Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Hearts of Iron IV 48356 Bug Reports 17309 After Action Reports (AAR)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

HOI4 Dev Diary - 1.6.2 Open Beta Patch

Hello! As podcat noted in the prior Dev Diary, he is away this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, so I am filling in for him with a tech lead's perspective about our ongoing activities for the 1.6.2 open beta patch. (If you want to get access to the current open beta build, see the 1.6.2 beta thread for instructions.)

Content

The content designers continue to patch up a variety of problems that have been reported. In particular, this will include fixes to the Battlecry and Awake and Angry achievements, and news events to inform players of relevant changes in the game state, such as naval treaties being removed.

I am also informed that we have two new popular field marshals, already a part of the available 1.6.2 open beta, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim of Finland, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey:

carl_mannerheim.png
mustafa_kemal_ataturk.png


Code

The programmers are also working through a number of issues of various sizes. These include improvements and fixes for naval interfaces, like a new mission warning icon that will help players detect when their task forces are ill equipped for their missions and explain why. Also, some of the rules and behaviors surrounding naval missions and assigned regions have been reworked to avoid weird or exploitable issues with distant and disconnected regions. We have also made some incremental improvements to the naval invasion AI to make it better coordinate the timing of multiple related invasion orders, and we are continuing to iterate on the invasion AI.

Balancing the Numbers

One area that we have been looking to balance is the ratio of screen ships to capital ships that the AI is choosing to produce. We know that some countries could stand to have more screens, but we don't want to push those numbers up too far, so that they end up with too few capital ships instead.

To help efficiently guide our balancing, we have taken advantage of a cool system that our automation testing team has provided, to log out various game stats that can be collected and graphed each night. This has given us a baseline to know what the current ratios tend to be for various countries. Then, after making balance changes, we can watch the numbers the following night to verify that the AI has adapted appropriately, instead of requiring the designers to manually run a game for an hour to find out if the changes hit the desired target.

Here are a couple examples of the current screen to capital ratios for the U.K. and Japan, over time (note that the numbers are multiplied by 10, but the ratios are actually from about 4:1 up to around 8:1):

screen_cap_ratio_ENG.png

screen_cap_ratio_JAP.png


We hope to have an update to the 1.6.2 open beta patch with these and other fixes by the weekend. The current status of the open beta branch is documented here, and you can follow that thread for future updates.
 
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
Otto said:
Completely agree with you. I play SP as Germany and the constant Russian army shuffling is a complete game breaker. It was always a problem but it is significantly worse now.
Click to expand...
@podcat

Solve this issue alone and you will make the Soviet AI 10x more effective!
 
CrazyZombie said:
Are high level subs able to sink anything other than convoys?
Click to expand...

Isn't the idea there that you put subs in with your surface fleets and then the subs kill ships as they retreat? I remember something like that from the pre-MTG dev diaries...

That said, if you've got a surface fleet that can participate in surface combat without dying, you don't really need subs.
 
Pied-Noir said:
@podcat

Solve this issue alone and you will make the Soviet AI 10x more effective!
Click to expand...
It's actually pretty easy to solve. The problem is that they have some code that checks if moving a unit will make the frontline more balanced, but there is never perfect balace so there will always be units playing musical chairs looking for the non-excisting perfection. This can be solved by having adding threashold to the check to see if moving a unit makes it more balanced. That way units wont move when the current situation is good enough.
 
I'm not even sure how to report this one but can you figure out why ones allies rarely send units now to help out? Like I will play France, allied with Spain (who will have 200 armies sitting in spain) and he will send maybe 30 to help out verse Germany and Italy. I will play UK, go after Bulgaria allied with Turkey and Turkey won't send more than one or two units to help me out after I push into in to Bulgaria via Istanbul. I see this across the board with nearly every "ally"; in 1.6 they simply camp out in their own borders and do nothing but defend their ports.

