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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...
 
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?
You can generate generals ad-infinitum in HoI IV.
 
not if they change that at the same time
No thanks, because that will limit the player as well. And I really didn't like the fact that for example playing as Afghanistan or whatever country, you would run out of military leaders sooner or later. And if the limit will not be limiting that much, why put one then?
Not to mention that unless you prune the number of already existing leaders + their limit it will not change that much.
 
OH MY GOD NOOOOO !

Guys Remember HOI3 and how that game blow soo bad !

I know I know you want to do something cool and great I respect that also I can play like this too but many players cannot.

How do I know ?

I have a facebook group which has more than 2k members who all play HOI4 and this game is like their first strategy. I mean you really nailed it guys with this game you turned a CS:GO player to strategy gamer and thats great but DO NOT GO TOO FAR please make it very simple.
People don't understand your patrician post.
 
Someone said this previously, but can we get more commanders for countries with a lack of them (notably France, Italy)? Even in the current game, I've found myself running out of land commanders while playing as either of them.

Also, why aren't divisions renamable?
 
Also, why aren't divisions renamable?

In case it helps, divisions are renameable - just click on them in the army view to bring up their division view, and then click on the name and name to your hearts' delight - example below :). Apologies if I've misunderstood your question - I know people are interested in custom division lists and naming styles, and I don't think everything that people want in that context is in the game.

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Am I blind or have the state borders of dead nations always been thicker, like Czechoslovakia's are in the picture?

Normally the borders of an other occupied country are slightly thicker than your regular states. Once it's annexed that goes away though (I thought), in the screenshot above it seems as though it was conquered by force and Czechoslovakia is still alive (albeit occupied) in the allies possibly.
 
It might make sense to have a 3:ed level for HoI4 as an organization only level ( no leader assigned ). I don't think they will add corps leaders considering how much art that would require.

Wouldn't need pictures, just auto-generated names for flavor would be nice. It could be used for "spawning" Generals (like Aces in HOI4) or commanders in other PDS-titles.

Also just like the "division" isn't actually a division (you can make them corps-strength, divisional size, brigade, regiment or single battalions in the template designer) the levels wouldn't need to be fixed (just like an army now isn't "fixed" but rather limited to what the general/FM can handle).

I'd really really really like icons or representations for unit size. A lot of people are complaining about unit-spam which is pretty awful but not AS awful as it looks since a lot of the forces are regiment-strength units (but look like full-fledged divisions both in 3D-models and Counter.
 
All that being said...If CoC Is a free feature, I'm salivating to discover what the paid features will be.

This expansion will need to have 20$ worth of value IIRC, for it to meet PDS's expansion pass goals. (Though I am not convinced TfV was worth 15$)
 
I'll buy this as soon as you reintroduce real supply lines. Still waiting.