Hi everyone and welcome back to regular weekly dev diaries (if you don't count the april fools one last week). I know you are all super excited to hear what we have been up to since Battle for the Bosporus. The answers to that are going to take a few dev diaries to cover, so I figured I would start with a timeline for you:

• We recently released 1.10.4 to fix various multiplayer exploits going on, but seems an important case was not detected at the time so we are working on a 1.10.5 to address that soon.
• Pdxcon is coming up in May so expect to hear some more details there.
• The yearly anniversary is coming in June so expect some cool stuff and a patch.
• We are however spending most of our time on the 1.11 Barbarossa update as well as the unannounced expansion that will be released together with it. That's what we will spend most of our diaries on, as well as today!

‘Barbarossa’ and the unannounced DLC will focus on the Eastern Front and the core of Hearts of Iron, which is warfare - particularly land warfare. Historically the Eastern Front was without doubt the most important front for World War II. It was the largest confrontation in history and
is where Hitler’s expansion was first stopped and pushed back signaling the eventual doom of the axis powers. There are several areas we want to improve here. Weather does not feel impactful enough, while historically it had a massive impact. Logistics currently doesn’t have much player interaction and is mostly something you have to deal with only when problems appear, and finally the combat and division meta has been stable (with an emphasis on large divisions) for a long time - something we hope we can shake up. As you can imagine, these are all things that affect the game on a deeper level and take a lot of work to get right.

Today, I’ll give you guys a bit of an overview on the supply aspect, but fair warning: it’s early days and stuff may still change here before we’re done. I’ll probably spend 3+ diaries on supply over the course of the development to cover everything, but I figured it would be nice to hear about the overarching ideas.

The old system worked by having discrete supply areas pathing back to the players capital and keeping track of the bottlenecks. To simplify a bit - those bottlenecks then decided how many units could fit into areas near the front without penalties. The areas themselves were unintuitive to players and required you to check multiple mapmodes to see if you stepped over an edge etc. I do like bottleneck systems though, because feedback is usually immediate, but it suffered from not having much scaling cost as distances increased, so it was hard to use it to limit snowballing. As I mentioned it was also a system you didn't care too much about until you had problems, while historically, logistics was a vital part of planning a campaign. This led to combining the issue with another gripe of ours - that the way fronts moved in WW2 often followed important railroads, but don't really in HOI4. We came to the conclusion that we should try and make a system focused on railways and with a truck based component as a way to get more out of it when away from the rails.

In our new system, supply flows from the capital (the total amount available depends on your total industrial base) through railways, where the level of the railway acts as a bottleneck. To transport more, you need a higher level railway (or a bigger port if it goes over water) so the railways are the current bottlenecks in a way. Depending on how much supply is transported you need a certain amount of trains for the rails to perform. Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P)

An important part of railways is that they are capturable, so as you push into enemy territory you will want to make sure to hold vital railways and capture railway hubs to supply your troops. There is a conversion time here to model the fact that there was usually some repair or re-gauging that needed to happen for attackers.

Mapmodes are still quite WIP

Rivers also had a huge importance on the eastern front for transport and supply so they will work essentially like basic railroads now, where you need to control both sides of their banks to use them to ship supplies around.

Supply is drawn from what we call Supply Hubs now, which are either cities, naval bases, or manually constructed stations along the rails, which have to be linked into the network. Air supply works a bit differently but we will talk about this in the future along with some other supply additions...

The flow of supply from a Hub to a division depends on the terrain/weather etc, and ideally you want to have available trucks here (which is to say, motorized equipment) to increase the amount of supply you get as well as range. Cost of trucks and trains and losses to attrition and bad weather will be a limiting factor on your logistics.

Overall, this creates a system where it's strategically sound to fight over railways, prepare for large offensives, to try and bleed each other's logistics capability and to force care when advancing in bad terrain and weather. The result is a much more fun, historical and immersive Eastern Front as well as adding a new layer of invasion planning in the rest of the world.

See you all next week for the next diary!

