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HOI4 Dev Diary - Formables and Releasables

Hello everyone and welcome to another dev diary for La Resistance! I should begin by introducing myself: I am Meka, I joined Paradox just a few months ago as a Content Designer. Some of you may be aware of me due to my work on Theocracies and Burgundy over on EUIV, but now I'm here to show what mischief I've been up to in my time on Hearts of Iron.

Man the Guns saw the creation of a lot of new tags, making some countries balkanisable, and almost all of the world decolonisable. Waking the Tiger saw the introduction of formable tags, a mechanic that until now has not been further utilised. However, with the Husky patch, a whole slew of new releasable tags will be added to the game along with two new formable nations; one as part of the free patch, and one for owners of La Resistance.
Polynesia 001.png

Starting with releasable tags, Man the Guns allowed most of the world to be decolonised, but Oceania was mostly left unloved with only one nation being added to the continent, leaving the rest of the disparate islands untouched and still under colonial rule. However, I have added 6 new releasable tags and one formable for the region.

The Kingdom of Hawaii was only annexed by the United States 38 years before the start of Hearts of Iron and can be released along with most of the US’s pacific holdings.
Polynesia 002.png


Tahiti
Polynesia 003.png


Samoa
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The Federated States of Micronesia
Polynesia 005.png


The Solomon Islands
Polynesia 006.png


The Mariana Federation
Polynesia 007.png


These disparate islands may struggle to survive on their own, and so a nation who holds enough of the Polynesian Triangle will be able to unite all Pacific peoples into a single state known as Polynesia. This state will be formable by any nation listed above plus New Zealand. Unlike other formable tags, this nation can be created by dominions meaning New Zealand does not necessarily have to leave the Allies in order to form this tag.
Polynesia 008.png


But perhaps players wish to live out an alternate history where the Naha Prophecy was fulfilled and Kamehameha united the Pacific several years earlier. With the Polynesian Empire game rule, Hawaii will begin the game having already conquered the entirety of the Polynesian Islands and built up a fair-sized industry.
Polynesia 009.png

Polynesia 010.png


The ability to form Polynesia is a free feature, as are the releasable tags.


Along with adding these releasable nations, I did also touch up the old fragmentation game options to make the world fully split into different continents. The UK now surrenders its African, Asian, and American islands to its former colonies, Portugal surrenders Timor to Indonesia, and a few other small changes like that.


Also, armies standing around in former colonial territories is now a thing of the past and nations will now only have armies stationed in territories where they have access.
Armies.png


Iberia is a focal point of La Resistance and as such, a few releasable tags have been added to the subcontinent as well.


Catalonia
Catalonia.png


The Basque Country
Basque.png


Galicia
Galicia.png


Spain can of course be fractured from the start of the game by selecting the appropriate option in the game menu. However, I noticed Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia simply weren’t enough to make Iberia look “shattered” so I took the liberty of adding an “11th of November” game rule, and I will leave it for you all to speculate what that option does.
Spanish Fragmentation.png


When it comes to the second formable, one must be opportunistic and take full advantage of the instability in Spain and Portugal. The Moorish people once reigned sovereign over all of Iberia, and owners of La Resistance will be able to restore the long-dead state of Al-Andalus.
Andalusia Conditions.png


Andalusia was once an Islamic Sultanate that ruled from the Iberian peninsula and a beacon of the Islamic world. Through struggles with the Catholic kingdoms in the medieval era, the Andalusians would slowly be pushed out of Iberia, ending with the conquest of the Emirate of Granada in 1520. However, the Moorish people continue to exist to this day in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria, many of whom are descendants from Moorish refugees fleeing the Spanish Reconquista.

