HOI4 Dev Diary - Future and Cornflakes

[DCyDe]

A league of nations would be nice that works similar to the HRE in EU4, where you can pass reforms that eventually can make it into the UNO.
That would be really really nice for mods that take place after WW2.

 

[steve.bd]

Now this is an awesome roadmap

Can't wait to know which of this will be in the next dlc bu i bet on the naval ones

 

[ValientBacon]

Great stuff. I look forward to some (or all?) of these things being implemented. They look like they will really bring new life to the game.

 

[Emren]

Historically it's impossible to plan an attack unless the attacking divisions are right next to the enemy?

If you keep up with decryption tech and build radar you can see enemy units behind the front lines. As for a historical basis it is the well know fake divisions for a supposed landing at Calais were created and believed, deception and misdirecting where you were strong and weak was a pretty big thing at the time.

What Alex suggested was a defensive line "some provinces back" where you could create a battleplan and build up a planning bonus, and then cut off the unsuspecting enemy once he rolled into your trap using that bonus. At least that's what I understood from his proposal. I challenge you (in a friendly manner, of course) to find an example i WW2 where a trap so deep was deliberately created.

Wasn't that basically what happened at Kursk in '43?

Not in those terms above, no. The Germans were effectively halted by determined defenders and subsequently counterattacked. You can easily accomplish this in the game already - build a strong defensive line, let the enemy bleed against it, and then launch attacks from armored units that sit behind the front line. And they don't need a planning bonus to be succesful, at all.

 

[Nicolas I]

All interesting features, but here's my short list:

• Properly represent fuel in some way in the game

• A Chain of Command system

• More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour + Improved naval combat interfaces with good transparency to underlying mechanics (give it the 1.4 air treatment) + Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare

• Spies and espionage

• Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff

• Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure

 

[George_VI]

Nice to see the possibility of expanding Britain's focuses. It'd be good to have a more in depth management of the Empire, and perhaps the inevitable march towards decolonisation after the Second World War has actually finished.

 

[SrgChris]

@podcat In general it would be helpful if you had more options to customise certain features for Multiplayer, with respect to the wishes of the group that are playing.

Considering games range from 2 or 3 people messing around, to groups of 12 or 10 playing free for all, or as is the case for most forum groups or TS/Discord games, 20+ players trying to do Allies v Axis historical-esque games, the current Multiplayer set up doesn't help to accommodate for any of these. A lot of the time, especially for the latter, an external and complicated rule set has to be used.

Simple options like "no factions" (FFA) , "historical war start" (Historical games) , "AI aggression towards players" (3 friends trying to survive the onslaught ) etc. would help tailor the lobbies and attract the right people.

 

[Alex_brunius]

What Alex suggested was a defensive line "some provinces back" where you could create a battleplan and build up a planning bonus, and then cut off the unsuspecting enemy once he rolled into your trap using that bonus. At least that's what I understood from his proposal. I challenge you (in a friendly manner, of course) to find an example i WW2 where a trap so deep was deliberately created.

Both the soviet counterattacks at Moscow in winter 1941 and Stalingrad in winter 1942 are good historical examples of where massive armored offensives were planned months prior to attack without revealing the tank divisions by putting them on the front.


In fact I challenge you to find historical examples to support that tanks must be put at the border over a month before an attack ( or counter attack ) in order to be able to carry it out successfully with maximum preparation and planning advantage!

 

[Mr Friendly]

@podcat I wish the division designer improvement and more buildings had rated a mention and the 5 year plan had been called the two year plan. And maybe you should brag that your staff numbers have increased and tell us who they all are again, thereby increasing our expectations? None of us would be disappointed or unsupportive of an expansion that was much larger than the average size.

 

[thinking_waffle]

@podcat I think that more politically flexible focuses could be interresting too. Currently once a government is replaced by the allies he will keep +0.1 communism/fascism influence and sooner or later they will be back in power. If the communists are replaced the political commissars should be removed and other bonuses regarding nationalism or freedoms should be granted depending if the government is fascist or democratic (Yes I forgot about the neutrals because my perception of it depends if the leader is "moderatist" (doesn't seem too bad), "authoritarian" (I find this more problematic)

In addition I would like to note that post war elements could be used directly on Vichy France to reflect its neutral/not so neutral weird status (btw random french names are taken from generals of the 19th century and the first world war and it shows).

