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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #3

Hi everyone, today it's time for another bag of tricks diary (the previous two can be found here and here). Let's jump straight in!

Attachés
Sending a military Attaché is a new diplomacy action coming in Waking the Tiger. It’s something you can only do while you yourself are at peace and the receiver is at war. It requires good relations and ties up a lot of your command power. In exchange you get army XP back as well as intel so you can see the receiver nation’s war. This is a pretty good way to get XP if you are a nation that isn’t able to send volunteers for example. The receiver gains also benefits from the attaché:
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Sending attachés will make any country the receiver is at war with dislike you, and they may issue a diplomatic protest that can seriously hurt your standing with them as well as cause a stability loss depending on the relevant ideology (so if you refuse a demand from a communist country, you will lose stability depending on the strength of communists in your country).

Extra ground crews
Another good place to spend command power when you don't need it for your armies is by prioritizing strategic air areas to receive extra ground crews. A prioritized area get +10% efficiency for planes operating there which can be great in certain areas to allow your planes to fly more effectively. Prioritizing ties up 20 Command Power per area while active.
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This ability as part of 1.5 Cornflakes and thus available to all.

Historical Army Insignias
As part of the effort to make the game feel a little more immersive and allow you to better recognize your armies, we have added Historical Army Insignias to Germany, France, Britain and the US (the Soviet Union and Japan didn’t really do Army Insignias). They can be assigned to any army like any other army insignia but won’t take the army color. All told there are 18 German icons, 11 British icons, 8 US and 3 French ones as well as 10 shared icons that are available to everyone else (some of them are locked to certain ideologies).
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If this is a popular feature, we might consider expanding it to include historical division insignias also in future DLCs.

Volunteer Air Wings
In Waking the Tiger will be possible to send volunteer air forces. Where before you could only lend-lease planes and hope the AI knows how to use them, you now get to control them yourself (you can still lend-lease planes as well, of course). This means you can have the Condor Legion or The Flying Tigers and help out your own volunteer forces.
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Rather than being sent to another theater like with regular volunteer forces you simply get access for a certain amount of planes to base in and operate in the receiver nation and you can just transfer them as normally. The amount of planes you can use depends both on the size of your airforce and the receiver airbase capacity.
Speaking of Flying Tigers, they actually get a special decision. China can invite the Flying Tigers which will unlock a decision for USA where they can decide to respond. This will both give fighters to China as well as increase their volunteer cap allowing them to send more wings over to assist.
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I’m home with stupid winter influenza so today we got @Da9L and @Archangel85 playing historical Japan in World War Wednesday, so tune in at 16:00 CET if you want to see how that looks or want in-depth info about focus tree design!

Next week we will be taking a look at a hopeful little empire on the rise for Waking the Tiger…
Best possible use of the new Historical Army Insignias:
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Unlikely, as the event occurred in 1933... so unless there's a mod with an extended timeline and a League of Nations mechanic it is doubtful.
Thanks for the information @Wraith11B
Much respect
 
Do we know how much command power one can expect to accrue over the course of a game yet? It's hard to do tell how much of an investment attaches and crews are without that.
 
Historical Army Insignias
This is the part which excites me most. While playing as a major nation, particularly one drowning in Manpower like the USSR, it becomes difficult to keep track of all your armies, especially late in the war when you have a bunch of theaters and tens of armies.
Are there plans to introduce any more colors other than the 11 effective colors in the game? (The 9 main colors available, plus black and grey). All other shades of colors are too similar to make out against the tint of the political map.
 
i still dont understand what ground crews is ... nevertheless @podcat thanks for the dd looking forward for the release date ...

They talked about command abilities for armies / fronts where you spend points to give extra bonuses to the troops for a time. This is the same thing for planes. You declare the air region that is the 'priority' for your military and every airbase that is sending planes to that region allocates extra / better ground crew to those flights thus allowing them +10% mission efficiency (e.g. faster refuelling, better allocation of repairs)

Everybody works harder whilst the boss is watching.
 
About Volonteer Air Wings - is possible to form in that way Dywyzjon 303?

I wouldn't believe so, as the UK can't pull Polish manpower. Mods might be able to make that happen, however.
 
Can we just name the elephant in the room and talk about Godzilla and the Japanese Focus tree?

I brought this up in last week’s DD and a bunch of people “disagreed”. :(
 
WOOHOO! TIGERS FOR THE WIN! CHENNAULT < STILWELL!

Attache will be fun. And I'm so happy you added historical insignia too!
 
So has no one yet mentioned the "hot code!" scream around 26.35-26:40 into the stream and what can be seen as modifier for the "Aichi" aircraft designer...?
Lets hope it means what I think i means...:)

hmm, no it didnt I think... just extra range modifier...
 
What would be cool for identity at the division level is some system to make a set number of divisions elite. They then get a buff (a hard one like 10% attack) or a Xp boost so they become and are likely to remain Veterans.

You can also give them a unique symbol without changing their template.

That way you can have a regular infantry division that is the US 1st infantry division.

I would just like a way to make a select number of divisions feel special.
 
I wouldn't believe so, as the UK can't pull Polish manpower. Mods might be able to make that happen, however.
That would be an interesting idea for a new feature though: being able to allow other nations in your faction to pull from your manpower or resource pools and vice-versa.