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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks

Hi everyone! The team is now back from the holidays and polishing on La Resistance. Today its time for a classic “bag of tricks” diary covering various small changes. The theme is quality of life here.


MEFO Bills
Ever forgotten to renew MEFO bills as Germany? Yeah me neither! But just in case someone does we got you covered. Now you can opt out or back in if you changed your mind, at any point during each cycle.
EOQK_waWoAYL_ue.png


Construction queue
We have changed the default behaviour for the construction queue. Now when adding say a new factory construction it will be placed just below the last non-repair entry (rather than at the bottom). This removes a lot of extra work with having to reprioritize things and still allows you to put specific repair jobs at the top of the queue with no issues. There are also new shortcuts in those rare situations where you might prefer sending to end of queue directly.
upload_2020-1-15_12-49-3.png



Exercise auto stop
Exercise now has 2 setting states so that you can either keep the old behaviour (keep training past max level and get XP) or hold shift when activating it and it will automatically stop when hitting the max level. This also works for ships and planes and its a nice relief not to have to babysit exercises when you aren’t after XP.
upload_2020-1-15_12-50-16.png



Decision Notifiers
Since we added decisions in Waking the Tiger the amount has been growing and we have been using them in more and more cool and creative ways. This has meant that the number of choices have gone up and some stuff has needed to change to make sure notifications are actually helpful for you. Firstly we have made notification numbers more visible and clear for both decisions and the espionage agency. Secondly its now possible to right click the decisions button to reset the available count. This means that after that only new ones will show up in the count. They can of course be switched on/off individually like before but if you are like me this saves a ton of clicking, and now it will impact what the notifiers show unlike before where it was only tied to separate alerts.
upload_2020-1-15_12-46-47.png



Allied Naval Invasion Alerts
Invasion alerts can be critically important for you to notice if an enemy is about to make a successful landing somewhere and you need to react. Previously it was difficult to help out nearby allies as alert were only for your own controlled shores. Now we have 2 new alerts mirroring the old ones for allies so you can bail out Mussolini when he's in a pinch ;)
upload_2020-1-15_13-3-10.png

This is me as Evil France with Netherlands and Belgium in my faction getting alerted about an invasion on my allies.


Civil War Surprises
During a normal war you have time to set up your plans and get units into place fast, but in civil wars this is not so. With the spanish civil war in focus this expansion we wanted to make sure we made this less stressful for players, so now if any civil war happens the AI will wait a short while to activate its plans giving a human player time to organize or pause if they want. Its not a long break but its enough where it feels a lot more comfortable to play against now.


Zoomable & Searchable Focus Trees
We already went into this in detail back here. But since then we have improved the UI to make filtering better and set it up for old trees as well to make finding things easier. This below is for Mexico and lets you highlight stuff related to rebellions and church authority as special filters on top of the regular filters:
upload_2020-1-15_13-20-1.png


Thats its for this week! Today we are also starting up streaming again. Me and Daniel (mah leaks) are going to show off as much as we can of the Espionage system at 16:00CET. See you then!
 
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Very disappointing how even though HOI4 is (to my knowledge) the most popular PDS game currently, the Paradox higher-ups seem to be reluctant to dedicate more resources to its development.

Edit: Very nice features, especially the Allied Invasion alerts. Can't wait for the achievement DD and specifically the "Turn the entire world into an anarchist commune" achievement.
 
Can there be a historical focus filter? At least to me, it feels like one of the most obvious options for a filter. Having to alt-tab and read a text document every 70/35 days gets annoying.
 
DLCs I am not sure you want to half DLCs at half the size so we can make them faster

Maybe a free patch or two between big DLCs would be good. A wise man once said touching bases with the community is pretty important! :)
 
The focus tree search function will be so handy! No more looking for that one focus that gets rid of that pesky negative modifier!
 
Solid package but please, for the love of God also fix Japan´s behavior in China (not only them, division shuffling happens in Europe too, specially with Italy sending transports in the North Sea).
 
As far as I know the PDS studios are quite Independent. This means they generate their income and can use it to expand their team. Paradox Interactive takes it's cut for Marketing, the shared QA and so on.
This means not PI is holding them back hiring new people, I'll just assume they are always looking, but not easily finding new people (programmers who wanna go to Stockholm, and want to work on HoI IV specifically and not another Paradox game) to hire.
 
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Now I we need for the construction queue is to sort by factory type.

Looks good. Happy to see that I don't have to manually keep pressing the MEFO bills button.
 
Looking forward to all this, will make the game so much more user-friendly.
 
When do we see the new 3d / 2d art? (don't forget the Ju52 and No. 1 MkIII Enfield)
 
Hi everyone! The team is now back from the holidays and polishing on La Resistance. Today its time for a classic “bag of tricks” diary covering various small changes. The theme is quality of life here.