 

[Sad german player]

L think we need the add war train 1nd gustav train canon or any think about war+trains

 

[santisav]

It would be very important for the player to have an easy way of knowing how much supply is required by an army or an army group and how much supply they can get from the railways and infrastructure. This could also be linked to the intelligence system. If the player has good intelligence of another country's civilian aspects he can see details of logistics and then he can plan his advance better. Also, there must be a better way to plan or making more detailed plans so you can make thrusts through logitical routes. It would help if you could mark a territory or a spot as to be avoided in a plan so that you dont hold your entire offensive and instead you can surround a city and siege it. Better data views on equipment and supply lost in battle would be necessary to allow the player to understand why his offensive is stalling.

For the land battle side im also very exited!! Please include a deeper planning ! For example making field marshal plans compatible with general plans. Being able to plan a naval invasion and the actions after it. A big part of the reason why everyone micro is because its fun ajja but also because plans are very general and details and small operations cannot be planned. Overhaul planning !!



This looks awesome devs !! So happy!

 

[Classicgamer23]

I know you said that Italy won't receive a new focus tree, but could they have an infrastructure focus renamed to "Getting the Trains to Run on Time" or something similar? It was Mussolini's dream after all

 

[blahmaster6k]

25 pages already, look how hungry the fans have been.

I combed through 115 pages of the hoi4 forum to make the meme on the first page of this thread. There have been like 50 different threads of people complaining/begging for dev diaries.

 

[Kazanov]

Amazing! Logistics is my favorite part of a war

 

[Wombat69]

Have not read all comments to review if this idea has been discussed yet.

I see lots of opportunities for new supplies.
Troops need fuel, which we have already implemented.

However, this is an opportunity to make munitions a resource.
Munitions factories could be another new building type.
They would need steel (or other materials) as resource.

Food supplies is another resource for troops.

What about partisan attacks on trains? This was a considerable factor in the German rear during Barbarossa.

I would not even need a long answer, but a simple yes or no if this would be considered would make me happy.

 

[Wombat69]

Also - when will the missing art for jet planes and experimental planes be filled???

 

[BeauNiddle]

Have not read all comments to review if this idea has been discussed yet.

I see lots of opportunities for new supplies.
Troops need fuel, which we have already implemented.

However, this is an opportunity to make munitions a resource.
Munitions factories could be another new building type.
They would need steel (or other materials) as resource.

Food supplies is another resource for troops.

What about partisan attacks on trains? This was a considerable factor in the German rear during Barbarossa.

I would not even need a long answer, but a simple yes or no if this would be considered would make me happy.

Ammunition is already included in the equipment you make - it's why you burn through so much equipment in combat. It also means you need specific resources for specific ammunition - e.g. tungsten for artillery shells

Food is amoungst the current "supply" that troops need and needs to be shipped to them (although there is some local supply)

partisan attacks on trains hasn't been covered yet but makes a lot of sense

 

[Wombat69]

Ammunition is already included in the equipment you make - it's why you burn through so much equipment in combat. It also means you need specific resources for specific ammunition - e.g. tungsten for artillery shells

Food is amoungst the current "supply" that troops need and needs to be shipped to them (although there is some local supply)

partisan attacks on trains hasn't been covered yet but makes a lot of sense

Understood - what I am trying to say is that munitions can be separated from the equipment itself. There is a constant flow of ammunition’s to be delivered while the tank (or whatever’s else) remains the same. Apart from spare parts that is.

 

[Wombat69]

Right, Fuel in Germany went to Panzers and Panzer Divisions, not to trucks. Horses moved supplies from rail heads to the troops so as not to waste fuel.

Horses got less stuck in the Russian mud than trucks did.

 

[Von Man Steiner]

Horses got less stuck in the Russian mud than trucks did.

This. Also horses were often times usable where trucks weren't like in tough terrain. Horses were widely used by most nations other than the USA really. Trucks aren't always better, but I doubt the devs will replicate this, which is ok really.

 

[safe-keeper]

Have not read all comments to review if this idea has been discussed yet.

I see lots of opportunities for new supplies.
Troops need fuel, which we have already implemented.

However, this is an opportunity to make munitions a resource.
Munitions factories could be another new building type.
They would need steel (or other materials) as resource.

Food supplies is another resource for troops.

What about partisan attacks on trains? This was a considerable factor in the German rear during Barbarossa.

I would not even need a long answer, but a simple yes or no if this would be considered would make me happy.

Partisans will probably hit railroads. I'd be surprised if they didn't.
I'd like for players to have to produce supplies, too, but haven't seen any sign of this yet.

