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HOI4 Dev Diary - Intel

Hi everyone! Next to last dev diary before christmas, and today we are going to talk about intel. We have been talking about ways to get intel a bit in previous diaries, like code cracking, scout planes and spies but not really talked about the system as a whole. So lets get to it!

Before intel was based essentially on comparing two nations crypto tech levels and it was a flat value covering everything. To make this more interesting we are splitting it into 4 separate values: Civilian/Industry Intel, Army Intel, Navy Intel, Air Intel. These affect what you can see in our new intel ledger, that replaces the little intel bit in the diplomacy interface from before for people with La Resistance:
upload_2019-12-11_12-24-29.png

Each of the tabs cover each type of intel (here we have civilian/industry selected), and they also come with mapmode information. As an example in the one above we aggregate building values as you zoom out (if you zoom in you see the same by state). This can help you when figuring out where to bomb or where and what kind of sabotage can be most effective.

The more intel you have the more information is displayed, we break down the levels in a tooltip per category:
upload_2019-12-11_12-37-57.png

So right now I can see how many army techs have been researched, but not specifically which. That requires 70% but then you can look at their tech tree. If I had 5% more I could see roughly how many of each division template the other nation had. At the moment I can only see that they exist but no real info about what they contain.

The army intel tab also lets you get a breakdown of the enemy stockpile of equipment.

Naval and air are similar:
upload_2019-12-11_12-44-10.png


upload_2019-12-11_12-44-42.png


Naval intel mapmode is quite powerful and at high intel levels will let you see where the enemy is placing certain missions
upload_2019-12-11_13-2-10.png


Intel can come from many different sources, for example:
- Spy networks
- Infiltrated spy assets
- Captured enemy spies
- Radar
- Broken Ciphers
- Scout planes
- Fighting the enemy in land combat
- Fighting the enemy in air combat
- Fighting the enemy in naval combat
And probably some I forgot.

Each source has a max it can contribute and may affect different intel values in different ways. For example if you have a spy network over the enemies coast, or scout naval areas with traffic you will get more naval intel. Each source also decays over time so its important to actively do things to keep your intel levels current and make sure you combine many sources to get as much intel as possible.

Here I have multiple sources:
upload_2019-12-11_13-17-34.png

Do note that the biggest chunk here is me doing some quick events with rewards of intel to cheat my way to quick screenshots ;). Also note that simply being democratic and having open trade laws make hiding the civilian part of your intel hard.

Knowing what kind of build strategy, templates, tech and stockpile an enemy has can be very useful allowing you to counter and attack them in the best way possible, but there is also direct advantage from relative intel which replaces the crypto level comparison from before.
upload_2019-12-11_13-35-41.png


See you next week for more cool stuff, and don't forget to tune into twitch at 16:00CET where we will be showing of France for the first time (aka watch Daniel accidentally leak stuff).
 
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There was a Dev diary about this with several posts explaining how an enemy can fly spy planes over your territory and there is nothing you can do about it. Intercept missions will not shoot them down. Apparently, the planes are disguised as "civilian planes" granting them total invulnerability.

The double agent thing again has nothing to do with defense...

No, I'm not asking for micro management or a cloak and dagger game. HOI4 devs are giving it to us, but they're only giving us HALF. the problem is they only allow offensive operations. My only argument is that a player should be able to defend themselves against these operations. You people only complain about defense for some reason which is insane because you have no problem with the complexity and micro management of offense. Defense should be so much easier that offensive operations... All you need to do is respond to the enemy attacks... You won't have to do anything unless there is something to do. When an enemy is attempting to do an operation, you should be able to discover it and do sometimes about it, to possibly stop it, that's all. You should be able to hide your information actively. That's also easy. Just allow players to guard their info and choose special projects to put more effort into defense rather than a blanket over everything... I don't care if the enmy knows how many guns I have but if I want to keep my shbb a secret I would focus my efforts on that...

I would have to dig in that particular one but I'm pretty sure that podcat said you can't take down scout planes when you are at peace.
After you are at war with the country, you can shoot them down.

Again, there's the whole thing about how much intel can be gained from scout planes that have not been completely clarified yet.

