Hi everyone, welcome to another dev diary! Last week we talked about changes to frontlines (both UI & backend and AI) and today I want to talk about some of the other fixes and changes we have been up to.

1.7 ‘Hydra’ is a chance for us to rewrite and improve some pesky systems and to step up and go 64-bit, so this diary is going to get a little technical

64-bit
1.6.2 will be the last 32-bit build of HOI4 and we will be leaving it (and older as normal) on steam for those who still want to access it (and make sure to mark the build). We also will not be converting any of the old versions to 64-bit. It would simply be too much work. Because of this we have decided to up the big decimal on our version number to 1.7. 1.7 ‘Hydra’ will be fully 64-bit supported on Linux, Mac and Windows and it has been a big undertaking. There are many reasons for this change. Some platforms like Mac are phasing out 32-bit quite aggressively and we don’t want to end up with people not being able to play on there. 64-bit lets us use newer compiler features and a lot more possibilities code wise in the future. It is also about time, because it felt like a lot of the industry did this over 5 years ago

As a player you won’t notice a huge difference. We haven’t seen any big performance improvements for example, although I wouldn’t say that it’s impossible some areas might improve as our investigations have been pretty shallow. 64-bit is tricky in that on one hand we get access to the possibility of more optimized code, CPU registers etc, but it also takes up more memory, and memory is often highly impactful on speed too. We see it as an investment into the future where we know we can start taking advantage of things now that the foundation is in and make it easier for us to work.

We have already seen some of this internally where we during this work have been able to replace a lot of basic code structures dating back to the Year of our Lord 2003

Convoy system
The old code system keeping track of your favourite little boats has long plagued development, and after 1.6, when we still had some issues, we decided it was simply best to take it out back and shoot it. 1.7 comes with a new system rewritten from scratch. The old convoy system was operating in a way where everyone could control it, and by association, everyone could also break it at any time. It would also swap convoys in between the country’s supply and the assignments at every single tick, swapping them around all the time, and convoys getting lost because there was no sense of ownership and control over the convoys. It was a nightmare.

The new system is a centralized system where each country has one instance of a class that has full ownership and control of convoys, and any other gameplay code that needs convoys can request them from this system but never have real control over them. This “magically” fixes bugs with convoys disappearing from the game because it’s not possible to write code like that anymore. It’s stability by design along with the other great and exciting stability changes that we are bringing to you with this patch.


Naval Balance Changes
We have been looking at convoy escorting, subs, detection and raiding and making improvements:

• Subs can now fire also while withdrawing
  • Convoy escort missions were too binary. Either you have protected the convoys in time or not. Arriving on time provided too much of an advantage to the escort and thus made sub raiding less viable. Subs will now get an extra volley or two in most combats, making raiding with high-quality subs against low-quality escorts more viable.
• We increased submarine detection chance from passive detection (hi bitmode) and lowered detection chance from firing torpedos. Detection chance from passive sweeps now scales parabolically so that large differences in detection and visibility will be much more pronounced.
• We gave carriers passive sub detection and gave them a detection increase in doctrines. This makes them more viable in their historical roles in the Atlantic.
• We also increased detection values on some later radars and a bit on sonar, to make detecting subs a bit easier.

We have also been looking at various issues related to convoys and how they defend themselves against naval bombers. There were many different problems:

• Unit transports died too easily vs naval bombers, this was extra bad for the AI which generally suffered more to this than a player would.
• In small naval bombers vs transports as above, we also had way too high casualties for the planes
• Because convoys are not “real” units they would heal up after battle, so unless you sunk them there was no real damage to the enemy.

To deal with this, we have made several changes:

• Troop transports get a special defensive boost in the particular case of being attacked directly by naval bombers
• The anti-air formula for ships shooting back has changed so that partial damage is taken into account. We now essentially roll a dice for partial damage allowing it to kill planes. Before, weak ships like convoys that got hit a lot had much to big an impact, and early naval bombers didn't really deliver. This should be a lot nicer now.
• At the end of battles we add up all the damaged convoys and for a fraction of them we roll a dice based on the damage to see if they sunk from that damage. The kills get attributed to the last to strike them during the regular battle.

When it comes to regular combat we wanted to help out carriers and capital ships a bit and we felt the more realistic way of doing that was to give them a time at the start of the combat when they are the only ones active. Carriers and aircraft are active straight away. Some ticks later capital ships and subs get to fire and last screens. This gives a bit of a boost to those bigger ships and represents their longer ranged weapons better.