 

[Fulmen]

"Flows from the capital" is the first point that really disappoints me. The mathematical form for flow from distributed origin points is actually no more 'heavy' than the single point version, as I wrote while ago, so I don't really think this is necessary or desirable. It also means that placement of industry doesn't really matter, which is not really a valid model (or as fun a game).

Do I remember correctly that AoD has supply originate from multiple points on the map (factories), rather than all originating from the capital?

A big +1 to this. I suspect it won't be part of the design, but I've gone on about this before. The millions and millions of tons shipped using coastal convoys, whether down the coast of Norway, along the coast of North Africa, through the English Channel (by both sides), in the Adriatic and Aegean, and elsewhere were a crucial part of the WW2 logistics effort. However, they've very poorly understood/recognised, and I suspect given the base game wasn't designed around them, not easy to 'squeeze' into HoI4 as it stands currently.

I fear the naval war particularly in the Baltic Sea will never get properly represented in HoI4. You'd need proper representation of archipelagos, coastal waters, coastal batteries, gunboats, torpedo boats, proper minefields, a giant anti-submarine net, key islands like Suursaari, more seazones and honestly a bigger map... But hopefully we'll at least get some improvements to the region, as well as representation of convoys going from Liinahamari and Narvik to Germany via coastal routes.

 

[rutger9]

It would be really cool if a similar way of representing horse draws transport was taken as Gary Grigsbies war in the east 2, that being that if horse drawn transport is used a certain amount of supply is consumed to transport a larger amount of supply. That way there'd be a direct reward to using motorized transport for supply delivery because you could both deliver more supply, not consume it to deliver it and probably deliver it over a longer distance, you would in exchange though be consuming fuel.

While I do not have an idea how you are balancing supply costs yet to just give an example of how I imagine it could work.
A supply depot receives 500 tons of supply, the total supply requirement of the divisions it wants to supply is 400 tons, for every province moved by horse drawn transport 1 supply unit would be consumed for lets say every 10 supply units. So if these units are in one stack 3 provinces away 120 supply would be consumed to deliver that larger number of which 380 would factually reach the divisions. This way there is a measurable cost to using both forms of transportation without having to include horse drawn equipment which as war in the east 2 shows is absolutely not needed for an in depth game to effectively represent the cost of moving supplies.

 

[Balesir]

This. Also horses were often times usable where trucks weren't like in tough terrain. Horses were widely used by most nations other than the USA really. Trucks aren't always better, but I doubt the devs will replicate this, which is ok really.

Indeed - and not just horses, per se. The Indian army switched to using lots of mules in Burma because they handled jungle-covered mountains and monsoon mud better than lorries. Lorries in France, on the other hand, were a huge boon.

Do I remember correctly that AoD has supply originate from multiple points on the map (factories), rather than all originating from the capital?

Yes, that's what I had in mind with my comments. Essentially, a flood fill algorithm for minimum 'range' from multiple points is no more operation-intensive than one from a single source.

 

[Ramage]

Hi everyone and welcome back to regular weekly dev diaries (if you don't count the april fools one last week). I know you are all super excited to hear what we have been up to since Battle for the Bosporus. The answers to that are going to take a few dev diaries to cover, so I figured I would start with a timeline for you:

• We recently released 1.10.4 to fix various multiplayer exploits going on, but seems an important case was not detected at the time so we are working on a 1.10.5 to address that soon.
• Pdxcon is coming up in May so expect to hear some more details there.
• The yearly anniversary is coming in June so expect some cool stuff and a patch.
• We are however spending most of our time on the 1.11 Barbarossa update as well as the unannounced expansion that will be released together with it. That's what we will spend most of our diaries on, as well as today!

‘Barbarossa’ and the unannounced DLC will focus on the Eastern Front and the core of Hearts of Iron, which is warfare - particularly land warfare. Historically the Eastern Front was without doubt the most important front for World War II. It was the largest confrontation in history and
is where Hitler’s expansion was first stopped and pushed back signaling the eventual doom of the axis powers. There are several areas we want to improve here. Weather does not feel impactful enough, while historically it had a massive impact. Logistics currently doesn’t have much player interaction and is mostly something you have to deal with only when problems appear, and finally the combat and division meta has been stable (with an emphasis on large divisions) for a long time - something we hope we can shake up. As you can imagine, these are all things that affect the game on a deeper level and take a lot of work to get right.