MEFO Bills
Ever forgotten to renew MEFO bills as Germany? Yeah me neither! But just in case someone does we got you covered. Now you can opt out or back in if you changed your mind, at any point during each cycle.
View attachment 539123

Construction queue
We have changed the default behaviour for the construction queue. Now when adding say a new factory construction it will be placed just below the last non-repair entry (rather than at the bottom). This removes a lot of extra work with having to reprioritize things and still allows you to put specific repair jobs at the top of the queue with no issues. There are also new shortcuts in those rare situations where you might prefer sending to end of queue directly.
View attachment 539126


Exercise auto stop
Exercise now has 2 setting states so that you can either keep the old behaviour (keep training past max level and get XP) or hold shift when activating it and it will automatically stop when hitting the max level. This also works for ships and planes and its a nice relief not to have to babysit exercises when you aren’t after XP.
View attachment 539127


Decision Notifiers
Since we added decisions in Waking the Tiger the amount has been growing and we have been using them in more and more cool and creative ways. This has meant that the number of choices have gone up and some stuff has needed to change to make sure notifications are actually helpful for you. Firstly we have made notification numbers more visible and clear for both decisions and the espionage agency. Secondly its now possible to right click the decisions button to reset the available count. This means that after that only new ones will show up in the count. They can of course be switched on/off individually like before but if you are like me this saves a ton of clicking, and now it will impact what the notifiers show unlike before where it was only tied to separate alerts.
View attachment 539125


Allied Naval Invasion Alerts
Invasion alerts can be critically important for you to notice if an enemy is about to make a successful landing somewhere and you need to react. Previously it was difficult to help out nearby allies as alert were only for your own controlled shores. Now we have 2 new alerts mirroring the old ones for allies so you can bail out Mussolini when he's in a pinch ;)
View attachment 539128
This is me as Evil France with Netherlands and Belgium in my faction getting alerted about an invasion on my allies.


Civil War Surprises
During a normal war you have time to set up your plans and get units into place fast, but in civil wars this is not so. With the spanish civil war in focus this expansion we wanted to make sure we made this less stressful for players, so now if any civil war happens the AI will wait a short while to activate its plans giving a human player time to organize or pause if they want. Its not a long break but its enough where it feels a lot more comfortable to play against now.


Zoomable & Searchable Focus Trees
We already went into this in detail back here. But since then we have improved the UI to make filtering better and set it up for old trees as well to make finding things easier. This below is for Mexico and lets you highlight stuff related to rebellions and church authority as special filters on top of the regular filters:
View attachment 539129

Thats its for this week! Today we are also starting up streaming again. Me and Daniel (mah leaks) are going to show off as much as we can of the Espionage system at 16:00CET. See you then!

Will you add the ability for AI to build tanks? Since 1.0 AI does not build tanks, and I think this is a much more important feature to add.
 
The Stellaris team is also slightly larger than the HOI team. I understand you guys want more frequent releases but with only 4 programmers on the HOI team, I can't realistically develop an entire DLC and frequent patches simultaneously :(

It's crazy that one of PDX's biggest games has 4 programmers only.

I really wish they'd expand your team. Clearly this game has a lot of potential and is doing extremely well on Steam. I don't know why they don't see that. I can't imagine how difficult it is for 4 people to deal with patches, debugging OOS issues, developing new content all at the same time.
 
Nice QOL changes!

May I have one suggestion as well? (not sure how many of us feel the same)
My pain list
1) allied invasion (tick)
2) allied division in my front line when I'm struggling for supplies (restriction button?)
3) custom key bindings (WASD not arrow keys)

Much love
War
 
For the factory screen, would it be possible to let us manage how many factories we want assigned to each construction? Like, instead of having all of my 8 civ factories building one thing I would like to cap 6 to build the next civilian factory 1 for a airport and 1 for forts. That way I don't have to micro it all.
 
Something like these "immersion packs" from The Game That Must Not Be Named would be cool. I mean, couple of thematic focus trees for, let's say, Greece and Turkey spiced with minor changes like reworked land lease is not so hard to develop (while remain very funny). Call it The Old Empires and sell for half the pri... Oh, i just invented TfV
Anyway, such popular game should get more attention from PDX bosses. Just 4 programmers...
 
Maybe it's time to hire some fresh blood? :)
But we talk about programming, throw more manpower on a problem and you get it later with more bugs and that for a longer period of time. When you are in luck after that time things go faster. It's no simple manufacturing, where more hands get more done.
 
Its a side effect of the DLC model that it makes it difficult to release frequent updates aside from DLCs and while I know you guys would want to have more DLCs I am not sure you want to half DLCs at half the size so we can make them faster?
How does the DLC model prevent you from releasing more patches to fix some very serious bugs that are allowed to linger for way too long time?

@podcat I mean will things like this finally be fixed this time?

If you just released more small fix patches between the DLC's I think most of us would be much happier ;)