a steep price to just take something away.

 

[Eruth]

BTW I have to say it: totally OK that you propose to have NATO units icons. But, since we see some in the DD, let me write it here. To me not only it doesn't look nice, but also it doesn't do justice to the HOI4 graphic designers who developed such a nice iconography for this game.
For that reason alone: I don't even want to learn what all NATO codes correspond to.

They’re not changing anything. All the nato codes already exist in the game as an option you can select. This particular dev jsut happened to Have that option on.

 

[HmJ_JP]

They’re not changing anything. All the nato codes already exist in the game as an option you can select. This particular dev jsut happened to Have that option on.

Yep, totally true. And I'm fine that there's an option for hard core players.
I was just saying that the iconography work is very nicely done and straightforward for us casual players, that was a compliment.

 

[KnyazSuvorov]

There was zero programmer time used to change the categories of battalions since it's all in script. It was a task I could do myself, so I did.

Ok, I am wrong then.

But why make these changes? How is this an improvement over the old way? I don't understand.

 

[Poliut]

BTW I have to say it: totally OK that you propose to have NATO units icons. But, since we see some in the DD, let me write it here. To me not only it doesn't look nice, but also it doesn't do justice to the HOI4 graphic designers who developed such a nice iconography for this game.
For that reason alone: I don't even want to learn what all NATO codes correspond to.

Aren't they also a wee bit anachronistic? Could be wrong.

 

[billyangzimeng]

ConsumerGoods = Max(ConsumerGoodsPercent , MINIMUM_NUMBER_OF_FACTORIES_TAKEN_BY_CONSUMER_GOODS_PERCENT ) (ConsumerGoods * Total factories).RoundedDown

I have a question regarding the consumer goods calculation.

Does this equation mean that we are taking a maximum percentage between a scripted constant and in-game calculation consumer goods percentage? If so I undertood this first part.
What does the second part suggest, (ConsumerGoods*Total factories)? Aren't we trying to calculate the consumer goods here?

If what you meant to write is this below, then it makes perfect sense. Please let me know what I am missing. Thank you.

ConsumerGoods = [ Max(ConsumerGoodsPercent , MINIMUM_NUMBER_OF_FACTORIES_TAKEN_BY_CONSUMER_GOODS_PERCENT ) * (Total factories) ].RoundedDown

 

[Khachdallak]

This might be more related to special forces dev diary, but I will ask this now too, since the idea came up to mind.

Radars in hoi4 (especially in multiplayer are big part of the game-play), but what is unrealistic is that they show every unit within a radius, no matter what terrain it is. It's very unrealistic for example that units can't hide in mountains/urban tiles to be not visible to radars. This will be very cool addition to special forces "research" - unlocking abilities to be invisible to radar in certain tiles. For example Mountaineers can be invisible in mountain tiles, paratroopers in city tiles, marines in marshes. This will be very usefull for Germany for example hiding it's Dday wall in multiplayer game. I would really like to hear what do you think of this idea. Thanks in advance.

 

[xtfoster]

This might be more related to special forces dev diary, but I will ask this now too, since the idea came up to mind.

Radars in hoi4 (especially in multiplayer are big part of the game-play), but what is unrealistic is that they show every unit within a radius, no matter what terrain it is. It's very unrealistic for example that units can't hide in mountains/urban tiles to be not visible to radars. This will be very cool addition to special forces "research" - unlocking abilities to be invisible to radar in certain tiles. For example Mountaineers can be invisible in mountain tiles, paratroopers in city tiles, marines in marshes. This will be very usefull for Germany for example hiding it's Dday wall in multiplayer game. I would really like to hear what do you think of this idea. Thanks in advance.

RADAR, in-game, represents far more than RADAR. Actually, ground-based RADAR would not be able to detect any-ground based units, regardless of terrain and would have difficulties detecting even surface ships beyond the curve-of-the-earth. In-game RADAR covers not just RADAR, but RDF, SIGINT, etc., which is why it helps detect ground units.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

There just isn't enough army exp to get all the templates you want and get your doctrines in a decent amount of time anymore.

