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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
##########
- 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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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.
@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 (elwolf 000s of subscribers) - 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 almost feels like the devs are trolling the player-base 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.

My other concern is reinforcement width, now you have this arbitrary 76+40 and 82+49, it will make combat in more than one direction extremely ugly, as the way smaller divs reinforce in to the combat will be very difficult to control.

Overall I don't think you should fix something that isn't broken.

The other changes look interesting, I always appreciate attempts to keep the game fresh & improve on the already great product.
 
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I got scared that flame tank support has been removed but it just didn't show on support companies list untill I made a flame tank template.
Could this be changed to that we can see the light/medium/heavy/modern (idk if there is a modern flame tank) flame support companies as soon as we research engeeners 2, not as soon as we create a flame tank template?

Unless it's been already thought about and it's in the game as it is to not clog the support companies list?
 
@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. :cool:
 
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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. :cool:

Understood and congratulations on the update so far.

My advice is to lend an ear to your hardcore player-base, we might not be the most numerous but we really understand your product! We are content creators, game hosts, and community ambassadors who help to keep your product relevant & most importantly, community alive.
 
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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
 
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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.
I think this is a trouble, which should be fixed, but the real solution could be make average base CW as 150-190 with decreasing infantry battalion to approximately 500 manpower, and make possibility to put 50 battalions in the division, this can give:
1. Range of CW 2-100, which could help with N CW meta
2. More range of CW for terrains
3. More varieties of the greatest common divisors for divisions, because the main trouble of 40-45W now, because these divisions can fight anywhere except mountains.
As 69arthurrr said earlier, this iteration of changes will ruin Barbarossa very much. Increasing CW number for terrains and divisions can help to decrease "good" range for a lot of war theatres, without making players to have math PHD for playing HoI4. With things I said earlier to give several support corps CW and make all doctrines to change CW of division, this can increase fun of warfare.
 
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I get the feeling a lot of HOi4 devs think players are microing everything at speed 1 for the entire war.
But I am...
 
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@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 (elwolf 000s of subscribers) - 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 almost feels like the devs are trolling the player-base 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.
Got some thought, not only players will have troubles with changing CW to this, but AI too, because without having universal CW, AI can't fight, this can ruin vanilla experience, ruin Expert AI mod with other cool mods, which really got a good AI, like Equestria at War.
 
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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
 
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Got some thought, not only players will have troubles with changing CW to this, but AI too, because without having universal CW, AI can't fight, this can ruin vanilla experience, ruin Expert AI mod with other cool mods, which really got a good AI, like Equestria at War.

Expert AI mod & others will adapt just as they did to the first round of combat width changes. Prior to this beta, the old 20w/40w meta was replaced by slightly less optimal 21w/42w meta with a little bit of room for other widths but really that was the main 2.

This new batch makes it far less important to have the "correct" width, so this should help AI and "historical" designs some. There are still good widths and bad widths, but no more "correct" widths.

I do share the concern others have shared about Barbarossa & Forest width. I think it is important that a 40w-45w tank can work in Plains & Forest & Urban. It's effectively a giant nerf to tanks making a 40w+ division have really poor width usage in forest, which I don't think was exactly the goal.
 
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Press f to pay respects to the 25 battalion super heavy tank destroyer division.
 
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I'm just curious what the goal was with the air changes, esp. reducing ranges and engine thrust. It just seems like it nerfs a lot of the effectiveness of air as you basically must have drop tanks and extra fuel tanks to have usable light airframes, which I guess could sorta make sense with adding more powerful techs for CAS and NAVs, but it seems to me like it would make air less worth interacting with overall when you have to sacrifice so much to achieve range. Outside of Europe, I bet AI will never get more than like 20% efficiency on missions against me, so why even bother making planes when you can just make more land units and run over them faster.

I'd say it's annoying for MP as a primarily MP player (because projecting air superiority to push is very important), but I don't really expect balance to be purely MP-compliant and we can mod anyway if necessary.

Also I will second the opinion that I really hope y'all are working on carrier mechanics in the background. Carrier fighters not stopping land-based planes at all makes them basically useless, and land-based bombers striking a carrier task force with impunity outside of naval combat, which can easily sink carriers due to how targeting priority works, feels really bad and ahistorical. They're also not even good vs. enemy carrier bombers, better to just stack your own bombers and hope to kill the enemy faster.
 
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Until the core combat math of the game (breakthrough, crits, coordination, targeting) changes, bigger divisions will always be better for attacking, so any decrease to effective combat width just makes offense harder, it doesn't shift the meta with regards to division design. I want to echo what Arthur said above - forest tiles are some of the most decisive terrain in the game, and leaving them below 80 width is significantly hindering the ability of players to attack them, producing slower, less satisfying games.

There's another important effect of these changes that I think is worth mentioning - newer players rely on google searches to figure out what divisions to make. For the entire post NSB period, 21 and 42 have been some of the most ideal widths - new players will see those recommended in almost every thread here, every thread on reddit, and in the vast majority of YouTube videos created by knowledgeable players. Those widths are now incredibly subpar compared to their numerical neighbors. I don't know if these tweaks, even if they do result in good outcomes, are worth potentially disorienting learning players to this extent. Knowledge in this game is hard enough to acquire - I don't think it makes sense to invalidate past guides for what seems like a poorly defined reason.

On another note, why are reinforcement widths so awkward? Ever since hoi3, I've been mostly used to reinforcement frontage being half of the width a single tile attack gives you - obviously that currently isn't the case for mountains and urban tiles, but fully scrapping that rule of thumb confuses me more than a little bit. It seems like the only effect will be to create really confusing over/understacking situations in multiple-combat scenarios.
 
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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
It's also missing an entire gun, and because of the stupid base refit cost (gj on another math error paradox) u cant give it the later refits that gave it more AA
 
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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
Please do that

I’d enjoy a Super Heavy Self Propelled artillery support unit quite a lot I imagine.
 
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It's also missing an entire gun, and because of the stupid base refit cost (gj on another math error paradox) u cant give it the later refits that gave it more AA
IRL it's even 3 guns, provided a main turret featured 3 guns each (and that was the first time the Japanese Navy did that ever), but yeah those excuses "2 batteries are 3 turrets by design" were getting old even by the time of MtG release, let alone now when both tank and air designers specify in plain words what your modules are supposed to represent and how many of those (e.g. 4x light machine guns) you're actually about to fit.

I'm a simple man: I see a turret, I consider it a turret.
 
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