HOI4 Dev Diary - Armored Cars - The new horsey boys!

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Hi everyone and welcome to another dev diary. The team is working hard towards PdxCon that is coming up next week and we are looking forward to pretzels, beer, and of course meeting you guys!

Today we will be talking about Armored Cars! I have often been asked why HOI4 doesn't have them, and today you get to find out why now is the time time

Resistance Suppression
Part of the reason we are finally adding armored cars is that they go hand in hand with resistance suppression. Since its inception, the armored car has been a useful tool against lightly armed and armored opponents. As explained previously, Garrisons will work as a shield against resistance activity. If adequate, the garrison will absorb the vast amount of resistance attacks that would otherwise sabotage industry or resource extraction. Armored vehicles will be especially suited to this role as hardness will give damage reduction to attacks made by the resistance.

In addition to being more resilient and preserving manpower, armored cars will come with a higher suppression stat and a better ratio of suppression to deployed manpower. Armored cars will generally not be as protective as light tanks, but will have a great amount of manpower protection for their cost.

All of these things combine to make armored cars a good option for resistance suppression when manpower is more of a concern than some extra production cost. Horses will still have an edge when it comes to suppression vs production cost, however.

• Hardness to prevent losses
• High suppression value
• Cheap production cost compared to other armored vehicles
• Higher cost still than just horseboys

Main battalion Combat Role
Fighting on the frontlines as the main battle force is not a typical role for an armored car. In HoI4 it will be no different. In most situations, the armored car will be outclassed or simply not appropriate for the terrain. However, in a few cases, armored cars should work fairly well as main battle units.

In WW2 armored cars saw a good deal of combat in the deserts of Northern Africa and the Middle East. Their decreased supply needs, ability to move quickly in desert environments, and excellent capability in fighting poorly equipped enemies made them perform rather well in those theaters.

In HoI4, armored cars will work similarly. They will provide increased protection and breakthrough over say motorized or infantry while coming cheaper than light tanks. They will also be the fastest land unit in the game in the right terrain. These factors should make them dangerous opponents in secondary and tertiary theaters of combat.

Combat and Intel
We have split the recon support company into several now so that it can be tailored to the division type you have, and the speed it needs to move at because now the speed on the recon company will be limiting the whole division. Meaning that if you scout your trucks with cavalry they will need to move at cavalry speed.
We have:

• Cavalry Recon Detachment - regular horsey boys you are used to. Cheap, but not that fast.
• Motorized Recon Company - Motorized, so jeeps and light vehicles. Fast but weak
• Light Armored Recon Company - Armored cars
• Armored Recon Company - Light tanks

Armored cars is a good sweet spot of capability, speed and armor while light tanks help keep your hardness and armor up in tougher divisions.

Recon companies give you an edge when picking tactics in combat, and that remains the same. We have on the other hand been rebalancing tactics to make recon more worthwhile. Tactics are now rerolled twice as often and we have lowered the frequency of certain phases like close combat quite a bit (unless fighting in urban terrain).

Recon companies now also do one more thing, they let you generate more intel in combat. More intel you say? What is this? As part of this update we will be redoing how intel works, but we will be going into that in detail in the future. For now all I can say is that there will be several ways to acquire intel (where fighting is one) and that relative intel will be replacing the straight up combat bonus from having crypto techs.

Armored cars looks really cool, so here are some renders for the new models for you to enjoy:

Ingame tech wise armored cars depend on motorized, so to use the recon companies you need both that and to have unlocked the recon support companies.

Armored cars will be coming with the DLC while basic intel changes and the other recon companies are available for all with the ‘Husky’ update. Next week is PdxCon and we are also moving offices, so I’ve set my alarm clock on “Maximum chaos!” but I think we should be able to give you a bit of an update diary anyways Seeya then!

 

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Will recon stat finally be made useful? It is worthless now. Tests showed it had next to no effect on battles. It should be made more than tweaked to be made useful.

We havent really done much testing on this yet, but I think already with frequency alterations it will be useful enough to make recon worth it. If not we'll tweak it more. Of course they do have the other impacts as well

Does this change also apply to other support companies: i.e. putting non motorized engineer/maintenence/artillery companies on panzer divisions will slow them down?

No, the others are not affected. from a modding eprspective its possible to set this up now (and to make main line battalions that do not limit speed also if you want)

 

[Archangel85]

THERE'S A MISSING FLAG ON ONE OF THE 3D MODELS . TO WHOM THOSE CARS BELONG TO ? ( i see what u did paradox with that epic teaser right there )

Those are the generic 3d models for countries without specific ones. The one on the left is a Polish vehicle (Wz 29 Ursus), the one on the right is VEHICLE OF GLORIOUS DESIGN Panserbil m/39

 

[podcat]

Will the different recon units be equally "good" at recon or will they differ?

The recon level will most likely stay the same. You pick between them for their other attributes.

VEHICLE OF GLORIOUS DESIGN Panserbil m/39

Good good. Archangel85 is making up for betraying me by having anti-swedish named ai strategies scripted

 

[Archangel85]

Good good. Archangel85 is making up for betraying me by having anti-swedish named ai strategies scripted

Sorry, I meant Beutespähpanzer 39(schw)

 

[YaBoy_Bobby]

Why would a higher frequency have any impact at all on viability? More choices are done but each one individually still has the same chance to produce a good outcome, so on average the advantage will stay the same.

Because the reroll frequency was not high enough to achieve reliable results where combats more comonly benefit from the 5-20% advantages one doctine can have over another in terms of tactics. Achieving a more consistent advantage means more phases in a single combat where the side that got countered has org/str eroded leading to a weaker position on the next roll. You are now more likely in each combat to see the benefit of your tactics. This is important in a game where breakthroughs often revolve around fighting for a single province. With less frequent rolls you have more random results for combats.

Also, it means less time bogging down combat in close bomat tactics when they are chosen, further moving away from RNG.

 

[YaBoy_Bobby]

This answer is silly. The problem with the recon bonus is that it doesn't appreciably improve the median tactics choice enough to justify its cost. Reducing the variance of tactics choices by doubling their frequency doesn't affect their total power. Sure, rerolling twice as often will mean you get double the chances to counter enemy tactics, but they'll only last half as long so the net effect hasn't changed. Sure, close combat will resolve twice as fast, but it will become twice as common.

Your answer is like saying you could make the odds of a 50/50 coinflip transform into 66/33 by doubling the amount of flips you do. That's not how statistics works.

Except thats not what im saying. I am saying you are more likely to see your statisitcal average advantage in a single combat, not that a change to frequency will somehow change the statistical average. Also, reducing the frequency of close combat phases increases the advantage of one set of doctrine tactics over the other.