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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 .
 
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
Stellaris is superior than HOI4 - in Stellaris you design own stuff as you want to.
 
If you are India, can you lend lease convoys to the UK to increase autonomy, who LL it to France, who LL it back to you, then you complete the whole threesome again to cheese autonomy?
 
Looks like some nice QoL features there, but this bit confuses me:

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).

Maybe I'm not understanding what this actually does, but can't we already click on exactly the number of factories we want in each line? What use is a "+5 factories" or "+10 factories" button when I can already always get the right number of factories in 1 click?
 
Is it still possible to send the production to the top/bottom with one click?
 
Maybe I'm not understanding what this actually does, but can't we already click on exactly the number of factories we want in each line? What use is a "+5 factories" or "+10 factories" button when I can already always get the right number of factories in 1 click?
Currently one line is limited to 15 factories. Now it's 150.
 
A. Will people still be able to cheat the system by deleting encircled divisions and having their stuff magically transport back into the stockpile?

As far as I know that bug was fixed a few patches ago already ( used to only block disbanding returning equipment in single province encirclements but fixed to include all where cut off ).
 
Looks like some nice QoL features there, but this bit confuses me:



Maybe I'm not understanding what this actually does, but can't we already click on exactly the number of factories we want in each line? What use is a "+5 factories" or "+10 factories" button when I can already always get the right number of factories in 1 click?
I believe that this does not mean that you add +5 or +10 factories, but if you will selectvthe x5 option, one click actaully reoresents five facories.
So in a situation where you want to assign 45 factories to infantry guns, you will be able to do it with one prodiction line instead of three.
This is really useful for late game. I hope for more lategame improvements.
 
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.

While x5 and x10 are nice, appealing numbers, having x5 available almost makes x10 superfluous, as it is simply a factor 2. If you had for example x3 and x10, you could cover a greater range of numbers up until 45 factories, and at that point, increments of ten is probably fine.
 
Currently one line is limited to 15 factories. Now it's 150.

I believe that this does not mean that you add +5 or +10 factories, but if you will selectvthe x5 option, one click actaully reoresents five facories.
So in a situation where you want to assign 45 factories to infantry guns, you will be able to do it with one prodiction line instead of three.
This is really useful for late game. I hope for more lategame improvements.

Ah thanks, I missed a small bit in the diary (I think I had the large screenshot zoomed in - the zoom covers up exactly that bit I missed) - I see now the picture with the x5 icon on top of the factories, it all makes sense now :)
 
Just a minor nitpick on your UI for the collapsible lines:

The expand/collapse triangle feels counter-intuitive, it points down when it should be pointing up and vice versa. If the triangle were on the bottom of the pane and moved when clicked, it would make sense in its current orientation.

You can see both types in action in Acrobat Reader: The contents of the bookmarks pane use the "indicator" style for expanding/collapsing individual bookmarks and sub-bookmarks (arrow points to the right = collapsed, arrow pointing down = expanded), while the whole pane itself has a triangle to collapse it to the side of the window (when the pane is open, the triangle is pointing to the left to slide the pane left out of view, and when it's closed the triangle is pointing to the right to slide the pane open). I'm not sure what the underlying principle is, but I would guess that the arrow/triangle should be pointing towards the screen content that it is going to affect.

acrobat_ui.png


I suggest changing the triangle to point to the right while the line is collapsed, and point down while it is expanded.
 
This is brilliant, just few days ago me and my friend discussed how cool it would be to be able to capture enemy equipment in the field, during combat. Now it's becoming reality. Many thanks for the diary.
 
The Soviets used captured German equipment extensivly. The Su76i was an assault gun built on the chassis of captured Panzer III's. The Romanians, Finns and Germans used it extensivly, the Germans at one point could equip entire battalions with KV-1s and T34s.
On the Africa Front between 50% and 75% of all German equipment had been captured.
It all looks nice and these small changes really improve the game, the red telphone and the "Decision"-freature hinted in the screenshot also look nice.
 
Just a minor nitpick on your UI for the collapsible lines:

The expand/collapse triangle feels counter-intuitive, it points down when it should be pointing up and vice versa. If the triangle were on the bottom of the pane and moved when clicked, it would make sense in its current orientation.

You can see both types in action in Acrobat Reader: The contents of the bookmarks pane use the "indicator" style for expanding/collapsing individual bookmarks and sub-bookmarks (arrow points to the right = collapsed, arrow pointing down = expanded), while the whole pane itself has a triangle to collapse it to the side of the window (when the pane is open, the triangle is pointing to the left to slide the pane left out of view, and when it's closed the triangle is pointing to the right to slide the pane open). I'm not sure what the underlying principle is, but I would guess that the arrow/triangle should be pointing towards the screen content that it is going to affect.

View attachment 309838

I suggest changing the triangle to point to the right while the line is collapsed, and point down while it is expanded.

I disagree. The button represents what happens when you click on it. You click down the down arrow to make the expanded display fall open. You click the up arrow to make the expanded display roll up. An animation would make this clearer than a screenshot.

It's not showing state, it's showing the possible action. I think that's fairly standard in computer games, isn't it?
 
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.

Rifle wise, Germany keep producing whatever variant of Mauser locally produced. And it makes sense, why waste all that tooling just to have a universal rifle in a time every single rifle counts?