Andalusia will be formable by any of the North African countries; Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara, Algeria, or Libya. In order to form this tag, one must occupy a large portion of both Spain and Portugal’s southern states and forming the tag grants cores on the entirety of the Iberian subcontinent.
Andalusia 1.png


But that isn’t the end of Andalusia. Similar to Byzantium’s “triumph” decisions, Andalusia will be able to sweep across the Mediterranean and beyond, restoring their old claims and titles.
Andalusia Decision 2.png


If a player can enact all decisions relating to the Andalusian conquests of North Africa and the Med, they will be able to press on for Egypt and Arabia and declare themselves the Umayyad Caliphate reborn, granting cores on the Arabian Peninsula.
Andalusia Decision 3.png


Upon doing so, Andalusia will unlock their final set of decisions, allowing them to restore the entire former claims and titles of the Umayyad Caliphate, effectively reuinifying the Islamic world.
Andalusia Decision 4.png

Andalusia 3.png


As we have expanded the scope of Hearts of Iron, some old bits of content started to become outdated and lead to some annoying bugs, which I have dedicated some time to fixing. One key thing I have improved is the way that the British Raj interacts with different game options and Britain doing strange things. From now on, the Raj will be able to freely pursue their focus tree even if Britain forces them into independence, with some focuses bypassing, and others no longer requiring the Raj to be a subject.
Raj Fix.png


Join Da9L, Bratyn and Jojo at 16:00CET on twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive as they have a closer look at Anarchist Spain!
 
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I did touch on bugs briefly such as fixing the bug with colonial troops standing around in their former territory and updating the Raj's focus tree to work better with MtG. I've been bugfixing as part of my work a lot since joining HoI and I wanted to share a part of my work that shows off some new content I have made of my own free will.

And you did an excellent job all around, @Meka66. Please do not take this forum's wariness as personal; we have been starved out of simple bug fixes for more than half a year despite raining money on PDX (Man the Guns sold like water in the desert by all reports, and HOI4 is the company's most played game by far).

Keep up the good work!
 
As a Galician I appreciate you recognize we exist, you even used the flag invented by Castelao (famous Galician nationalist from the era of the game) for the country. Although using "La Coruña" as capital and city name would be unrealistic. Nowadays, even being part of Spain, the only official name of that city is "A Coruña" in proper Galician and the capital is Santiago de Compostela. Just changing the name would be a nice touch.
 
I’m fully aware that content design in this case takes no time from fixing ai bugs or whatever, but what it does is just pile on to the heap of things that currently are working badly.

These country tags might work fine or they may not, it doesn’t matter, so many more important things are functioning poorly anyway.

You say that you understand content design and AI bugs are different, but you're still saying they shouldn't add them until existing problems are fixed. Adding new formable nations isn't going to make fixing the naval AI any harder. Again, I point out that this dev diary actually talked about devoting time to fixing bugs, so this dev diary actually specifically said they're working on bug fixes, like you'd hoped.
 
You say that you understand content design and AI bugs are different, but you're still saying they shouldn't add them until existing problems are fixed. Adding new formable nations isn't going to make fixing the naval AI any harder. Again, I point out that this dev diary actually talked about devoting time to fixing bugs, so this dev diary actually specifically said they're working on bug fixes, like you'd hoped.

Yes, how is that confusing? More content equals more problems when it comes to this game, ergo, try to make the stuff from the last one work ok before expecting people to pay for the next one.
 
I very much made the decisions for Andalusia in the spirit of the existing Byzantium formable, prioritising fun and layered objectives over any historical believability.
Sooo.. Pax Mongolica confirmed?
 
More content equals more problems when it comes to this game, ergo, try to make the stuff from the last one work ok before expecting people to pay for the next one.

Again, they ARE trying to fix stuff, and if they follow their past model all of that will be available as a free patch alongside the DLC. Think of all of this as fixes to old content, paid for by the people who decide to buy the new DLC. And it sounds like you're arguing that adding additional releasable nation tags and adding a new naval combat system are equivalent in terms of how many bugs they cause, which I'm pretty confident is not the case.
 
I have to say that I love all of this alt-history stuff, and restoring the Umayyad Caliphate is such a delightfully absurd option to have in the game that I feel like I'm going to have to do it at least once.
 
