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HoI4 Dev Diary - Combat Changes & Soviet Exiles

Greetings all,

Today we have two important topics to cover, for which we have reinstated @podcat with a battlefield commission, in order to detail our latest efforts to combat the width meta. In addition, Comrades @Bratyn and @Wrongwraith return for a dive into changes to the Soviet Exiles branch of the focus tree, based partly on community feedback.

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Hi everyone, @podcat here for a little guest appearance to tell you some more about the combat changes coming with Barbarossa. Back in the Combat and Stats Changes diary we outlined our quest to break down the 40 width meta and try to combat an “overall best division”.
In there we outlined several changes such as varying terrain width without easy multipliers to exploit (meaning you can still make optimums for particular terrains but not all), as well as reduced penalties to going over widths.

To expand on this we have changed how targeting and damage spreading works. One way 40 width (and also larger) divisions were stronger than smaller ones was how they could concentrate all of their damage into one target overpowering defense more easily. Targeting is now changed so that divisions will select targets up to its own width (so a 40w can fire on two 20w), but doing so spreads the damage over them relative to their width (and just to be clear, it’s not just for 40w. This applies to any widths that match up like 30+10 say).

Screenshot_21.png
?
‘tis mathematics innit

With these changes I can say that I am not really sure what the best meta is anymore. I think there are likely some optimums depending on your opponent and location (when balancing Org versus cost and piercing and such) but what that is I look forward to see you players try to figure out :)

We also have one more change that I think will have a pretty big impact. When deciding if a division can reinforce to the battle line inside combat we no longer check in order of the order they joined combat, but instead we will now pick randomly among all waiting divisions with their chance weighted by their reinforce chance. This means that to optimize reinforcing you no longer need to pull micro feats to get the right divisions in order, and can much more safely toss in your newly designed tanks to save the day in an ongoing combat. Also, don’t forget your signal companies, they should be more impactful now!
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Hi guys! This is @Bratyn and @Wrongwraith, part of the CD team on the Exiles branch for the Soviet Union. The last month has (other than lots and lots of keyboard-scrubbing...) seen some significant changes to the branch, and while we’ve kept much of the original design, we’ve also incorporated feedback from you guys, the community, and did some further iteration of our own on how the tree looks and works.

I believe we mentioned last time around that the civil war was hard if you chose to go down this path of the focus tree. Really hard. “Realistically hard” someone might argue. "Unwinnable", our testers might say. And while that might be to some degree realistic, it isn’t that fun. So we decided to make it _slightly_ less hard, while also introducing a few new elements to make the war even more interesting. Among other things, you now use Command Power to recruit units, rather than Political Power. And we have increased the amount of things you can get from countries supporting your cause.

We also added a few new focuses.

DD_pict_1_civil_war_tree.png


As you can see, the main structure of this section is similar to what it was before, with some minor changes. Maybe it should be stated at this point that most focuses are short focuses. The new ones that you can access before the war are these:

DD_pict_2_covert_operations.png

DD_pict_3_smr.png


Why do you need these? Well You really, really need to be the one triggering the war, and you want to ensure you have control of as much land and units as you possibly can. So you need to be juggling your PP’s and CP’s while keeping an eye on the Political Paranoia of the Soviet Union. If Stalin starts the war before you are ready, it will still be very hard to win. And in order to do the latter, you can use the Covert Operations focus to try and divert the attention away from you - by providing fake evidence that e.g. the army is plotting against the state. This will cause an inquiry into army affairs, and this in turn will both damage Stalin’s army, and lower the Paranoia level temporarily - allowing you to continue with your schemes. The other new focus here is intended to give you a better supply situation when the war breaks out. Fighting through Siberia can be tough. Extra so if you don't have a supply system that supports it. So why not get some more help from the Japanese, right?

But I suppose the most interesting thing is this set of Focuses:

DD_pict_4_breakaways.png


What do they do? Well, they give you different options in how to deal with nations that declared independence during the civil war…

DD_pict_5_uprising.png


A number of countries can declare independence during the war, especially if it drags on for too long. You then get the choice to see that as an act of war, or as a potential ally (for a while at least). Getting help from minor nations can be a good distraction, and something that can greatly reduce the time you need to fight against the Bolsheviks. However, being the empire -wanna be, you might not want that situation to last forever, hence the post war options.

DD_pict_6_uprising_map.png


DD_pict_7_breakaway_focuses_detail.png


This, together with a few other events that can happen during the war, should make the 2nd Russian Civil War winnable for the exiles, although still a challenge.

DD_pict_9_desertions.png


Some of the biggest criticism we received from you was the fact that the Western and Eastern expansion branches depended on whether you went down the Tsarist or Fascist branches. And rightly so! It made no sense to arbitrarily lock some of these options behind an ideology choice; a Fascist Russia would certainly have cause to wish to reconquer in the West, and a Tsarist Russia might well have even more reason to exact vengeance upon the Japanese than the Fascists would.