Script-Side Performance Improvements
1.6 came with a number of new script features to improve performance for targeted decisions. Previously these decisions would check every country in the world every day, and with some of the more complex triggers that could amount to quite a bit of number crunching. With the new features, we can pre-restrict the list of targets to reduce the necessary number of checks. Unfortunately, the new script features came too late in development for us to utilize these features in the initial release and other bugs took priority.

Thankfully, a member of the community by the name of Antoni Baum (aka “Yard1”) did make the effort to go through our script and fix all the places where the new features would make a difference (as well as a few triggers where a small reordering of script checks resulted in better performance). This work has been merged into 1.7 with permission. While it is difficult to measure the immediate performance effect of these changes, we saw a performance improvement of about 5-10% depending on the overall gamestate, number of wars etc.

We planned to put 1.7 out as an opt-in beta tonight but we hit some snags (which is why this diary is a bit late ) but we think we should have the open beta tomorrow with patchlog for those brave enough to help us test it

See you again next week!

 

[Madradon]

The penalty has been halved in the open beta to address this issue. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

yes... 1/2 is at about where I feel ok to start adding them to some ships. Or upgrading them. Still... late model FC systems should have a way to be upgraded to become more reliable.. maybe a new tech line in the ships tree where you can specifically research tech for lowering penalties of FC's of all levels... as a percentage, not as a flat amount.
Or is that what the Damage Control tech line is for? Tho that seems to be more about critical hits, which isn't exactly the same as reliability issues....
the start of which would be late in the time line?

 

[Rafled]

Or is that what the Damage Control tech line is for? Tho that seems to be more about critical hits, which isn't exactly the same as reliability issues....
the start of which would be late in the time line?

Reliability is about critical hits, damage control helps mitigate the effect of lower reliability.

Per the wiki page:

Reliability. Reliability is the ability of a ship to continue functioning during combat. The lower the value the more likely the ship is of suffering a critical hit. Ships may receive critical hits that are much stronger than usual hits primarily because of exploding ammo or fuel tanks. Increasing a ship's reliability will reduce the chance that a received hit becomes critical.

 

[Madradon]

Reliability is about critical hits, damage control helps mitigate the effect of lower reliability.

Per the wiki page:

Reliability. Reliability is the ability of a ship to continue functioning during combat. The lower the value the more likely the ship is of suffering a critical hit. Ships may receive critical hits that are much stronger than usual hits primarily because of exploding ammo or fuel tanks. Increasing a ship's reliability will reduce the chance that a received hit becomes critical.

aha!!! thank you)

 

[Goliathe]

Torpedo bombing guide:

That's a lovely video showing how that torpedo was supposed to work. I will refer you to its use at the battle of miday in June of 1942 where about 50 torpedo bombers were lost using that torpedo without scoring a single hit.

Hence necessity of the airman using it (who actually scored a hit) of firing it low to the water.

 

[Goliathe]

Little damage? They deliver one strike after another with little to no losses or any other associated cost, and even a fleet freely operating in uncostested waters and filled with AA up to the brim is still extremely helpless.

Relative to CAS (since what you quoted takes that out of context) torpedo bombers do not deal tons of damage. And that was my point as you can skip NAV bombers and just use CAS to clear out the English channel. As for "little to no losses" I have seen a stack of convoys shoot down bombers 20+ bombers without taking any losses. You most definitely lose planes in the process of bombing and if you don't have a massive advantage in terms of air superiority (think 2:1 numbers) you will lose a ton of bombers to enemy fighters.

As I said before I would love to see a rework where CAS do more damage to unarmored targets (due to much higher hit rate) and NAV deal more damage to anything with significant armor while the other attacks generally bounce off.

 

[Alex_brunius]

That's a lovely video showing how that torpedo was supposed to work. I will refer you to its use at the battle of miday in June of 1942 where about 50 torpedo bombers were lost using that torpedo without scoring a single hit.

Hence necessity of the airman using it (who actually scored a hit) of firing it low to the water.

It's a video of how the fixed version 2 years after the battle of Midway worked.

The US didn't have a well performing Airdropped Torpedo until 1944 unlike the Japanese who had one at the start of hostilities.

 

[Goliathe]

The US didn't have a well performing Airdropped Torpedo until 1944 unlike the Japanese who had one at the start of hostilities.

No problem, I thought you were trying to say the US had an early working high altitude drop torpedo and I was slightly taken back by that.

 

[Alex_brunius]

No problem, I thought you were trying to say the US had an early working high altitude drop torpedo and I was slightly taken back by that.

USN didn't have any working torpedo at all early on. Their sub-launched, surface launced ( at least those with magnetic detonators ) and air-dropped all were among the least reliable of all naval powers in the war!