And regarding the concept of defense, AGAIN, podcat said that you have a probability chance of catching enemy agents when they are running an operation and that probability increases by the specifics of your intelligence agency and the quality and numbers of agents running counter intelligence missions.
Then he goes to say that PROBABLY, a pop up would appear for the targeted country to decide the fate of the enemy agent or SURELY a pop up would appear that an enemy operation was run against you and certain information like Country of Origin, type of operation could be revealed.
 
Beevor, Antony (2015). Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s last gamble. New York: Viking. p. 172. ISBN 978-0-670-02531-2.

During the Battle of St. Vith an M8 Greyhound armoured car destroyed a Tiger II after getting in behind it on the Schonberg Road, though the commander tried to traverse his turret to engage the M8. The M8 fired three 37 mm rounds into the relatively thin rear armor of the Tiger from only 25 yd (23 m), setting it on fire: "There was a muffled explosion, followed by flames which billowed out of the turret and engine port."

Its not World of Tanks. Penetration can be quite high at at extremely close ranges.

That's interesting. That 37mm round probably went thru some weak point, like a pipe or such in the rear, not real armor, but who knows, maybe that part of armor was low quality (German steel quality went down in late war). Surprising things do happen at war: one Soviet IS-2 was frontally penetrated by German 28mm AT-rifle; that round went thru lover front armor (IS lower front was weaker than upper front, but anyhow surprising).
 
That's interesting. That 37mm round probably went thru some weak point, like a pipe or such in the rear, not real armor, but who knows, maybe that part of armor was low quality (German steel quality went down in late war). Surprising things do happen at war: one Soviet IS-2 was frontally penetrated by German 28mm AT-rifle; that round went thru lover front armor (IS lower front was weaker than upper front, but anyhow surprising).
Well, I just looked up an article on WW2 AP ammo. Later WW2 era AP ammo could penetrate easily up to 2.5 times its caliber under 100m. As this round was fired at 25m, yep, the GreyHound could do it....but big ballz to get in that close. And the Tiger 2 didn't have spaced armor on its rear, although it had spaced armor on its sides, which would have defeated the round.
 
Would the useless Amelia Earhart disappears event show up as spy flight ?
 
Well, I just looked up an article on WW2 AP ammo. Later WW2 era AP ammo could penetrate easily up to 2.5 times its caliber under 100m. As this round was fired at 25m, yep, the GreyHound could do it....but big ballz to get in that close. And the Tiger 2 didn't have spaced armor on its rear, although it had spaced armor on its sides, which would have defeated the round.

To be fair, the Greyhound could actual move unlike the King Tiger
 
the buff already exists and its on research superiority, probably research crypto related will be reworked.
Well, more specifically, the US has 3 NFs related to Intel/Ciphering which certainly need to be changes. Right now, they are global, not country specific....so U.S. will need some "buffs" that apply only to Japan. As well, the UK has 2 NFs, giving 5x 100% electronic/decrypt bonuses. This will all have to be sorted out.

Historically, I don't recall the US offering anything to the table regarding German ciphering (I doubt they were even told what was happening at Bletchley)....and to be honest, I'm not aware of any British success against the Japanese in regards to code breaking. Maybe it was a gentleman's deal for the U.S. to specifically focus all decrypt resources on the Japanese, because the UK told them "uh, we have the Germans covered, trust us".

This might be an @Axe99 question
 
Well, more specifically, the US has 3 NFs related to Intel/Ciphering which certainly need to be changes. Right now, they are global, not country specific....so U.S. will need some "buffs" that apply only to Japan. Historically, I don't recall the US offering anything to the table regarding German ciphering (I doubt they were even told what was happening at Bletchley)....and to be honest, I'm not aware of any British success against the Japanese in regards to code breaking. Maybe it was a gentleman's deal for the U.S. to specifically focus all decrypt resources on the Japanese, because the UK told them "uh, we have the Germans covered, trust us".