Making these two expansion paths available to both branches would, however, mean other focuses were required to continue to offer a unique identity to both of the ideological branches. Some people suggested more focuses geared to creating alliances, and we paired these with certain focuses intended to offer some flavor to the branches. This is the current state of the post-civil-war branches:

dev diary total branch new.png


The difference will be immediately apparent. The tree has ‘thickened’ quite a bit, with over 10 new focuses, and the branches against Sweden, the Baltics, and Finland on one side, and Japan on the other, are now available regardless of the political choice you made, clustered near the center of the branch. Nothing has changed in these focuses, except The Lonely Island, which, if you relied upon Japanese aid too much and thus were puppeted after the end of the civil war, converts into a “war for independence” focus.

dev diary lonely island independence.png


Let’s explore the newly-added focuses. On the Tsarist side, Capital of the Tsars moves the capital to St. Petersburg, and adds a bunch of goodies for the state itself. Reforge the Triple entente does what it says on the tin: reach out to the UK and France to re-establish the old alliance aimed squarely at Germany.

dev diary capital of the tsars.png


To emphasize old Tsarist Russia’s emphasis on being a ‘defender of the Slavs’, there’s yet another “Slavic Commitments” focus. If you elected to go down Third Rome, this will still give you an option to send guarantees to the various Slavic powers (along with some other bonuses), after which you may invade Romania (The Fate of Romania) to establish a land connection to the Balkan powers. And finally, “The Iron Wall off Russian Resolve” gives major bonuses to research and production cost, reliability, and armor for Super Heavy Tanks, incentivizing their use by offsetting the most detrimental aspect of them (their production cost), and thus offering a more unique playstyle for the Tsarists.

dev diary iron wall of russian resolve.png


On the Fascist side, Russian Corporate State offers some factories and industrial bonuses. There is a focus to create a Berlin-Moscow Axis, and follow-up focus Japanese Overtures allows for an alternative choice to simply avenging the war of 1905 by going to war with the Japanese: you can invite them into the new Axis and secure Russia’s flank that way.

dev diary japanese overtures.png


Eastern Expansion is now Fascist-only. After this, there is still the option of meddling in the Americas and, ultimately, declaring war on Canada and the USA for the old Russian colonial possessions on the continent. A second branch can be taken, however, offering wargoals on Afghanistan and Iran, and ultimately leading into Iraq, Turkey (if it hasn’t already been taken as the Third Rome), Syria (France), and India.

dev diary last break southward.png


These changes should offer a bit more identity to the Exiles branches, while also allowing both to fulfil the ‘basics’ of recovering Imperial Russian possessions in the West and avenging the war of 1905 in the East.

Finally, here’s some pictures of certain characters:


DD_pict_8_generals.png
dev diary tsar vladimir I.png
dev diary archpatriarch meletius.png


As usual, the tree is still under development, and even what you see here might not match what ends up being released :) See you next week for another dev diary!





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Nice new Dev Diray. That shows the Devs read what the Community and Players (most SP) having in Mind. On the other Hand the Devs see what Modders are doing to upgrade the exsting Base-Game-Version incl. all DLCs to the Maximum it can give to help the Devs making an excellent Game.

Both things the Devs try to implement in the Base-Game-Refits and DLCs, without making the Game with complexitiy unplayable (like Hoi 1 to 3). I like the Game-Upgrade to 1.10.8 atm-Standard with all DLCs activated incl. the Boutification-Modifications.

But I hope too, that the first big Refit to 1.11 "Barbarossa" incl. the DLC "NsB" will bring in cool new Content for Economy, an Refited R & D-Tree and more with the atm shown Refits, Reworks, cool Implementations and integrated Upgrades.

It dosen´t matter when it comes out this Year, but it must be a big BANG for the Community, esp. with all older Bugs fixed (dosen´t matter how) from Beginning on (1.0.0) up to 1.10.8-Version.
 
Can you confirm wether you could implement the changes I proposed about changing the penal battalions into orthodox militias? Or is it not yet decided?
We considered doing that, but we felt there was no need since Penal Batallions are far from being communist-specific. It should work flavor-wise regardless of the ideology you follow as SU/Russia.

However, I believe you made several proposals for focus flavor changes in the common branches when SU goes non-communist, and as I said in that thread there were really good ideas there, and some of them have been implemented into the game, such as:

1632928577586.png


So, thank you for your feedback!
 
