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HOI4 Dev Diary - Collaboration, Compliance and Coups

Hi guys! Today we are going to be talking about collaboration, compliance and also coups as we missed covering them in last weeks dev diary about operations.


Coups

Lets start off with coups. These are now an operation and needs to be set up by your agents.

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Its possible to say where you want the coup to originate, which adds some nice strategic power to it (such as targeting colonial areas that are harder to recover etc).

There are several ways to make a coup more successful, and in reverse protect yourself. A coup needs low stability, political support for the couping ideology and agents need to have prepared a network, infiltrated the government and built up the coup. So as an attacker you will want to mess with these things in advance (say by using spy missions and operations). And of course as the target, you want to keep these values up to stay safe, as well as making sure your nation counterespionage is up to the task.

We have also changed the behaviour of the resulting wars a bit so when a side wins against the other planes and ships will switch hands instead of being lost. This could often be a reason to launch small coups with no hope just to mess with the enemies navies.


Collaboration

Collaborators work similar, but opposite to Governments in Exile. They are created by an operation where agents are sent in to convert and/or support local collaborators.

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This is an operation you can run more than once (although cost and time goes up every time), and for each one you will strengthen the collaborators. Foreign Collaboration governments are tracked (much like GiE) from your country screen.

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The higher the value of collaborators present the easier it will be to make the nation capitulate which can be important in cases where you need to move in fast. You also unlocks levels of compliance in the new resistance and compliance system which will be transferred to regular compliance once the target nation is capitulated. This can be useful for giving you a head start on managing a lot of occupied areas by laying some groundwork before you even attack.

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Speaking of compliance, we never really went into detail on how that worked before, so lets take a look now. If you need to read up on the changes coming to the resistance system as a whole though check out the dev diary here.

There are several levels of compliance "unlocks". These happen on a national level for the occupied nation.
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The first unlock is “Informants.” Secret police working in the province have established a network of snitches and collaborators. This gives an increase to defense against enemy operatives in the occupied nation. The next unlock is “Local Police Force.” At this level, enough locals have been trained and are loyal enough to police their country for the occupiers. As a result, local garrison needs are now reduced. The third unlock is “Reorganized Workforce.” At this point, Life is returning to some level of normalcy and people are able to go about their daily lives and perform their normal jobs. This compliance unlock adds access to another 10% of factories and resources across the occupied nation. “Volunteer Program” is the fourth compliance unlock. This represents locals volunteering to serve in their occupier’s military and adds 10% of the population as fit for service.

The final unlock is “A New Regime”. At this highest level it is possible to create a new subject type “Collaboration Government” directly. This frees you up from policing it and ensures that it sticks to you in any peace deal you win. Getting high compliance can be a lot of effort in war time and it can be a very good idea to make sure you have collaborators in place before invasions.
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Collaboration governments will mirror your map color as well to show how closely aligned they are.

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See you all next week when we will look at some intel gathering tools…
 
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Defense is mostly passive because we need to keep the overall pressure on player attention down. You defend by passive upgrades and assigning operatives to defense. We have tried to keep operations often depending on something else so saboutage and such dont really work without resistance so as a defender you can make sure to keep on top of that and stability as ways of defending. Passive defense has some perks tho as you will capture and interrogate enemy agents and thus gain intel on them in return

I get what you are saying, but a counter-intelligence operation to dismantle networks/reveal agents could be cool. Maybe it can be really expensive, resource-wise, to pull-off?
 
I get what you are saying, but a counter-intelligence operation to dismantle networks/reveal agents could be cool. Maybe it can be really expensive, resource-wise, to pull-off?
It shouldn't be expensive, if anything, it should be cheaper than an enemy operation, but there should be some difficulty to it, with variable chances of success on either side depending on who invested more effort...to keep the mission secret or to discover the secret mission.
It should be a tug of war. Both sides are ACTIVELY trying to get the upper hand over the other, both sides working to either hide or discover what is going on.

The devs decision to cut off an entire arm of a two sided thing is just stupid and sad.
 
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What about instigating rebellions/increase resistance in non occupied provinces of starting nations, like the Soviet Caucasus or British Iraq? the locals were anything but loyal to the central government.
 
I certainly hope that the compliance mechanic can also be extended to countries that do not yet exist but that can later exist. Like for example the states of the Soviet Union such as Ucraine and so on. Because I'd like to set up collaborationist governments with the states that I "free" from the Soviet Union. There was a lot of initial support for the Germans when they reached Ucraine in the early stages of the eastern front, and well, I think the Brest-Litovsk Treaty also had in mind creating a series to governments, in the west of the Russian empire, that were meant to also be loyal to Germany.

On the other hand, I like the idea of the remaining planes and navies switching hands instead of being lost, because, when the civil war in Germany starts, Germany's navy ends up crippled because of the losses, as well as it does become difficult to recover part of the air force.

