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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:
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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 .
 
Is it possible to keep the up and down arrows for the production screen? I appreciate the drag and drop functionality but would also miss the ability to move stuff straight to the top or bottom of the list with a shift+click on the appropriate arrow.

While we're on the subject of sorting things, is there any chance we could get ships to be sorted by class instead of name in the transfer ships interface? They are already sorted this way when you look at the fleet they're in. I've attached a picture for clarity.

ShipSorting.jpg
 
@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.
 
@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.
 
Some fantastic interface changes, really good looking improvements. Hopefully now I'll not have to scroll so much through my production queues!

It'd still be good to dispose of unwanted equipment by scrapping it. Melting down your old tanks, giving you a slight refund on the resources. If you suddenly run out of steel scrap your old tanks and get a little bit of resources back to build new 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.

I was thinking that it could simulate improving your own arms industry by learning from the country you're fighting with.

Then again it could be better represented with a research boost. Like for example getting an X% boost to Swerpunkt (I butchered the name probably) if you've been fighting the German Reich for Y condition.
 
Ui and qol Improvements are some of the best imo. Keep them coming!

One qol change I know will be popular is to let us restrict equipment types in airwings the same way we can for divisions. Just saying....
 
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.
The Bazooka was copied by the Germans to make the Panzerschreck. So it was not just keeping captured factories operating (The Germans kept the Polish & Belgium Arms factories making non-standard pistols for Germany).
 
The problem with these suggestions, as you probably know, is stocks vs flows.

The equipment is a stock.

The game's currency is CIC output, which is a flow. If you sell equipment in nations, they would have to give you CIC output for a certain period of time in exchange for a punctilinear change in equipment stocks, which is going to require a large amount of programming to manage.

Resources are also a flow. Your equipment stocks are destroyed at a moment in time, but your resources would have to flow for a period of time.

It could be done, but I suspect it would be a pain to manage without exploits. The decision not to use money has many advantages, but makes these suggestions rather, erm, expensive ones. ;)
Indeed, I know that ;)

One solution that I proposed in the past in some other thread could be to actually assign CIC to scrapping stuff so that the scrapping is actually a flow which converts stocked equipment to resources at a specific rate (maybe dependent to a to-be-introduced technology and, of course, number of CIC used for that job). So the production side of equipment could stay unchanged.
And on a very basic level the equipment to resource conversion is just an extension of the trade interface (technically speaking. It should, of course, not be part of trade USER interface ;) ). The trade interface is already able to have different conversion rates of CIC to resources (e.g. normal trade vs colonial trade). It should not be that difficult to implement an equipment drain "while trading".

Of course there are other ways possible, like using only MIC for that, similar to conversion. Basically it would be a conversion of "anything" to "anything else". But using CIC for the scrapping instead of MIC feels more "right" imho...
 
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that it gets stuck in a phase? yea its solved


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.
My suggestion would be this:
Use the top row for 50x, the middle row for 5x, the last row for 1x factories.
Every time a row is filled up, remove the 5 and add a different-shaped/colored factory to the row above.
When removing a colored factory, re-add the 4 original-colored ones.

Would allow for exact numbers, but still allow for a good overview.

Basically this works like the roman numeral system, but without the subtracting.
 
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:
index.php


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.
It's... It's beautiful...

Now you really have something that you can hold over Stellaris, that game doesn't even let you see some of its queues, and reordering any of them is out of the question, while you keep improving HoI4's queues' UIs with stuff like this. :D
 
I love all of this, but I have a few questions relating to the subject of equipment:

A. Will people still be able to cheat the system by deleting encircled divisions and having their stuff magically transport back into the stockpile?

B. Would it be possible to destroy only a certain percentage of stockpile for a particular set of equipment?

C. Could the time required for the equipment to be destroyed be scaled by the number of guns being destroyed within that stockpile? I see with the lovely changes to the production system for convenience, I may end up with a million units of rifles laying around (it might even do the weird break and go negative when it goes too high) and realistically, nobody can destroy a million units of infantry equipment within 90 days.

Anyways, I really do appreciate all the hard work and effort you put into these updates and I'm always delighted to see a new dev diary. Thanks for being a very devoted team of developers to a brilliant game! :D
 
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.
Also Soviet SU-76i production (well, from other captured and damaged ones, but still - 201 vehicle).