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@podcat

"To expand on this we have changed how targeting and damage spreading works. One way 40 width (and also larger) divisions were stronger than smaller ones was how they could concentrate all of their damage into one target overpowering defense more easily. Targeting is now changed so that divisions will select targets up to its own width (so a 40w can fire on two 20w), but doing so spreads the damage over them relative to their width (and just to be clear, it’s not just for 40w. This applies to any widths that match up like 30+10 say)."

The change to targeting is welcome since it completely kills the previous "the bigger the better" thing, but without other adaptations, I fear the pendulum swung too much on the oter side since I don't see what are now the drawbacks of very smalls divisions. (regardless the softcap of number of available generals, wich can be irrelevant depending on how the new systems encourage very tiny divisions)

Following the 40 vs two 20 exemple with the same frontline bataillons :
- Same offensive stats since the bigger divisions offensive stats will be divided equaly
- Same defensive stats since smaller divisions will get half the defense/breaktrough of the bigger one but half incoming damages, and bigger one will get twice the defense/breakthrough of the smaller one but face combined damages of the two smaller ones
- The two combined smaller divisions will get about twice the org of the bigger one
- the two combined smaller divisions will get more effects from support bataillons since there will be double the available slots comparing to the bigger one.

That calculation can be done to 20 vs 10 width and smaller and smaller making logicaly new meta consiting as smallest divisions as possible, wich I doubt is the result anyone want.

So, is there any point giving advantage to big divisons over small ones in that system?

Would be better to have some balancing system making optimums being roughly on historical size of divisions, and avoid either very big or very small divisions being META.
 
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With the combat changes, what has testing shown w/ regards to stalemates? It feels like late game often distills itself into a battle of attrition until one side finally runs out of manpower. In some of my games, WW2 feels more like WW1 when both sides are competitively equal.
 
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With the combat changes, what has testing shown w/ regards to stalemates? It feels like late game often distills itself into a battle of attrition until one side finally runs out of manpower. In some of my games, WW2 feels more like WW1 when both sides are competitively equal.
Foritifications weren't any less effective in WW2 than they were in WW1, people just got better at avoiding them. If you can't go around the fort then it is working as intended, surely. In any event, if both sides are roughly equal then the combat should take time.
 
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As Belarusian I hope Belarus will also be able to break away during Soviet Civil War.

Nevertheless, good work with community and a big move forward. Thanks for your work and cool Soviet Union content, guys!
 
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That's the current in-game flag for Non-Aligned Ukraine. The devs have a policy of having every ideology of a country giving them a different name and flag, so I guess they decided to go with that variant, which was the flag of the Ukrainian People's Republic for a short while when it broke free in 1917.
I just checked and there are debates if the yellow-blue flag exist. Found the article where said that there is no mention of the yellow - blue flag during the meetings of Tsentralna Rada. Yellow-blue can be found only on some posters, and was never regarded as offical. Also attacheck screenshot of first document flag.
'At a meeting of the General Secretariat on January 11, 1918 (December 29, 1917), the draft Provisional Law on the Fleet of the Ukrainian People's Republic was approved. The bill proposed: “II. The flag of the Ukrainian Navy is a banner in two colors: yellow and blue....'
But it is just a describtion of the colors, not the actual color scheme.
When editing the text of the draft law by January 1918, the order of colors in the text was clarified, brought in line with the actual. - blue-yellow.
 

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The Romanov/Fascist branch does look very fun, and it's clearly designed to be fun, I just think it shouldn't exist. They should have (and really this expansion does look to be doing that mostly) spending more time making WW2 fun and less time making things that aren't WW2 fun. They love to make things that aren't WW2 fun because those things are popular, but they're popular in part because the alt-history paths are often just straight up better than the historical paths. People always say "oh you should play with mods then" or some nonsense when the Romanov restoration for the USSR is like, textbook example of what should be a mod. Of course, I know that Hoi4 has not been hiding that a certain amount of wacky alt-history is now par for the course (this expansion seems to be a welcome refocusing on core gameplay, which is good) so I'm not complaining too hard. Looks like a good DLC, I hope naval will get (another) rework in the future.
How does removing or not making parts of the game that are fun make the game better? One thing is to ask for a better and more interesting historical paths and that`s ok, and I think that they did that in the Soviet tree. But the reality is that the alt-paths adds replayability that the game would not have if it just existed the historical paths. I agree with asking with better historical paths but I don`t think that the way is removing or making less varied content because otherwise "it isn´t fun".
 
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The theocracy path removing the Romanovs is the one black spot on a dev diary I have absolutely no problems with otherwise. It just doesn't make any sense for an "arch-patriarch" to remove the ruling family.
 
