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HOI4 Dev Diary - Airplanes and Lootboxes

Hi everyone! Today’s diary is sort of a logical continuation on the 1.4 “Oak” updated where we did a full revamp on the air interfaces and much of the underlying combat mechanics. So lets dive into some more air stuff!

Attaching air wings to armies
It's now possible to attach air wings directly to armies. This means that if you assign them to an army pushing into a hostile nation those wings will get automatically move to bases in range and assigned to areas the army is fighting in. This should hopefully mean no more accidentally forgetting your air force in france when you move forces up to the russian front in hectic multiplayer games or needing to manage things manually when crossing into new areas under an advance.
Assigned wings show over armies in air mapmode (you can’t attach to army groups) for easy check on how your attached air forces situation is. We show them in 3 groups: Fighters, Close Air support/tactical bombers and Transports for supply. You can’t attach strategic bombers, because, well, having planes on order to destroy the area you move through is generally not good. You can also quickly select those planes in each group which makes sending them around and rebalancing easy and quick.
Attaching is a free feature for everyone as part of the 1.5 “Cornflakes” update. The rest of the diary will cover features in the upcoming (and still unannounced. Trust me I’m itching to tell!) DLC.
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Air Supply
Ever had your troops encircled and out of supply and wished there was some way to help them out? Now you can assign your transport planes to bring supply across enemy lines. Each plane assigned to a strategic area will boost supply in supply areas there. These planes can be intercepted as any other mission resulting in less supply, and destroyed planes. Air supply is designed to be a costly thing that you only want to use at a smaller scale, or to adjust minor supply problems. To ensure this we are rebalancing transport planes a bit so you will need a lot more of them (although with reduced costs as their “air fleet” status right now works badly with being intercepted) and air supply being a logistically tricky affair will require tying up new country resource to work. More info on that in a later diary though when we can show the whole picture. What is important here is that it's hard to use this at a large scale, and that it will come with some trade-offs.
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(German planes delivering loot-boxes in a totally not-artificial at all situation of troops trapped in the middle of Poland)

To make it easy to identify where to send your transport planes on supply missions the air mapmode now has a special indicator showing areas with a supply need where planes could be assigned. If you are over supplying them through the air this is also shown, so that you may want to withdraw some of your wings.
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Prioritization for strategic bombing
Players can now affect target selection for strategic bombers. The way it works is that you mark your prioritized targets when picking the strategic bombing mission. Those building types selected will have a higher chance of being targeted compared to others. Bombing isn't the most exact process and we felt it would be weird if you could completely control what doesn't get hit etc. So instead we decided on a system where you can somewhat affect it, but won't be able to walk into an area with all refineries destroyed but pristine infrastructure and factories.
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We also have one more air related feature as part of the DLC, but we will be showing that off in a future diary where it fits in better with the content there ;P

Next week is a diary I have been looking forward to - we are going to explain what that new topbar button does that you may have spotted in screenies :)

PS. The second episode of our beginner-stream with @Da9L and @bus is coming any second now. Even though most of you are probably familiar with the basics, this is perfect for any friends that want to join in. Check out the Paradox twitch today at 16:00 CET: https://go.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive
 
The vast majority of the community sees the additions to the game in this Patch/DLC cycle to be great additions to the game.

What is it you were aiming to see?
If there was nothing worth buying in the DLC nobody would buy it.

I think that is BabTheOnlyOne's point. He wants the features mentioned for free. He says he realizes this is for "... profit and money and all that **** ...", but I think that's exactly the problem. He may "realize", but he doesn't agree.

Putting a desirable feature into a DLC makes it more marketable. Sales and Marketing 101. As long as enough people purchase the DLC, having those who complain is acceptable.
 
These are good new features. The attachable air wings should reduce micro and it's a great bonus that it's free. The DLC features are well-suited to being optional extras, but are things that forumites have regularly requested, so I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in buying them.

Yes, that's correct. It was used by both sides as well pretty extensively.

The reason I suggested things like the Me323 and C-74 might be relevant still is because they added totally new capability ( transport of light tanks and guns ).

This would have to be handled carefully. At the moment 1 transport plane = 1 unit of transport capability, so that latter variable isn't calculated separately, as far as we know. If different models of plane had different carrying capacity, it seems likely that several calculations could be affected, so it would be quite a major feature, I would think.

A different way to handle this would be to add tech(s) that made a slightly wider range of battalions air-droppable. As you know, at the moment only Parachute Battalions and Support Companies are paradropable. Or maybe you could have a basic tech that only allowed you to drop Parachute Battalions and a more advanced tech that allowed you to drop Support Companies. However, the AI doesn't use paradrops at all, and I have read on the forum that many MP groups ban them in their house rules, so I'm not sure there's much point expanding the feature until the AI can handle it (which is probably not top of the AI priority list).

Or America could just have planes in the Yunnan airbase first.

