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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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Just played around some more with the Heavier planes.

I just don´t like the changes to base range for any of the planes, especially heavier ones.

Maybe I was just spoiled because of the ranges. Rushing engines seems to be even more important now so nothing changed on that front.

Seems like building airports near the frontlines will be more important than ever too which is a good thing.

Ehh I dunno, I´ve changed my mind. I feel the range nerf was kinda harsh for medium and heavy airframes, but the more I test it you can make them work and old models still can keep up as long as you keep upgrading their engines and stuff. You will have to get used to keep improving your planes as new engines become available. As far as ranges go I actually think they are Ok now.

Hopefully you guys also give us a way to ranges in kms easily so we can actually design based on our needs. The Naval stuff I turned off al DLCs to see something and it seems a lot of stuff is broken. Dunno if it was because of the update

The 1936 SHBB says can´t be built because of modules, 1940 BC has the same armor value of the 1944 SHBB, 1944 BB has 80 armor.

Will run some naval tests if I feel like it, but dunno. Seems a lot of the changes are above my paygrade. Armor I thought worked fine?

E: and yeah, more research again. And no way to boost it and its on something vital like air. The rich get richer....
 
The thing is, the naval XP buffs are basically all for techs that give % stat buffs, not unlock new modules, with I guess the idea being that experience helps you learn how to use your tools effectively faster. There aren't any air techs like that, only modules.

That's a good idea, especially when from mid-game we have tons of XP and don't know what do with it, except navy's as you mention.
I would really love to see the mechanic "exp for research bonus" ported from the navy only to air as well. Aside from being a tool to adress the fact that now more techs have to be researched in the air department, it would also deal with air exp being least used (as it is the only of the three lacking an extra sink land has as its own with division design), while piling up fastest over the course of the game due to fairly high numbers of planes operating all the time.
 
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Please give a special eye for France. Only 3 slot for most od early game, and now more basic research to find... I understand the purpose but you might reconsider the baseline for some majors.
If France gets 4, Germany must have 5. The best in R&D were the USA, Germany and the UK, everyone else lagged behind thru WWII.
 
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If France gets 4, Germany must have 5. The best in R&D were the USA, Germany and the UK, everyone else lagged behind thru WWII.
Italy and Japan start with four. France was not 25% technically worse than those, or than Germany/UK/USA for that matter.

The reason France starts with three, is as a deliberate hobble to make them a factory piñata for Germany on historic AI settings. I doubt that's changing any time soon.
 
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Dear developer, SOV AI is broken and it doesn't upgrade it's divisions in the field as the AI changelog said, it just keeps all the start divisions and deploy the new upgraded division from zero
 
Italy and Japan start with four. France was not 25% technically worse than those, or than Germany/UK/USA for that matter.

The reason France starts with three, is as a deliberate hobble to make them a factory piñata for Germany on historic AI settings. I doubt that's changing any time soon.
It is very difficult to model France's 1940 incompetentcy in a game.
 
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Is this true? Are there any physics geeks here? In my mind I am thinking about how commercial aviation CHASES weight reduction with full blown passion. It's true that the speed of commercial aircraft doesn't change a whole lot, but that's because the manufacturers match thrust to weight. So, the reason commercial aviation chases less weight is to reduce the amount of thrust needed in order to increase fuel efficiency. I think . . . . .
Well commercial aviation is somewhat different to the military one to begin with. Commercial flights are all about cutting the costs while still meeting the safety standards and maintaing the bare minimum of comfort for passengers. In the miliatary, there were planes that outright leaked fuel while still at land (SR-71).

Matching thrust to weight is a HoI4 nonsense. Planes are neither helicopters nor rockets, they don't need that much thrust to take off, since they do that by aerodynamical force (i.e. lift), not by applying thrust against weight. As long as the plane can reach its take-off velocity, there's no magical thrust-to-weight threshold which will render it inoperational, while HoI4 implies just that.

Thrust to weight ratio of 1+ was actually quite a feat for combat aircraft, and it was achieved many years after ww2.

If Corax's statement is true, however, typically adding cannons to fighters did increase drag, so you would want to account for that. Also, anything that is an external pod (bomb locks, drop tanks, etc) would give quite a bit of drag and so should decrease speed, but I don't believe there is a "drag" variable in the calculations? Which would mean, the only way to reflect this would be to give a malice to speed based on weight. Just thinking out loud . . . .

