HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #1

[podcat]

Hello, hopefully you can tear yourself away from rewatching the Star Wars trailer for just one more glimpse of the Porg creature... because it's Wednesday! Time for another dev diary for 1.5 “Cornflakes” update and the as-yet unannounced DLC. We have been covering several big features in the diaries leading up here, so now it's time to also look at some smaller features from our "bag of tricks"

Control Groups
This might actually be one of my favourites Was reminded about this in a forum thread about UI improvements people wanted and realized I had totally forgotten how nice it was. You can now hit Ctrl+number to save any selection, and then hit the number key again to bring that up. It works with any selection, not just divisions, so you can mark areas, air wings etc and jump between them quickly. Double tapping the number key moves camera to the selection.

Consolidate Divisions
Sometimes after hard battles, or when cut off from reinforcement and supply you can end up with a lot of divisions a low strength. Sometimes you need them at full strength right away and can’t wait for them to fill up normally. The DLC will come with a new feature that lets you consolidate divisions together into fewer, full strength (or as close as you can get ones). Units will move towards the strongest division and transfer over their manpower and equipment when they get there. The system also handles doing it with many divisions in which case it will try to form as many full strength divisions as it can.

Minimap & Pinging
A minimap is something HOI4 was designed to live without, but there is clearly a part of the community that really miss it, so you can now get it as part of the DLC if you want. It also comes with some new functionality for multiplayer. You can ping the map to illustrate to allies of things you are discussing, like where you want them to defend or push, or as a quick reminder like “watch out here the russians are about to encircle you!”

Minimap can be toggled to a closed state if you like, and you can still use pings through keyboard shortcuts.

Kick From Faction
With Cornflakes it will now be possible to kick nations from your faction in the form of a new diplo action.

Since this stuff tended to lead to some exploiting in the past (players picking off members one by one etc), we have been working on how AI sees this stuff to make it handle a few things… Kicking is possible in war time also and we have been putting a lot of time into dealing with how HOI4 handles wars in code. Basically the underlying system has been completely remade to stop war merging and the like from ruining your wars, or getting nations dropped or included in ways you wouldn't expect. Its one of those non-sexy things that you can't really show but that is going to make things feel a lot better and avoid edge case bugs messing up your day. This also allows us much more flexibility with how we may want to handle wars in the future.


That's it for today, see you all again next week for more updates!

****************************
Guys / Gals

This thread is to discuss the dev diary, not Pdx DLC policy, which has been debated ad nauseam. Stay on topic of the thread. - Had a dad

 

[Archangel85]

(Also, wondering if you missed a part @podcat, see emphasis)

Eh, its been our design philosophy for that part of the game since forever, nothing new.

 

[podcat]

Will the ai be able to consolidate its divisions?

It doesnt yet, but the plan is that it should in a couple of situations

Really cool stuff! Especially the changes to how wars are handled.

(Also, wondering if you missed a part @podcat, see emphasis)

quick reader I fixed that after like 30 seconds (the part I wrote afterwards already)

 

[podcat]

are the control groups DLC or Patch? it's the only feature that isn't specified.

Free. If we dont specify its safe to assume its in the update and not the DLC.

 

[podcat]

I like it all. I’ll have the DLC, but I think the mini map should be part of the free expansion, myself.

Its one of those things thats really for a part of the players only. When I had the betas and QA play they were basically split between "oh yes!!!" and "I like it the way it is and will keep it collapsed", so I think its a pretty good fit for DLC. I personally still like to use quick mouse zooming

 

[podcat]

So if two nations in a faction fight two different wars, the faction leader gets a notification that the member's war will merge with theirs unless the other is kicked?

No, the changing (which is still ongoing and needs testing of edge cases and stuff) effectively makes wars a country to country relation rather than a separate thing, so we never really merge, we instead show stuff as a war if it makes sense, and as separate wars where it doesnt. Its a little technical and tricky to explain, and I plan to show it once we start feature highlighting in the live stream because its a lot easier that way.

@podcat
Will you rework majors in the future 1 by 1 to make their focus trees interact better with newer minor ones from DLCs, or it will be one big update?

Not gonna tease yet, but you may hear something about this in one of the upcoming diaries.

 

[podcat]

What are the consequences for kicking someone?

Its mostly down to AI in that it is aware of the mechanic and if you kick people it likes and declare war on them and the like it may make a move. Or say you are in allies and randomly declare war on ppl, the others may boot you and possibly even attack you. Basically factions could be used to hide in and exploit stuff and we wanted to avoid that.

