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HOI4 Dev Diary - 1.5.2 Update #2 and Modding Goodies

Hi everyone welcome back to another update on our post-release work on Cornflakes and Waking the Tiger.

1.5.2 Patch
The path has now been in beta for a bit and also updated. If you are brave and want to try it early to help us find problems you can go here for how to do so. Go there to check out the current changelog, but I am going to cover some stuff here too. Note that all these things are not yet in the patch, but will appear later today when the beta gets updated.

Air Balance and Changes
Based on feedback, primarily from the MP community we decided to do several changes related to the air war.
  • Planes on missions now have to gain efficiency over time. Strategic bombers are slower than smaller planes when it comes to this. This was done to avoid ping-ponging and terrible microing in multiplayer where players would keep switching their bombers around to stop them from being caught. It also simply makes sense that it takes some time after a move to get organized.
upload_2018-3-28_15-28-28.png

  • Division anti air now reduces damage to the division caused by close air support attacks, in proportion to the AA's ability to shoot down planes. This should now make divisional AA more helpful against direct attacks as well:
upload_2018-3-28_14-14-28.png

  • We now allow a bigger bonus from close air support supporting a combat, while the penalty to defense to the enemy from pure air superiority has been reduced. The speed penalty from enemy air superiority has also been reduced as it was a little excessive. We hope these things together will incentivize CAS over fighter spam a bit.
  • Strategic Bombers now only give 0.01 air superiority to make it clear thats not really their job ;)
  • The last 3 levels of radar tech will now improve hit chance for static AA guns while unlocking new AA equipment will increase their damage and all their intermediary techs will increase the protection from AA on buildings in the area. We hope this will make the techs nicer to get and help in late game defense vs bombers.
Nukes and Surrender
We have fixed a couple of things with nukes. They should now work more reliably and hurt the targets war support depending on target. The target selection is now a bit more flexible, before you had to hit specifically the VP province, but now the state is enough for things to work out as expected. In addition a nations surrender limit will be lowered when at low war support (below 50%). It scales from 0 to -30%. That means nuking will again make nations more likely to surrender, but also have other negative effects before that point.

Manchukuo
We felt the Manchukuo independence path was a little heavy handed with bonuses so it has been reworked. We basically removed most of the factories you get from focuses. Instead you get a decision after taking over the railroads to build up to 4 civilian factories. You can also solve the bandit problem by recruiting them but that means you have to endure raids for a while until you get the focus to bolster nationalism. In the Manchu branch you get to create underground gun shops which make infantry equipment massively cheaper but also reduce its reliability by a huge amount. In the 5 people branch you can raise the Manchu banners, which are large divisions with artillery support. Finally, purging the General Affairs Council lets you spend CP to prepare to seize Japanese arms depots which gives you guns and the Japanese a negative modifier for fighting against your troops.

upload_2018-3-28_14-18-20.png


Game start speedup
Nobody likes to wait around, particularly not devs who have to start the game many many times during a day so to help with this we now do some caching during startup that should help speed up the process after the first time you run it.

Other stuff
We are still going to add some more things before the patch is done. MEFO bills for example are currently undergoing balancing work.

We also have a really cool thing for modders, but I'll let @shultays show it off for you:

Hello everyone, shultays here. I am a programmer in HoI4 team. Today I will be introducing some new cool features/tools that we introduced with our newest patch.

Scripted GUIs

That is a feature we solely developed for our modders. This new tool will enable modders to create their own GUIs (or attach their GUIs to existing ones) and attach scripts/triggers to GUI elements in those GUIs. Here are some gifs that show what you can mod in to game now.

1.gif

2.gif

3.gif

4.gif

5.gif


Everything on that gifs are modded in to the game. Here are some features that this example mod adds:

Code:
- Fuhrer Mana, a new resource for Germany
- A spell system that uses Fuhrer mana as a resource
    - You can use spells targeted on your country by clicking Fuhrer mana resource
    - You can use targeted spells on enemy countries by clicking them
    - You can use targeted spells on your own states by clicking them
- A psuedo-focus system works independent of existing one that can boost your Fuhrer mana production
- A way to boost your research by consuming Fuhrer mana
- A basic AI that can make use of Fuhrer mana

If you want to try this mod, you can download it from Steam Workshop using this link or just download the mod attached in this post and extract it to your mod folder (under \Documents\Paradox Interactive\Hearts of Iron IV\mod). I also added a small cheat, right clicking on Fuhrer mana resource will give you free Fuhrer mana.