 

[Dan1109]

USN didn't have any working torpedo at all early on. Their sub-launched, surface launced ( at least those with magnetic detonators ) and air-dropped all were among the least reliable of all naval powers in the war!

Yep, I’m shocked PDS hasn’t put in a spirit to make the USN torpedos poopoo until that time frame, to help with the ebb and flow of the Pacific. Midway was a fluke, USN should be handicapped further early in the war, but it’s 1942 and beyond production is still waaay off. This is supposed to be the release for “balance”, then they need to balance things rather than give everyone an equal footing throughout the war....on historical mode only of course.

 

[Goliathe]

I second that motion... I would love to see the USA with a "poor torpedo design" national spirit that could be removed after researching 1944 tech with an event (maybe 25 pp after research).

 

[Baron_von_Beer]

Or an NF w PP cost to butt heads with BuOrd to remove early or accelerate removel.

The real jaw dropper is that they never did a single live fire trial of the Mk14 prior to deployment because it was "too expensive".

 

[ButtPepsi]

Will, there be any reworks for upgrading planes and land vehicles similar to the naval of how we can choose a certain upgrade for that vehicle such as more defensive turrets or a larger cannon for the tank?

 

[kentsfield]

Then there is the question of reaction time, frequently fighters on the carrier deck could scramble and intercept within the 5-15 minutes from detection of an incoming strike until it dropped it's ordnance. Good luck with achieving that when the fighters are 3 hours flight time away..

That's ridiculous. By your logic, escorting strategic bombers is ineffective because their escorts would only take off once the strategic bombers were under attack. A good naval CAP would maintain a constant overwatch maintained with relief fighters replacing exhausted fighters.

 

[uberjedi]

I second that motion... I would love to see the USA with a "poor torpedo design" national spirit that could be removed after researching 1944 tech with an event (maybe 25 pp after research).

They shouldnt nerf US torpedo bombers until they restore the CV dive bombers to their historical effectiveness in naval combat.
Otherwise, the US would lose any Midway-like battle everytime.

 

[Alex_brunius]

That's ridiculous. By your logic, escorting strategic bombers is ineffective because their escorts would only take off once the strategic bombers were under attack. A good naval CAP would maintain a constant overwatch maintained with relief fighters replacing exhausted fighters.

A good Naval CAP historically made use of both some fighters already patrolling + having more fighters ready on the decks in case a large attack materialized. You will struggel to find a single example in the history books of a Carrier battle where Carriers under attack did not scramble/launch fighters or anything they had available to reinforce the CAP.


If your land based fighters have fuel to stay in the air for say 7 hours and need to spend 3 hours hours flying to the taskforce + 3 hours to get home they will struggel to maintain an effective aircover due to needing ~8 fighters for each one fighter that is permanently in position ( assuming 1 hour lost for cycling planes or combat fuel ). That is also assuming the land based fighters are able to locate the fleet at all and that the admiral of the fleet is willing to restrict their movement to stay within range.


A good historical example of the efficiency of land based air cover / CAP is the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse. Not a single of the land based fighter tasked with protection of the fleet appeared until after the attack was over and the ships were sinking.

 

[Pandia]

Btw., does anyone know what happened to the 1944 super heavy battleship?

 

[Ossiv]

Channel Dash, when Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen in 1942 sailed thru the English Channel without losses, shows that sometimes land-based fighter cap gives good protection. But that was a rare occasion.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Channel Dash, when Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen in 1942 sailed thru the English Channel without losses, shows that sometimes land-based fighter cap gives good protection. But that was a rare occasion.

It also outlines the situations where it can work.

Land based CAP could be successful when:
- Planning and coordination before.
- Enemy not being aware.
- Very short distances with ships basically hugging the coast.
- Short fast operations since it lacks endurance of Carrier CAP.

 

[King_Viper]

So not sure if this is because of the new system for convoys but I find it odd that not only it takes away all convoys remaining from me, despite being at peace, and then some extra. So the idea is that the country sending lend-lease also is responsible for the convoys now then? @podcat

I was test playing USA and noticed all the convoys, including the ones for trade, went all to the UK lend-lease that I sent them, maybe a better clarification for the new convoy system because either I didn't understand it or Technical Boogaloo happened.

 

[BeauNiddle]

Btw., does anyone know what happened to the 1944 super heavy battleship?

It got removed in MtG didn't it? (unless you use console commands to unlock all tech)

The idea being it's a choice between powerful early but no upgrades vs. eventual supremacy IIRC