It has been a long day, but I suddenly feel like playing Egypt as they overthrow their British masters and seize the canal, threatening to destroy it if attacked. The uprising spreads rebellions all across North Africa and eventually spreads across the continent. No one is Allied, Axis, or Comintern. Even South Africa says, once is a enough, and decides to go neutral. The majors withdraw from the African "distraction". A nice change of pace with much smaller armies while the major powers fight their WW2.

Yea, I know it is not believable, but Germany winning the war is pretty far fetched, too. Still, many of us play the Germans because it is fun. That is why we play, right? For fun, I sometimes want a change of pace, before doing the big war again. It is nice this game can give me both.
 
Sure, as soon as one content designer has some free time at his hand and you 5 to 10 € for the cosmetic DLC :)
My entire post was sarcasm . . . To AzrealForReal and MercerFrey, and anyone else that might disagree on it, it was a joke. I thought about putting sarcasm at the end of the comment, but considering how ridiculous it was, all you guys should have picked up on it.

EDIT: I did now point out now that it wasn't a serious post.
 
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As we have expanded the scope of Hearts of Iron, some old bits of content started to become outdated and lead to some annoying bugs, which I have dedicated some time to fixing. One key thing I have improved is the way that the British Raj interacts with different game options and Britain doing strange things. From now on, the Raj will be able to freely pursue their focus tree even if Britain forces them into independence, with some focuses bypassing, and others no longer requiring the Raj to be a subject.

Being serious for a minute, there's an issue that I think you all should look at, hopefully before the release of 1.9.

Britain choosing a different ideology results in the dominions breaking away, and there is some special scripting that allows them to go down alternate ideologies in the focus tree even if they have already picked the loyalist path. If you use the decisions to provoke a civil war by imperial loyalists, then this is "reset" and the facsist/communist spirits are undone and the dominion is forced back into its loyalist path.

The problem is that this REQUIRES you to use the civil war decisions, which cost ~100 PP each. If you conquer the dominions with just a wargoal rather than instigating civil war, then they are still stuck with their communist/fascist focuses. For King's Party Britain which has a passive 50% increase to PP generation, this isn't a huge deal, but for Fascist Britain which has no bonuses to PP generation and no access to any PP generation advisors, it's something of a pressing issue.

Thanks.
 
Again, they ARE trying to fix stuff, and if they follow their past model all of that will be available as a free patch alongside the DLC. Think of all of this as fixes to old content, paid for by the people who decide to buy the new DLC. And it sounds like you're arguing that adding additional releasable nation tags and adding a new naval combat system are equivalent in terms of how many bugs they cause, which I'm pretty confident is not the case.

You really struggle to miss my point and instead try to tell me what I’m arguing... Having to wait a year after buying a DLc to be able to play it as it was intended is pretty f-in bad. And for the last time, these tags as such are not the issue. The fact that someone thought it was worth even a minutes work to include them in a game centered around ww2 is.
 
Having to wait a year after buying a DLc to be able to play it as it was intended is pretty f-in bad.

But you can go play it, you can go play it right now. A lot of people are, and are enjoying it. Most people who play this game (probably playing on Recruit) won't notice the naval bugs, and don't care about them.

And for the last time, these tags as such are not the issue. The fact that someone thought it was worth even a minutes work to include them in a game centered around ww2 is.

I'm honestly having trouble understanding this... it's not the tags, it's that they spent time working on them?

It seems like you, personally, want to play a historical WW2 sim. That's great, that's how I play it too! But people play the game as an ahistorical WW2 sandbox as well, apparently about half of the people who play the game. Just because something doesn't have value to you, doesn't make it worthless.
 
Not gonna lie, the Andalusia thing feels kind of absurd. I can understand most of the other formable nations, but the idea of Morocco managing to actually hold all of Iberia, much less the entire Muslim world, is far-fetched at best.

Then again, we are getting some new resistance mechanics in this DLC, so that might make it more realistic by making it almost impossible to actually govern effectively?

Speaking of formables and cores, is it possible we could get an update to Austria-Hungary's path, so we can get more cores on conquered territory? Having a supporter of Pan-Europa on the throne makes it a bit more feasible, after all!
 
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