Here is a list of things you can do using scripted GUIs

Code:
- Create GUIs that will be visible when a certain trigger is true (for example in first gif, the player clicks on resource to pop up a new GUI) and/or when player selects a country/state (second and third gifs shows an example to this)
- By default this GUIs are not attached to an existing GUI (like first three gifs) but you can also attach them to existing GUI elements (5th gif has a scripted GUI attached to national focus tree)
- Attach effects to buttons in scripted GUIs, which will be called when player clicks, right clicks on them. You can also attach different effects while user is holding ctrl/alt/shift while left or right clicking
- Attach triggers to buttons that will disable them (for example spells are disabled when you are out of mana)
- Attach triggers to buttons/icons/texts to make them visible/hidden with certain conditions (disable research button is only visible when you actually enabled it)
- Use scripted localization in your texts, tooltips, button texts etc. You can also display description of effects you attached in tooltips
- A score based AI system that will evaluate your scripted GUIs on an interval you chose and on targets that you have filtered (for targeted scripted GUIs, like 'meteor swarm' spell GUI) and simulate clicking on buttons on the order of scores you have given to them.
- It will be available on multiplayer as well!

I created a tutorial on how to use this new system, which can be found on our modding forum following this link. It gives you a much more indepth on how you you can implement this features.

If you have question, please tag @shultays and ask away!

Reloadable databases
This feature was always there, but it was hard to use for our modders. In our development branch, most commonly databases (some folders under common, gui files, yml files etc) are reloadable and automatically reloads when you make an edit on them. After 1.5.2., you can also enable same functionality on our release builds by adding following launch command

-debug

After that game will auto reload the database that contains the files you edited. Here is the list of all reloadable stuff:

Code:
- events
- decisions
- traits
- ai_strategy
- ai_strategy_plans
- on_actions
- scripted_effects
- scripted_triggers
- scripted_localisation
- scripted_guis
- defines
- some gui files
- yml files

Some of them have limitations, so if you are encountering some weird issues I suggest closing and relaunching the game, but otherwise they should work just fine. We are constantly trying to improve this list.

If you want to disable this feature for some reason but keep the other -debug features, you can add -nofilewatcher to launch options.

So that is all from me for now. From now on I will try to be more active at modding forums and write a couple more tutorials. So see you there!

While we are on the topic of modding we need to talk about dependencies. Sometimes you will want your mod to depend on other mods, and also require a certain loading order. Mods will usually load in alphabetical order of their file names (so the mod last in the list will overwrite the earlier). But some things may affect this so if you need a certain load order and be clear that you have dependencies this needs to be specified by including its full name in the .mod file under "dependencies". There have been bug reports etc about this, probably because we didn't explain properly how it works. The wiki page has been updated, here but essentially this is how to do it:
Code:
name="testmodB"
path="mod/testmodb/"

# this guarantees we load testmodA first before our testmodB is loaded
dependencies= {
   "testmodA"
}
supported_version="1.5.2"

See you next week!
 

Attachments

  • fuhrer_mana.zip
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Of all the DLC trees I'd like them to revisit, the Polish one is the one that should be top priority. Even just minor changes would greatly aid it, turning the Intermarium into a set of "decisions" that invited neighboring countries/applied pressure to them.

Disagree since both the USA and USSR trees are currently awful and major nations should be done first. Of the 'other' nations Poland should def have top priority though since as you say their tree is both bland and well ... really bad.
 
Since we are still talking about airplanes, you know what would be nice? A text filter to select planes (when i'm adding fighters to an airport, i just type fighter and only fighters appears - it could work to plane models too). Please!
 
Wowsers! That's a DD and a half - cheers for the DD Podcat/Shultays, most excellent stuff :D. That moddable GUI capability looks all kinds of exciting, and the changes to air/CAS look very sensible as well. This 1.5.2 is shaping up to be a very impressive patch :).



Just wondering whether this will work for folders in /mod, as well as folders in the game's base directory? Very cool either way, and much appreciated - as is the faster game loading as well. I usually get through a few pages of whatever book I'm reading each modding session while reloading, I'll have to make some more dedicated reading time after this change :D.



Very sensible :). Here's a high-efficiency regain small plain launching from a US CVE (USS Card) :D

View attachment 352216

Reloadable databases should work for mod folders as well.
 
Bravo on the changes, but a few suggestions on 1.5 Decision content, before you finish the 1.5 polish an move on:

1. Can you please add the "days_removed" value to all tooltips - the amount of time is shown for some decision like Rosie the Riveter (until peace breaks out), or Arsenal of Democracy (360 days), but my main complaint is prospecting. Its a brilliant ability, but you don't know how long it takes for the use of the civilian factories. Initial use is 30 days or so, but when you use them again, its progressively longer and eventually a player would not necessarily want to use them (or delay their priority), when the 3rd use takes 180 days of 12 CIC to get 12 ALU for example, but the first use only takes 30 days of CIC. Hopefully this can just be a GUI script change. I'll play with modding it myself, but I strongly feel this should be in the base game.

