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podcat

Studio Manager, Game Director <unannounced>
Paradox Staff
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Jul 23, 2007
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Hi everyone and welcome back to regular dev diaries. This and upcoming diaries will be covering stuff happening in the 1.5 "Cornflakes" update as well as the unannounced expansion that will come out together with it. One of the main focuses of those can be summarized as "making players care more about armies, leaders and troops" (our DLCs tend to have 1-3 main focuses or missions). The first feature that touches on this, and the topic of today's dev diary is adding a military chain of command to the game.

After Hearts of Iron III, where something like organizing the soviet chain of command could take about an hour of the players time we decided that we wanted something that was a lot less effort to work with for HOI4. We basically settled on a flat level with field marshals with no restriction on commanded divisions, and generals with a limit on division count but with a different set of traits. Over time we felt that we lost a bit too much of the WW2 military flavor with this abstraction, so we started thinking about how to do it in a more interesting way.

Pasted image at 2017_09_13 02_48 PM.jpg

What we have done now for 1.5 is that field marshals are now leading an Army Group, which is a certain number of Armies (what we had before) led by Generals. There are then places in theaters as before. Theaters are like before just a geographical organizational tool for the player and don't have a commander or the like to keep them as flexible as possible. This means that we have a Theaters->Army Groups->Armies->Divisions structure now.
While the Generals still come with a soft cap for how many divisions they can efficiently command, the field marshals will now have a number of armies they can efficiently command.

I also want to make sure to point out that this is still very early on in development, so stuff is very likely to change, and some stuff aren't completely working as it should yet. So we are showing you this in progress rather than showing a completely finished feature, and as always any numbers you see are extremely subject to change ;) Also I very sneekily hid the topbar for now ;)
upload_2017-9-13_15-27-6.png


When it comes to controlling your troops the new system introduces some changes to the battle planner. You can either do a plan for each army in the army group, or have a central plan for the whole Army Group where each army has a part of the frontline assigned as its responsibility. You can also do a mix, in which case an Army will finish its plan and then fall back to executing the Army Group's plan. We are still iteration on this stuff though but I figured you all wanted to know how it would work in practice.

upload_2017-9-13_15-26-30.png


Something that does not really come across in the images is that we are working on ways to streamline the process for setting up fronts using the new army groups. This should make at least the basic cases feel smooth to set up, even with one more command level and more armies without a ton of extra clicking.

upload_2017-9-13_15-23-51.png


The sharp eyed reader will also notice that we have removed the skill level for generals. This is now replaced with separate skills of different kinds. Attack, Defense, Planning and Logistics. Attack and Defense do what you expect while Planning improves planning speed and Logistics lowers supply consumption. Field marshal stats apply together with army general stats at a reduced capacity, so you will always want to have a chain of command for best efficiency.

The chain of command feature is going to be part of the free update, although there is some cool DLC features that tie into it we will be revealing in later diaries. Also expect to read more details about the system itself like how things in combat are affected etc.

See you next week when we will be taking a look at national unity...
 
BTW, is this feature for DLC or for 1.5?

As @podcat wrote 'The chain of command feature is going to be part of the free update, although there is some cool DLC features that tie into it we will be revealing in later diaries'
 
Also sorry for the late post, as I said we are early in development still and we had some problems with stuff not working for the screenies
 
Which skill does breackthrough fall under?

Breakthrough is still a defensive based thing, although its "defense on the offense". Its based on the defense stat atm (also otherwise I fear aggressive players will ignore the stat completely)

Would the new "skill point" of commander increase over time? Or it is permanently fixed?
Will the leaders skills in attack, defence, planning and logistics change (up or down) with game play?

Yes

What about Special traits like:
- desert Fox/swamp Fox
- Ranger
- Mountaineer
- Engineer
- Tank-Leader
- and so on
?

We have a whole future diary to talk about traits, progression and all of that stuff, but you'll have to wait a bit for it.

Will base levels of planning speed and supply consumption be adjusted to account for everyone having an additional source of bonuses in these areas?

yeah we need to scale down a lot of current defaults to offset new bonus levels for sure
 
The two questions that occur to me are (1) will we still be able to have "independent armies" and (2) would it be possible for a General to command a army group, albeit with a lower number of armies he is able to oversee then a Field Marshall*.
they have to be field marshals to do it. independent armies still work, but generally you will want to have a full chain for the bonuses
 
Does an army group need to have the armies it contains be near each other? That is, could I put two armies in the same group, then order one army to fight in France, and send the other off to China, and still retain the bonuses and such?

There will be limitiations about range, but we havent implemented a solution as of yet. We'll talk about it when we have the followup diary with more details in the future

@podcat

To be clear, the upcoming release is going to be a proper expansion with several new features, not a country pack?

yes