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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.
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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!
 
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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.
They've talked about it previously, though you'd have to go looking through previous dev diaries for exactly what they said.
 
Can something be done about the annoying endless line of join war requests from allies? Maybe make it similar to how you get multiple requests to join your faction.
 
They've talked about it previously, though you'd have to go looking through previous dev diaries for exactly what they said.
I know, I remember seeing it in one of the previous dev diaries, iirc they said they were considering it but leaning towards not changing it because they were having trouble coming up with a good way to handle it or something along those lines. Could be wrong about the second part but I know they said they were discussing it internally at one point.
 
Haha I wish. First MTG Bag of Tricks was in August 2018, the expansion launched on February 2019.

Now that I think of it, HOI4 needs shorter patch cycles. One year for a DLC and eight months for a patch is too extreme for a game that is supposed to have continued support.

Imperator nailed it recently while still reworking large areas of that game, and the devs said the model is a success.

I certainly hope this isn't the case. What else is there for them to reveal? They've gone over the espionage system and the focus trees in depth. It doesn't feel like there is much else left.
 
Great to see these QOL changes.

  • Air wings can be assigned to multiple missions at once, but some combinations don't work. E.g. an air wing assigned to 'air superiority' and 'interception' will only do 'air superiority'. The UI doesn't make this obvious; I imagine many players think they are performing both missions. This one could be dealt with by graying out the 'interception' button when 'air superiority' is selected, for example.


Oh my god I had no idea.
No wonder...
 
Can we get the option to give Allied AI attack or defense commands? Or just any orders really. Naval invasion, garrison, resistance, frontline etc. Often times the value of your AI is dependent on their intelligence, and they aren't very smart at all. Can we please have a mechanic like in CK2 where you can set objectives for siege, or ask troops to follow your command? And I hope in the future we get peace reworks, being able to take certain pieces of land without needing to capitulate an enemy, and maybe actual diplomacy one day? I have dozens of ideas I hope can be added, and eventually hope the game can reach it's full potential.
 
Cheers for the DD Podcat, and the extra info Vash :D Quality of life updates are always nice, and you've made some great changes here. For a start, I reckon I've spent more time shuffling things around repairs in the production queue than I have spent playing whole other games - those new behaviours sound tops :D.

Also, as someone who intermittently rambles on about notifications, these are brilliant:

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 ;)

No more eyes on another front as GER just to scroll back and find the Allies are half-way up Italy :D.

Decision Notifiers

More notification customisation goodness - cheers :D.

No, but its not a bad suggestion :) Will keep it in mind

+1 for notifications on paradrops :) (which will be a surprise to no-one :eek:). Paradrops are pretty infrequent, so this is unlikely to get too spammy either.

As for a naval pic for today, I think we'll go with a naval invasion shot - this is a pic of a less well-known landing, that of Commonwealth troops on Ramree Island in Burma, in January 1945, with the landing craft and support vessels formed up off the invasion beaches:

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(from https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205022017)
 
Dsingis said:
Oh god, PLEASE don't tell me we hear that annoying "whoooop" sound everytime someone naval invades our allies now?
I am also concerned about that. That naval invasion alert sound annoys me already when it just keeps going with no way to mute an alert at just that one location the AI keeps trying to naval invade. Allowing for a little more customization in regards to naval audio alerts or being able to mute it at certain locations could be useful in the future.
 
I am also concerned about that. That naval invasion alert sound annoys me already when it just keeps going with no way to mute an alert at just that one location the AI keeps trying to naval invade. Allowing for a little more customization in regards to naval audio alerts or being able to mute it at certain locations could be useful in the future.


Funnily for me it's the opposite.
The current Naval Woop drowns in the Soundscape and not once, did I actually take notice of it wile playing.
And yes I did check, that it's actually there and not bugged.
 
Can you relese expansion pass 2 covering all dlc-s from expansion pass 1 until now + 3 next. I and my friends would defynytly buy this. Add it would by ligical sisce first expansion pass where huge sukcess. We where glad to gain 2 extra dlc-s thanx to first expasion pass. We whant moore expansion passys ! ☺
 
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.
we got a solution for that. I have a planned diary to go over changes on stuff since we showed them in diaries and its slotted for that to show off
 
we got a solution for that. I have a planned diary to go over changes on stuff since we showed them in diaries and its slotted for that to show off

In addition to allowing screen ships to be lend-leased, could you also allow self-propelled artillery pieces to be used as support companies? They'd offer the same benefits as support artillery/AA/AT, but with the added bonus of armor. They would be ideal for 10-inf, 20-width defensive divisions.
 
I certainly hope this isn't the case. What else is there for them to reveal? They've gone over the espionage system and the focus trees in depth. It doesn't feel like there is much else left.
I really think it'll be no later than Februrary. If it is later then that makes this the longest gap in between DLCs.
 
In addition to allowing screen ships to be lend-leased, could you also allow self-propelled artillery pieces to be used as support companies? They'd offer the same benefits as support artillery/AA/AT, but with the added bonus of armor. They would be ideal for 10-inf, 20-width defensive divisions.
Why only screens? The UK received 29 Bogue class and 5 Long Island class CVE (some of which were then sent to Canada) and the UK loaned the HMS Royal Sovereign (Revenge class BB) to the USSR.
 
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.

I'd like seperate queues (budgets if you will) so I can allocate so many factories towards various projects!