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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.
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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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Haven't you consider creating a separate queue for repairs? And give player an option to allocate any amount of factories to that queue.
I think that would be more manageable especially at the endgame.
 
As things are supposed to get easier in (Hoi4) life, could we please

- get a ledger to gain control over specific equipment being used in air wings (just like we have it for divisions)?

- get drag and drop for the lineup of division templates?

- get maybe a ledger to sort divisions into more than one lineup?

- get at least three more generals for Italy to mark it as a major power in the game?
 
This is a nice dev diary, but I would have preferred the following:
  • An option to "renew MEFO bills continuously without bothering me".
  • An exercise option that only exercises the untrained portion of an army.
  • An option to stop the "BWOOOMP" sound effect whenever an enemy is launching a naval invasion. This sound effect is played so frequently that it's almost entirely meaningless.
Any progress is good progress though.
 
Great changes... I actually liked checking to see if my planes had become regulars even though it was a little micro. Once they were trained in peace time I would then deploy the next 100 fighters of the same type, reducing the chance of too many accident replacements. However If I continue this way I will still have to check... unless there was a notification to tell me that X squadron was now fully trained.

I was forever dragging constructions above repairs and yes I am not afraid to admit I missed the deadline for those damn mefo bills many times. To be honest though it should be Hjalmar Schacht’s responsibility to ensure they are extended :).
 
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 :(

Really... that is quite astonishing. Last time I checked HOI4 had more players than Stellaris.

I just checked and HOI4 has 17,329 in the last 30 minutes, Stelleris 8,108. I guess they must be funding Stellaris because they feel they could get more.

From a business perspective why fund for better HOI4 AI when people are playing it more than any other title. How far can you go with AI? Would you guys ever be satisfied with the AI? I know for me, there are a number of basic aspects regarding the AI that stand out for improvement.
 
Really... that is quite astonishing. Last time I checked HOI4 had more players than Stellaris.

I just checked and HOI4 has 17,329 in the last 30 minutes, Stelleris 8,108. I guess they must be funding Stellaris because they feel they could get more.

From a business perspective why fund for better HOI4 AI when people are playing it more than any other title. How far can you go with AI? Would you guys ever be satisfied with the AI? I know for me, there are a number of basic aspects regarding the AI that stand out for improvement.

The basic problem is that there is no competition for HOI4 as a WW2 gsg and there is quite a demand for this. Don't get me wrong, HOI 4 is a good game, but it could become a great game with some more work on AI and core features. Maybe Firaxis could try its own ww2 gsg to spice things up.
 
Really looking forward to this, thank you Hoi4 Team! :)

Sorry to bother you again Podcat, but I'd like to bring up 2 unanswered questions from previous threads:

1.) Did you also manage to fix this fleet bug? https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...orce-reinforcement-bug.1201650/#post-25751709
2.) Some time ago you mentioned on twitter, that you were perhaps thinking about adding some more "filters" or "hosting options". (https://twitter.com/podcat_paradox/status/1135846948882305024)
Any news on that? I'd love to sometimes just spectate a mp game but 90% of the time I'm getting kicked because they don't want observers or think that it will impact the performance too much :(
 
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.
Statements like this are hard to take seriously when there are AAA games released that involve dozens if not hundreds of programmers. Software development is nuanced enough that blindly throwing money at a problem can sometimes do more harm than good, but suggesting HoI4's meager dev team of just 4(!) programmers is some sort of natural limit is pretty silly.
 
Speaking of civil wars, I dont think it's right that once it's over you automatically lose half your fleet! Unless the other side scuttles the fleet you should get it back !!!
You will. That has previously been mentionned as a change for the next patch.
 
Speaking of civil wars, I dont think it's right that once it's over you automatically lose half your fleet! Unless the other side scuttles the fleet you should get it back !!!


Also there should be some random factors in civil wars. You are not supposed to know which states you are going to get. Stockpiles should be split between you and the revolter and it shouldn't always be 50-50. A random number between 20 and 80% weighted by the ideological composition before the civil war would be great.
 
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.

actually it seems that AI doesn't build Tank TEMPLATES - but it will build tank divisions, if given a template via tag switching.

That said AI's research is borked too, so its hard to make AI stay up to date with things such as a Heavy tank divisions or the like.
 
When do we see the new 3d / 2d art? (don't forget the Ju52 and No. 1 MkIII Enfield)
I got an art diary planned for later :)

  • An option to "renew MEFO bills continuously without bothering me".
  • An exercise option that only exercises the untrained portion of an army.
- I think you misunderstood, thats exactly what this MEFO bills thing does
- again, this is actually what the new exercise thing does. it only trains stuff that needs it up to the level, it doesnt train the other division unless you use the normal setting
 
- I think you misunderstood, thats exactly what this MEFO bills thing does
- again, this is actually what the new exercise thing does. it only trains stuff that needs it up to the level, it doesnt train the other division unless you use the normal setting
Oh, well that's great then :D

It didn't really come across these ways when I first read the dev diary. The MEFO bills part sounded like you'd still have to click to renew every so often, and the exercise option sounded like it would only stop if every division in that particular army reached Regular. That training tooltip in the screenshot might benefit from some rewording to make it clearer.
 
These all sound good, but the only "polishing" I want from this next update/DLC is historically accurate states. Before most were historically accurate but Paradox decided to change them in favour of Cold War borders which I do not understand at all. You cannot even create accurate borders in Yugoslavia because the state of Baranja doesn't exist in HOI4 so Serbia's border with Croatia is wrong. I like that we can have Cold War borders from the Yalta Conference as well as WW2 borders like how it was done in Romania (Besserabia (continued in a minute)) and Poland (Białystok). Another thing that bothers me is the fact that the Stanisławów and Lwów states in Poland are not longer accurate, and the Besserabian state (one the border of Bucovina) is not accurate for Ukraine. Can you add new states so we can have both WW2 borders and more modern borders for Yugoslavia, Poland, and Ukraine?

They're all small inconveniences to my game but I think that for a game set in WW2 you should be able to have historically accurate borders for the time.

Also why aren't same coloured puppets and option in Vanilla? I can't even use the mod because it's not Iron-man compatible.