HOI4 Dev Diary - MTG - Bag of Tricks

[podcat]

Hope you are all having a nice day. It's Wednesday, so that means it's time to roll out another dev diary. Today’s is going to be a bag of tricks diary covering several smaller features from Man the Guns and the 1.6 Ironclad free update. The large changes to naval things are occupying much of the team, so there will be a bit before I start giving you the details on that. But meanwhile, lets dip into some smaller, yet juicy features...

Faction Leadership
Being the leader of a faction comes with a much larger degree of control. Once someone controls a faction that you are in there has not really been any ways of taking over that control, except of course to leave and make your own.

With MTG we are adding a system for taking over that control, assuming you qualify:

To be able to take over leadership in the faction they are in, a country must:

• Have more than twice the deployed manpower of the faction leader (subjects count, but at varying strength depending on autonomy)
• Have more than 150% of the factories of the faction leader
• Be in every war the faction leader is currently in
• Not having capitulated already

After paying a hefty amount of political power, and then the faction is yours. The faction leader will get an alert warning them if another country is close to qualifying so they can take steps to avoid it if they want to (AI will generally play fairly nice here), but it is also possible to see candidates in the war screen at any time. Ownership can only change once every 6 months to keep things stable and predictable.

Cancelable Focuses

Sometimes you accidentally click that focus and then realize it wasn't at all what you intended, or the situation changed moments after you clicked. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does it can be very frustrating… so with 1.6 you will no longer be locked in and can cancel a focus and pick another (with a few exceptions). Some focuses that fire off event chains or would otherwise break by being canceled half-way will still be locked in (the game will warn you in a tooltip ahead of time). To be nice to misclicks we save a few days progress, but beyond that you won't get it all back if you change your mind, so you still need to think through the choice of focus properly.

Naval and Air Exercises

With fuel added to the game and a new repair system for ships (see a diary in the misty future!) we felt that there was now an argument for letting the player exercise their ship crews and air wings as well. Before there wasn't enough ability to model cost really. This means that you will be able to tell ships and air wings to go and exercise. This works a lot like training your land forces - your forces take some damage and consume fuel while gaining experience (and also generating some global xp). Just like with land troops, exercises can only train them to a certain level. Experience level on ships is nothing new, but for air wings it is. A trained wing will be performing better, and losing planes means you will be losing experience as well. It will be up to the player to decide how much training they can afford, and this will be heavily dependent on their access to fuel. Of course experience is also gained in combat as you would expect.

That's all for us this week, see you next week!

Spoiler

Rejected Titles:
- Learning from Experience: A Kamikaze Pilot's Life
- Getting into ship-shape
- Practising RAF-Pilot-Banter
- Pumping Iron: Scharnhorst Edition
- What do you mean a 20min theory course isn't enough to be a combat pilot?
- Luxemburg, the new leader of the axis!
- I will make a seaman out of you

 

[podcat]

Why don't you make it so that you can cancel a focus provided you haven't unpaused the game yet?

because not everyone pauses the game, and some effects fire when selected not when ticked. givign you 10 days is more flexible

 

[Bratyn]

Great dev diary and a lot of good addons honestly but can we expect releasable Mauritania?

If I find the time, probably yes.

 

[podcat]

Also, cheeky US focus tree tease.

couldnt resist with that icon, its so sexy

 

[Bratyn]

Any update on Imperial Federation?

You mean something like this?

(WIP art)

 

[podcat]

No tease what we can expect next week? Come on now Podcat. I would love to see something on that exiled goverment button you teased!

Not quite ready yet also I have realized that I prefer doing tuesday teases on twitter instead the day before so I can see people guess whats happening. :cackles:

So question: Can subjects like the RAJ take over leadership of a faction? I said the RAJ because of how it becomes strong often... But there can be other examples like how a country may puppet other after winning a way, but the puppet has more factories, and manpower, and becomes faction leader...

No, subjects need to break free first, they can not use the diplo action no matter how big.

Could you guys take the "Take Over Faction" text and replace it with "Assume Direct Control"? For no particular reason, of course.

No, but feel free to say it in a growly alien voice when you do it

Are there any plans to add perks for faction leaders so that people actually want to spend 200 pp? Because I dont see myself spending 200 pp just so I can kick countries from my faction.

yup! stuff coming in Man the Guns.

@podcat, please, if you can find the time, make this happen. I so desperately want to have air wings in low priority areas(say, the Balkans as Germany, or China after conquest as Japan, heck, even the Far East as USSR.) only use old aircraft, saving the new ones for where it is important, instead of having the old ones constantly cycled back to the pool and replaced with new ones everywhere, even where I might particularly not want/need them.

yeah, this is another high prio thing we got on our suggestion pile. e.g let ppl do what you can do with division equipment restrictions here too.

 

[podcat]

Will faction leaders be able to coordinate there allies to some degree; add troops to fronts, attack now/here, help defend here etc etc? For example using the attack and defence pings already introduced from WtT for multiplayer or similar

we'll be covering some of the new advantages of being faction leader in future diaries

 

[Bratyn]

You absolute hero! How does it work?