The Americans could use Transport Planes to supply their only planes in Yunnan, yes. But the new DLC doesn't appear to allow the US to deliver Lend-Lease to the China by Transport Plane, nor provide Supply to Chinese armies. So although you will be able to create a stream of planes flying over the Himalayas, they'll be playing a rather different role to the historical 'Hump'.

In the long-run, I like the suggestion above about optionally supplying Lend-Lease by plane. This would probably have to be a major DLC feature though, since I think it would require a lot of changes.

I believe that is the case as well.

On a related topic: would it make sense for the game to do a little more abstracting of the equipment? Honestly, right now the game noticeable slows down after 1941, and becomes usually pretty horribly slow by 1943. I'm not running a super modern rig, but it is well above the minimum specs and should be fine running this thing.

From what I understand late game the engine simply has trouble tracking all the tens of thousands of pieces of infantry equipment, manpower, divisions, planes, and battleplans.

Maybe instead of fighters/cas/bombers all being at a roughly 1-1 ratio we could see them get the transport plane treatment, instead of building "a" fighter you build "a" fighter flight which is roughly 3-6 aircraft. Cut down on the number of aircraft by like 1/4th. That would certainly reduce the number of aircraft in the skies and the number of calculations that have to be made by the CPU a ton.

I believe that HoI 4 actually resolves air combats between small groups of planes (between 1:1 and 3:3, IIRC). So for air combat, you really could reduce the number of calculations and the CPU load by reducing the numbers. Your point is quite right there. However, as far as I know, land combat is handled by whole divisions. I'm not a programmer, but as a layperson it's not clear to me that reducing the numbers of equipment necessarily affects the number of calculations at all. Let's look at two extremely simplified and silly examples (I know that the real combats are vastly more complex):

A. High numbers: ( ( 300 duck-sized horses * 10 animal attack = 3000 combat points ) vs ( 10 horse-sized ducks * 100 animal attack = 1000 combat points) = Duck-sized horses win

B. Low numbers: ( ( 3 duck-sized horses * 10 animal attack = 30 combat points ) vs ( 0.1 horse-sized duck * 100 animal attack = 10 combat points) = Duck-sized horses win

Although B has lower numbers, the number of calculations is the same: two multiplications and one subtraction. So reducing the numbers doesn't reduce the CPU load. And we have moved from only using integers to also have floating-point calculations, which are handled by different parts of the CPU (I don't know for sure whether they're slower, but it's certainly something that the devs would need to check for). We could resolve that and the absurdity of having 0.1 ducks by setting a minimum of 1 animal on each side per fight:

C. Low integers: ( ( 3 duck-sized horses * 10 animal attack = 30 combat points ) vs ( 1 horse-sized duck * 100 animal attack = 100 combat points) = Horse-sized ducks win.

This keeps the numbers as integers, but it changes the outcome of the combat, which has obvious balance implications. Reducing equipment numbers might force the devs to rebalance the whole game, which is going to tie up huge resources.

I am all in favour of performance enhancements, but I'm not convinced that reducing equipment numbers is actually an effective strategy or an efficient use of dev time. But I'm not a programmer, so there maybe some aspect of this that I've missed completely.

Now that air wings can serve as part of the army, is there any thought given to creating air unit templates for a more seamless integration? It seems like an unnecessary annoyance to have to create custom wings every single time, as opposed to having pre-defined wing templates with for example 8 24-fighter squadrons and 8 24-CAS squadrons. It would also better integrate ace and experience concepts into air warfare.

Although I would really like to see air units change to become more like land units (using the division planner and template), the devs has not suggested that anywhere AFAIK. The patch will enable you to attach existing air units to existing armies.

I think you should be able to assign Field Marshals to theaters. The bonuses should scale inversely to the total number of divisions assigned to a theater in a similar way that ace bonuses scale with air wing size. This would then provide at least some command structure without going into the micromanagement order of battle detail that was in HOI3.

Are you aware that the new DLC will include a chain of command? I agree that it would make more sense to assign Field Marshals to theatres, but they have instead gone for a three-level system (Army/General - Army Group/FM - Theatre), so it's arguably a more complex system.
 
Now that strategic bombers get an ability to focus on certain targets, I think we should get an option to create night radar heavy fighters to help target/disrupt these better coordinated bombers.
Me110G4_2.jpg

A Messerschmitt Bf 110 G-4, equipped with radar to serve as a night fighter
 
Well, @Stug_Life, they'd have to actually get the AI to use night bombing...
 
Now that strategic bombers get an ability to focus on certain targets, I think we should get an option to create night radar heavy fighters to help target/disrupt these better coordinated bombers.
[snip]
A Messerschmitt Bf 110 G-4, equipped with radar to serve as a night fighter

Are those drop tanks I spy with my little eye?

Wald
 
So forgive me if this isn't the "correct" spot to ask, but all this talk of improving the air-forces got me wondering. Is there going to be any love for naval forces? Big fan of naval combat / playing Japan / USA / UK for that reason. Maybe next patch / DLC after this? Navies need some love atm I think. Will spare the novel of ideas from being typed here, wouldn't mind if anyone at Paradox would like to see it though haha.

