HOI4 Dev Diary - 1.5.2 Update #3 and Telemetry!

[balmung60]

We havent done a breakdown of the per-nation buffing yet, but its not that common either. possibly because its quite hidden

This feels weird to me because I always give the maximum buff to every nation I expect to fight.

 

[NiKuTa_SG4]

Devs make better AI not some 3d tanks in division designer or extra difficulty settings !!

 

[balmung60]

basically this..i hate having negative modifiers, it just sucks out the fun, if i want a "challenge" i just play smaller nations that have a lower start base

id rather the AI gets "better" at using naval invasions, paras etc (just better in general) as the difficulty goes up, the second best thing is prolly is give other nations buffs as difficulty goes up or things mention above

Same. If I want a harder game, Czechoslovakia and New Zealand are right there.

 

[Robosoldier1]

Look at the telemetry. 10-15% of games are MP. Less than 1% of those games are of that size. Why would they want to balance around less than 0.1% of the playerbase?

I mean those games are cool and all, but they are very niche.

Ye and what are those numbers being based and judged on? The quantity of the type of game, the frequency of the game, the concentration of players? Overall the data being presented is not representing the reality in the sense the impact and or objectives of people playing those modes. Which it even addresses. As it shows people switch between methods of play, which again for all we know are competitive multiplayer people testing out strategies with each other.

Again Competitive multiplayer appears small, simply at how the data is presenting it. Sure every 1 game of 25 ppl there are 20 games of 2-3 people. However think the amount of effort/demand it takes to get a group of 25 together compared to 2-3 people. Got to have an established means of communicating, community, scheduling, fair rules, to get the right people to fullfill roles/make it balanced fun and worth it to come back. As opposed of gettin bill and joe together to do the unholy alliance. I ain't dismissing methods of play but you really aren't gonna convince me that paradox wouldn't achieve more by cultivating that form of play as opposed to the 2-3 player games. As the team community games simply amplify the feelings 2-3 player games offer (with some negatives mind you) to come back and play more.

However, fundamentally i think we can agree that the only way for paradox properly judge that themselves is to roll up there sleeves and spend a couple weekends over a span of months to get a gauge of what hard numbers can't tell you.

 

[Traks]

No strategy game works that way. Even the big boy mainstream Civilization games "cheat" to give the AI a better fighting chance against your average players.
The mere fact that almost all players play on the lower 3 difficulty settings tells me that the AI is almost perfect where it is now, and doesn't need cheats to give players the sort of challenge they prefer.

Yes, with latest AI I am overall very satisfied. While it has quirks, challenge provided is good.

 

[Constans]

This feels weird to me because I always give the maximum buff to every nation I expect to fight.

You can't get achievements if you use the difficulty sliders. That's the only time I don't use the sliders.

 

[Reaper Frank]

Has the Ship names Being fixed so i once a again get Destroyer 1 Destroyer 2 etc instead of Destroyer 1 ,Destroyer 1 and so on?

 

[mcmaha1]

- Adjusted Vojvodina and Serbia states to make Austro-Hungarian borders more historical.

I wrote this in another thread, but I will write it again here. The new Vojvodina borders only really serve for Yugoslavia and Austria-Hungary. Other than that, they actually now make historical borders of Independent State of Croatia, WW2 Hungary, Government of National Salvation in Serbia (German occupied Serbia) and even pre-Trianon Hungary all impossible. Before at least the borders of WW2 Hungary were possible. For this to be fixed, the one tiny province just at the spot where Sava and Drava rivers meet should go to state called Croatia and Vojvodina should be split into West and East bits to make the above all possible. I know immediately a lot of you will think "Oh no, not another thing in the Balkans", but if we are changing Vojvodina, it might as well be conclusive. The current beta situation ONLY really give Austria-Hungary neat borders, which is quite niche. Everything written here is in no way political and only interested in improving the game's map accuracy. I will leave the Powderkegging to others

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Wow I really like those changes. Can’t wait to restart again!