This might be an @Axe99 question

Hey Dan :) Both the US and British both worked to decipher Japanese and German codes - the US received significant assistance from British codebreakers and intelligence on their way to break JN25 iirc (super-tired atm, but I'm pretty sure that was one of the key Japanese codes) - from The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters*, and I have a vague memory of a reference to US codebreaking efforts of German naval codes from Stern's The US Navy and the War in Europe. The Dutch also definitely had a crack at the Japanese codes (and while I haven't read anything, I think it's fairly safe to presume paid some attention to the German as well!)

There were quite a few different codes, and iirc (I haven't read a lot of specifically intelligence-related stuff, so most of what I've picked up is from references to it in books focussed on broader campaigns - I'll have to spend a bit time increasing my intelligence at some point :) ) even the 'cracked' codes were a bit of work, so I'm pretty sure there was plenty of work to go around.

Also, while more strongly Allied than most independent nations in history outside of the British Dominions and Britain (which are a fairly unique case), there was still tension at times between the US and Britain, and I don't know the evolution of the intelligence sharing. While there was sharing prior to Dec 1941, I doubt the US would have shared enough to make the British comfortable packing up their intelligence efforts focussed on Japan, and until the US was confident it was going to go 'all in' with the Allies, I doubt it would have made much sense for them to rely only on what they heard from the British (not least as the British were trying to paint a picture that would encourage US entry, so it made good sense for the US to have their own independent assessments).

Sorry I don't have any more detail than that - I'd definitely be interested in anything other forumites had to share :)

* Although I've seen references elsewhere as well.
 
Is the Ai trained to adjust strategies based off of intel?

Hoi4 AI is not...trained in general. When you're in game just press " button and type "tag chi" for instance to switch to another country and see what ai does with all the divisions. AI has no idea how to use battleplan system and it is one of the fundamental game design problems that made me give a bad rewiev to this game on steam and I don't play it anymore.

I just came here to see if they are making the game better or are they just keep ignorign the basic fundamental design flaws. AI is bad, economy is bad, trade is bad, politics is almost non existent, but you may say "This is a war game", then I tell you that the combat system is the worst. You can't pick tactics, tactics change randomly, you can't actually create templates. Template system is a complete plasebo because you think you create template but actually all you do is create 40 width tanks and when combat happens a diceroll decides which division fights which.

I played this game for litterally thousands of hours. I played countless competetive multiplayer battles. I know this game: You press buttons, you stack construction bonuses and construct factories and steamroll ai. Singleplayer is not enjoyable, vanilla game without mods is certainly also not enjoyable. Slot based point and click research system is an abomination. Imperator Rome for instance has a much better research system compared to this. I'm just using HOI4 avatar because it looks nice. This is a bad game.
 
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Well, I just looked up an article on WW2 AP ammo. Later WW2 era AP ammo could penetrate easily up to 2.5 times its caliber under 100m. As this round was fired at 25m, yep, the GreyHound could do it....but big ballz to get in that close. And the Tiger 2 didn't have spaced armor on its rear, although it had spaced armor on its sides, which would have defeated the round.

Then you look at wrong tables (what tables, hopefully not game manuals). IRL 37mm had problems penetrating Panzer IV, that's why it was called a "door knocker". Some US companies claimed hugely exaggerated penetrations to their guns and ammo, for commercial purposes as all for-profit companies do, to sell their stuff for the government. If you do a more thorough research you will find that out (as I did). Also, Tiger II rear was not vertical, it was angled about 20 degrees, and if it was just weakly penetrated it would not lead to the destruction of the whole tank, because that would require proper penatration and hitting ammunition for an internal explosion, or setting the tank on fire, or something similar. However, German armor quality varied in late war, much more in Tiger II than Tiger I, so with luck they might have hit a weak spot. But reliable penetrating a Tiger 2 rear with 37mm every time (or most times) is totally No No.
 
