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Developer Diary | Small Features #1

Hello there, it's me C0RAX.

This week we are going to talk about some of the small features coming with Arms Against Tyranny, these are small things that add or change the game to increase the QoL or add to the game.

So this week we have 3 main groupings;
  • Division structure
  • Economy
  • Presets

Division Structure
First up we have division structure changes. The way you make a division has been fairly static for quite some time. With this update there are some new changes that increase the challenge and compromises you will have to make when designing your divisions.

First up we have some changes to the categories for each brigade that you choose when you pick the first battalion for each vertical column. Previously we had both artillery, AA and AT in the same category as maneuver units like infantry and tanks. This is no longer the case; artillery, AA, and AT are now in their own category meaning you need to choose how many support brigades you have and how many maneuver brigades you have. This extends to mobile battalion and armored battalion categories.

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Previously there was never any real scarcity when it came to a division's battalion slots, you could generally always have whatever number of battalions you wanted in generally any mixture. Now your brigade also starts with the bottom slot locked making a 5x4 grid.this is the default state of divisions and you can unlock this 5th slot by unlocking doctrines giving you a 5x5 grid. When this is combined with the category changes you will need to think about how much combat support battalions you can bring vs vs how many maneuver battalions you you need if you want to make that large division with lots of tank and infantry you will be significantly restricting just how much Artillery, AA and AT you bring to boost your unit.
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Economy
Now we are onto something many of you have seen in the focus tree dev diaries is the new modifier “Consumer Goods Factories Factor” . This new modifier exists because the Consumer goods calculation and its associated modifiers have changed.

Previously the calculation of consumer goods was calculated by adding all the consumer goods modifiers to get a percentage; it then worked out the number of factories that percentage represented against your total factory count. So if you had 5 civs and 5 mils for 10 total factories and your consumer goods modifiers total was 10% you had to pay 1 civ for consumer goods. You were then “taxed” that number of civilian factories.

This had a nasty problem in that it was very easy to first reach 0% consumer goods which was a considerable balance consideration due to it allowing faster snowballing of the economy. This easiness of reaching 0% consumer goods was then a problem because once you reached 0% other parts of the game where the reward was a further reduction of consumer goods were rendered useless since you cannot go below 0% consumer goods.

This is now done a little differently, firstly there are now 2 steps to the calculation of the percentage. First we have the base value(expected consumer goods), this works the same as the old percentage calculation; it's a simple percent value that is added up together. This generally is only set by laws so it acts as a base value that everything else modifies. We then have the consumer goods factor (the new modifier) which multiplies this value and if there are multiple factor modifiers they are multiplied together meaning that you will generally never actually reach 0% consumer goods from just the factor alone and the effect of each additional consumer good factor modifier has diminishing returns.
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We have also as part of this made the consumer goods calculation round down consumer goods factories which should help minors a bit while not really being highly noticeable for majors.

For those who want a detailed copy of the calculations it's like this:

ConsumerGoodsPercent = (Base1 + Base2 + ….) *((1+Factor1) * (1+Factor2) * ….)

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



Presets
And finally I kept the most exciting one till last, and that is presets for your equipment designers. Ever since the introduction of the equipment designers we have known that some players don't want to or struggle to interact with the complexity of them especially when they are new to the features or game. This was for many off putting and something they would shy away from or be continuously frustrated with, Since the game didn’t really teach you how to make a well rounded design for each role. This was doubly true if they wanted to recreate a historical vehicle that they know from their own knowledge of WW2 but didn’t understand how to translate that into the game with the designer.

What these are are premade designs for your equipment designers that are stored in the game files. When you create a new variant from a blank chassis you can press the presets button and will get a list of all the presets made for that chassis/hull/airframe. So should you open up the improved heavy tank chassis presets you will find an entry called Tiger I and you will see the picture of the Tiger I tank and if you click it all the modules and roles and values will be set for you. Should you be missing modules or upgrades the preset entry will tell you what you are missing in order to make it, then all you have to do is research those modules and then create the variant.

So now if you don't understand or want to understand the deeper workings of equipment design you can still make good use of the equipment designers just pick the tank you want and the game will make it for you. Of course if you want to try out tweaking the designs to edge your way into the world of equipment design you can do that too. Once the preset is loaded you can adjust any part of the design as normal, and if you feel lost at any point you can just load the preset back in.
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Some of you may wonder why we’re not allowing you to add your own presets or saved templates. In short, this is something we’d like to do and are not ruling out for the future - historical presets are an important step towards making custom presets a possibility.

However, this feature is entirely moddable so if you want your MP mods to have all the latest meta builds there as presets you can do that, or if you want even more templates for your super in depth history mod or maybe a totally different world you can do that. These presets are defined by the templates you make normally for the AI with some new additional fields, you can now define the art and the name of the template.

That's everything for this dev diary, I hope you will enjoy these changes as much as we have. As always feel free to let us know your favorite parts.

