Developer Diary | Summer Open Beta

[C0RAX]

Hmm a little bit dissapointed, that there is no political rebalance like a little buff for democracys to give the player any reason beyond roleplay or focus tree to play that ideology. Maybe buff industry factors and stability for example

I like the changes, and I am happy about the beta update. The weight / thrust update and combat wide are a good idea.

But since release of for blood alone there is a massive visual bug, do you have already worked on it, and when do you think it will be fixed?
It's very annoying.

This one:

HoI 4 - BBA - Field Marshal Portraits Disappear

Description of issue BBA - Field Marshal Portraits Disappear What platform do you play on? Steam Game Version current Enabled DLC Do you have mods enabled? No Description After Peace Conference, Portrait of Italian Field...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

It's confirmed and there are even dozens of "multiple reports" so I guess you know about.

As mentioned in the dev diary this is specifically balance effecting changes we want feedback on. its not the full change log for 1.13

 

[C0RAX]

Cool changes, it's only a shame that carriers are still untouched.

carriers are not untouched both carrier planes are changed and the carriers themselves

 

[C0RAX]

Will Naval armor piercing work like it does with tanks (Tank is not fully pierced) or it will be like with the old piercing system where if the tank was not pierced it had a set amount of buffs

its as listed in the the penetration to damage table in the change log

 

[C0RAX]

Whats the point of CW changes?

These make 40-45w not the same high width peak for efficiency and flatten most of the rest of the curve so the efficiency losses are not quite so harsh from one width to the other when fighting on the common terrain sets

 

[C0RAX]

The agility effect from Bomb Locks vs Small Bomb Bay are strange. The -15 agility from the Bomb Bay is removed in this patch, thus making the Bomb Bay basically always give more agility than the Bomb Locks even though the description for the Bomb Bay says that it makes the plane unable to do "radical maneuvres in combat" (agility).

whoops that's a missed value

 

[C0RAX]

View attachment 1002975
View attachment 1002976
1945 small airframe gets tied for range by 1936 medium? sounds real stupid to me

looks like you might need to use an extra fuel tank if you want more range.

 

[C0RAX]

"Super Heavy tanks are now support units. Super Heavy tanks are no longer line battalions"
AH!
You think you can stop me?
View attachment 1002972

yep the current change is just moving SH tanks to support, based on the feedback we will move them all over to support in future

 

[C0RAX]

It is slightly confusing that the combat width change is listed in the air section - unless I have missed something, CW is a land-only thing, correct?

oops fixed it

Nice for us that the summer break for HoI4 seems to come later than for other titles, but of course you all have deserved your summer holidays !

Dev diaries wont be stopping for HOI4 even in summer

 

[C0RAX]

True yeah, with the buff they got
Speaking of more air, the axis kinda gets screwed in the air war even more now with the 1944 airframe having an extra slot, axis just gets way worse fighters as a whole due to the allies getting the 44 airframe super early from aus, the allied fighters are just way better now, its gonna be tougher for the axis to compete in the air

aus getting airframes super early is known and something I want to address, just not in this beta

 

[C0RAX]

This CW change isn't solution. This change will literally annoy players instead changing the game. Like you want to fight in USSR, you have mostly forests and plains in Europe part, this can be easy. But you have France, you can't free operate with tanks without getting headache. You won't have time to care about CW, you want to push France as Germany, but France has plains, hills, forests and some mountains, and I have to remember that all these things will be ruined by rivers. Maybe instead changing CW of terrains, could be better change CW of battalions, support companies, maybe give to every doctrine thing like Massive Assault has. I think this idea (make really different numbers for every terrain) can work, but it will require to increase CW on all terrains and change division designer to have more battalions to change, and make finding largest common divisor for certain theatre as I said.

The big point with this is the efficiency difference is very low from one CW to another so you don't need to care so much so long as you in are in the "good" range of CW's somewhere between 10-45cw. of course you can specifically design for a terrain type but this is a rare case.

 

[C0RAX]

@Corax I don't normally post here, but I'm part of a community of very experienced & active multiplayer players who effectively use the most popular "vanilla lite" mod - i.e. we keep things as close as possible as to how you devs set it up outside of some minor quality of life and performance optimisation changes for multiplayer. As someone who has 5,000 + hours (I know, v. sad) I generally don't comment on changes as I love the product your team has built and most things can be massaged for a multiplayer setting.

However, these combat width changes are really grating - you've effectively buffed defensive units which fit into more fungible small combat width sizes and nerfed 40+ width attacking divisons (tanks).

Now the key terrain change is FORESTS!!! they shouldn't be an odious 76 width they are simply to common on barb (eastern front), it simply detracts from the quality of life of players (single player and multiplayer) without adding meaningful strategic depth (its honestly feels like the devs are trolling the playerbase xD) - please consider revising the forest width up to 80 width to a lesser extent it would be nice to see hills in the 74-78 range.

The other changes look interesting, I always appreciate attempts to keep the game fresh & improve on the already great product.