Here is a picture of a Tiger I hit 252 times during the Battle of Kursk with Soviet guns up to 76.2mm. After all this, it was driven 60 km to a repair shop, and repaired to fight again. This was Tiger I with weaker armor than Tiger II; Tiger II rear was as thick as Tiger I sides. So, was a US 37mm gun far superior to Soviet 45mm, 57mm and 76,2mm guns? Only in Hollywood...
https://imgur.com/gallery/UIqd0
 
Here is a picture of a Tiger I hit 252 times during the Battle of Kursk with Soviet guns up to 76.2mm. After all this, it was driven 60 km to a repair shop, and repaired to fight again. This was Tiger I with weaker armor than Tiger II; Tiger II rear was as thick as Tiger I sides. So, was a US 37mm gun far superior to Soviet 45mm, 57mm and 76,2mm guns? Only in Hollywood...
https://imgur.com/gallery/UIqd0
Nice. Well one thing you fail to understand from my post, is that the shot was taken at 25m range. 25!!!! Penetrations are normally given for 1000m range, and rightly so. That Tiger was beaten up at RANGE. Everyone wants to shoot tanks at a distance. Unlike World of Tanks, Penetration is always much higher the closer you are. Its physics. The velocity is much lower 1000m away than at 25m. You are correct about the rear slope and additional relative armor thickness, however 20 degress only gives 5 more mm! 85mm relative armor. So, not, the "slope" in the rear wasn't designed for defense, it was designed to fit the engine.

I can't find any table lower than 500m distance for the M3 AT round, but again multiple sources state up to 2.5x caliber at 100m. 37*2.5 is 92, and that's at 25m range. It didn't blow the damned turret, it started a fire in the engine, which is rear located unlike the the Porsche Tiger II (P) which is located in the middle.

I do believe the book I read and it did penetrate.
 
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Here is a picture of a Tiger I hit 252 times during the Battle of Kursk with Soviet guns up to 76.2mm. After all this, it was driven 60 km to a repair shop, and repaired to fight again. This was Tiger I with weaker armor than Tiger II; Tiger II rear was as thick as Tiger I sides. So, was a US 37mm gun far superior to Soviet 45mm, 57mm and 76,2mm guns? Only in Hollywood...
https://imgur.com/gallery/UIqd0

https://www.hornady.com/team-hornady/ballistic-calculators/ballistic-resources/external-ballistics

Further, here is a link on ballistics. Note, its talking about bullets, not AT projectiles, but the concept is the same, and their ballistic coefficients can't be THAT far different. Here, we see at 500m, the projectile loses ~50% of its velocity. Hell, even at 100m, it loses about 10-15%. At 25? I'm guessing the 37mm round had 98% of its muzzle velocity. And recall, kinetic energy is 0.5mv^2. The velocity squared is the import part...the higher the velocity, the higher the kinetic energy. Basic math. So, HELL YES, a round will penetrate a crap ton more than any table would say, at 25m. They don't test them that close because you would have to be insane to get that close with a vehicular or fix mounted AT weapon (I'm sure hand carried AT weapons have tables for extremely short ranges, and I'm sure they always suggest, try to shoot it in the rear, not the front, you might die, but you will disable the tank).
 
Here is a picture of a Tiger I hit 252 times during the Battle of Kursk with Soviet guns up to 76.2mm. After all this, it was driven 60 km to a repair shop, and repaired to fight again. This was Tiger I with weaker armor than Tiger II; Tiger II rear was as thick as Tiger I sides. So, was a US 37mm gun far superior to Soviet 45mm, 57mm and 76,2mm guns? Only in Hollywood...
https://imgur.com/gallery/UIqd0
From Lt. Sabel's own words, "The enemy, with tanks, AT guns and AT rifles opened fire at a great distance." Of course it wasn't going to pen at that range with those calibers. What's the answer? Get a bigger gun...or get CLOSER.
 
There was a Dev diary about this with several posts explaining how an enemy can fly spy planes over your territory and there is nothing you can do about it. Intercept missions will not shoot them down. Apparently, the planes are disguised as "civilian planes" granting them total invulnerability.

The double agent thing again has nothing to do with defense...

