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.
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.
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. Something 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.