That's the point. If you can get everything, you don't have any choices to make, which is boring. This part of the game would become just a button-clicking game like a slot machine or something.

 

[HmJ_JP]

That's the point. If you can get everything, you don't have any choices to make, which is boring. This part of the game would become just a button-clicking game like a slot machine or something.

I agree with you, but we might also rephrase that: on the long run, by 1949 you can have it all. But until then, you'll have to prioritize and focus.

 

[blahmaster6k]

That's the point. If you can get everything, you don't have any choices to make, which is boring. This part of the game would become just a button-clicking game like a slot machine or something.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on that, because I just see the high exp requirement as limiting player freedom in a game all about customization and player choice.

Army exp is now required for:
Land Doctrine
Mountaineers Doctrine (As of the new feature showcase video)
Army Spirits
Division Templates
Tank Designer

In the early years of HoI4 you only needed army experience for division templates and upgrading tank variants. At one point you could speed up doctrines by spending army exp for a research boost when they were still in the tech tree at a cost of 50 per doctrine if I remember correctly. Back then you could keep a research slot on land doctrine and have your entire doctrine tree finished before world war 2 started, which was probably a bit fast considering that a lot of doctrines were still being developed as the war went on historically.

But as they've added new systems, there are even more things to spend experience on and at the same time army experience gain has gone down. Doctrines cost 100 experience now, so you can't really finish doctrines in time for the war anymore and that's fine. But all the other stuff still costs army experience.

Just to do some math on army exp requirements, let's look at how much army exp you needed way back before many new features were added and reworked, probably in the era around patch 1.5 and the Waking the Tiger DLC:

• Land Doctrines were free (took up a research slot instead of being done with army xp).
• Upgrading a tank would cost 100 exp to fully upgrade the gun, I think the total cost was around 600 to fully upgrade everything I found an old video where someone shows the tank upgrade window with a 5-5-5-3 upgraded tank costing 855 army xp, so it's probably over 900 to fully upgrade the tank. You really only cared about gun and reliability though from what I remember, so about 200 exp probably.
• Templates cost the same, at 10 per support company, 5 per battalion, and 25 for every additional type. It costs about 170 exp to design a 40 width tank template with five support companies from scratch or when editing from an infantry template. For meta players, a pretty common tactic as Germany or the USSR was/is? to expand the starting infantry template to 40w during the Spanish Civil War. Going from 18w to 40w would be 55 experience. Then you get your volunteers to maximum experience veterans and manually edit the template to tanks, which would cost (25 for adding tanks + 25 for adding motorized + 90 for battalions + 30 for new support companies) = 170 experience. In total, that strategy costs 225 army experience, and you'd be a fool to pass up the ability to start world war 2 with 5-7 divisions of level 5 veteran tanks, each with a +75% combat bonus to everything.

So basically over the course of the entire game you would only need about 500 army experience in total in most games, or 700 if you upgraded both 1941 and 1943 tanks. That would cover your tank designs and your templates, and that's all you had to spend experience on.

Now let's look at how much experience you need over the course of the game now:

• Land Doctrines cost 100 experience each without bonuses, at ten doctrines per tree (aside from mass mobilization) that's already 1000 army experience. And we haven't even gotten to all the features that already existed back when we only needed 800.
• Tanks cost considerably less now, it costs 24 army exp to make a "meta" single player medium tank from scratch. If you count multiplayer, you're probably paying around 50 exp in total to make both tank and tank destroyer designs. That's way less than needing about 200 per tank design, but this is the only place we have such a discount.
• You can design mechanized now, primarily to make them cheaper. It costs 100 army exp to bring the production cost of mechanized 1 down to 4 IC.
• Army spirits: 20 for the left slot, 35 for the middle slot, and 50 for the right slot. That's a total of 105 exp to use, more if you swap your spirits around during the game.
• Mountaineers doctrine: The recent feature breakdown video doesn't show the exact cost for a doctrine so this is pure guesswork, but if it's also 100 just like a normal land doctrine that's an extra 600 if you want to optimally use mountaineers. It could be less, but we have no idea and it could also be more.
• Division templates still cost the same as before, so 225 for the same tank strategy I detailed above.

