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Developer Diary | Summer Open Beta

Hello there, it's me C0RAX.
A bit of the different DD than you’re used to this week. I'm here to introduce a new thing I will be doing over the summer. This summer for 4 weeks we will be giving you the chance to test some of the balance changes coming with the 1.13 Stella Polaris patch. These changes are hand picked for testing in order to get feedback from the community on specific changes that might have large impacts. These changes will affect all three major combat groups (Army, Air, and Navy), and vary from value changes to some new functionality and behavior so be sure to read the change list so you know what you're getting yourself into.

So let's go into how this is going to work. From July 6th until August 3rd there will be a special Summer Open Beta branch on steam, this branch will have the new changes listed below. Additionally it won't have anything new coming with Arms Against Tyranny just changes for base game and previously released DLC’s. In the last week of the test we will post a feedback form to be able to collect feedback data that we can use to analyze your responses. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t post about it outside the form, I want to encourage as much discourse, theorizing and number crunching as possible so give it a try and let us know what you think.

Now lets go over the change log.

################################################################
######## Summer Open Beta ######### Balance
################################################################

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Air
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- Excess thrust will now increase agility instead of max speed (0.5 AGI per excess thrust)
- airframes now how base max speeds to better represent airframe size speed effects
- major air rebalance pass for airframes and modules
- increased tech date for survival studies to 1939
- Improved aircraft turrets
- slight decrease in agility hit for large bomb bays
- small airframe can only take single turret modules
- adjusted turret stats so they are less powerful for fighters but better for bombers
- rebalanced thrust and weights of modules and airframes,
- added new modules
- Large autocannon
- Large bomb rack
- Armor piercing bomb rack
- 3 levels of torpedo mounting
- Added new techs for plane designer (see above)
- Combat better Agility and Speed has increased effect on air combat

##########
Land
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- reduced terrain combat widths slightly, change support widths also
- Super Heavy tanks are now support units. Super Heavy tanks are no longer line battalions
- Armor skirts provide 1 more armor
- Most tank chassis' now grant 10-20% more armor
- Super heavy tanks now cost more overall, but require 20 per support company.

##########
Navy
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- added damage reduction to piecing thresholds for naval combat
- convoy hitprofile reduced from 120 to 85 bringing it inline with new hitprofile calculations
- Ship torpedoes accuracy increased to bring them back in line with new hitprofile calculations 145 > 100
- slightly decreased AA disruption from ship AA
- removed visibility effects of super heavy bb armor
- rebalanced, ship engines
- removed visibility impacts from medium guns
- rebalanced IC costs to reflect engine changes
- super heavy armor now part of normal heavy armors
- rebalanced armors
- added cruiser armor to carriers


##########
AI
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- AI more likely to upgrade division in the field even with equipment deficits
- added generic AI upgraded infantry template for late game infantry
- added ENG and USA upgraded infantry templates for AI and improved their infantry templates in general

Right now let's get into some explanations.

Thrust and weight:
Let's get the big one out the way thrust and weight for planes. This change requires a bit of game explanation and some explanation of aircraft. So why affect agility, agility previously was a stat that was seldom increased but often reduced by making it something you are rewarded by not using all your thrust budget you can lessen the agility effects of modules by not loading up your entire plane creating a choice between maximizing raw damage or maximizing damage bonuses during air to air combat by bring higher Agility.

Now the aircraft stuff, so power/weight is very not intuitive for aircraft, adding more power will make a plane faster but taking weight off a plane won't make it faster since speed is almost entirely determined by thrust against drag not weight. What less weight does provide is better climb rate acceleration plus some other things. These are abstracted into agility in game. So now if you want your plane to go faster you either use a newer airframe with lower drag (higher base speed) or by putting a bigger engine in the existing airframe.

Combat widths:
Now the next big change, terrain combat widths. This is the change that originally spawned the open beta idea. These changes are generally intended to flatten the efficiencies further for combat widths while also reducing division sizes. There will obviously still be certain numbers that fit better than others but overall these differences should be less extreme.

  • Terrain = CW+Reinforcement Width
  • Desert = 82+49
  • Forest = 76+40
  • Hills = 72+36
  • Jungle = 74+34
  • Marsh = 68+22
  • Mountain = 65+25
  • Plains = 82+49
  • Urban = 86+28
Ship penetration:
Finally the last change I want to discuss is the new penetration effect for ships. To put this imply they now reduce damage directly on top of reducing critical chance. The damage reductions are smaller than for land combat but that's because they have a much greater effect on the combat but be careful defeating an armored foe with just small guns should be much harder now.