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Still not a fan of the Soviet exiles tree. The Tsarist options seem way off to me. Either reinstate serfdom (against all logic) and tsarist absolutism or become a theocracy (which makes literally no sense because "Patriarch" isn't just a synonym for Pope and having the Patriarch hold temporal power would be actively heretical to Eastern Orthodoxy) and those are your only 2 options. Because I'm sure the Russian people would be totally content with those options...

I'd rather that the effort had been spent making a constitutional monarchist path, because if the Archpatriarch path stays you might as well add in a British focus tree that lets the Archbishops of Canterbury and York overthrow the government and rule as a diarchy instead. Or maybe a Turkish/Anatolian fascist tree that lets the Ecumenical Patriarch launch a coup in Turkey/the neo-Byzantine Empire. After all, that's about as believable and likely to happen as a patriarchal theocracy in Russia replacing their Romanov allies. There's alt history and there's straight up just making shit up. The Russian "Archpatriarchate" very much fits in the latter category.

Seriously, scrap the Patriarchal theocracy crap, put in constitutional monarchist and republican paths and Russia's focus tree will be perfect.
 
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The changes to combat mechanics are excited, but exiles surprise and raise some questions again:
1. Why Konstantin Nechayev wear Chinese uniform?
2. You haven't cut out the freaky concept "Third Rome = Theocracy by the Arch-Patriarch(Cringe title)" - Why?
3. The four generals you showed are all the exiled generals that Whites can get.
4. I love democracy, and I have already come to terms with the fact that there won't be dem. focuses, but will Kerensky have at least a new portrait?
5. Also what about portraits for leaders of major national states like Ukraine, Central Asian khanates and etc?
 
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Thank you for making additions to the exiles branch. I would say that the Tsarist branch should get a focus to conquer Turkey, given the history between the Russian Empire and the Ottomans.
 
Changes are nice, definitely feels more flavorful than when we first saw the tree. Question though: is there a counterweight for moscow-berlin axis + japan also joining? While I doubt AI could pull off a victory as the whites, it seems fairly unbalanced to have Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan in the same faction. Is it a similar or the same mechanic to the parallel Germany focus where a ton of nations join the allies? Are we allowed to know what "our slavic commitments" does? I'm interested in knowing seeing as it's exclusive with the other two major options as russia (panslavism and third rome) and can only imagine it just being guarantees or puppet requests.
 
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We considered doing that, but we felt there was no need since Penal Batallions are far from being communist-specific. It should work flavor-wise regardless of the ideology you follow as SU/Russia.

However, I believe you made several proposals for focus flavor changes in the common branches when SU goes non-communist, and as I said in that thread there were really good ideas there, and some of them have been implemented into the game, such as:

View attachment 761017

So, thank you for your feedback!
The battlepriests leading troups for the god-emperor of Mankid Russia are coming !
 
All of the changes are made, and I'd like to thank the devs for addressing some of our concerns. However, the issues with the "Third Rome" path still persist. Allow me to reiterate these from my original post on the "Russian Exiles" dev diary in August:

This path should not overthrow the Tsar or remove them from power or whatever, because the idea of Russia and more specifically Moscow being the Third Rome was encouraged by the Tsars themselves, working in collaboration with the Church. If you want to find a way to make the Patriarch take over Russia somehow, it should involve making the Tsar a figurehead who cedes power to the Church or something, even though that doesn't particularly make sense. Either way, a key theme of a "Third Rome" path should include the restoration of the Byzantine Empire in Greece/Turkey (since the idea of the Third Rome stemmed from the fact that the Tsars were technically descendants of Byzantine royalty, further underscoring the point that they should not be removed from power in a "Third Rome" path).

As it stands this path is unimmersive and flies in the face of history and tradition, and as a result I can't really take it seriously like the other two exiles paths.
 
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Given the rather impractical placement of Leningrad (and how quickly it was abandoned as capital in WW1) I'd suggest either:
St. Petersberg/Petrograd/Leningrad is only badly placed if you are losing. It's actually quite favorably placed to support sea supply. At least, compared to Moscow it is.
 
Have you tested out for the possibility of a 2-width spam breakthrough meta? I really love the changes to combat, but this one possibility worries me.

I also have one suggestion. Could the officers system be expanded, in a way that each country has a total amount of available officers? Each division would require a certain amount of officers, & they would die in battle similarly as how you lose manpower. The amount of available officers could be a simple % of your total population, or could be something more in depth with player interaction and requiring investments. Depending on how much the player is investing and how many officers his armies requires, you could have high quality officers that would improve combat efficicency and even supply to some extent.
If 2 combat width meta ever becomes a thing, a more in-depth officer system could counter this, without giving away the benefits of how the new combat system works.
I'd also like to have to manage a pool of trained pilots. It was one of the strengths of the Allies being able to train large numbers of pilots whereas their enemies were unable to do so - Germany lacked the fuel while Japan had a different training tradition.
 
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