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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #2

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:
all_of_it.png


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.

boosted_line.png


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:
99cd63a5e0512bf62ea830ab90e4df95.gif


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.
Captured Equipment.png

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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.
destroy.png


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.
lendlease.png


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 Any chance of getting the auto rebase for air wings back that was taken out in the Air UI change? While its nice to see the plane ranges, its not so nice that you have to manually move all the air wings yourself especially if they get rebased randomly after being kicked out of a province. That single button saves a lot of time and effort as it takes in both range and airfield capacity.

Or while we're at it: why not only having to select the mission region and have the wings be automatically placed at the optimal air base?
 
Or while we're at it: why not only having to select the mission region and have the wings be automatically placed at the optimal air base?
That's even better but the Hoi 4 dev team being as it is, I think its easier for them to put in something old rather than making something 'new'. Though I would prefer far more automation and QoL but again its up to the devs how much time they have.
 
I believe it was mentioned AI was something that they'll just continuously try to improve along this other content.

Yes of course the AI will be continuously updated :)
I meant in a dev. diary update where they actually discuss how long they have come in fixing the game breaking issues.
 
Some excellent changes indeed!

I do have a question, though: does the 90-day "being destroyed" stage destroy all the material at the end of the period, or at some rate over the course of the period? The latter would make more sense in terms of realism, though it could weaken the stated intent of the mechanic... so I'm not sure which path is being pursued.

Destroying equipment gradually would also make it a whole lot simpler to implement a mechanic to "recover" material, since you could temporarily add resources to the capital province for the duration of the breakdown.

...Though my own favorite change in this patch has got to be the equipment-captured-in-battle part. Especially since it looks like divisions take up captured arms immediately rather than needing them delivered, which will be wonderful when fighting in poor supply.
 
Great stuff, thank you. Especially capturing enemy equipment.

Question: will we be able to add slots to our divisions that we haven't researched yet? For example, add a heavy tank battalion to allow my divisions to make use of enemy heavy tanks even if I haven't researched them yet myself :) ?
 
Even if we only get a percentage of the resources -- it just makes sense you'd be able to recycle the steel, aluminum, etc. (not the oil though)

Congrats on Post #1 !

(and thanks for "voting" for resources from recycling. )

why do we have to wait for a nation to go to war to lend lease :(

Same! (good idea about the "why")
 
Question: will we be able to add slots to our divisions that we haven't researched yet? For example, add a heavy tank battalion to allow my divisions to make use of enemy heavy tanks even if I haven't researched them yet myself :) ?


I believe that a nation may add slots to its division templates long as the nation has either:

1. One (1) piece of equipment (e.g. one heavy tank) in their inventory OR

2. Has the piece of equipment (e.g. heavy tank) promised to them via Lend Lease (even though the equipment has not arrived yet).

There is a bit of ensuing confusion.

The template statistics chart will not reflect the unresearched equipment...but, combat uses the statistics of the unresearched equipment.
 
Two questons
1.Will units bmore likely to take gear of a higher level,and will they upgrade themselves?
2. Will a large stockpile of higher level equipment boost research of said equipment?
 
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.
It'd be cool if we could produce the equipment of our annexed enemies.
 
Has anyone looked at increased supply usage if you have multiple versions of equipment in one unit especially if it is foreign equipment. One of the problems the Germans had in Russia was the vast quantity of different types of motorcycles. It is a lot more efficient to supply 1 type of piston ring or carbonator than 10 or 50. Especially if some of those engines were made in foreign factories and your mechanics did not train on that model.
Just a thunk
 
Wait a minute. So all these features posted on the front page are all part of the freaking "PAID DLC"? Then non DLC owners will not have these features? Especially the drag and drop production lines?!

But I've waited for this drag and drop since this game launched.
 
Best to edit/delete post ASAP about the things which may not be discussed.