Otherwise I don't have anything bad to say about this long term plan.

 

[CantRushThis]

• Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff

Maybe allow nations to sell stock in return for civilian factories?

 

[EntropyAvatar]

What Alex suggested was a defensive line "some provinces back" where you could create a battleplan and build up a planning bonus, and then cut off the unsuspecting enemy once he rolled into your trap using that bonus. At least that's what I understood from his proposal. I challenge you (in a friendly manner, of course) to find an example i WW2 where a trap so deep was deliberately created.

I don't think the "trap" part is particularly important here. The game needs the ability to plan an attack while not on the front line. As I understand it, the normal course of events, an attack is planned, units move up to the enemy, and the attack begins. In HoI4, units can't begin to plan until they are adjacent to the enemy. That seems rather constraining. In particular, you probably don't want your mobile divisions sitting on the front line in plain view while you plan.

I think this also applies to mobile reserves. If you keep your mobile reserves on the front line, then they can counter-attack with full effectiveness (assuming they aren't pinned by a spoiler attack). Mobile reserves behind the line are less capable on the attack, for reasons which are hard to understand.

 

[Praetori]

stuff isnt locked down at all in this list. this is supposed to give you an idea where we are moving, so feel free to discuss and suggest stuff

Utilize your beautiful map and the layered approach even more with strategic-level, operational-level and tactical level simplifications and interactions with information appearing or disappearing and grouping to relative scale/zoom.
Something like:
-Zoomed out, theater-logistics, strategic warfare and theater/army-group grouping, relative force balance etc and relevant interactions (resistance etc).
-Operationally relevant zoom level with army/corps grouping and information, general battleplan information, air-warfare, weather etc.
-Zoomed in tactical information, divisions, battleplan arrows, terrain, aircraft zooming about. divisional battles etc.

 

[Merrivale]

@podcat This looks like a great list and I'm not surprised at all to see HOI IV starting to gain exit velocity.

Obviously I'm here to post about message settings. I've refrained for months as I know you've had bigger fish to fry and I wanted to give you time to come up with your alternative solution you brought up.

I'm guessing you're still planning on doing something and the omission from the list is an oversight, but I think it's pretty telling. I'm not going to rehash the arguments in favor of some sort of system that lets you know who what when and where instantly, as well as going to the spot if you want. I think they've been made, and if you're not persuaded you basically never will be. I'll reiterate that making this moddable, if possible, would result in a community solution pretty quickly.

What I do want to suggest is that whatever you end up deciding to do, bring @Axe99 in on the process. He loves this game and is one of its most visible supporters on these forums. He is a modder, so he's at least somewhat familiar with coding on a basic level. And most importantly, he plays in the style that no one at Paradox understands, so he's going to be able to be straight with you and let you know if you are really solving the problem (assuming you don't just implement message settings a la HOI III). He almost certainly will not leak to the forum or badmouth your behind closed doors discussions or decisions. To me it looks like there is a TON of groupthink at PDS right now when it comes to UI and how to engage with your games and I think you need a different perspective if you're going to do something about this problem (which you have acknowledged is a problem) that works.

 

[DicRoNero]

Quoting another thread here:

Also, please a mothball feature, where ships are (over time) reduced to ex. 50% strength and manpower is returned to pool and ships rendered unusable until un-mothballed. (can still be bombed in port ofc)

So much this!

I only play minors and every man matters.

 

[CantRushThis]

Cornflakes tho.

For those wondering Operation Cornflakes was to trick Deutsche Reichspost (German National Postal Service) into delivering anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens during 1944-45. It involved Allied C47s dropping bags of properly addressed mail around bombed German mail trains.

Air resupply and propaganda confirmed

 

[adil3tr]

Hi everyone, this week I'm going to take some time and talk future plans with you all.