 

[Jamey]

We havent done a breakdown of the per-nation buffing yet, but its not that common either. possibly because its quite hidden

It is not the most obvious. I've started games and realized that I forgot to enable custom difficulty a few minutes after clicking through to start it.

Still, it is my favorite way to up the difficulty. Giving the AI bonuses is more fun for me than giving me penalties.

 

[sleepy lemon]

paradox, can you implement a focus that allows you to demand the treaty ports?

 

[fabius]

@fabius @Erepio
Yeah, I usually play regular and use the sliders to buff all enemy nations which provides a decent challenge, but it disables achievements for one... and I really wish for more dynamic difficulty elements like events for example:
"Soviet Winter Offensives | reduces planning time and increases breakthrough for one month"
so temporary combat modifier events which help the AI from time to time (could also happen to players on lower difficulty) and make sense depending on the state of the frontline with stronger events happening the closer they are to surrendering so there could be a potential comeback and another big factor is reduced industry take over in my opinion. On hardest difficulty fascist and communist nations should displace/destroy all industry as the enemy conquers the state although that might be hard for the AI so I'd be content with just a lower occupation use-rate combined with lower factories from annexed countries. There is much that could really make harder difficulties more interesting and I don't think it's super hard to implement these things.

Another thing that's help with difficulty and country slider buff would be ability to change mid game. Like with EAI if I see Russia crumbling to fast I raise their production buffs. Or just raise them when I approach Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad ish.

Events for difficulty. Bice did that last time I played. One week or so modifiers certainly made it tougher at times and slowed the advance.

 

[Constans]

Yes, with latest AI I am overall very satisfied. While it has quirks, challenge provided is good.

I agree with this.

As someone who really enjoys the game, up until DoD was released I wouldn't even consider going for achievements, because that meant i'd have to turn off Expert AI, which felt like a requirement to play the game. Now, I feel like I can achievement-hunt AND still have a real fun challenge.

 

[Praetorian44]

I'm looking forward to some of the changes and fixes

 

[Robosoldier1]

As one of these players I would love to see Paradox talk to us directly. I understand that we are in the extreme minority of players (iirc a previous Dev Diary said something like 5% of players play multiplayer at all, and now this diary shows that 0.8% of multiplayer games are "competitive teams", which means we represent like 0.04% of players... not hard to see how we get looked over), but I also feel like players in our community know the game better than anyone, even sometimes the Paradox devs. If you had polled our community on the 1.5.2 MEFO change (before today's update), I can guarantee you close to 0% of us would have approved of it or suggested anything like it.

Now of course, we have always known to some degree and especially know now that at it's core HOI4 is not a competitive multiplayer game, and Paradox is not designing for us. We have to bend the game to our will, with pages upon pages of house rules, to avoid it breaking from us pushing the game to it's limits. This has led to the discovery of countless bugs and exploits, many of which have been widely known nearly since the game's release, and many of which continue to persist, documented in multiplayer rulesets with obscure rules like "No setting planes to invalid missions".

However, just because the game is not balanced from the ground up as a competitive multiplayer game doesn't mean Paradox should ignore how the game performs under these extreme conditions. We would love to be able to do away with as many of our house rules as possible, not to play with balance mods (many of which are more broken than the base game IMO, far too often I see these mods go way out of control and become a tangled mess with no real goal in mind), and I believe the game could stand to benefit from opening a more regular line of communication between the competitive community and the developers.

Regardless of us being small in scale you can't disvalue the quality of impact we have. Not only do we have as you pointed out experiential knowledge but we also add a fundamental mode of play that this game inherently advertised/praised recreating when the game first came out. Meaning we added that extra step for those that wish for a more human interactive/challenging reality that encompasses a world war. Now obviously the metas/extensive rulesets that have been developed over time crux this experience to an extent but I find that no more a hinderance then the challenge-less AI that people face in single player and cooperative play throughs. Where you only get the option to crutch yourself through stat buffs instead of enjoying a genuine challenge. Which just ties back into experience and knowledge of the game. Also ye I don't expect to have the game solely balanced around us. but have the distinction of considering how this could impact this form of play or offer a reliable means of changing it, which they have done so but again It just doesn't feel they have directly tried to involve themselves.