Speaking of ports, when AI countries run out of stuff to do they really to do do something else or you (as a player) should be able to force a peace if lets say have X time no provinces have been taken by EITHER SIDE. Like a couple times now I took the Monarch path as the UK and it ends up with me trying to naval invade a solo Italy (neither him or I allied with Germany and we are both in our own factions of one) and you know, you just can't crack Italy with their 400 units sitting at home no matter how big your make your invasion force because even if you punch through you die on counterattack and the Axis own every other piece of land touching them. OK I'm fine with that, but then I should be able to sue for peace instead of fifty year stalemate waiting until I have 48 marines and hundred of nukes completely precluding me from doing any of the other war focus because I can't peace out with italy. While sure that is "fair" (as in I would do the same as them if was in their situation) I would equally agree to peace out so we could both get on with our lives, i.e. maybe Italy wants to the rest of their focus tree as well without me bothering them.
 
Last edited:
I don't really see how what type of ships the AI will help it to deploy. Furthermore have I found a balance issue with between different ideologies. 1. Germany is OP they need to be nerfed and/or the Alies and Comintern needs to be boosted. Furthermore is the Civil War in the USA too hard to beat, even if the president has full house and senate support. Furthermore is the mechanic with provinces living for the democratics a good Idea since people proboly would side with the ideology most popular in that specifc region. But it has become to hard to play USA as anything else then democratic since its nearly impossible to win the civil war. 1. The Democratic side eats you up without troops 2. They join the Alies and you can't join a faction 3. they get the most of the army. All this even if facist support is 60% or above, below 50% is understandable but 60%?
 
withche.07 said:
In real Fevzi Çakmak was field marshal, so actually him becoming field marshal after november 1938 is plausible.

Problem with fascism thou, there were no fascist parties in Turkey... I mean Millet Partisi in game was founded by Fevzi Çakmak, that's true, but it was not fascist.
@battle4royal told me it would be better to use real fascist person with non existing fascist party. Not sure. There could be Nihal Atsız directly or one more politician which was totally racist, I couldn't remember name now.


Looks great, but hat should be more perpendicular like this
View attachment 464341
Click to expand...

The man who was mentioned is Recep Peker. He was sent to Fascist Italy in 1936 to investigate the gov. type. But that dumb man was impressed from Mussolini and after his return proposed to gov. to establish a "Fascist Council" over the Grand Assembly, but it was violently rejected. Also this is my experimental colorization work which i'll use it in my on own mod.
Recep Peker.png
 
Voigt said:
I wouldn't say we need further buffs, instead we need nerfs. Nerfs for occupation and peacedealed conquest. That is where the Axis and Japan get a big chunk of their strength from.

The other would be Civ Building while having War Economy or even Total Mob, and with that reaching Civ Industry of USA.
Click to expand...
That has more to do with the fact the US isnt nearly as strong as its RL counterpart.
 
So I opted in to the 1.6.2 Beta and started a game as Italy just for fun and ... yeah the Chinese - Japanese situation is really bad in this build as well. Really really hope you can figure this out soon. It's sorta sucking the life out of MTGs for me. :\

After investigating a bit (including playing China and Japan myself) I feel as though the core issue is a combination of generally poor Chinese AI (especially when it comes to defending it's ports) and the excessive nerfs that are applied to China at the start of the game. Japan itself isn't excessively strong it's just that China is excessively weak.

B4hTSjC.png
 
Last edited:
FieldMedic said:
So I opted in to the 1.6.2 Beta and started a game as Italy just for fun and ... yeah the Chinese - Japanese situation is really bad in this build as well. Really really hope you can figure this out soon. It's sorta sucking the life out of MTGs for me. :\

After investigating a bit (including playing China and Japan myself) I feel as though the core issue is a combination of generally poor Chinese AI (especially when it comes to defending it's ports) and the excessive nerfs that are applied to China at the start of the game. Japan itself isn't excessively strong it's just that China is excessively weak.
Click to expand...