As I said in the DD, this beta is about having a discussion, iterating on ideas and improving the balance changes so feedback is always welcome. thanks for the opinion.

 

[C0RAX]

Do the 3 new Torpedo Mount modules fix the issue of Torpedoes being the only plane weapon that only lose their weight when not mounted, but still keep their agility penalty on non-naval missions?

no agility or weight effects when not on mission

 

[C0RAX]

If Super Heavies are now support companies, are there any restrictions on what they can do/be in? Paradropping Super Heavy Tanks would be really stupid for example.

Super Heavies should not be airdroppable

 

[C0RAX]

With the Superheavy tanks becoming Support, can you leave the SHTD and SHAA hardcoded in (Even if you can't make them) so modders can make armored cars and mechanized vehicles using the designer?

Basically setting it up so that modders can make "SHTD" equipment required for mechanized companies, allowing you to design your own half-tracks and the like

all the super heavy variants will remain

 

[C0RAX]

I am somewhat confused by Toperdo Air Research Level 1 in the Air Tree. It gives the Light Torpedo Mounting which is already avaiable if you have the Torpedo Tech in the Naval Tree. I feel like nations who start with Torpedo Tech should also have this one or rather the Light Torpedo Mounting should be exclusive to the Air Research then.

yep research setup for the new torpedoes has not been implemented yet so that will be the case in the final patch

 

[C0RAX]

Minor Hotfix for some problems found on day 0.

##########
HOTFIX
##########
-hotfix for legacy damage reduction for ships was conflicting with new system (they will now add to each other) set legacy value to 0
-hotfix for missing agility mods for bomb bays

 

[C0RAX]

@C0RAX I'm 99% sure NAVY_PIERCING_THRESHOLD_DAMAGE_VALUES does not work in two ways. It uses the piercing value before it is initialized, i.e. it acts as if the ship has zero piercing. Secondly, the value from the array should be a multiplier as is, but 1 gets added to it. This makes the factor scale from 1.3 to 2, instead of the intended 0.3 to 1.
(I have not looked at the hotfix yet, so apologies if it addresses this too)

Just had a look and seems you are correct. Well guess there will be hotfix next week since everyone has gone home for the weekend, but I've done the fix internally so its ready to push out on monday. Well that's the life of pushing development code earlier than normal.

 

[C0RAX]

This has completely borked naval armor? The legacy system for armor was fine. Now armor is worthless and barely reduces damage.

Previously, if you had say a 60 armor Superheavy vs a 20 piercing Heavy Cruiser, the armored ship would take around 60% less damage. This was balanced because heavy armor means you get hit a lot more, is much more expensive, and doesn't help you vs air attack.

Now in this patch, these 46 attack Cruisers are dealing around 40 damage per hit. This means that the massive IC investment in armor does nothing but make you an easier target.

In the last version, the only Counter to the new low-visibility Heavy Cruisers was SuperHeavies. Now thanks to worthless armor, they get completely destroyed.

Side note, the visibility change means that stacking Medium battery on Heavy Cruiser is way too strong due to the HP bonus. Even without this hotfix, 330 HP Cruisers were just better for the cost than Battleships, only losing to Superheavies.

In addition, Navs are still too weak, ships shoot them down too much. It takes about 6-8k modern navs to kill a basic AA refit UK fleet. The damage numbers are fine, but the AA losses are just too favoured to surface ships.

as mentioned just above there is a bug that's been found that causing the reduction to be 0 right now, welcome to betas stuff breaks we will get it fixed as soon as possible.

 

[C0RAX]

I generally very much like the air changes, since they bring vanilla closer to what I have been wrangling out for the Waltzing Matilda mod , despite the fact that I'll ahve to rework some stuff to fit in due course... I do have a couple of questions and suggestions, though:

1) Excess thrust is moving to add AGL rather than speed - excellent, and much closer to reality. I assume the limitation of Thrust>Weight to get airborne will remain? The old version did, however, permit mission-specific speed changes, and no other mechanism allowed this; will max_speed multiplier be something we can add to mission stats, now (please)?

2) Turrets in vanilla don't seem to have a defence effect; splitting the effects of turrets to add both defence and attack is both realistic (it's why they were called "defensive weapons") and acts to make turret fighters a bit less attractive - fighters tend to need attack more than defence.

3) Are the effects of speed mission-affected? Bombers outpacing fighters was a huge thing (becuase if you can run faster than the fighters, then agility and firepower are pretty academic), but fighters against fighters the speed was less of a factor because both sides usually wanted a fight.

4) Any chance of specific anti-submarine values for aircraft weapons?

1. yes thrust must still be >= weight
2. turret now provide both air attack and defence and agility on bombing missions to represent it being harder to attack from optimal directions.
3. kind off
4. not without significant amounts of code work no

 

[C0RAX]

BTW, are Advanced Carrier Airframes meant to be missing the 4x utility slots of their land-based cousins?

Yes, but if it's causing issues you can provide that feedback.