Thanks!
Yes, outside armament increases drag and decreases flight characteristics directly. It also increases weight (and thus also worsens flight characteristics indirectly, by forcing you to produce more lift) and requires more internal volume for ammo. And that volume is also precious.

Basically, the entire history of aviation was all about making a [combat] plane as uniform as possible between its wings, fuselage and other parts. When they first swapped corrugated fuselage for a smooth one, drag decreased by some 30% iirc. Then there was a perceivable movement towards wings-fuselage unity (in part to decrease boundary layer, which is summed for the joint of two surfaces; in part due to other reasons). Nowadays these purely aerodynamic sources are long exausted, and thus older planes fully encompassing them like MiG-29 and F-16 are still fairly relevant, despite being 40+ years old.
 
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Italy and Japan start with four. France was not 25% technically worse than those, or than Germany/UK/USA for that matter.

The reason France starts with three, is as a deliberate hobble to make them a factory piñata for Germany on historic AI settings. I doubt that's changing any time soon.
Yep, sorry but for me still hard to swallow. Basically my wars until 1940 can only be based on infantry, and then I can wander into tanks and/or air and/or navy... I'mglad with the many debuffs, it gives some sense of urgency and prioritization, but the constant addition fo new research modules in that context keeps it boring the first years.
 
This is pretty cool but I'm a little disappointed that this dev diary was so short and had basically no new content announced. also, I hope the super heavy tank decision is reversed, because it makes the focuses that give bonuses to them in Russia and Italy's Trees a lot less useful. excited to see the next diaries though! ;)
 
Matching thrust to weight is a HoI4 nonsense. Planes are neither helicopters nor rockets, they don't need that much thrust to take off, since they do that by aerodynamical force (i.e. lift), not by applying thrust against weight. As long as the plane can reach its take-off velocity, there's no magical thrust-to-weight threshold which will render it inoperational, while HoI4 implies just that.
Yeah it wasn't meant to represent true thrust and weight as a value. It's more an abstract representation of how aircraft weight and thrust have a range of good to bad aircraft performance, with the bad end leading to an aircraft to bad to fly. Measuring as a 0 summing value makes it much more understandable than having the cut off be a seemingly arbitrary value between 0 and 1 as would be if we used true thrust to weight values. Alas HOI4 is a game and not a aircraft simulation so abstractions are made for this purpose.
 
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Yeah it wasn't meant to represent true thrust and weight as a value. It's more an abstract representation of how aircraft weight and thrust have a range of good to bad aircraft performance, with the bad end leading to an aircraft to bad to fly. Measuring as a 0 summing value makes it much more understandable than having the cut off be a seemingly arbitrary value between 0 and 1 as would be if we used true thrust to weight values. Alas HOI4 is a game and not a aircraft simulation so abstractions are made for this purpose.
It's unclear what was actually achieved by enforcing this tambourine dances around 1:1 thrust to weight ratio (TWR) cut-off and prohibiting e.g. 44:45 TWR planes from entering service.

Besides, air designer is admittedly oversimplified to begin with, so instead TWR could have been made far more important for fighters from the get-go (you're on the right way now, good job) to discourage creating underpowered planes in a natural way.

Tank designs don't limit one's perversions that much, and the only limitation of 4km/h makes sense as that's the lowest base speed for land units. For planes, the barrier of operating necessarily at TWR over 1 is unclear in its reasoning. The root problem here is that other stats (i.e. range) are barely affected by most air modules.
 
It's unclear what was actually achieved by enforcing this tambourine dances around 1:1 thrust to weight ratio (TWR) cut-off and prohibiting e.g. 44:45 TWR planes from entering service.
Two things limit the weight that can be added to an airplane for war; the physical strength of the airframe and the fact that it has to accelerate to a minimum speed by the end of the runway in order to get airborne before it hits the end fence. IRL runway lengths are variable, and additional aids (like JATO rockets to assist with takeoff - and yes, these were a thing in WW2) can be used to get into the air, but there is still some level of practical limitation. Weight being limited to 'Thrust' is an abstracted way to represent this. Think of it as "past this point the plane is going to be so limited in where it can take off from because it struggles so much to get airborne that it's just not going to work well".
 
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Italy and Japan start with four. France was not 25% technically worse than those, or than Germany/UK/USA for that matter.

