HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks

[Michael Gladius]

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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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!

Thank you for all these QOL changes! It's little changes like these that really show how much you care about us players.

Edit: could you add screen ships to what can be lend-leased?

 

[FLUX2226]

That's more QoL changes than I expected, nice! But I agree that perhaps a few hotfixes in between would be preferable than having the next DLC one or two months earlier.

Something I'd personally like to see are some changes to the Japanese-Chinese war in order to improve the gameplay of all Chinese countries, especially for Manchukuo on Assertiveness:
- Remove the "Nationalist China <20% surrender progress" condition from the main white peace event. This condition makes it very difficult to get Japan truly out of China if you're playing as Manchukuo (or any other assertive enough warlord) and are fighting Japan and China at the same time. You have to let China reconquer almost everything to enable Japan to sign a white peace with the United Front as well, and not just with you.
- Let Japan's "backup war goal" against Shanxi from the Marco Polo event expire after two months like a regular one, or remove it once Japan is at war with them. Nothing is more frustrating than finally having pushed Japan out of China just for them to immediately declare war again because they still have that war goal from 5 years ago. This would also be helpful for Communist China or other warlords who aren't Shanxi, since they can't force the Japanese AI to use both war goals by not calling Shanxi into the war.

A bonus would be making Manchukuo's "Obedience" branch more viable by adding the removal of "Low Legitimacy" to Manchukuo's focus "The Two Emperors". Currently it is not possible to remove that national spirit if you go with "Obedience", even if you gain your full independence (which is not realistically possible anyway) - and sticking with a permanent -40% stability/war support is less than fun. Also having the Japanese AI respect your cores on China and give you the Chinese territory they would usually puppet in the peace conference.

 

[Daelyn75]

I got an art diary planned for later


- 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

With the selected training on, will your aircraft stop and retrain back to veteran if it dips below veteran again? Or do you need to keep monitoring your aircraft, especially carrier aircraft because they sometimes can take a lot of losses.

 

[amocpower]

Pls add for "Lend-lease" menu a button to "add Max avaible equipment"...its so much micro managment to give manuell number to send to someone....

 

[Ketchup & friends]

Dear HoI4 Devs, The QOL changes in the diary are good, but this:

only 4 programmers on the HOI team

is quite unexpected and depressing, although it explains why your updates and DLC take so much time.
Please make some smaller patches coupled with minor DLC (graphics or soundtrack)! They could bring you more cash without requireng too many resources.
If your bosses won't hire more programmers, perhaps you could make more options easier for modders (for example, simplify the creation of new scenarios, make adding more historical leaders and portraits ironman copmatible) and so they could fill the gaps?

 

[Rashie]

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.

4 people is pretty far from the point where you start running into a serious "too many cooks in the kitchen" issue.

There's definitely room for more in a team that small.

 

[Kazakk]

Oh no, all these changes, these little things were what made hoi4 a difficult game which took lots of skill!

 

[Áurum]

I got an art diary planned for later


- 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

But when I train my armies, I usually don't want to train them until the max level, just until the Trained level, the level deployed units have when not deployed early. That option would be fine.

 

[Abadon777]

Great dev diary. Can espionage also give you early invasion warnings.

 

[Iskulya]

Honestly the biggest disappointment of today is that there are no new Spanish sprites in the latest dev build, as per the stream. Here's hoping Nationalists, Republicans, and Portugal do get their own sprites by release.

 

[excaleranth]

I really appreciate the change to the construction queue. Could the team possibly put my suggestion here in the backlog for a future update?
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ing-repair-prioritization-automation.1308092/
Micromanaging construction repair is pretty intense right now.

 

[kimidf]

podcat,

Although I always love having more technology to investigate and I love the fact that we have armored cars for this DLC and the different types of recognition that I thought it was necessary to insert.

I would also love to know if we will also have the infantry tank variant as the first dev hinted at having a specific designer for that type tank that came in the first dev of this new dlc with the rework of France

 

[balmung60]

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.

Also, tell it to actually hire advisors, design companies, and a general staff. That it doesn't is part of why it's so easy to kick over AI divisions

 

[XselenS]

Awesome QOL changes, will be buying the DLC just for this now to support QOL development. Please add in a few more:

1. The ability to drag/drop and arrange everything especially division templates
2. The ability to train individual units within an army so that we don't have to set up a second army to train. Also incorporate the train until veteran feature as well for this new QOL change.
3. The ability to train until regular and veteran
4. Communist China needs the Chinese voice pack to work with them
5. The ability to set custom default army colours, army names, army group names, fleet names, and division names and change all current armies, fleets and air groups to them (So we don't have to manually set them at the beginning of each game and as we build up a military.
6. The ability to calculate PP needed to justify multiple war goals without having to justify one first to see the cost of the second

Thanks Paradox!

 

[mursolini]

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

Why is the most popular and probably profitable Paradox franchise so heavily understaffed ?

 

[Eogos]

Can't help but notice that you didn't mention changing license production so that you can't spy with it anymore any where in the dev diary, hope this hasn't been forgotten about cause if there was ever a time to fix it this is the DLC/Update for it.

 

[AppLaGee]

Loving the way the update looks! I can't wait for the release!

Also, one time, I visited the National WWII Museum in Louisiana and there was an exhibit that had a small bit about deception, distraction, and espionage. I thought it may be cool and fit with the espionage theme to add Rupert Dummies like the Allies used after D-Day and maybe a phony naval invasion like the Allies' deception tactics to make the Axis think Calais would be invaded. Not expexting much to come from this reply, but you guys keep up the incredible work! HOI4 just keeps getting more incredible!

 

[GeorgieBest]

But when I train my armies, I usually don't want to train them until the max level, just until the Trained level, the level deployed units have when not deployed early. That option would be fine.

Training can only get units up to regular anyway, which is one step above trained (the default which they deploy at). You can only get seasoned and veteran from actual combat.

 

[Kenttäharmaa]

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.

Will fleets with at least one ship not capped out at training XP continue training all ships, or is there a smart system in place allowing for the portion of the fleet finished training to go to port, splitting the untrained ships off to continue training, with those then re-merging with the fleet once they too have reached their XP cap from training?

 

[Daelyn75]

Why is the most popular and probably profitable Paradox franchise is heavily understaffed ?

I was wondering that myself. If HOI4 is one of their most profitable, why so few coders? Now we know why it takes 8-12 months per DLC.