Did those snowflakes (or what looks like snowflakes) next to the digging in icon exist before? Something to do with frozen ground slowing down the process?

:3

Control groups are something of a 'marmite feature' to me (you either love it or you hate it - I'm not a lover.)

I think they are better than in HOI3/EU4 because you can also tag areas, and because planes and ships etc are in different mapmodes its a really nice way of quickly jumping to that. Also say remembering which air force parts you want to move around and which are more defensive etc.

 

[podcat]

I have to second this. Auto join is super silly and we had a few situations in Multiplayer games ruined because nations auto joined when they really shouldn't be doing that.

I hear ya. The team mostly agree it doesnt really fit anymore in HOI4 (cant remember if HOI2 had it, but HOI3 did). It comes with some problems to solve though, but its something we are thinking about and I suspect it will change. If not for 1.5 then a later patch

 

[Archangel85]

Just leaving a comment to get notifications

You can click "Watch Thread" in the top right

 

[podcat]

Not wanting to assume anything but when consolidating divisions well we lose org/exp??
Or well it stay the same as what division it's being consolidated to??

@podcat - when you consolidate divisions do the plundered divisions go back to a recruitment/training stage or are they gone completely?

I should have been a bit clearer on this. A big point of it is that XP and other such per division things are retained, so it will move experienced soldiers over and you may end up with an overall more experienced division

 

[podcat]

This DLC is part of the expansion pass right

yup

Can you give an example of a problem that comes with the removal of autojoining?

Germany rushes netherlands, you are britain and you dont have time to offer them entry before they fall. now germany has annexed thwm. among other stuff

I heard it suggested that the 'kick faction' feature is behind a paywall?

dont listen to porgs

Nice qol features. The important question that no one has asked is @podcat what sandwich fillings did they have last week?

tuna and cucumber sallad

 

[Archangel85]

@podcat @Archangel85 @KimchiViking please be aware that the reception to the minimap being part of the DLC is overwhelmingly negative on both r/hoi4 and r/paradoxplaza. It's also not very good here. I would strongly recommend reconsidering the decision to include that feature as part of the paid content, even if for no reason other than cynical PR management. Even if that means we get a minimap for free but pinging is paid (to my knowledge we've never had pinging before) that would be an improvement. You were all doing so damn well with the dev diaries up to this point and locking something as fundamentally basic as a minimap has lost you a fair chunk of that goodwill from the community.

I understand the pressure to include features as part of the DLC since so many big changes are coming for free (and you need to make up the $25 price point to fulfill the contract with consumers you made with the season pass) but this is Blitz all over again - actually arguably less defensible than Blitz because at least that was a feature we'd never had before.

Suffice to say that the people on the team who argued for the Chain of Command feature to be free (which it really shouldn't, given the development time it took) instead of the damn minimap have a lot of egg on their face now.

 

[Archangel85]

Archangel, you were hanging out here and I'm sure you are well aware that the community is very happy that Chain of Command is a free feature. You were all commended for making the right decision about that feature. The dev diary it launched alongside was the most positively received - and one that had the fewest "disagrees" and angry responses - of any diary I can remember in the post launch period. That doesn't make the decision vis a vis Minimap "good". I'm an expansion pass holder, so in theory I shouldn't care - I'm getting this all no matter what. I already paid for this expansion at launch by grabbing the FM edition. But I firmly believe - and I'm not alone - that a basic QoL feature that has always been featured in past HoI4s and every other mainline paradox game (except Stellaris as discussed above) really is not fodder for expansion DLCs.

If we have stuff in the DLC that people want, they will call it a greedy cashgrab. If we don't, they will complain that there is no value. Some people claim that we should only be selling Focus trees, others consider this to be the height of greed and that all focus trees should be free. Some say that they will happily pay for new mechanics, others demand that core mechanics should not be paywalled. Making mechanics that don't interact with the game at large will piss off both groups. There is no good move here from a PR perspective. Any paid feature "should have been in the base game" as far as the community is concerned. I have never seen a community consensus on what type of stuff should be paid, and i suspect I never will. So saying that the community is upset about having to pay for content is a non-statement.

 

[Archangel85]

While people were raging about minimaps, nobody seems to have noticed this:

Why is the selected Infantry division called "1. Panzer-Division" although the DD from two weeks ago stated that divisions will now change their names when their template is switched, respecting the template namelists?
Different development branch? Bug? @podcat @Pallidum @Archangel85

Bug. The backend and database of that system is still work in progress.