No, I'm not asking for micro management or a cloak and dagger game. HOI4 devs are giving it to us, but they're only giving us HALF. the problem is they only allow offensive operations. My only argument is that a player should be able to defend themselves against these operations. You people only complain about defense for some reason which is insane because you have no problem with the complexity and micro management of offense. Defense should be so much easier that offensive operations... All you need to do is respond to the enemy attacks... You won't have to do anything unless there is something to do. When an enemy is attempting to do an operation, you should be able to discover it and do sometimes about it, to possibly stop it, that's all. You should be able to hide your information actively. That's also easy. Just allow players to guard their info and choose special projects to put more effort into defense rather than a blanket over everything... I don't care if the enmy knows how many guns I have but if I want to keep my shbb a secret I would focus my efforts on that...
I suppose there could be a gameplay feature that allows you to concentrate your defense in a given field, like industry, army, or naval, giving those fields some extra protection. Like, spend some PP or command power on extra funding for counter-espionage or whatever. Not that important to me, though, and keep in mind, defense often is passive and reactive.
 
Hi everyone! Next to last dev diary before christmas, and today we are going to talk about intel. We have been talking about ways to get intel a bit in previous diaries, like code cracking, scout planes and spies but not really talked about the system as a whole. So lets get to it!

Before intel was based essentially on comparing two nations crypto tech levels and it was a flat value covering everything. To make this more interesting we are splitting it into 4 separate values: Civilian/Industry Intel, Army Intel, Navy Intel, Air Intel. These affect what you can see in our new intel ledger, that replaces the little intel bit in the diplomacy interface from before for people with La Resistance:
View attachment 531788
Each of the tabs cover each type of intel (here we have civilian/industry selected), and they also come with mapmode information. As an example in the one above we aggregate building values as you zoom out (if you zoom in you see the same by state). This can help you when figuring out where to bomb or where and what kind of sabotage can be most effective.

The more intel you have the more information is displayed, we break down the levels in a tooltip per category:
View attachment 531793
So right now I can see how many army techs have been researched, but not specifically which. That requires 70% but then you can look at their tech tree. If I had 5% more I could see roughly how many of each division template the other nation had. At the moment I can only see that they exist but no real info about what they contain.

The army intel tab also lets you get a breakdown of the enemy stockpile of equipment.

Naval and air are similar:
View attachment 531795

View attachment 531796

Naval intel mapmode is quite powerful and at high intel levels will let you see where the enemy is placing certain missions
View attachment 531798

Intel can come from many different sources, for example:
- Spy networks
- Infiltrated spy assets
- Captured enemy spies
- Radar
- Broken Ciphers
- Scout planes
- Fighting the enemy in land combat
- Fighting the enemy in air combat
- Fighting the enemy in naval combat
And probably some I forgot.

Each source has a max it can contribute and may affect different intel values in different ways. For example if you have a spy network over the enemies coast, or scout naval areas with traffic you will get more naval intel. Each source also decays over time so its important to actively do things to keep your intel levels current and make sure you combine many sources to get as much intel as possible.

Here I have multiple sources:
View attachment 531799
Do note that the biggest chunk here is me doing some quick events with rewards of intel to cheat my way to quick screenshots ;). Also note that simply being democratic and having open trade laws make hiding the civilian part of your intel hard.

Knowing what kind of build strategy, templates, tech and stockpile an enemy has can be very useful allowing you to counter and attack them in the best way possible, but there is also direct advantage from relative intel which replaces the crypto level comparison from before.
View attachment 531802

See you next week for more cool stuff, and don't forget to tune into twitch at 16:00CET where we will be showing of France for the first time (aka watch Daniel accidentally leak stuff).


Will Intel effect the AI when you deploy units to the lines? IE, troops with more soft attack will move to where units with more soft units will attack or be attacked automatically. Automatically adjusting units to areas they are more likely to be needed based on intel and enemy attack plans or defence plans would be a natural move for the generals leading your troops. Maybe a switch to turn that on and off?
 
I suppose there could be a gameplay feature that allows you to concentrate your defense etc.
To elaborate on this, the reason (which I support) for defense being so hands-off was that the players who just weren't that interested in intelligence wouldn't have to micro it to defend their country against espionage. You just made the decision on whether to build certain intel buildings and then just left your intel agency on defense, and then you could get on with managing army, navy, and air force. So we're not complaining about micro on the offense because, well, the people who go on the offensive are the people who care about espionage to begin with. The rest of the players, those who never purchase spies in 4X games, can choose to just ignore that level of gameplay and focus on the core aspects of the game.