But a question I have is, how will this last mentioned mechanic impact wars among two nations? Like, for example, if Qing china invaded Japan, would they keep all of their fleets?
This also poses an interesting question if Germany invaded the UK before the US joins the war, if the UK gave up all their navy to the Germans, that would be a huge boost for them.
Not really. The only Ukrainians that initially supported Germans were in the western territories, recently retaken from Poland. As Germany went further into Ukraine they encountered more and more resistance. Furthermore, even in the West, reactionary Ukrainians would rather join Ukrainian Insurgent Army than the Germans.
 
It shouldn't be expensive, if anything, it should be cheaper than an enemy operation, but there should be some difficulty to it, with variable chances of success on either side depending on who invested more effort...to keep the mission secret or to discover the secret mission.
It should be a tug of war. Both sides are ACTIVELY trying to get the upper hand over the other, both sides working to either hide or discover what is going on.

The devs decision to cut off an entire arm of a two sided thing is just stupid and sad.

Nah, it's good the way it is.

The way it's designed is to not punish people who don't want to put a lot of literal in-game resources and their own mental resources in terms of time and attention into espionage. Everything you're proposing would just be an active punishment to players who don't want to go out of their way and spend a lot of literal and figurative resources into espionage. Many players expressed concerns that this would become a "game within a game" and the current design allows them to choose their level of involvement without actively crippling them for not wanting to go all in on it. You complaining quite vocally, but I don't think it's at all representative of the needs of the player base.
 
It shouldn't be expensive, if anything, it should be cheaper than an enemy operation, but there should be some difficulty to it, with variable chances of success on either side depending on who invested more effort...to keep the mission secret or to discover the secret mission.
It should be a tug of war. Both sides are ACTIVELY trying to get the upper hand over the other, both sides working to either hide or discover what is going on.

The devs decision to cut off an entire arm of a two sided thing is just stupid and sad.

The whole idea about clandestine operations are that they are just that (clandestine).
It'd be both ahistorical and kinda pointless if tailored defensive responses could be made to subvert what is essentially an unknown enemy operation being orchestrated in an unknown way with an unknown goal in an unknown part of your domain or occupied territory (if there even IS an existing hostile operation being prepared).

Passive defense (it's just an in-game term to differentiate from offensive "operations") makes perfect sense but then IF you discover something fishy through said means I agree that it would be interested if there were different ways to respond (setting up traps to kill or capture operatives, feeding tailored/false intelligence into known operations or spy-networks etc).
 
Very nice! But few questions:
1. Will be finally possible to support different ideology? For example - Germany during WW 1 send Lenin to Russia. This is nice trick to hide your thrue intensions. You can guarantee loyalists first and in case of civil war they just join you and you dont become agressor!
2. Is it possible to collaborate your own faction allies, to create puppets from them if you are a spymaster? Just like German focus for economic integration with Hungary and Romania?
 
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From what I see this is looking great, ways to influence diplomacy is my jam.
This should keep the player more engaged during pre-war time, and keeping the collaborator governments after the war is a great incentive for not worrying with them in a peace deal.

such as targeting colonial areas that are harder to recover etc
Speaking of colonial areas, is there a possibility to create "independence" operations? For example, stirring UK's colonial holdings in Africa to create an ally independence movement such as Egypt?
 
Nah, it's good the way it is.

The way it's designed is to not punish people who don't want to put a lot of literal in-game resources and their own mental resources in terms of time and attention into espionage. Everything you're proposing would just be an active punishment to players who don't want to go out of their way and spend a lot of literal and figurative resources into espionage. Many players expressed concerns that this would become a "game within a game" and the current design allows them to choose their level of involvement without actively crippling them for not wanting to go all in on it. You complaining quite vocally, but I don't think it's at all representative of the needs of the player base.

Wrong. I am not allowed to choose the level of involvement I want in defending my country from espionage. I am the one being punished by people who will use this system against me and there is nothing I can do to stop them. I should not suffer from this if I want to have the ability to defend myself.

This is exactly like saying YOU are allowed to use tanks, but I CANNOT use anti-tank against you. The game will not allow my to move anti-tank divisions to counter your tanks because that's too much micro. You're just allowed to steamroll me with your tanks and I just get to watch.

No. You couldn't be more wrong.

When they introduced the navy, (the real navy, MTG) that is a game within a game. The air war is already a game within a game. Production is it's own separate game. Land warfare is also a different system from air and sea.

They are already adding an extra layer. They are ALREADY adding another game within a game. But the extra layer is incomplete. The new game within a game just doesn't have a defensive side. Your argument makes no sense.
 
The puppet system needs a rework, we have Puppets, Integrated Puppets, Reichskommissariats, Reichsprotektorats, Colonies, Collaboration Governments, Supervised States... I feel that there are too many puppet types considering they are all a direct line between annexed and free. We need a system that:
  • Clarifies each puppet type and makes them more standardized with special puppet types for some cases, like Japan and Manchukuo or the RK's.
  • Makes it easier to change puppet types, because right now, as a master, improving puppet autonomy in a logical way is impossible; and reducing autonomy in a way that doesn't break immersion (build factories and send lend lease like hell) is very slow.
  • And maybe makes puppet types non-linear (there could be different branches in puppet types).
Actually, Reichskommissariats are less autonomous than Collaboration Governments, because the latter at least are formed out of local people. RK's are more similar to civilian colonial governments.
 