 

[Lucius Cornelius]

I hope that the bug that delete production of ships, for UK and Italia for exemple, will be resolved soon.
It's very boring to remake a production chains several times because ti was deleted withotu any reasons( no event, no regions losts, no boulding lost)..

 

[Agiknight]

I hope that the bug that delete production of ships, for UK and Italia for exemple, will be resolved soon.
It's very boring to remake a production chains several times because ti was deleted withotu any reasons( no event, no regions losts, no boulding lost)..

??? I have never encountered or heard of this bug. Are you sure the production lines are set to infinite and not to only produce a finite number of ships?

 

[anastiel]

Perfect thanks support paradox dev!! love this game please support for Paradox Launcher

 

[Blastaz]

Ye and what are those numbers being based and judged on? The quantity of the type of game, the frequency of the game, the concentration of players? Overall the data being presented is not representing the reality in the sense the impact and or objectives of people playing those modes. Which it even addresses. As it shows people switch between methods of play, which again for all we know are competitive multiplayer people testing out strategies with each other.

Again Competitive multiplayer appears small, simply at how the data is presenting it. Sure every 1 game of 25 ppl there are 20 games of 2-3 people. However think the amount of effort/demand it takes to get a group of 25 together compared to 2-3 people. Got to have an established means of communicating, community, scheduling, fair rules, to get the right people to fullfill roles/make it balanced fun and worth it to come back. As opposed of gettin bill and joe together to do the unholy alliance. I ain't dismissing methods of play but you really aren't gonna convince me that paradox wouldn't achieve more by cultivating that form of play as opposed to the 2-3 player games. As the team community games simply amplify the feelings 2-3 player games offer (with some negatives mind you) to come back and play more.

However, fundamentally i think we can agree that the only way for paradox properly judge that themselves is to roll up there sleeves and spend a couple weekends over a span of months to get a gauge of what hard numbers can't tell you.

I'm certainly not going to convince you if you don't look at the data!

The chart is by time played. They stop counting after 5 players 1.4%. That means that 2.4% of total multiplayer time is spent on games with 6 or more players. The last slightly bigger block is games with 10 or more players and eyeballing it, it looks about half the size of the 5 player block. Let's be generous and say it's 1%.

So for every hour played in a 10 player + game, 75.7 hours have been played in a 2 player game and 92.1 hours played in a 2-3 player game.
But further than that for every hour of multiplayer something like 8-9 hours of single player are played. Lets be generous to me and say 9 to make the maths easier!

So to go back to your example rather than

Sure every 1 game of 25 ppl there are 20 games of 2-3 people.

for every hour of a 10 player game (and 10 players playing at once means for every 6 minutes played in a 10 player game = one hour played in 10 player games in total) 92 hours are played in 2-3 player games and 900 hours are played in single player.

I ain't dismissing other types of play. I've raided in MMOs and struggled to get seven guys round a board to play Diplomacy. You often spend longer on the logistics than you do the game itself and when everything works out it's a sweet experience. But. These types of games are seriously niche. That is what the data tells us.

And that's why Paradox shouldn't be balancing around the "meta" in large form multiplayer. So when someone says something like "this change to Hungary makes Axis OP and needs to be rolled back because now they can produce tons of planes" or "Germany should be building civs not refineries because the Axis can just go free trade as a block and share industry around" or whatever makes sense to someone who has the top twenty countries controlled by a player and thus abiding by the "meta" in every game they play - that person needs to realise that for every six minutes of his experience of HoIIV there are 992 hours of other peoples' experience playing a totally different way.

 

[Gamer_1745]

Good Stuff!

Now where are my counters model view option?

Yes, I know we need a 2d map for traditional counters to work (I have been trying to find someone to make a 2D map for HOI IV).