Right now
With the "Oak" 1.4.2 patch out the door and the team back from vacation its time to start looking at the future. This week we started work on the next DLC which is going to be a full-sized expansion. A lot of people have been asking for more mechanics and larger changes, and this will be it. As normal the expansion will arrive together with a free update we've dubbed 1.5 "Cornflakes".

As for exactly what these will contain you will need to bear with us a bit. As I said with us getting started on it now we need some time to actually make and test stuff before we start showing it off to you. This will mean that the next two diaries (if all goes according to plan) are going to be covering other stuff while we get ready. My plan there is to get some guest writing in from people who can talk about the business and process side of the company and team.

The five year plan
Not actually a five year plan, but I want to share with you some form of roadmap on what to expect in the future. Some of you may have seen me talk about some of this in my PdxCon talk earlier this year.

Just to be super clear, this is not any form of exhaustive or final list and unless we have already done it we can't promise anythings. Priorities change etc. The point of this is to give you an idea of things we would like to do. The order of things is also not in any kind of priority order, or order we would do them.

• Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc.
• More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour
• A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals
• A logistics system with more actual player involvement (now you only care once stuff has gone very badly)
• Improved naval combat interfaces with good transparency to underlying mechanics (give it the 1.4 air treatment)
• Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare
• Long term goals and strategies to guide ai rather than random vs historical focus lists, visible to players
• Every starting nation has a custom portrait for historical leaders
• A way for players to take dynamic decisions, quickly. Somethign that fits between events and national focuses.
• Spies and espionage
• Changing National Unity to something that matters during most of the game rather than when you are losing only
• Improving peace conferences
• Update core national focus trees with alt-history paths and more options (Germany, Italy, USA, United Kingdom, Soviet, France, Japan)
• Wunderwaffen projects
• Properly represent fuel in some way in the game
• Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff
• Rework how wars work with respect to merging etc as its a big source of problems
• More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms
• More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China, South America, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Greece)
• An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.
• Make defensive warfare more fun
• Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc
• Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure
• Have doctrines more strongly affect division designing to get away from cookie cutter solutions and too ahistorical gamey setups

You'll notice that some of these are small and some of them are huge. I can't really talk too much details about this stuff though. That is stuff we will do once/if it makes it to dev diaries with feature highlights and has been implemented. Oh yeah, and before someone goes "why isn't improving AI on this list" the answer is that its not really something you can ever check off as done. We'll keep working on that in parallel with other stuff as we have since release.

There is no World War Wednesday stream today since the channel is all streaming from Gamescom today, but you can now check out last weeks episode on youtube to see me run the dev team as generals in a massive co-op.

Changes to the Tech tree could be interesting considering most mods leave it unchanged so it can be pretty repetative going back to release.

How about adding that mad science you talked about during PDXcon to the list of potential avenues? That was a really good idea and we don't know what random seed we're in right now so it might work!

 

[Praetori]

Both the soviet counterattacks at Moscow in winter 1941 and Stalingrad in winter 1942 are good historical examples of where massive armored offensives were planned months prior to attack without revealing the tank divisions by putting them on the front.


In fact I challenge you to find historical examples to support that tanks must be put at the border over a month before an attack ( or counter attack ) in order to be able to carry it out successfully with maximum preparation and planning advantage!

I would much rather have some form of subterfuge points/cost to add to battleplans to make enemy spotting of said divisions or battleplans harder. Maskirovka points or something similar, could be used for ruses as well (said divisions appear to be somewhere else).
Or a speed setting for battleplanning with quick buildup of offensive capabilities and logistics makes for easily detectable preparations while slow, night-time buildups are harder to notice.
Or some kind of mix.

Would require the AI to not be stupid about reacting to it though (or allow the AI to see through it much easier than players).

 

[sirarthurharris'mixtape]

• Wunderwaffen projects

Can't help but think of UFOs

 

[Vokasak]

I didn't read anything about fixing your egregious mistake of leaving Bulgaria out of DoD. >:[