HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #3

[FStefanak]

You mean, a path that would entail the USA just sitting there doing nothing until 1948? Though they come up some times as ideas from a 'completionist' standpoint when we brainstorm focus tree designs, the sad reality is that they are, in fact, not very fun to play. Especially not considering HoI4 is a wargame.

@Bratyn As we are getting an ability to lock AIs into specific paths, it could be useful to have that choice. For instance, for playing Germany without USA in the war.

 

[SnakeInATopHat]

By far the most game changing of this list is the ability to push down through the west coast of Africa now.

 

[Tamarin_Monkey]

Is Ukraine going to be releasable yet, also other former soviet nations should also be releasable and berlin and east berlin should be different states. Otherwise good job with africa, I cant wait.

 

[CrabMonarchy]

Is Ukraine going to be releasable yet, also other former soviet nations should also be releasable and berlin and east berlin should be different states. Otherwise good job with africa, I cant wait.

Ukraine is already releasable.

 

[Brucesim2003]

They don't. GER gets a spirit reducing manpower weekly, and every 2 months or so a new division is formed from the defectors. It's not full divisions defecting en masse, but rather divisions being formed out of thousands of individual defectors.

How can fascist Germany fight this spirit? In the same vein, how can the British dominions/Raj fight British political interference if they are following a tree in opposition to the tree the British are following?

 

[MacedonianSukhoi]

The region of "Macedonia" was known as "Vardarska Banovina" at the time before and during WW2, only changing after the communists under Tito decided to create the "Macedonian" nation to cut off the influence of the Bulgarian state to the ethnic Bulgarians in "Macedonia", turn those Bulgarians to "Macedonians" as well as gain irredentist claims on north Greece - Macedonia, its rich natural resources and access to the Aegean sea trade routes.

Here's proof:View attachment 422203 View attachment 422204

First image represents the province names in 1929 and the second in 1939. In both cases the province was known as "Vardarska Banovina" Banovina meaning region in Serbian.

The land was always called Macedonia.... It even goes beyond the "Vardar" Banovina, the banovinas were made in order to be neutral in national administration. Their names did NOT represent the actual historical name or national identity of it's inhabitants. Are you gonna call the inhabitants of Belgrade as "Dunavians" and not Serbians?
Even the Pirin Region of Bulgaria is called by actual Bulgarians as Macedonia... It's part of geographical Macedonia that includes both Aegean, Pirin and Varadar regions which are ALL called Macedonia. And were called that way even before ww1 and in the 1800s.

 

[aiakira]

The ground support air mission is only to help out land combat. There is no ability to just bomb ground units outside of combat at the moment.

it should change
a good player in the mp are not defeated in Britain or Japan
they continuously produce infantry and place them on the coast and make the coast unconquered.
it must be like the air force in the old hoi and this is more realistic

 

[Perikles]

@Bratyn As we are getting an ability to lock AIs into specific paths, it could be useful to have that choice. For instance, for playing Germany without USA in the war.

Yes, and also more interesting game as Britain or Soviet Union, if the USA does not come to help. And it is also a more realistic alternate history than many others in the game, since isolationism was very strong there.

 

[Yugoslav_Warrior]

@Bratyn Ok this is epic and btw are we going to have voice lines for Yugoslavia when we select units in 1.6?

 

[MacedonianSukhoi]

Ok this is epic and btw are we going to have voice lines for Yugoslavia when we select units in 1.6?

Yeees.... Paradox said apparently that it would be "too many voices to record" when in reality the official language and all they had to include was Serbo-Croatian.

Hell.. If they wanted to be inclusive the only other voices they would have had to add would be Slovenian and Macedonian!

 

[omar44]

Western Sahara (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic)

T R I G G E R E D
I see Algeria on the map, what about Morocco and Tunisia?

 

[Brucesim2003]

it should change
a good player in the mp are not defeated in Britain or Japan
they continuously produce infantry and place them on the coast and make the coast unconquered.
it must be like the air force in the old hoi and this is more realistic

No it wouldn't be. The airforce (especially in WWII) couldn't unilaterally destroy a ground unit of divisional size. What would work would be if bombing infrastructure created an organisational cap (with no floor). Though that would boomerang when somebody took the province.

 

[GPounda]

@Bratyn - I'm very excited for the new DLC, but I have a small favour I've been asking for over the past two years. . .

I realize it isn't naval related, but would you PLEASE break northern France into two air zones!?!?!?!?!?

 

[fighting_falcon93]

These allow you to expend political power to give an ideology drift, and, when ideology support becomes high enough, forcibly swap them to your ideology.

There're so many things to spend political power on, but we earn it so slowly. It's fun to have to make decisions, but when you have like 5-10 different choices, and you get only 1 political power per day on average (if even that), it unfortunately becomes frustrating rather than fun. May I suggest that you remove the political power cost from national focuses and also that you make design companies much cheaper, but that we instead pick one in the research window every time we research a new vehicle? The slots that becomes free in the cabinet could instead be used for allowing us to have more than 1 theorist of different types at the same time, for example, it makes no sense that a country can't have an army theorist and air theorist active at the same time.

Various new additions have been made to the tree.