The reason France starts with three, is as a deliberate hobble to make them a factory piñata for Germany on historic AI settings. I doubt that's changing any time soon.
I mean real history. Technologically top three countries were the USA, Germany and the UK. The USA got nuclear bomb first, Germany was ahead in rocket technology, the UK was advanced in radar (just examples). Japan, Italy and the Soviet Union lagged behind the top three in research at that time, and France was occupied most of the war.

The top three knew eachothers strength in research and development. For example the USA did not first allow use of proximity fuses in Europe, in fear of Germany's ability to copy the technology. However, they did not fear that Japan would copy, because Japan was not as advanced at that time.
Those top 3 should have one research slot more than other countries.
 
Those top 3 should have one research slot more than other countries.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here -- that Italy and Japan should be reduced to three at start?

Because it seems to me that's not going to happen for reasons similar to why France is limited to three at start: the game is balanced to smooth the way for early Axis/Imperial Japan gains.
 
What do those updated division templates look like out of curiosity? I always feel like the ai can't compete with my division templates and it makes wars too easy
Previously generics nations were building 7/2's and then upgrading to 14/4's. now it builds just 7/2's but it will be upgrade further to make the 7/2 not the target template, probably something closer to 9/1 but that depends on how the CW changes shape out. majors mostly make 9/1 or 9/2's but also now add AA and AT but its specific to each nation.

you can check out all the target templates in SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Hearts of Iron IV\common\ai_templates
 
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Anyways, Did some tests to see if Agility was enough to overcome defense and Air attack.

The test was Germany vs UK, in German occupied German France. I used both drop tanks and extra fuel tanks to get a range of around 1300 kmwhich is more or less enough to fully cover a neighbouring airzone. 950 km(Drop tanks only) left the zone covered but not fully. THough I guess if you are only defending your airzone range doesn´t matter that much.

I tried one build, one focusing on Agility, one focusing on getting lots of armor and Air attack.

Air attack model:

20230708130215_1.jpg

Agility one


20230708130548_1.jpg


Note the agility one is cheaper and has 50% more agility, but has much less armor and air attack.

1688844502763.jpeg

I did an equal IC build, so it was 2k of the agility one vs 1,416 of the armor one


1688844512721.jpeg


The agility ones trades pretty badly. By the time the agility planes were running low at around 300 planes, the armor and attack ones were at around 1k planes. So it was around a 3 to 1 loss. So don´t count on pure agility to save you.

I know the test is hardly conclusive(and honestly I don´t care too much to do it in a rigorous manner) but seems agility is not king, at least sacrificing too much Attack and defense for the sake of agility will not win you battles.

I also did a glass cannon build(same as the armor and air attack, replaced the armor with non strategic materials, removed the self sealing fuel tank. At equal IC it was around 1,598 Glass cannons vs the 1,416 Armor and Cannons planes. They got slaughtered p. Badly

One funny design I tried was a smoll range one, full of plates and guns. Sure, they can only cover the Benelux and small airzones effectively, can´t really go well into offense but damn they can fight
 
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This is unnecessary. Armor Piercing Bombs are much heavier than torpedos, meaning you cant afford them on long range planes.
The weight doesn't help that much since you can't equip more than one torpedo. Yes, my dive bomber is at 30/30 weight, but it still has drop tanks and extra fuel tanks while still having better naval performance than a torpedo bomber. If range vs. damage is the intended trade-off and 1330 km is considered a short range plane, then I'll still say that the balancing is off.
 
Extra thrust shouldn't give agility it should give extra speed. What should increase agility is lower weight or reduce agility by a fraction of the weight.
Yeah it wasn't meant to represent true thrust and weight as a value. It's more an abstract representation of how aircraft weight and thrust have a range of good to bad aircraft performance, with the bad end leading to an aircraft to bad to fly. Measuring as a 0 summing value makes it much more understandable than having the cut off be a seemingly arbitrary value between 0 and 1 as would be if we used true thrust to weight values. Alas HOI4 is a game and not a aircraft simulation so abstractions are made for this purpose.
Have you considered giving the planes penalties instead of making them unable to fly? There were some seriously under powered planes in use in WW2.
 
I'm not sure what you're arguing here -- that Italy and Japan should be reduced to three at start?

Because it seems to me that's not going to happen for reasons similar to why France is limited to three at start: the game is balanced to smooth the way for early Axis/Imperial Japan gains.
As a long time HOI player and war history enthusiast, I am freely expressing my opinion. Do you have something against it?