HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #2

[xtfoster]

I don't think anybody from Paradox has clarified on that yet. There's been speculation it's intelligence & spies, but time will tell, I suspect.

Correct that no one from Paradox has clarified what it is yet.
Wrong in that they have clarified on what it is NOT (Intelligence & Spies).

 

[xtfoster]

@podcat
When can we expect ai updates?

They usually talk about AI updates in the last DD or so before release (if at all).

 

[xtfoster]

While you are still working on the production interface I would ask you if it would be possible to easily see the estimated time till fully stocked (estimated time until every soldier has a functioning gun and ammo for his duties) without having to go to the logistics tab and hovering over the red stockpile count there. It would make balancing out the production a lot easier.
Having it tell me you need 15k rifles, 5k Artillery and 2k medium tanks for reinforcements is not easy to read if it can't tell me how long each would take to reach 0 if you get what I mean.
I thought I remembered being able to see it by hovering over something in the production interface but I either forgot how or was never able to.

Loving the take other ppl's stuff bit and how it makes maintenance companies more attractive, well done.

Hmm, so now the 'average' HOI player can't do simple math in their head? From the screenshot you know:
A) How many you are producing per day/week/year
B) How many you need
so why can't you just solve B/A = C in your head for the answer you are looking for?
C) How many days/weeks/years until needs are met.

 

[xtfoster]

These are some good looking features. About the AI why cant the devs just integrate an AI mod into the base game?

Simple. NONE of the 'AI Mods' out there do anything that actually affects the (real) AI...so it wouldn't make sense to appropriate them and then claim they improved the AI.

 

[sprites]

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.
View attachment 309810

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).

well you can use this to get rid of old equipment , but i didn't know you get XP out of it. i suppose it is army experience?

 

[Duke_Dave]

Simple. NONE of the 'AI Mods' out there do anything that actually affects the (real) AI...so it wouldn't make sense to appropriate them and then claim they improved the AI.

yeah but people don't understand that.

 

[LiberiusX]

These are some good looking features. About the AI why cant the devs just integrate an AI mod into the base game? I'm sure most of the modders wouldn't demand outrageous compensation, just give them the next dlc free or something. Since one mod that would be great is the Better Mechanics: Front Line AI. It makes fighting nations much better/challenging since the frontline AI is improved to properly reinforce the border and wont keep troops in useless areas and helps mitigate attrition. But if theres a bigger reason the devs cant just use players mods/ideas then forgive my ignorance.

I really like that mod. however, podcat and team have explained numerous times why they don't normally appropriate mods for the game. It's a lot more work than just copy/pasting.

 

[Grogzor]

I'm an experienced war gamer playing Gary Grigsby titles and the like and in my first game I got owned by Italy... I was focussed on securing Suez and those pesky Italians invaded and took London so I switched off my PC in rage

 

[Sleight of Hand]

I'm an experienced war gamer playing Gary Grigsby titles and the like and in my first game I got owned by Italy... I was focussed on securing Suez and those pesky Italians invaded and took London so I switched off my PC in rage

I can't imagine anyone could possibly transition from those games to HoI IV. That's like going from Rembrandt to Jackson Pollock.

 

[Nodfor]

Why would anyone delete equipment while the storage cost in game is currently zero? It makes absolutely no sense, that's a useless feature. Only aspect of the game where that would help is in faster aircraft deployment because of the UI, but the new lend lease change fixes that.

Also since you can capture equipment in battles (and probably even more in encirclements), it would be nice to fix the change encircled division template exploit, since right now changing the template of an encircled division to a unit with less manpower and equipment, will save manpower and equipment.

In addition to the above - the game should handle differently the deletion of encircled units - right now the player who deletes those units just loses the equipment, it should be made so that part of the equipment goes to countries on the surrounding squares.

In my opinion you should add a reliability penalty to captured equipment, in order to account for the difficulty of finding spare parts and consumables to keep those units operational for prolonged combat use. More complex pieces of equipment (like tanks) should have a bigger penalty (maybe 20%) while infantry equipment could have a 10% penalty.

 

[Rauzy2222]

I think it would be a good idea to change the production of airplanes, and place them for production by equal quantity as ships.

 

[derflensburger]

I think it would be a good idea to change the production of airplanes, and place them for production by equal quantity as ships.

If you mean that you should only be allowed to assign 15 MIL to a certain production of planes this doesn't make the same sense as with ships. Ships are a lot bigger and (at that times) were for the biggest part produced in one place . Whereas planes are small and can be produced much faster in various factories getting a huge amount of planes.

E.g. a battleship cannot be hurried any further after you have maxed out what you can produce in one spot. On the other hand you can build a certain number of planes every month in factory x and anouther amount at factory y, which might be hundreds of miles away, and so on.

 

[Mowbis]

Soon ?

 

[Dinoking93]

I am glad to see these tweaks and additions

 

[Deleted user]

It would be nice if destroying equipment yielded some benefit.

For example: Destroying advanced Infantry Equipment will yield bonuses on your own gun research?

One shouldn't forget the amount of back and forth in technology stealing there was historically. Germans capture some allied Bazookas, reverse engineer them into 'Panzershreks' with improvements, and then the Allies reverse engineer panzershreks to produce 'Super Bazookas'.

While captured equipment alone shouldn't auto-research anything, it should at least help close the gap when your opponent is a bit ahead of you in certain areas.

Would be nice to see some equivalent to Akutan Zero as a random event, available to any country. 'Plane crashes, we study it'. Nothing more complex than that.

 

[Dan1109]

Simple. NONE of the 'AI Mods' out there do anything that actually affects the (real) AI...so it wouldn't make sense to appropriate them and then claim they improved the AI.

yeah but people don't understand that.

