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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!”
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Minimap can be toggled to a closed state if you like, and you can still use pings through keyboard shortcuts.
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Kick From Faction
With Cornflakes it will now be possible to kick nations from your faction in the form of a new diplo action.
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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!

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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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Kick From Faction
With Cornflakes it will now be possible to kick nations from your faction in the form of a new diplo action.
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Is Cornflake mana a new type of game 'currency' like political power? Does this mean new types of resources (maize, pasture for milk cows etc)?
 
>that snowflake icon next to the entrechment icon in the second picture
am I imagining this or is this new

Probably represents the difficulty of entrenching in frozen ground. Digging in frozen dirt is a cast iron bitch.

If I'm right I hope we see a similar thing for mountains and sand dunes as both are similarly challenging locations to entrench.
 
Here come the rants about why all this stuff should be free in the patch.
 
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.
 
It works with any selection, not just divisions, so you can mark areas, air wings etc
I am literally crying tears of joy.
In my case there are some tears of sadness as well. And I'm really trying not to be too negative here, but... it amazes me when things like hot-key selection, which have been part of Paradox games for many years (see e.g. EU), apparently have to be "re-invented" for every game. Even when they use the same engine (see EUIV). So it takes years to implement this "new feature" that has been old for years. Was the thought process like "It has proven to be very useful, of course we do not want it for the new game"? Just amazing...

Still glad there's progress.
 
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Will I be able to kick auto joining nations (ex Soviets declaring on Iran during barbarosa), without penalties or will my allies all jump on me?
What are the consequences for kicking someone?

I generaly like this feature for sp, but it could lead to negative consequences in mp.
 
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A minimap as part of a DLC is, for Paradox, a shameful act.
 
Thank goodness for the return of the mini-map - one feature I really missed.
Control groups are something of a 'marmite feature' to me (you either love it or you hate it - I'm not a lover.)
 
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.
 
Kick From Faction
There also needs to be a way to deny joining "my" faction - me being the faction leader. It's just crazy that you have to disolve the faction if you don't want allies. Because nations can auto-join, if attacked, if you bloody want them or not.
 
I like the minimap. Its most useful in multiplayer, which is for the hardcore players, who rightfully should buy the DLC to ensure they are familiar with all the features before going online.

Please fix the air mode though, right now you can't see the types of Allied planes in the air above you, even though you can see the enemy's. Also, I don't think allied fighters can escort allied CAS?
 
There also needs to be a way to deny joining "my" faction - me being the faction leader. It's just crazy that you have to disolve the faction if you don't want allies. Because nations can auto-join, if attacked, if you bloody want them or not.

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.

( Communist Spain with Independence guaranteed by Soviet and with their border guarded by Soviet divisions get auto joined into the allies when attacked by Germany... )