So now we have 1000 + 50 + 100 + 105 + 600 + 225 = 2080 army experience as a rough approximation of the amount of experience you will need in a full game. That's more than 3-4x the amount of experience we used to need.

And despite the amount of experience we need being tripled, we actually have less generation of experience compared to before. Army experience gain from combat is capped at a slow rate, so you get way less from fighting. This cap on army experience from combat makes lend-leasing guns to Spain, Ethiopia, China or other early wars much less profitable and a net loss in most cases. Attaches are also practically useless for generating army experience compared to before, they're still useful for war support but not for experience. One-division training, the previously best method of generating army experience, was massively nerfed. It's still possible, but it's not nearly as good and it only works with countries that aren't going to be going to war for a long time like the USA.

Over the past four years, every method of generating army experience was massively nerfed, while the amount of army experience required is now more than double what it used to be and is possibly going to be at triple or quadruple the old number once the next DLC comes out.

The only thing we have now that we didn't before is the passive generation of experience from the army high command, which is roughly comparable with the amount of experience you used to be able to get from one division training. Before you would be getting 0.25 exp per day from one division training once you got your training infantry template to 50 combat width, now you get either 0.2, 0.3, or 0.4, but most countries will be getting 0.3. But you could also one division train from the start of the game, and the ability to get passive army experience didn't compete with economy laws and political advisors for your early political power. So even the new passive experience generation is worse than the old passive experience generation unless you have a genius in your chief of army. But then you're paying 200 political power for the ability to do something that used to be free, so there's a tradeoff there too.

This is why I believe we need either cheaper template designs or increased methods of generating army experience. It doesn't feel like I have meaningful choices because there's still a best order to buy things in, it just feels very limiting in what the game allows you to do compared to in previous patches.

As for that order, it's something like this: First two army spirits (they boost your economy and/or improve early game general grinding or army experience gain) -> Tank designs (the first thing you need to produce) -> Division templates (you need tanks before you can put them in a division template) -> Land doctrines (what use is boosting your troops when you don't have good divisions yet? 0x0 is still 0) -> Third army spirit (boosts your troops like a doctrine). That's not a meaningful choice at all, it's just a lengthy progression system before you can get to the end.

 

[KnyazSuvorov]

I'm of the opinion that template changes cost way too much army XP already, especially now that doctrines cost EXP. If it were up to me I'd bring the cost down to 1 exp per battalion, 2 per support company, and 5 per category instead of 5/10/25 that we have now.

There just isn't enough army exp to get all the templates you want and get your doctrines in a decent amount of time anymore. The only real exception is navy if you have the oil to train your fleet around the clock or air if you have the ability to send air volunteers in the early game. Army you just have to slowly get from your advisor, a little bit from sending volunteers and/or lend-lease, but mostly you have to wait until the war starts. And if you're making a lot of templates you might end up having to start the war with almost no doctrine researched.

Agreed.

I don't even see the logic of why you need army XP to change templates. It's not like you're inventing something new, you're just moving chairs to make them function in a more orderly fashion.

it's a nuisance that just gives a hard time and no benefit.

 

[Evethor]

The tooltip about consumer goods is wordy and quite confusing, especially if you dont know much about the game.

I suggest something like this.
"With our current Economic Policy,
the people expect 14% of our total factories to produce Consumer Goods."
___________
Total Factories: 62
Civilian: 34
Military: 28
________________
Consumer Goods: 8
"Free" Civilian Factories: 26

 

[MilanOvidi]

presets are great. Will AI actively use them? It's a big disappointment to me that the AI doesn't use a lot of tanks. I do not see the Tigers, KV and Churchill on the battlefield. This does not create the need to design and study remedies against them. Only anti-personnel attack and knead the meat ((

 

[Delareon]

Plz give us also some amount of factorys for repairs.
Its a micromanagement nightmare to always balance the things that need to be build and the things that need to be repaired