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HOI4 Dev Diary - Chain of Command

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.

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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 ;)
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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.

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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.

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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...
 
I hope Strategic Bombing gets improved, since it is pretty much worthless as of right now. Naval combat and just the naval part needs a huge overhaul as well.

Not in my experience. Pick up a few doctrines that improve strategic bombing, run air wings of a few hundred bombers and watch your opponent's industry turn into so many smoldering ruins.
 
Planning skill affects planning speed only?
Planning speed is very situational and rarely useful. Germany basically doesn't benefit at all from it.
1. Germany already has the national spirit and doctrine to make plans lightning fast.
2. Germany usually is the one initiating a campaign which means that the starting offensive will have max planning anyways and as long as you aren't forced to rush the planning, it won't make a difference.

I would split planning skill into:
a) improving planning speed
b) improving max planning bonus (just a tad, not overpowered)
 
I think you are misunderstanding. There is no reason why the old traits will not mostly or even all be kept as they are currently. He said nothing about removing those. What is changing is that instead of one single number to represent a general's skill there will be four numbers.

They are adding detail. I don't see where anything has to be taken away unless it directly clashes with the new two tier system. Even if that were the case, it is even more likely that the new system will encourage the addition of a few new traits for your commanders to acquire.
Yeah, I read it on my phone so I couldn't see the pictures and I was in a hurry.
However I feel like the game was missing something like this the chain of command thing since putting a fieldmarshall on the soviet border and then press go was pretty silly...
 
Giving generals and field marshalls different command roles seems like a good way to put some life into that area. The old system of them doing the same role with the difference being different trait and how many divisions they can command only reduced the cohesion of the game and was confusing as you did seldom know which commander type was better for a specific situation and which often lead to throwing everything to a field marshall and forget about it.

Having 4 skills instead of one seems like a very good way to differentiate commanders and given how broad they (skills) are it should not lead to problems of understanding these skills. Im not complete sure about the faster planing skill as it look a bit wierd when the three other are passive and always useful but I guess it may change during development. That skill could for example be changed to increase max org of your divisions, your divisions movement speed or many other factors which would make it much more like the other 3 skills.
 
Am I blind or have the state borders of dead nations always been thicker, like Czechoslovakia's are in the picture?
 
Planning skill affects planning speed only?
Planning speed is very situational and rarely useful. Germany basically doesn't benefit at all from it.
1. Germany already has the national spirit and doctrine to make plans lightning fast.
2. Germany usually is the one initiating a campaign which means that the starting offensive will have max planning anyways and as long as you aren't forced to rush the planning, it won't make a difference.

I would split planning skill into:
a) improving planning speed
b) improving max planning bonus (just a tad, not overpowered)

Piggybacking on this, I'd also like to see the planning bonus become more important and dynamic.

What I would love, and it's been talked about on the forums before, is for division speed to be tied to planning bonuses. Cut the speed of divisions across the board by like 15-25% normally, and add the speed back into accruing in the planning bonus. I would much more accurately reflect the speed/nature of the mobile warfare of WW2, as armies could sometimes move extrmeely fast, but couldn't maintain those speeds for very long. Rather than jsut having a flat speed armies are always moving at regardless of how long they've been fighting.
 
Not sure what are you talking about, you can easily deploy anything between one battalion and whole corps as a single unit, just create a suitable template and train/change template. HOI3 is much less capable in this regard, with smallest unit being a predefined brigade with no way of customizing it.
I understand that you can design a template with only one battalion or a whole core. After thinking about it in regards to your response perhaps it would have been more appropriate to focus more on how you are required to use army xp for any template design. To me this limits the potential of using custom templates in the way you described.
 
I understand that you can design a template with only one battalion or a whole core. After thinking about it in regards to your response perhaps it would have been more appropriate to focus more on how you are required to use army xp for any template design. To me this limits the potential of using custom templates in the way you described.

That constraint is only binding pre-war. Once it kicks off army XP is so absurdly abundant that I feel forced to spend it on variants I know I don't need just to prevent it capping out
 
That constraint is only binding pre-war. Once it kicks off army XP is so absurdly abundant that I feel forced to spend it on variants I know I don't need just to prevent it capping out
That depends on the nation played - in my last UK game army XP was relatively thin on the ground, as was naval XP. I had tonnes of air XP, though.
 
That depends on the nation played - in my last UK game army XP was relatively thin on the ground, as was naval XP. I had tonnes of air XP, though.

You need to lend lease more tanks to other nations if you aren't fighting enough to get xp. Promise you'll be amazed how much you get doing that with the soviets for example.
 
Not to be nitpicky, @podcat, but is there going to be something for the nations that didn't use the "Field Marshal" rank, as in "Marshal" for the Soviets and "General of the Army" for the United States?
 
Not to be nitpicky, @podcat, but is there going to be something for the nations that didn't use the "Field Marshal" rank, as in "Marshal" for the Soviets and "General of the Army" for the United States?

Seems like a reasonable enough request. I'm hoping we get some more flavor stuff too. Not the expense of gameplay improvements, but a few things here and there are nice, and flavor helps make the game a better experience IMO
 
This looks very promising. Let's see how much of HoI3's OOB is now present in HoI4 -

Theater - check, although it functions differently.
Army Group - check, incoming
Army - check, in from start
Corps - ???
Division - check, in from start
Brigade - not individually commandable (no rebellions or uprisings to crush anymore)...but yeah, check

I do miss the Corps level. It was very handy and helped command divisions of a small but coherent army in a legible way. But lets see how this turns out. :)

I don't know if corps will ever be added in HoI4, but I do hope they'll add it for Victoria 3 with a simple army->corps->division system rather than the EU3 inspired mess that was Vicky2's 3k man unit military. Gets my hopes up.
 
Oh yeah, and for the PRC, aside from Mao being Field Marshal, he also should have the following generals:
  • Lin Biao
  • Peng Dehuai
  • Zhu De
  • Chen Yi
  • He Long
  • Xu Xiangqian
  • Liu Bocheng
  • Ye Jianying
  • Nie Rongzhen
  • Lou Ronghuan
 
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Having considered the information in this Dev diary it occurs to me as it presents a simple 'cure' for the games overproduction of divisions. If a nation has only a finite number of generals, would it not be a simple matter to write some code so that a nation cant produce more divisions then its generals can control?