2. Can the ability to CANCEL decisions be made? I haven't played enough nations to see if there are decisions that you certainly want to NOT be cancelled (which there might be some), but without the ability to see the duration of the decision to take effect (specifically in the secondary and tertiary uses of prospecting examples), I might hit a decision and then immediately want to change my mind. Arsenal of Democracy, War Bonds, and Harboring Axis Scientists for example may not have the best cost-effect benefit (you can only really tell after you choose it). I'm on the fence about it, but it would be fair to receive the PP back when cancelling as well, even though in the prospecting case the PP is cheap. Again, having not played other nations with decisions other than the USA, there may be some that shouldn't be cancel-able, but at minimum I think ones that take time to enable (such as prospecting), should be cancel-able prior to their completion and receive the PP back.
 
Disagree since both the USA and USSR trees are currently awful and major nations should be done first. Of the 'other' nations Poland should def have top priority though since as you say their tree is both bland and well ... really bad.

I agree with you, that's why I said "of the DLC focus trees." America and USSR are higher priorities, and will surely be next. Paradox has been a little unclear on whether they are going to re-look at the DLC trees they released, but with Poland I think it's necessary. (esp. because everyone has it)
 
Hey, could you please do me a favour?

You're patches are awesome, but there is just one problem: Whenever there is a new update, I need to start a new game as there is always a new version, which isn't compatible with my saved game.

I know I can just change the version of the game by choosing other patches before I start, but then I always have an error sign (a dog with a helmet) on all airports, which is very disturbing during the game and there is no way to remove them.

So, could you please do anything or give me an advice how to remove these error signs?

By the way, I am sorry if it isn't the right place here to post my question, I am new here.

Thanks.
 
This so much, lost 4 of my good units, when playing as manchukuo, this way
I just played through the Spanish Civil war as Germany, and my volunteers all came back in 1.5.2 beta. If it's still happening you need to write up a bug report.
 
Iw try to use debug events, debug scripted_localization, debug decisions... but all time console say - "command available only for developers".
Game started in -debug mode and play 1.5.2 beta.
Whats wrong?
 
Borders... Not only Germany-Poland need right borders. Lithuania need to have too. I dont imagine from what map devs took Lithuania borders. This nonsense what devs call "Wilno" is from another space. With "vanilla" states isnt unreal to make real map, what was in 1920 year Lithuania-Russia peace treaty.
Devs making small changes for Germany-Poland borders, that Germany could make German Empire borders, but forgetting Lithuania historical borders and dont let to players to get way how to rebuild 1920 year Lithuania borders. What historical was Vilnius Land, in game split into three states - into 97, 94 and 96.
In reality Vilnius is Lithuania capital, but in game dont have core of Lithuania, but have bielorussian core. Why? If Germany can rebuild German empire borders, why Lithuania cant take back Vilnius Land with Suvalkai (Suwalki), Augustavas (Augustaw), Gardinas (Grodno), Lida and Ašmenos (Ashmiany)?
With event "Cede Memel" Lithuania losing Klaipėda (Memel), but where is Vilnius back event, when at 1939 year soviets cede Vilnius to Lithuania by "mutual treaty"? Long time i thought that is difficult to make right map and event, but in 1.5.1 patch i made it by myself and all works perfect. So i hope that devs in near future would make changes in map again and would make true Lithuania map with "Vilnius back to Lithuania" event.
 
What i made and about something like that i dream from devs.
hoimap.jpg
hoimap1.jpg
hoimap2.jpg

These maps is historical - first map, what must o be at start, second picture is from historical (neutral) focus line, third - from play, when gamer can return borders from 1920 Lithuania - Russia peace treaty. Its possible for my, it must to be easy for devs.
 
SPAA was already quite strong against CAS, being cheap to produce and shooting down lots of - expensive to produce - CAS.

After the new traits the game now has conceleament expert as a trait for generals, -50% cas damage, making CAS useless in these situations, especially if both the Field Marshall and General of the army have the trait. And now we have further dmg reduction from division AA? Sure it makes sense and should have been there in the first place but unless the conceleament expert trait is removed, I don't see CAS being useful at MP anymore with the new changes. Because of the way CAS works (automatically joins battle) a few divisions with strong SPAA under a conceleament expert general spam attacking in a region where CAS is active will wreck the CAS while taking almost no damage.

Maybe MP rulesets should limit number of SPAA to 1 per 20 width if these changes go into effect.
 
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btw one thing i really dislike is how some focuses say something like "this focus no longer has any effects" when you try to read what it does (or did); the old trees don't do this but i notice a lot of the new ones do, and i don't see what the point of it is, it's just annoying really - can you remove this?