Today, I’ll give you guys a bit of an overview on the supply aspect, but fair warning: it’s early days and stuff may still change here before we’re done. I’ll probably spend 3+ diaries on supply over the course of the development to cover everything, but I figured it would be nice to hear about the overarching ideas.

The old system worked by having discrete supply areas pathing back to the players capital and keeping track of the bottlenecks. To simplify a bit - those bottlenecks then decided how many units could fit into areas near the front without penalties. The areas themselves were unintuitive to players and required you to check multiple mapmodes to see if you stepped over an edge etc. I do like bottleneck systems though, because feedback is usually immediate, but it suffered from not having much scaling cost as distances increased, so it was hard to use it to limit snowballing. As I mentioned it was also a system you didn't care too much about until you had problems, while historically, logistics was a vital part of planning a campaign. This led to combining the issue with another gripe of ours - that the way fronts moved in WW2 often followed important railroads, but don't really in HOI4. We came to the conclusion that we should try and make a system focused on railways and with a truck based component as a way to get more out of it when away from the rails.

View attachment 701614

In our new system, supply flows from the capital (the total amount available depends on your total industrial base) through railways, where the level of the railway acts as a bottleneck. To transport more, you need a higher level railway (or a bigger port if it goes over water) so the railways are the current bottlenecks in a way. Depending on how much supply is transported you need a certain amount of trains for the rails to perform. Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P)

An important part of railways is that they are capturable, so as you push into enemy territory you will want to make sure to hold vital railways and capture railway hubs to supply your troops. There is a conversion time here to model the fact that there was usually some repair or re-gauging that needed to happen for attackers.

View attachment 701605
View attachment 701616
Mapmodes are still quite WIP

Rivers also had a huge importance on the eastern front for transport and supply so they will work essentially like basic railroads now, where you need to control both sides of their banks to use them to ship supplies around.

View attachment 701607

Supply is drawn from what we call Supply Hubs now, which are either cities, naval bases, or manually constructed stations along the rails, which have to be linked into the network. Air supply works a bit differently but we will talk about this in the future along with some other supply additions...

The flow of supply from a Hub to a division depends on the terrain/weather etc, and ideally you want to have available trucks here (which is to say, motorized equipment) to increase the amount of supply you get as well as range. Cost of trucks and trains and losses to attrition and bad weather will be a limiting factor on your logistics.

View attachment 701610

Overall, this creates a system where it's strategically sound to fight over railways, prepare for large offensives, to try and bleed each other's logistics capability and to force care when advancing in bad terrain and weather. The result is a much more fun, historical and immersive Eastern Front as well as adding a new layer of invasion planning in the rest of the world.

See you all next week for the next diary!

Nice dev. Talking of supply I have a suggestion. I ran into problems as a novice us player planning a surprise attack on Japanese islands when I dumped too many GIs onto Johnson atoll to find not enough supply and they were starving and had to rapidly ship them back to Hawaii. So my question is: Can you build in a division predictor that shows the potential max division capacity of an existing supply zone BEFORE you send your troops there to aid battle planning?

 

[Harin]

Nice dev. Talking of supply I have a suggestion. I ran into problems as a novice us player planning a surprise attack on Japanese islands when I dumped too many GIs onto Johnson atoll to find not enough supply and they were starving and had to rapidly ship them back to Hawaii. So my question is: Can you build in a division predictor that shows the potential max division capacity of an existing supply zone BEFORE you send your troops there to aid battle planning?

Similar to what @Ramage is saying, it would be helpful to have an easy to see supply consumption number for a group of divisions.

 

[kimidf]

the implementation of the railways opens the possibility that in the future to investigate the super heavy siege artillery such as the German Dora or Gustav

 

[zanyfred]

When it comes to logistics and supply , the biggest problem I encounter is the way allied troops are deployed onto player frontlines and ruin supply. Its the number one reason I avoid joining factions or call allies to war. I haven't seen any question related to this....

Are you going to address ai controlled troops ruining player supply?

 

[Harin]

Now that there have been several posts about railroad guns, how could they be modeled at a grand strategic level? I know they would look good on the map and should make BOOM like no other, but how do they fight in the combat system? Would they strictly be used for actions before combat, like reducing a fort? Would it take them a month or more to set up, like in real life?