You're making the national focus trees quite large, but most things still take 70 days to complete, and multiple national focuses can't be ran in the same time. I noticed this when playing a historical Germany playthrough recently. The thing is, as Germany you can only pick 18 focuses and then the 19th focus should be Danzig or War if you want to start the war somewhat historically. Now if we compare the national focuses with what was actually done between 1936-1939, it becomes appearent that it's impossible to pick all relevant focuses in 3.5 years. Less of an issue in unhistorical playthroughts, but quite frustrating when playing historical. Maybe a better solution would be if you turned the entire national focus tree into decisions instead? Then we could do multiple decisions at once, the path of a decision wouldn't be "spoiled" by checking what comes afterwards, and it would allow you to make some decisions pop up on their historical date. The focus tree can instead contain a lot more types of continous focuses, you could even make it so continous focuses can only be changed every X months.

Finally, some naval zones have been split up to make better use of the new naval terrain, as well as making for more interesting strategic choices with your navy.

Could we also please get smaller air regions? Actually, the air regions themselves are very illogical, they should get reworked completely. For example, if France wants to get air support/superiority over their Maginot Line, why should they get a penalty because their planes can't reach Brest? Similiarly, a carrier supporting a naval invasion with some fighters or CAS will also get massive penalties, not because the planes can't reach the battlefield, but because they can't reach an additional 500 km inland. To make it even more illogical, planes that cover the entire air region, but that has to fly 1000 km to their targets, still operates more efficient than an air wing that operates from an air field next to the battlefield, but at the edge of the air region. That makes no sense at all. Anyhow, making the air regions smaller would atleast make this less annoying while we wait for a rework (or not).

 

[s_team337]

What's the soft tag cap? Are you talking about division spam performance issues?

You can have any amount of tags you want (limited by memory of course) but you can only have 256 once colors begin to just "run out". They turn grey, and are unaffected by colors.txt.

 

[Hellenic Might]

The land was always called Macedonia.... It even goes beyond the "Vardar" Banovina, the banovinas were made in order to be neutral in national administration. Their names did NOT represent the actual historical name or national identity of it's inhabitants. Are you gonna call the inhabitants of Belgrade as "Dunavians" and not Serbians?
Even the Pirin Region of Bulgaria is called by actual Bulgarians as Macedonia... It's part of geographical Macedonia that includes both Aegean, Pirin and Varadar regions which are ALL called Macedonia. And were called that way even before ww1 and in the 1800s.

My point is that the region was called "Vardarska Banovina" from 1929 and it was populated by a majority of ethnic Bulgarians and with smaller Albanian and Greek minorities. They should change its name from Macedonia to that, regardless of what previous empires that owned the province called it.

During ancient times the region was called Paionia and was populated by its namesake, the Thraco-Illyrian people called Paionians. Still this is a WW2 game and during that time the province was known as Vardarska Banovina.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

These look like some useful incremental improvements: no individual change is spectacular, but it all adds up to a more polished game (though I hope that the Western Sahara change is thoroughly playtested).

@Bratyn, I have a neat way to avoid the 'ASW Warfare' argument completely. Why not call that focus 'The Tobermory Training School' or 'The ASW Training School' after the Royal Navy's famous ASW training school? There is a good summary of its importance in the Wikipedia article on Vice Admiral Sir Gilbert Stephenson, the school's founder. I should credit @Axe99's excellent mod The War at Sea, which has an event based on his career giving somewhat similar bonuses to your NF.

 

[Daelyn75]

it should change
a good player in the mp are not defeated in Britain or Japan
they continuously produce infantry and place them on the coast and make the coast unconquered.
it must be like the air force in the old hoi and this is more realistic

How is it more realistic to bomb ground units with the ground support air mission? Edit: This is only in support of your ground units, not just softening up enemy units. You need another type of attack mission.

I forget what such an air mission is called, and it should be in the game, agreed. Interdiction is hitting supply, and infrastructure in that area, so that's not what it's called.

Anyhow, you should be able to target a single province and hit it with assigned aircraft. Also, I think that bombardment by artillery should also be in the game for your land units.

In previous HOI games, not sure about 3 because my time was least spent with it, but you couldn't order air units to support ground units, and only could attack enemy ground units within an area you designate. So now we have the opposite in this game. We should have both.

Edit: If anyone disagree's with this, please let me know why. Looking at you respectfully disagreeing people.

 

[MacedonianSukhoi]

View attachment 422280


My point is that the region was called "Vardarska Banovina" from 1929 and it was populated by a majority of ethnic Bulgarians and with smaller Albanian and Greek minorities. They should change its name from Macedonia to that, regardless of what previous empires that owned the province called it.

During ancient times the region was called Paionia and was populated by its namesake, the Thraco-Illyrian people called Paionians. Still this is a WW2 game and during that time the province was known as Vardarska Banovina.

They shouldn't change Macedonia to neither Paionia or Vardarska Banovina because:
1. If you change to Paionia you might as well rename France into Gaul at that point.
2. You cannot rename or change it accurately to "Vardarska Banovina" because at that point Paradox would have to change the states for the rest of Yugoslavia into the map you showed earlier and that wouldn't be convenient for the historical ww2 occupation ones the country experienced.

What the state that includes the city of Skopje SHOULD be renamed into is "Vardar Macedonia" that is a name that is universally accepted and is an accurate descriptor of the modern geographic region of Macedonia. Along with the Greek Aegean region of Macedonia, i would also add a state for Bulgaria that includes it's share of Macedonia it owns.

As for anything else I won't be going into that topic despite the fact that i have serious opposition to your claims given that I live in "Vardarska" as our very discussion about this is going extremely off topic and quite into politics and can lead us to being banned.

 

[fighting_falcon93]

Ok this is epic and btw are we going to have voice lines for Yugoslavia when we select units in 1.6?

Talking about voice lines... @Bratyn why doesn't Communist China have any voice lines while Nationalist China do? Surely they also speak Chinese?