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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.
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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paranoidsteve said:
I don't miss the mini map .I cannot understand the rage. My troops are always sorted by theaters, and to get to a front I just click on the command in that theater and the map scrolls automatically.
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Pretty much this... Doing the theatre click thing is so second nature, that I don't even notice the absence of a mini map. To be honest, I hardly gave it a moment's thought.
 
Hey thanks for the heads up!

My question is about Airborne Supply - do you have any news about it?
Also - any chance of new Scenarios (like the Spanish Civil War) and new Starting Dates for the campaign (like the Day of Infamy)?

Cheers!
A.
 
Gamer_1745 said:
I am sorry you don't like the video posts. I don't type so well & it takes be (me) a lot of time. I lose track of what I am trying to say as I concentrate on typing (an spelling). It never come (comes) out as well as I thought it before starting to type.

This took about 3 minutes for me to type and if I had typed up what I said after recording it, to make sure I didn't lose my train of thought, it would have taken me hours.

Now 6 minutes.

Edit:The 2 corrections were made after posting now 7 minutes.
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1. You did post during the course of thread the link to the same video at least twice. It looks like 'hey, look, look at my video, LOOK AT IT'
2. Video is monetized (two ads if I remember correctly) and such it looks less like video post that you made to just avoid problems with putting the thoughts on 'paper' but even more reinforces the idea of 'look at my video' and the self-promotion aspect of it.
3. Even though it may take you hours to write what you think, remember it also would take us time and more of it to just watch the video, and if you want for such thoughts to reach out to the people, I don't think wasting their time is the best idea.
4. If you have problem with what you are trying to type and lose the train of thought, have you considered (just a suggestion - don't take that as something negative) recording your thoughts in whatever way it suits you best and then use what you recorded to write it down? (So you can always go back to the recording and check what was original intention/train of thought?)
 
Couldn't care less about the minimap tbh. You have a mousewheel people. Use it. It's faster than any minimap is going to be ^^
DLC's looking good so far though.
 
@Zwireq
1. Yes, First post I made before deciding to make the video and then after posting the video, I went back & added it to the first post for the more visible position.
2. Yes, monetized. Paradox can, if I understand correctly, block ads (I am glad they don't). And yes there is a self-promotion aspect to this. Is that bad, so long as the video is clearly on topic, as both videos are made for this thread?
3. No one is required to click on the link and if they do and they get bored with it they can stop it (I do have a tendency run long on things).
4. You are right that I could do this. It does take more time. But more importantly I would rather watch podcat deliver the DD as a short video than read it (make an even better video than I did). Some people like to get their news by reading it & others want to watch it on the TV. Since Paradox is not making video DDs, I will along with my commentary.

I truly don't mean to offend anyone & I hope those who don't want to watch it, for any reason, can just by pass it.
 
C1 Ariete said:
Also - any chance of new Scenarios (like the Spanish Civil War) and new Starting Dates for the campaign (like the Day of Infamy)?
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This is not going to happen as they now regret the 1939 start date. Metrics show that very few people play the 1939 start date & the effort is not worth the small number of players. I hope modders will make mods covering these things.
 
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C1 Ariete said:
My question is about Airborne Supply - do you have any news about it?
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It's not in podcast's Five Year Plan, but that list is not exhaustive. I don't think there's been any other news.

I think we would be exceptionally lucky to get airborne supply in the next patch, because I think it would require a lot of work, and we have already been promised many, many good things. But that's just my speculation.
 
It's times like these that cause me to exercise great self control...
 
Myself, I would expand the MP ping system to allow the drawing of text, arrows, lines, etc., and use the sword and shield icons as indicators to show where battles have taken place.
 
Rhel said:
Couldn't care less about the minimap tbh. You have a mousewheel people. Use it. It's faster than any minimap is going to be ^^
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Having to scroll out, middle-click and drag the map, and scroll back in is faster than a single left-click to get exactly where you want to go? o_O
 
him_15 said:
BTW, I think the unit naming DD should be combined with this one as a single DD, they are all minor improvement instead of big feature.
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But does it mean we would have had no DD instead of the naming DD? I don't know how many features they were ready to show back then.
 
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.
 
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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Not a bad idea actually. It just makes Things a lot easier.
 
Kapoii said:
Damnnn, with every dev diary i get more and more excited for the new update.
When is it tho?
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We don't know but my general policy is to assume that it will be "Whenever their next vacation is" minus 2-3 weeks. This is more or less what happened for the other two DLCs, and since this is the largest one yet I think it will hold true here too. It allows for them to release a hotfix and deal with any imminent problems, then start thinking about what to do for the next in-between patch.

Christmas is the next biggest holiday so the first week of December might be a good rough estimate. It could come sooner than that, but I think they'll want to take the extra time.
 
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