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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #1

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 :D 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.
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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.
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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!”
Screenshot_1.png


Minimap can be toggled to a closed state if you like, and you can still use pings through keyboard shortcuts.
Screenshot_2.png



Kick From Faction
With Cornflakes it will now be possible to kick nations from your faction in the form of a new diplo action.
Screenshot_3.png



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
 
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I think making the mini-map an optional inclusion is the best way forward. I, for one, will not use it, but I appreciate it being there for those who will. I still think being able to decide ping length would be a good complement to showing battle plans to allies. Will that be configurable in any way?
 
Am I the only one who wants peace deals to be a thing?

Not just when you are at 50% Cap but basically any time like in the White peace mod. Itˋs about Time that is in the game, and Iron Man friendly.
 
Leutnant Walker said:
Am I the only one who wants peace deals to be a thing?

Not just when you are at 50% Cap but basically any time like in the White peace mod. Itˋs about Time that is in the game, and Iron Man friendly.
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Depends on the implementation. I certainly want to see some way for Japan to be defeated by China without China having to invade Japan.

I guess it all depends on what criteria you need to fulfil to get peace.
 
Gort11 said:
Depends on the implementation. I certainly want to see some way for Japan to be defeated by China without China having to invade Japan.
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Why? That's nonsensical. If China can re-take Manchuria and Korea and drive the Japs into the sea then why would there not be some kind of peace? Should Haile Selassie's forces have to sack Rome?

Haha oh shit, I read that as 'don't want' :oops::oops::eek::p
 
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How about we pay PDX a monthly licensing fee. Each game PDX produces has its own fee. The fees are cumulative. The fees could also be less per game if one were to have multiple games. For this monthly cash flow, PDX promises to provide new content, patches, bug fixes on a regular basis, say every four months.
 
TBH this Dev Diary is the best news I´ve heard about HOI IV in a VERY long time and you call it "smaller features". Go figure. Needless to say that I really missed control groups and the mini map that much.
 
Farquarsen said:
How about we pay PDX a monthly licensing fee. Each game PDX produces has its own fee. The fees are cumulative. The fees could also be less per game if one were to have multiple games. For this monthly cash flow, PDX promises to provide new content, patches, bug fixes on a regular basis, say every four months.
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Judging by the development speed for HoI4 it wouldn't have to be a high monthly fee.

HoI4 released June 2016 ( 17 months ago ) and so far have released $25 worth of DLC + let's say developed half another $25 worth DLC. Let's also subtract 4 months for "post release patching" funded by sales of the base game ( so 13 months of DLC development ).

That's $37.5 over 13 months which comes down to $2.9 a month ( or even a bit lower if we include the discount from expansion pass /FM edition )

I could live with that price.



The problem with such a model however is should someone who comes in 5 years down the line only have to pay a single monthly fee to unlock all content that you have paid over $100 for them to develop?
 
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Gort11 said:
Depends on the implementation. I certainly want to see some way for Japan to be defeated by China without China having to invade Japan.

I guess it all depends on what criteria you need to fulfil to get peace.
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They need to add unique peace conference events for Germany aswell.

You should be able to sue for peace with USA if UK and all major allies in Europe capitulate. USA has bigger navy which basically prevents you from invading across the Atlantic but at the same time without UK, USA cannot stage any invasion in Europe. Same goes for Soviet Union, i'm pretty sure they would never capitulate even if Germany would took important cities like Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow, but at the same time i don't want to march all the way to Vladivostok just to force them to surrender.
 
I really don't understand the critisism about some smaller UI being payed for. As far as I see it any major feature and mechanics that is added into an expansion changes the game in such a way that paradox then would have in support multiple different games, this would of course not be sane in any reasonable way. The only real option to for paradox to produce is DLC with content such as NFs, Events and smaller UI. All the "free" content in the patches if of course subsides by the DLC:s.

Its probably quite hard to decide what to be free and what should be a payed feature.
The next DLC must work balanced together with each version of the game. Right now there is in practice 4 versions of the game that has to be balanced and maintained.
HOI IV
HOI IV + TfV
HOI IV + DoD
HOI IV + TfV + DoD

If you add the next DLC then you have 8 versions of the game.Obviously most effort will put into balancing the game will all expansions, over time when more expansions/patches comes any imbalances in the nonfullversions games might get neglected.

HOI IV
HOI IV + TfV
HOI IV + DoD
HOI IV + TfV + DoD
HOI IV + CornflakesDLC
HOI IV + CornflakesDLC + TfV
HOI IV + CornflakesDLC + DoD
HOI IV + CornflakesDLC + TfV + DoD
 
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grandad1982 said:
With the new control groups can we have the map movement assigned to wasd please? That way I can just reach my finger up rather than move my hand right across the keyboard.
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So much this.
 
adam_grif said:
Only if they wanted to maintain two separate versions of the battle planner and leader system. They're reworking how general traits, battle-plans and combat bonuses work and removing FM's abilities to command troops directly in the way they used to do it. It would be much less convenient for them to go down that path and they have made statements in the past to effect that they prefer to make underlying engine/gameplay changes free because it makes the modular aspect much easier. When they rip out this much of the guts of the old system they don't want to keep it all around as legacy code just in case you don't have the DLC, it's much more clean and convenient to do it the other way around, have cosmetics, focus trees and other conveniently modular systems be the ones that are enabled by DLC.
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eh... again objects are objects. I can think of multiple ways that it could easily be done, however that is based on hypothetical conjecture as I have never seen the source code, so I cannot quantitatively say it'd be easy.
and if I was presented the source code, it'd take me a month or year to get back to you cause while my theory is getting way better, my ability is still lacking. :)
 
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