Thresholds and damage are as follows

Pen to Armor ThreshholdCritical Change FactorDamage Factor
221
111
0.750.750.9
0.50.50.7
0.10.10.5
000.3

##########
HOTFIX
##########
07/07
- 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

10/07
Naval Combat:
- fixed damage reduction happening before stat initialisation
- fixed +1 to threshold values for ship penetration
issues reported here

- updated combat width defines as per
- implemented type 2 combat widths as per
- improved some templates for planes
- balance pass on new modules
- rebalanced dismantle and conversion costs for BB engines
- adjusted damage reduction thresholds for ships

That concludes the run down of the upcoming “Summer open beta” and it's coming to you tomorrow!. I hope to see you try it out and give feedback on the changes. See you next week for more Arms Against Tyranny content coming your way. It's going to be a pretty one.
 
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I have few questions and suggestions.

1) why did you remove Super Heavy Tank as Division?

2) Can you add DLC tanks icons also for modern tanks?

3) can you let Portugal bypass join axis and remove instable Republic in another way when it is in faction with fascist Italy o Germany? Same thing for Join tripartite pact for Bulgaria since if those countries join Italy faction their focuses are unlocked.

4) let Turkey bypass join faction focus specifically if they join a specific country for example bypass Mediterranean faction of Turkey if is already in Italy Faction

5) there is a bug for historical Portugal AI that doesn’t produce support equipment so doesn’t follow the Salazar branch and goes Fascist.

6) if you can fix Falangist spain unit 3D model since when you go Falangist it makes the unit the same as the Carlist ones and after 1945 all Spanish 3D units models become the general ones.
 
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5) there is a bug for historical Portugal AI that doesn’t produce support equipment so doesn’t follow the Salazar branch and goes Fascist.
Actually, I believe requiring 800 support equipment is a bit too much, as the production cost for support equipment is 8x more than the infantry equipment I. Maybe 100 or 150 would be a more reasonable value.
 
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).
 
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Big fan of changing up the plane meta a little bit, even if it isnt drastically.

I'd also like to see more variants of Mechanized and Motorized. We have Mot. Rocket Arty, why not AA, Arty, and AT for both Mech and Mot?
 
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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
 
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Super Heavy tanks are now support units. Super Heavy tanks are no longer line battalions
Are there any plans to add more options for modding - like extra support company "slots" - to allow modders to deploy more tank variants as support companies?
There are a few mods that increase the number of support company slots already. Off the top of my head I know of ones for 6, 10, and 12, and I personally use the 10
 
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1688658222106.png

Still think torps are too weak imo, if all it takes is 10 empty CL's to result in them losing very badly
The tank changes are also questionable, unpierceable armour slave heavies might now be a proper thing again
 
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I've never actually built a super-heavy tank, but is there some reason we can't have them both as line battalions and as support companies?
 
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"Super Heavy tanks are now support units. Super Heavy tanks are no longer line battalions"
AH!
You think you can stop me? :p
1688659631097.png
 
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Heavy tanks should get more armor, they are still easily 100% penetrated by SPTD. Or nerf SPTD a bit instead, its penetration is way too high comparing to infantry AT. It is not realistic that SPTD gets more penetration than standard tank.
 
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Heavy tanks should get more armor, they are still easily 100% penetrated by SPTD. Or nerf SPTD a bit instead, its penetration is way too high comparing to infantry AT. It is not realistic that SPTD gets more penetration than standard tank.

I think the idea with tank destroyers getting more penetration than tanks is that tank destroyers - being designed specifically for destroying tanks - will have more shells designed for tank destroying than the average tank, which is designed to handle a wider range of tasks.
 
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My SHBB lost 4 knots out of nowhere under the same design. I'd hate that alone already. The rest of ships seem to be intact.

(It's nice things are finally set in motion, though, and at least having some options is good.)

edit: base ship_hull_super_heavy_1 speed is now 24. Oh, boy...

edit2: @C0RAX and also speed penalty from ship_armor_shbb is inconsistent with those of bb/bc, hence such a drastic drop in speed I observe for the class. (And it also misses HP, haha). If you insist the hull to be that slow in its base, the ship needs a new set of engines, then. Propelling a far larger and heavier ship with a stock BB engine is unrealistic, everyone would utilize that space to install more boilers.

I now tag-switched to JAP and their historical Jamato design is... 20.6 knots. That's unreasonable.

dqW6YUh.jpg
Seems like you need T4 engines to reach close to historical speed on the Yamato now, that's.. not great.
 
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Heavy tanks should get more armor, they are still easily 100% penetrated by SPTD. Or nerf SPTD a bit instead, its penetration is way too high comparing to infantry AT. It is not realistic that SPTD gets more penetration than standard tank.
Every WWII heavy tank could be penetrated. Since this is a history-based game, so should be in game also.
 
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