And by no means am I lamenting the changes to air power. I love that they are getting better! Supply drops, however limited, adding airwings to armies, and selecting what to bomb is all wonderful stuff I am sure to make use of. The only think I can think of now that I'd would like added would be to CAS standing armies. Even if it's limited, CAS planes wouldn't solely wait to there is a battle ongoing to attack. They would patrol looking for targets of opportunity, forces in route, supply lines, etc. Perhaps from a balance / lag / coding stand point that would be an issue but still would be nice to see. Though I will admit the name for it is rather silly, I mean "Cornflakes"? Really? lol. Does someone really like them that works there? Or am I missing some historical context and or joke of the name?

Oh and no one can really complain about the DLC model. It's much better than most, it gives everyone some improvements and only the host needs the DLC to make use of them vs forcing everyone joining to require it. So overall, nice work Paradox. No real complaints from me. :D

*Edit: Oh and forgot about "droptanks" You can just pretend that whenever you upgrade a plane model using XP to have better range you are adding them. ;)
 
Are supplied necessarily air dropped?

If there is/are one or more airfields in the cut off area then surely supplies will be flown in and unloaded. If so then wounded, key personnel, etc. could be evacuated.
 
So forgive me if this isn't the "correct" spot to ask, but all this talk of improving the air-forces got me wondering. Is there going to be any love for naval forces?

...Though I will admit the name for it is rather silly, I mean "Cornflakes"? Really? lol. Does someone really like them that works there? Or am I missing some historical context and or joke of the name?

The community has been anticipating this DLC will be China/PRC and Naval Warfare focused. What we have seen so far in this cycle does not support that. But PDX has said this dlc/patch will be twice as big as any before...so who knows?

Cornflakes is in reference to an Operation in WW2. It was a psy-war Op, from the wikipedia article:
"The operation involved special planes that were instructed to airdrop bags of false, but properly addressed, mail in the vicinity of bombed mail trains. When recovering the mail during clean-up of the wreck, the postal service would hopefully confuse the false mail for the real thing and deliver it to the various addresses."
 
So forgive me if this isn't the "correct" spot to ask, but all this talk of improving the air-forces got me wondering. Is there going to be any love for naval forces? Big fan of naval combat / playing Japan / USA / UK for that reason. Maybe next patch / DLC after this? Navies need some love atm I think.

Podcat said in his very first dev. diary that's aimed for the upcoming expansion that one of the things they would like to improve is Navy (combat, interface etc.). It might not happen in this patch/expansion but ever since they revealed expanded German focus tree it shows that new focuses are flavouring a lot of naval warfare, which kinda makes me hope we might receive it.

Here is full post:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/hoi4-dev-diary-future-and-cornflakes.1040806/
 
The Americans did--at the very least use Gliders for Jeeps on Dday. It didnt work well. Stephen Ambrose in DDay has an excerpt of a glider pilot and company commander getting killed by a jeep during the crash landing of the glider...inertia and all that.

As for the Germans...at least in Real Life...they just didnt have the transport plane capacity for any real air reinforcement. Their big attempt at Air Supply was the Stalingrad pocket...and they ended miserably (the pocket collapsed, Russians took 96k prisoners of the 350,000 in the pocket at the start, 5k made it to Germany after the war--nice job Goring).

I have a vague memory of a temporary successful supply of a pocket on the eastern front at some stage - I'm fairly sure it happened at least once - although I'm afraid I can't remember the details, am sure a more knowledgeable forum poster will come along and fill in the gaps :).
 
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What are these two? The first one looks like some laws, the second one looks intresting. Does anyone know what that is? (Btw love the new sneak peaks)
 
is that a fuel icon i see.

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could that be what the 'new resource' is?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that it's an indicator of supplies delivered. The 22 transports in this case is delivering -6.5 supplies shy of what's needed
 
I have a vague memory of a temporary successful supply of a pocket on the eastern front at some stage - I'm fairly sure it happened at least once - although I'm afraid I can't remember the details, am sure a more knowledgeable forum poster will come along and fill in the gaps :).

Air transports sustained Paulus' surrounded German 6th Army at the Battle of Stalingrad.
Some of the German wounded during that battle were lucky enough to be medically evacuated by air. (perhaps air transport could increase manpower "trickleback" and preserve unit experience. )

upload_2017-11-2_15-50-19.png

Photograph reportedly of a Junker re-supplying German troops at the Battle of Stalingrad.

(but the " :) " indicates that you probably knew and allowed an opening for others to participate. ;) )
 
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I have a vague memory of a temporary successful supply of a pocket on the eastern front at some stage - I'm fairly sure it happened at least once - although I'm afraid I can't remember the details, am sure a more knowledgeable forum poster will come along and fill in the gaps :).
That would be the Demyansk pocket. It can be argued this was basically a trade of aircraft for manpower and not a very good one.