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HoI4 Dev Diary - Achievements

Hello, and welcome back to another Dev Diary from the snow-stricken city of Stockholm. Today we will be talking about that quintessential feature completionists like myself simply crave whenever a new DLC is released: achievements. :D

This batch consists of 21 new achievements, most of which relate to the new countries and mechanics, though one is dedicated to the 2018 PDXCon HoI4 Challenge (30 Minutes of Hel), and another was a brilliant suggestion by a viewer of Daniel and myself's playthrough of the new British focus tree (Britzkrieg).

In addition to adding these new ones, I've made some adjustments to the more 'grindy' achievements that were added to Waking the Tiger. Having myself completed every single achievement in the game, none annoyed me even nearly as much as Battlecry and Awake and Angry. To make these less of a 'conquer the whole world three times over' pain to get, I've added exclusions for the European enclaves to the requirements of these achievements. It now will no longer be necessary to reclaim Guangzhouwan, Macau, and Hong Kong to get them :)

Now, on to the new achievements:

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Team America
As the U.S.A., drop a nuclear bomb on Paris.

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History Repeated Itself
As the U.S.A., win against the Confederate States. Again.

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Georgia On My Mind
As the U.S.A., own and fully control all three Georgias.

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To Arms in Dixie!
As the U.S.A., start a new civil war as the South.

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Arsenal of Democracy
As the U.S.A., have more than 300 military factories.

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Underpaid, Undersexed, and Under Eisenhower
As the U.S.A., assume faction leadership of the Allies, and have over 50 expeditionary divisions from the United Kingdom.

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Last for a Thousand Years
As the United Kingdom, accomplish the federation of the entire British Empire.

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Britzkrieg
As the United Kingdom, put Edward VIII in power, ally Germany, and fully control Paris.

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Nothing Wrong with our Bloody Ships
As the United Kingdom, have at least 9 battlecruisers.

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William Wallis
As the United Kingdom, put Edward VIII in power, enforce an American monarchy, and have both it and Scotland as subjects.

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Crush the Dream
As a Communist United Kingdom, crush the American Dream by puppeting the U.S.A.

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Treading the Narrow Path
As the Netherlands, do not cave to the Germans, continue the Zuiderzee works, and do not lose control of any of your continental European states until 1945.

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Putting the Raid on the Medway to Shame
As the Netherlands, ensure the United Kingdom has no capital ships (carriers, battleships, battlecruisers, or heavy cruisers).

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Bevrijding
As the Netherlands, liberate the continental Netherlands after relocating the government to the East Indies.

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Mi Casa es tu Casa
As Mexico, host a government-in-exile.

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The New Home of the Revolution
As Mexico, put Trotsky in power and puppet the Soviet Union.

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Assuming Direct Control
Starting as a minor power, assume faction leadership of the Allies, the Axis, or the Comintern.

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Vive la Jeune Ecole
As France, have at least 150 Destroyers and research the maximum torpedo launcher technology, before 1945.

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30 Minutes of Hel
Try to beat the record set at the 2018 PDXCON HOI4 challenge by inflicting over 1,800,000 casualties to Germany in the 1939 “Blitzkrieg” scenario start, as Poland. Extra bragging rights if you do it in 30 minutes or less!

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Pride and Extreme Prejudice
Sink the British Pride of the Fleet.

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Do You Mined?
Lay at least 1,000 mines on the coastline of an enemy nation.


That was it for today (though not for this week ;) )! We hope you'll be enjoying hunting for them. Let us know which you're most excited about, and don't forget to watch Daniel leak more stuff in today's stream at 4PM CET!
 
I think this is the right thread to ask: The ability to tell Nations to go a specific NF path is in game, iirc. But Pdox wasn't sure if they are going to make it valid for achievements. Was anything else said about it since then?
And maybe add in an all random option that still allows achievements, without any of the weights of the normal ahistorical path.
I haven't once seen the Kaiser take over GER for example.
 
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I think this is the right thread to ask: The ability to tell Nations to go a specific NF path is in game, iirc. But Pdox wasn't sure if they are going to make it valid for achievements. Was anything else said about it since then?
And maybe add in an all random option that still allows achievements, without any of the weights of the normal ahistorical path.
I haven't once seen the Kaiser take over GER for example.
We know that setting specific paths for any country will disable achievements. It has not been clarified if "all random" would work.
The Kaiser never takes Germany because, as it turns out, focuses with a very low weight are never picked in HoI4. It's not just 'very rare', the probability actually gets rounded to zero somehow.
 
Thanks for changing the china achievements, got teally frustrated when i saw that i needed the exclaves
I did all three while they required those, where is the reward for those of us who grinded the entire planet into a massgrave for those?
 
We know that setting specific paths for any country will disable achievements. It has not been clarified if "all random" would work.
The Kaiser never takes Germany because, as it turns out, focuses with a very low weight are never picked in HoI4. It's not just 'very rare', the probability actually gets rounded to zero somehow.
Hilariously bad gamedesign - I saw Japan going communist 5-6 times, 2 times for democratic, but NEVER got return of Kaiser.
 