Next week we will be bringing you more information on a new system for content along with how it will be tied into the stories you can tell with this expansion and beyond. See you next week.
 
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I don't think locking the 5th slot in the division designer is meaningful. You can make 14/4s still and very powerful tank divisions, it doesn't really change how I design divisions in any way. I think locking the 4th and 5th slot would be way more meaningful gameplay wise.
 
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@C0RAX

Now that there are presets, will the focus trees (Germany for example) change to unlock new presets or will the focuses stay the same and unlock models with their specific modules?
 
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((1+-0.33)*(1+-0.13)) = 0.5829
0.5829 * 0.25 = 0.145 rounded down to 0.14 = 14%

We are probably losing some values somewhere to fixed point accuracy or rounding which would explain the 57% instead of 58% shown in the tooltip
Ahh, my bad. I forgot the minus. Thanks for the clarification!
 
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I think locking the 4th and 5th slot would be way more meaningful gameplay wise.
It also locks out several pre-existing templates, such as JAP "Hohei Shidan" and USA "National Guard" divisions.
 
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Regimental units should be incorporated into the force structure, which is in line with history
In the early years of World War II, the German division level was four regimental units plus four battalion units, and company units were already very small units
There are two solutions, one is to increase the design of regiment-level units, which will allow players to spend more time on troop formation, and the other is to eliminate company-level units and add regiment-level units, and the time spent by players on troop formation will not increase or even decrease
For example, the communications company, this unit does not make much sense, because is there any Army division in the 20th century that does not need communications? Every German regimental unit had a communications platoon
 
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Okay... We're going to ignore the debatables of the rest of this diary to talk about the middle-finger you just gave your community as a whole (especially modders) with Presets... (This will be a bit passionate, but I don't care at this point. Disagreement tally be damned.)

In short, you just said...
"We're going to give you half of what you asked for, with historical presets ONLY that we determined through half-backed research and didn't bother to playtest, but it's moddable so you modders can do custom presets for yourself."

Do you have any idea how Lazy that makes you guys sound? This is a bare-basic feature people have been asking for since NAVAL designers... to SAVE and LOAD designs across games. You finally get around to the idea after adding three more designers, but can't be bothered to do anything more than hard-set Historical templates? With no way for common players to save alterations we'd like??? Say "we'd like to do it" as if there is no reason (and without giving explination) as to why you couldn't do it right now????? And then say "But it's moddable for metas!" as if that's the only thing modders care about???????

Modders don't care about "Meta," we care about "Gameplay." Something you guys have seem to lost understanding of since you don't playtest. Yeah, cool, we have another tool to use... Can you not pressure us into using it so you can avoid adding this feature youself? Because if you're going to treat modders like they're part of your QA and Testing Staff... We're all going to tell you to get over yourself, as a collective company, reguardless of which of your Execs or team-leads thought it was a good idea to braodcast "We're lazy so the modders can do it," in a "Developmer Diary" which at this point should be renamed "Community Outreach Blog."
 
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I’m not sure I’m a fan of the new division changes, I don’t mind unlocking the 5th slot but I think the game is going to start having a real issue with a bloat of things that cost xp, especially since we’re also going to need army xp to upgrade mountaineers. I think this is going to be an issue especially for minors and countries that don’t get much army xp, and it’s going to be an indirect buff to Japan and Germany, and not in a way that’s historical since with the way division designs will be set up it will heavily punish a French or British player for using historical Infantry support tanks. It also discourages combined arms and it’s especially frustrating since pure artillery/at/aa divisions aren’t good. If your set on putting artillery and such in their own category I think there should either be an across the board reduction of xp cost for editing divisions or an increase in the amount of army xp generated in general.
 
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Division Structure
Doubt it'll achieve anything. Even if it was horribly restricting (it isn't), who even uses artillery battalions in significant numbers when there are tanks with howitzers? Speaking of: where are armoured support battalions?

This had a nasty problem in that it was very easy to first reach 0% consumer goods
Easy for who? Nations with fancily reworked focus trees with no regards for balance?
 
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Will the ai use these preset templates? My ocd can't see inter war looking Fw-190s and spitfires when im looking at air stats in a region anymore. Awesome feature tho!!excited either way
 
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Previously there was never any real scarcity when it came to a division's battalion slots, you could generally always have whatever number of battalions you wanted in generally any mixture. Now your brigade also starts with the bottom slot locked making a 5x4 grid.this is the default state of divisions and you can unlock this 5th slot by unlocking doctrines giving you a 5x5 grid. When this is combined with the category changes you will need to think about how much combat support battalions you can bring vs vs how many maneuver battalions you you need if you want to make that large division with lots of tank and infantry you will be significantly restricting just how much Artillery, AA and AT you bring to boost your unit.
First off I would like to comment that the individual columns in the division designer are not brigades but regiments. They work like regiments mechanically, historical division templates treat them as regiments, they are even named regiments in some old communication from the dev team and I think even on the HOI4 wikia and finally they are too small to even be able to represent brigades. I believe this might perhaps stem from a misunderstanding caused by the specific British terminology of this era where regiments were called brigades and battalions were called regiments but this was a regional exception. Since battalions are named battalions in game and since regiment was already a accepted term I think the modifier "brigade size" should be renamed to "regiment size".