Japan should win, at least with historical focus on, otherwise the Pacific war would be over before it even started (and in historical terms, when Japan would have lost against China, the USA maybe would not have (or later) entered the war).
Besides of that you can adjust the sliders and boost China, but I dont find it particual interesting when China wins, it messes with the Japan AI and there is nothing more happening in Asia then.
 
Aspi90 said:
Japan should win, at least with historical focus on, otherwise the Pacific war would be over before it even started (and in historical terms, when Japan would have lost against China, the USA maybe would not have (or later) entered the war).
Besides of that you can adjust the sliders and boost China, but I dont find it particual interesting when China wins, it messes with the Japan AI and there is nothing more happening in Asia then.
Click to expand...

I'm not saying Japan shouldn't win. What I'm saying is they shouldn't win in '38. Or '39 or even '40. It's a little silly that they can brush aside China in a few years when historically they never succeed in beating China at all.
 
One of the reasons the Chinese AI sucks so bad is the garrison ratio in peace time bug. No matter how you tune the garrison ratio in defines.lua it only works when there is war and a normal front. In peace time CHI AI sill have 8 units on garrison order vs 100 on the frontline. Even if the ratio is say 30% and it has plenty of garrison role units. When war breaks put the garrison ratio works and the mega shuffling starts to move many of the units to the garrison order from the frontline. Bit its too late, one of the JAP invasions have already landed in an un-guarded port. :(
 
Aspi90 said:
Japan should win, at least with historical focus on, otherwise the Pacific war would be over before it even started (and in historical terms, when Japan would have lost against China, the USA maybe would not have (or later) entered the war).
Besides of that you can adjust the sliders and boost China, but I dont find it particual interesting when China wins, it messes with the Japan AI and there is nothing more happening in Asia then.
Click to expand...

No, in historic mode the desired outcome should be for Japan not to win, most of the time. Ideally the Sino-Japanese war should drag on until the end of WW2.

The outcome where Japan wins and has all of China as a client state that requires no Japanese troops to police is frankly ludicrous. Even in a situation where Japan blitzed the entirety of China they would have needed to keep massive numbers of troops in place in order to keep control of the country.
 
The only good solution for the China problem might be an event peace when Japan takes the historically desired territories which can be escalated back into war by both sides. The Japanese stopped because had no intentions to advance into mainland China, not because the Chinese have their invasion stalled. China could escalate when let's say Japan has any surrender progress so has lost some core islands while Japan could escalate freely or could choose not to peace out with China but with the possibility of an immediate Allied/US intervention then.
 
It would be cool if Finland got its own national focus tree, because right now its really annoying to play as the country without going fascist (extra manpower from the generic tree) and scraping the barrel. Actually it helps a lot if I unite Scandinavia and make them my cores but it would still be awesome if Finland got its own tree.
 
Oh, c'mon you've just copypasted Ataturk civilian portrait and called it a day? Besides Ataturk portraits is kinda mediocre (too overexposed and his suit is too blury) he no doubt need a new portrait for FM version.
 
Last edited:
Remember hoi4 is not about 100% historical results. Its about a historical start and plausible alternate scenarios.

Historically, japan didn't take china seriously. In hoi4, a japan player that takes china seriously can roll china. This is good for balance and more or less a plausible historical scenario.

Now if you are saying only that japan ai when set to historical shouldn't take china seriously, probably all that would be needed would to make japan not use escalate the war in china unless it was losing ground. This would need testing though to make sure japan ai wasn't overnerfed.
 
Hey nice work and I'm really enjoying the expansion. However there is one quality of life problem that has really been nagging me while playing larger naval factions. A way to set multiple task forces to the same preset composition efficiently would be a huge boon to micro. As of right now I am having to do each one manually requiring dozens of mouse clicks. If this is already a feature I would love a short explanation.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back