Completely disagree. The "AI" is both internal and external in PDS games. External AI can be modded, and vastly improved, but still has its limits based on what is moddable, and by what means. Examples of where done include production, research, trade, diplomacy, area prioritization (broken it appears in 1.4.x), templates, and of course changing of defines values. The latter may seem trivial, but modding changes in defines have proven to make some huge improvements to the game. Why doesn't PDS simply just use the defines changes? Well, many of them do work in conjunction with the rest of the mod, and that large amount of work cannot be simply "copy and pasted" - PDS would need to spend time analyzing everything in a particular mod before "liberating" it for their own use. In the end, they may simply disagree with what the modder did. I do believe in the current PDS m.o. in changing/improving things which modders simply cannot. Nevertheless, I am absolutely certain that some of the PDS defines changes/improvements and other changes/improvements of the "external AI" (and even internal AI, when mod's External AI seems to do something the original internal AI should do) were first encouraged by seeing them used in what the community has deemed "this mod improves the AI".

People that don't mod simply don't understand the difference between what is considered internal and external AI. But in general, they shouldn't have to. As long as there are mods that focus expressly on AI, and not events, units, immersion, flavor, etc, that mod will always be better than Vanilla's AI. PDS doesn't have the resources to think of and implement everything.

 

[Balesir]

The latter may seem trivial, but modding changes in defines have proven to make some huge improvements to the game. Why doesn't PDS simply just use the defines changes?

I think there is another dimension here that is being missed. Modded 'improvements' to the AI can certainly give a boost to the game value as it stands, but they generally involve compromises - things the AI has as blindspots or pre-programmed behaviours that will only suit a specific set of circumstances. Although the circumstances chosen can be ones that are relatively likely, I think Paradox is setting their bar somewhat higher; they want to develop the AI into something that has as wide a scope of "will deal with this" as possible. That all means that, for now, AI mods are probably the way to go if you are picky. Hopefully, though, the core game AI will be good enough, eventually, that the mods to the AI would just be straitjackets to an AI that doesn't need them.

Short version: use AI mods for now and have patience!

 

[Dan1109]

but they generally involve compromises - things the AI has as blindspots or pre-programmed behaviours that will only suit a specific set of circumstances.

The only compromise is game performance IMO. If the mod is done well, it will include all sorts of circumstances not thought of by PDS, in its internal and Vanilla external AI. Here is a very simple example. External Production AI does not compensate for the fact that screens get slaughtered, and once you run out of screens, its game over for your navy. I wanted to address this, and looked around for hours (including finding a 9 year old HOI2 modding request which was never implemented, to add basic arithmetic capability to modding ), and could find nothing. So, I was looking in various mods to see if and how they addressed it. Expert AI addressed it. However, the code that it needs to do this is retardly inefficient. However, hats off to @Chondrite, its the ONLY way to mod it. Hopefully PDS will notice this code in that mod one day, and spend an incredibly short amount of resources to address it by creating a several new defines values which calculate various ship ratios, and then they can add the trivial amount of external AI code/script to use it. Any other circumstance to NOT change the production which EAI did not think of (and there are several, besides just the ship ratios), can easily be added as well.

In summary, PDS wouldn't implement some external AI solutions because its incredibly inefficient, and they would rather not compromise game performance for every single player. But from a development point of view, its more costly to implement internal AI solutions as those have to be written from scratch - the objective of the external AI solution needs to be translated into their internal AI sourcecode (which I think is still LUA, but not accesible by users).

 

[Alech]

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.

In the case of Germany, a lot of factories in occupied countries kept producing whatever small arms or vehicle they had been producing before occupation. And that equipment was then used to arm secondary divisions and the SS. That's why you get so many French, Czech, Polish, Norwegian small arms with German proof markings. And in the case of armour the Czech factories kept building stuff and even developing (e.g. Hetzer) the models up until the end of the war.

As for quantity of captured materials; I've red over half of all the trucks used by the Germans to supply the invasion force in the USSR was made up of French and English trucks. Apparently over 50.000 British trucks alone. Also, here is a good listing for French equipment used:

<redacted> Google it...

So, for Germany at least, the use of captured equipment and the continued production of "local" stuff, was significant.

 

[Chondrite]

Well put, @Dan1109.

Many seem to imagine there is some mastermind AI making plans in the background. There are many AI's working together: research AI, template design AI, construction AI, battleplan AI, land warfare AI etc. As Dan1109 wrote, some of these are external and scriptable by modders, some are internal/hardcoded and cannot be modded directly. Luckily through the moddability of HOI4, even some hardcoded areas for the AI can be worked around, and while this can result in a much more competetive AI, it will never be integrated into the vanilla. *If* Paradox wants to do that, they will implement it properly through code which is much more efficient.

When it comes to dynamic vs railroaded AI, vanilla AI currently isn't very meaningfully dynamic either. For example, it goes through national focuses based on scripted AI factors but since these factors often lack modifiers that account for various circumstances, it leads to things like country X declaring wars in absurd situations. It pretty much always builds the same stuff (inefficiently at that) instead of adapting to its own situation or the enemies it faces. It launches endless naval invasions instead of considering the bigger picture and so on. Areas like these can be modded to make the AI adapt better to a certain extent.

Paradox will obviously keep improving the AI and working towards a more meaningfully dynamic AI but it will take many patches with incremental improvements to the AI (it won't be "fixed" by the next DLC). People should also understand that there are many different ways to make the AI. I don't know what PDS's plans are but they will probably try to strike a balance between accessibility (keeping it easy enough for the non-hardcore players), historicity and competetiveness. Mods can focus on historicity or competetiveness alone and take it much further.