As to the change itself I was unsure about it but now I see what is the intended goal. Since battalions got split into different categories and one can't mix different categories within the same column or "regiment" positioning of battalions will indeed make a difference now when it did not before. This basically means that not only do we lose 5 slots for battalions but also lose a whole additional column because it will usually be taken by "combat support" or in other terms artillery units leaving just 4 other columns for the actual line units. I will be curious to see how it works out. Its certainly a interesting change though my hope is its only just start of changes to combat and division organisation.

Also a question it was mentioned that one of the goals of this update is to have doctrines impact divisional templates more is this the extent of changes we can expect on this field or will future dev diaries feature other changes to doctrine which would impact templates?
 
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Will it be possible to add flavor text to these presets? There were some mods that added custom descriptions for the tank techs of countries, and now that the research slots are the chasis instead of the tanks themselves some of that flavor got lost. Could one, say, add the history of the T-34 into the tooltip of the T-34 preset, as an example?

Along with this, just a simple tooltip on 3D models, along with the 2D cards, of what they are supposed to represent would be good. I can usually figure it out and pair them together right, but I have the allied/axis armour packs as well as eastern front planes DLC and there are quite a few. Let's hope the 2D sprites, 3D models, equipment names, and proper designs all align with this new update, along with the stars.
 
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Late game economy is something that would be nice to improve but we don't have any immediate plans with changes to it.
It would be interesting to change it so consumer good have some kind of basic effect on its own beyond taking away factories. For example by giving a stability bonus that scales with the % of factories expected to be given to consumer goods. The higher the amount required the higher the stability bonus one gets this way actually simulating your citizens having a large amount of consumer goods eg being wealthier. As economy turns to military production and access to goods is restricted the citizens dissatisfaction grows and stability goes lower. This though would be based on the base value so mostly by the selected law and not the modifiers. This way any negative economic modifiers increasing the required number of factories given to consumer goods wouldnt turn into half positives by also increasing stability. In the same way positive modifiers lowering the number of consumer goods required wouldn't then also carry a negative effect of lowering stability. I think that would be a nice little system to work with. It would also open up the ability to have changing the base value of required consumer goods be a far more impactful change as it would also impact the nation stability so say a national spirit lowering the base value of consumer goods required would indeed give you more factories to work with but it would also lower your stability so its a interesting trade off.
 
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I will definitely mod my alt-history /never built designs but I wanted to ask how far did you go with Never built designs and concepts and what about designs that share the same hull/airframe/chassis time vise or literally like He 112 and Bf 109,
Panzer III and IV were based on the same chassis.
Scharnhorst and Bismarck fit in the same time frame and should be based on hull 1936 (pls return Scharnhorst her BB armor 1)
And about laid down but never finished designs like
Lion class which would share a 1936 hull with KGV
German M class would share hull with K and L class
Or H Class for Germany (two laid down both scraped)
And Alsace Class for France ( two Ordered and one maybe Laid down but France had much larger problems like Panzer Divisions crossing "unpassable" terrain for tanks
also what about refits, Andrea Dorias, Standards, and QEs were rebuilt and modernized to a great measure before and during the war
 
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I will definitely mod my alt-history /never built designs but I wanted to ask how far did you go with Never built designs and concepts and what about designs that share the same hull/airframe/chassis time vise or literally like He 112 and Bf 109,
Panzer III and IV were based on the same chassis.
Scharnhorst and Bismarck fit in the same time frame and should be based on hull 1936 (pls return Scharnhorst her BB armor 1)
And about laid down but never finished designs like
Lion class which would share a 1936 hull with KGV
German M class would share hull with K and L class
Or H Class for Germany (two laid down both scraped)
And Alsace Class for France ( two Ordered and one maybe Laid down but France had much larger problems like Panzer Divisions crossing "unpassable" terrain for tanks
also what about refits, Andrea Dorias, Standards, and QEs were rebuilt and modernized to a great measure before and during the war
Good questions.

It is also, why I am pleasantly surprised that the developers are introducing pre-sets. No matter what choices they make, converting the game system stats to represent the hundreds of different ships, planes, and tanks during the war, through the medium of the designers, is going to create many points of debate. I hope the future debates can be civil. I know there are many players with a vast knowledge of WW2. It sounds like you know quit a bit yourself and can contribute to the future conversation.

IMHO, another possible benefit of the pre-sets is they may open the door to new things in the future, if not in vanilla, then in mods. I have played every major mod and so many others. I believe the talent and imagination of the HOI4 modders is something most everyone should try to experience.
 
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