Wrong. I am not allowed to choose the level of involvement I want in defending my country from espionage. I am the one being punished by people who will use this system against me and there is nothing I can do to stop them. I should not suffer from this if I want to have the ability to defend myself.

You are allowed to choose your level of involvement. You can set up how many agents you running counter-intelligence at home.
 
Wrong. I am not allowed to choose the level of involvement I want in defending my country from espionage. I am the one being punished by people who will use this system against me and there is nothing I can do to stop them. I should not suffer from this if I want to have the ability to defend myself.

This is exactly like saying YOU are allowed to use tanks, but I CANNOT use anti-tank against you. The game will not allow my to move anti-tank divisions to counter your tanks because that's too much micro. You're just allowed to steamroll me with your tanks and I just get to watch.

No. You couldn't be more wrong.

When they introduced the navy, (the real navy, MTG) that is a game within a game. The air war is already a game within a game. Production is it's own separate game. Land warfare is also a different system from air and sea.

They are already adding an extra layer. They are ALREADY adding another game within a game. But the extra layer is incomplete. The new game within a game just doesn't have a defensive side. Your argument makes no sense.


There seems to be a pretty decent amount of things you can do - reduce enemy party support in your country, increase stability, add more spies on counter espionage, invest resources into counter intelligence, and keep resistance down. All of these reduce the odds of opponents’ operations succeeding, and are similar to investing in anti-tank support for all your divisions, or achieving air superiority, or investing in doctrines/research to reduce tank successes.

Sure some enemy missions will slip through the cracks - occasionally even with your best efforts tank divisions win via luck or circumstance - but at that point your opponent’s return on investments have diminished significantly. Given that Hoi4 revolves around the resource production war, whatever your opponent is gaining from their missions might well be less than what they put in and you lost
 
What about instigating rebellions/increase resistance in non occupied provinces of starting nations, like the Soviet Caucasus or British Iraq? the locals were anything but loyal to the central government.
I'm pretty sure you can't do much in territories where the current owner/controller has a core, that would fall under 'Collaboration Government' instead (or a targeted Coup in those territories if I understood the DD correctly). Isn't Iraq independent in Vanilla? Not even a puppet of Britain? So that would be a coup (the Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani Coup), which IIRC they said is possible (not necessarily that coup, but a coup in general) using the new system.
 
There seems to be a pretty decent amount of things you can do - reduce enemy party support in your country, increase stability, add more spies on counter espionage, invest resources into counter intelligence, and keep resistance down. All of these reduce the odds of opponents’ operations succeeding, and are similar to investing in anti-tank support for all your divisions, or achieving air superiority, or investing in doctrines/research to reduce tank successes.

Sure some enemy missions will slip through the cracks - occasionally even with your best efforts tank divisions win via luck or circumstance - but at that point your opponent’s return on investments have diminished significantly. Given that Hoi4 revolves around the resource production war, whatever your opponent is gaining from their missions might well be less than what they put in and you lost

"invest resources into counter intelligence"
How? I never saw anything about that. No one has said anything about that yet and it wasn't in the dev diaries. I'm pretty sure you can't. You can't mean buying more agents to put on passive because you brought that up as a separate point (and it's not the same thing as active defense).

None of those will allow you to make some of your research or information "top secret" or deliberately protected, more difficult to steal with a higher chance of failure and capture?
None of those will allow you to discover and counter an enemy operation.
 
Nah, it's good the way it is.

The way it's designed is to not punish people who don't want to put a lot of literal in-game resources and their own mental resources in terms of time and attention into espionage. Everything you're proposing would just be an active punishment to players who don't want to go out of their way and spend a lot of literal and figurative resources into espionage. Many players expressed concerns that this would become a "game within a game" and the current design allows them to choose their level of involvement without actively crippling them for not wanting to go all in on it. You complaining quite vocally, but I don't think it's at all representative of the needs of the player base.
Yeah. HOI is a wargame. Politics, espionage, and similar should be part of the equation,but not a game within game.
 
@podcat
will there at least be new game rules to disable all operations of any kind so we can salvage this mess? Still get the other things added by the DLC, but remove the spy part with host decided game rules?
 
Yeah. HOI is a wargame. Politics, espionage, and similar should be part of the equation,but not a game within game.
politics are already in the game and are a game within the game. espionage is being added already and will be an additional game within a game. that argument is invalid. since we are ALREADY getting an espionage system, why can't we get a complete version with offensive AND defensive actions? You ALREADY have to micro offensive operations. Why can't I do the same thing but be DEFENSIVE about it? It makes no sense.
The game within a game is already being added guys. That's what this DLC is...
It's perfectly reasonable to want a defensive aspect to it to counter the offensive for something that will already exist.
 
Not really on topic, but I'm late for the other sections of the diary and it fits into the DLC as a whole, so here it goes:

Can we get unit name lists for the french and spanish foreign legion? Maybe even a unit template?