Hilariously bad gamedesign - I saw Japan going communist 5-6 times, 2 times for democratic, but NEVER got return of Kaiser.
Return of the Kaiser is not picked, the probability for that is 0. I don't understand why they put in NF decisions with 0 probability but they did, they should change it.
 
Return of the Kaiser is not picked, the probability for that is 0. I don't understand why they put in NF decisions with 0 probability but they did, they should change it.

That is not true, see my test results below.

I decided to test this so I created a mod where I modified the generic focus tree to have a weight of 1 for the navy, industry and political focuses, a weight of 10000 for the army focus and a different value in each series of tests for the aviation focus. I then checked how many of the 57 countries using that focus tree pick the aviation focus as their first choice. Each test series consists of 10 games. All results can be seen in the attached screenshot.

In the first series I used a value of 5001, because then the aviation focus should only be taken when it gets the minimum random multiplier of 1 while the army focus gets the maximum multiplier of 0.5, assuming the official statements are correct.
The results of the first series show a chance of about 25% for the aviation focus to be chosen. This would only be consistent with the official statements if there are no steps in between 1 and 0.5, so for every focus it would be a coin flip between that focus' AI weight being unmodified or cut in half. Even if there was only one step in between the two (for example 0.75), the observed chance for aviation being picked would be too high, as it should then only be about 18%.

In the second series I used a value of 9998, which should produce exactly the same results as the first series if it is indeed only a coin flip between the multipliers of 1 and 0.5, because again only a combination of 1 for the aviation focus and 0.5 for the army focus would cause the aviation focus to be taken.
However, the results now show a chance of about 50% for the aviation focus, which is inconsistent with the results from the first series. It might be possible to explain the results if the chance or method of assigning the multipliers is somehow different depending on the difference between the focuses' AI weights, but this would seem needlessly complicated. However, the results are perfectly consistent with bitmode's diceroll theory.

I then did a third series with a value of 4000, which means if the official statements are true, the aviation focus should not be picked at all, because 4000 is less than 50% of 10000.
But, this assumption turned out to be completely wrong, as the aviation focus was still picked with a chance of about 20%, which is again consistent with the diceroll theory.

There was another developer statement in this thread claiming that the limit for focuses to be picked is actually 1/3 of the focus with the highest weight, so I decided to add a quick final test. Here, I used a value of 400 for the aviation focus, which is only 4% of the 10000 for the army focus, but in the fifth test game, Oman picked the aviation focus, so there seems to be no limit under which a focus absolutely cannot be taken, which means Germany should at least have a slight chance of opposing Hitler.

Also, I apparently have too much free time if I decide to spend it on analyzing video games like this.

View attachment 421310

That said, the chance is very low, I think you need on average more than 700 games to get one oppose Hitler start.
 
That is not true, see my test results below.



That said, the chance is very low, I think you need on average more than 700 games to get one oppose Hitler start.
Okay, that is a 0,14% of that happening that is too low in my opinion.
 
Average game takes a day. So, I have to non-stop play HOI4 for nearly 2 years to have CHANCE to see Germany, going path of Kaiser? Seriously?

I think the devs have said that there were a lot of vocal players who complained that their games would be ruined if Germany took the "Oppose Hitler" focus on non-historical, so they effectively made it a "human player only" focus.
 
Average game takes a day. So, I have to non-stop play HOI4 for nearly 2 years to have CHANCE to see Germany, going path of Kaiser?
A wild Math appears.
Math uses probability theory.
It's very effective!

In other words: On average every 700th game will lead to Oppose Hitler. This does not mean that you have to play 700 games to get the chance of seeing Oppose Hitler. You have the same chance of seeing this event in every one of the 700 games.

Plus: Oppose Hitler is Mutual Exclusive with Rhineland and Rhineland is oftentimes the first or second focus chosen even on historical OFF. So you don't need the full game/day to check if Oppose Hitler gets taken. In most cases you could unpause the game for one tick, check what Germany has chosen and restart the game if necessary.
I'm not saying that this is a feasible workaround (but then again I've read many accounts of people restarting Pokemon Let's Go several hundred times just to get a shiny Mewtu :rolleyes: ) but "nearly two years" couldn't be more wrong - at least on average ;)
 
A wild Math appears.
Math uses probability theory.
It's very effective!

In other words: On average every 700th game will lead to Oppose Hitler. This does not mean that you have to play 700 games to get the chance of seeing Oppose Hitler. You have the same chance of seeing this event in every one of the 700 games.

Plus: Oppose Hitler is Mutual Exclusive with Rhineland and Rhineland is oftentimes the first or second focus chosen even on historical OFF. So you don't need the full game/day to check if Oppose Hitler gets taken. In most cases you could unpause the game for one tick, check what Germany has chosen and restart the game if necessary.
I'm not saying that this is a feasible workaround (but then again I've read many accounts of people restarting Pokemon Let's Go several hundred times just to get a shiny Mewtu :rolleyes: ) but "nearly two years" couldn't be more wrong - at least on average ;)
We don't touch savescumming methods, so usually look purely at "classic way" - what was started, should be finished. In that case - when I untick "historical focuses", I want to see every path equally possible to be taken. When I will want predictable world - I will put historical focuses back on.

I hope, that new "random AI" setting will be really random, with equal weights for every path.