HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #2

[podcat]

Welcome to another bag of tricks dev diary for 1.5 “Cornflakes” and the unannounced expansion. Today we have several smaller features and improvements for you and all are connected to equipment in one way or the other.

Building your own stuff
Managing production lines is something you do all the time, and thus we want the interface to help you as much as possible. We have done several things to help out with this, like allowing you to collapse entries:

The UI now also has more filters, so its easy to just look at lines lacking resources, lines used for upgrade, lines going straight to stockpile etc. Its also possible to assign up to 150 factories to a line (not naval production lines) by using the x5 and x10 toggles.

Toggling on x5 lets you put down 5 factories with each click so its easier to manage big lines (this part is still a bit more work in progress than normal and may see changes before release though).

We have also added drag-and-drop to the production interface and the civilian construction interface too. It makes reordering and changing priorities a breeze. See the future! In moving pictures:

Hopefully this will make it a lot easier to manage things for everyone and if it proves popular we may start adding this to other interfaces too.


Taking other people's stuff
At the end of combats it will now be possible to capture enemy equipment. The divisions involved will grab stuff depending on participation (higher level maintenance companies help a lot here if you want to take full advantage of capturing). If the equipment isn't something the division needs it goes back to your stockpile. This one will be available for people with the DLC.

Getting rid of stuff you don't want
There are sometimes situations when you just want to get rid of some of your equipment stockpiles. Death or Dishonor added the ability to convert equipment, but that is not always applicable. For people who get the DLC we have now added the option of straight up cleaning out your stores of stuff you don’t need or want anymore. To avoid exploits around surrender where someone in MP would try to destroy things to keep them out of enemy hands these are held in a special “being destroyed” storage, and will be accessible to the conqueror if you fall within 90 days.

Also finally there is another way available to all. Lend Lease has been changed to allow to send equipment that isn’t originally yours. This means that you can give captured stuff to your allies etc.

Sending equipment that isn't yours like this will however not give you any XP (you wasn't the one who did research and development after all).

See you all next week for more updates and details!

Also, do you need more friends to invade and annex? Tell them to take a look at our new stream starting later today, Blitzkrieg for dummies! As always on Twitch: https://go.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive .

 

[podcat]

Arg, you are so cruel. People expected to see another focus tree overhaul. Instead you give us news about interface changes. >_<

Did anybody from the dev team say that?

Nope. I said it would be another shown at some point. Its going to be a couple of weeks before you see that one.

Do encircled divisions yield more loot?

The amount you get is based on what you destroy, and if you overrun a division you will destroy more - so yes.

The changes to the production menu have to be one of the best minor changes

If you had to code it, it wasnt a minor thing its probably our most complex UI and we had to redo a lot of it Luckily I wasnt the one stuck with it

in the case of destroying stockpile equipment - do we get the used materials back (all or parts of it)?

No, its purely scrapping them. We considered it, but it would have very large and wierd impacts on balance for production that we werent keen on (or have a very small effect which is kind of no effect).

 

[Archangel85]

Do encircled divisions yield more loot?

Encircled divisions destroyed will yield a "lootbox", which you can open for some exciting equipment! No worries if you are not a strategic genius, though, you can buy more lootboxes in the store for only $0.99!

Just kidding.

Spoiler

Note to self: pitch this to sales

in the case of destroying stockpile equipment - do we get the used materials back (all or parts of it)?

No, but we are planning on adding more ways to get more resources.

 

[Archangel85]

That begs the question. Will drag-n-drop also be possible with the CIC production? It's usually there that you end up with important repairs or new builds that you might want to move up in the queue but not always through shift-clicking it to the top.

Yes.

 

[podcat]

I'm not mad at you, but it feels like waiting for Christmas gifts and getting an Easter egg, instead Sometimes it's hard to wait ... and because there are no pre-announcements, it's a lot of speculation what we can expect ... and with that comes a lot of exaggerated hope.

No worries As someone who has been waiting for games I know your pain Paradox at least shares progress unlike a lot of places where you only get to know stuff at the end.

The important distinction is thatthe French equipment you mention here was not captured in combat. Instead the French arsenals used were those the Germans captured after the fall of France. The British equipment used was mostly logistical equipment captured at Dunkirk after its fall and did not represent that much of an injection of material - I think the only major exception was the use of British land-mines in the desert war, but land-mines aren't part of this game.

The British never fielded German equipment in any significant quantities. The same is true of the Russians. The Chinese made little use of Japanese equipment until after the Japanese surrender when large amounts of equipment fell into their hands. The US obviously never used that much in the way of enemy material.

The reason for this is because equipment captured in combat is often damaged and includes little or nothing in the way of ammunition or spare parts. You have to capture a large amount (as the Germans did in the Russian encirclement and in over-running Russian supply-bases) with ammunition and spare parts to make using enemy equipment worthwhile.

Yeah you sort of are talking about capturing arms depos and such. In HOI4 its kinda abstracted between stuff captured after combat, and stuff captured on capitulation, and stuff captured on annexation.

The british and russians didnt really need to use captured equipment as much, although I have read about russians using german equipment.

 

[podcat]

@podcat

Whilst I remember, can you confirm that the combat tactics fix is being/has been implemented in 1.5?

that it gets stuck in a phase? yea its solved

@podcat you mentioned that the new factory number is still a work in progress. Do you plan to make it more flexible to he able to assign odd number of factories like 22 or 37?

thats being discussed internally. it makes stuff fiddlier, and I am not sure if people will actually care. its not that hard to make a line of 140 factories and a second one of 3 if you specifically want 143 rather than 150 or 140.

 

[Archangel85]

@podcat this may sound weird, but how about producing captured equipment (in the same way you produced licensed ones)?

The way the system works right now would mean all kinds of strange behaviour like the original owner gaining XP for the enemy using their own tanks against them.

 

[podcat]

@podcat this may sound weird, but how about producing captured equipment (in the same way you produced licensed ones)?

Was that ever done much? its not something I know about if so. We do model germany capturing stuff and and converting it to other things with the conversion feature.

oh actually I guess the Czech factories kept producing Pz 38(t) etc. So yeah I guess it was a thing.