BTW, not sure if of interest, but check the Suggestions forum, I added a cool new formable nation you could add that would be relevant for the new UK tree.

Oh, and the Federation focus should have a unique icon if possible!

Currently the Imperial Conference enables a new group of decisions, allowing for the discussion of a variety of topics, including defense, trade, and imperial federation. Federation requires unanimous support from CAN, SAF, AST, and NZL, and India may accept if they have been granted Autonomy through the other new focus you see. Regardless of whether India accepts or refuses, you may form the federation if all the others accept, but if India rejects, deciding to form the Federation anyway will necessarily grant India independence.

You also get cores on CAN, AST, and NZL, but not on SAF and RAJ. The reason for this is that both of those had much less of a "British" culture, and getting cores on all of the Raj is outright OP.

I might also add a cosmetic tag but this hasn't been done yet.

As for your suggestion, I figure the Federation concept and Imperial Reconquest path kind of fill the same role.

And yes, the art is still WIP I haven't assigned proper icons for them yet.

 

[Bratyn]

@Bratyn Will we ever get a little peek of what nations get a new focus tree?

I'd say probably the Tuesday right before the relevant dev diary, or perhaps at the end of the previous week's dev diary

 

[podcat]

Can you take the leadership of a faction if you are a subject?

nope, you must break free first.

I mean, isn't that basically what happened?

yea arguably. USA ai can definitly do that if its strogn enough

 

[Bratyn]

@Bratyn Can you give us a little nudge in the right direction on what nations do for the sake of speculation only to prove us all wrong?

Both nations have map colors in HoI4 that are a part of the 390 to 700 nanometer wavelength range of electromagnetic radiation.

 

[podcat]

@podcat - for experience and manpower of air wings from combat losses, is crew size accounted for in some way?
What about survive-ability, not all aircraft lost had the pilot and/or entire crew killed.

its not linear, the xp retention is pretty decent to model the fact that people often made it back etc

 

[Bratyn]

@Bratyn
Another question: What's your favourite part of the new DLC/update?

Something that hasn't been announced yet, unfortunately :/

 

[podcat]

Thank you for another great dev diary. Here's my question can the A.I in a situation challenge you for the faction leadership on its own?

Will the changing faction leader mechanic be modabble ?

For example being able to create an event that transfers the faction leadership from one country to another. Asking for Edward VIII, King of Canada, Leader of the Entente and soon to be King of a reconquered United Kingdom.

I am pretty sure there are triggers and effects around to be able to run faction mechanics from events

Would you guys be willing to update the British dev diary with the full tree once it is complete?

the idea is to update on the stuff thats changed/been added in a later diary, so yeah

1. Does fighting over friendly/neutral/enemy territory affect XP retention at all ? (generally, fighting over friendly territory would allow more aircrew and their experience to be recovered)

not atm, but we have been thinking about it. From a historical perspective it makes sense

Can we expect new focus trees for nations which don't yet have one?

yup :3

Will the AI try actively to "de-throne" the player from being the leader of the faction, or will it be limited, similar to how the AI is blocked from doing coups to the player's country?

as I said in the diary they play pretty nice with you, so they wont be cutthroat about it, but depending on the situation the ai will do it.

 

[Havebeard]

Please add a mis-click guard of some kind for events, too. Some other Paradox games have this, whereby event options will not be clickable until two or three seconds after they pop up; I've lost count of the number of times I've missed an event or taken the wrong option due to clicking something else on the screen when the event had just popped up unexpectedly.

This would be a huge quality of life improvement @podcat !

As well as stopping them from being dismissed by pressing "Escape"

The number of times I've pressed "Esc" to get out of the Supply/Trade/Logistics/Other tabs and ended up dismissing an event/news pop-up is too damn high

Pretty sure we already have that, but the timer might be too low. I can see how this can be frustrating.

Great idea, Balesir.

Such a feature (choosing which planes to use for training) would mimic the way pilots trained on older aircraft in order to familiarize themselves with the basics. The USA's Stearman Kaydet is one such example:


View attachment 395810

Perhaps there'd be a limit to how much experience a unit could get based on the model of equipment.

E.g. Using interwar planes would only allow advancement to Experience Level 2: Trained.

It seems weird that you cannot become an expert pilot in a gw_fighter if that is the newest model available.
The system is also an abstraction. Putting a limit on that doesn't add any interesting gameplay imo.
If I really wanted to model this kind of thing I would add a minor experience loss when upgrading to a newer equipment type.

 

[Havebeard]

Fully agree with the last sentence; coolest would be if experience was lost similarly to the efficiency loss switching a production line to a new equipment type. If this allowed air units to switch between plane classes, all the better - switches from CAS to Tac or the reverse were quite common, and fighter to fighter bomber (or CAS, if you don't have FB modded in) or the reverse was also a thing.

We went with a simpler model, both in terms of coding and explaining to the player.

@Havebeard So does Imperial Federation simply annex all Commonwealths?

You want @Bratyn for that =)

 

[Bratyn]

@Havebeard So does Imperial Federation simply annex all Commonwealths?

We'll be showing the updates on the British focus tree in a future dev diary. Short answer: "Not simply, but yes, that's a part of what it does".