• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

HOI4 Dev Diary - MTG - Bag of Tricks

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 ;)
upload_2018-8-8_15-0-59.png


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.

upload_2018-8-8_14-56-6.png


Cancelable Focuses
usa.png

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.

upload_2018-8-8_14-40-30.png



Naval and Air Exercises
upload_2018-8-8_14-48-46.png

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.

naval train.jpg


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

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
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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.
I would advocate doing it just as land units are done; when the equipment is changed, the experience level drops by a fraction. That way, you could train up to Trained with old, obsolete planes, then swap to front line equipment (losing some but not all XP) and train again to get to full effectiveness before deployment into combat. Unless the situation is desperate, of course, in which case the unit might just get thrown into the fight half-trained...
 
It would be nice if there was a way to implement that for vehicles as well (tanks - having an excess of light tanks past their usefulness date)
There sort of is, but it's clunky. If you make a "training template" with old equipment specified, build units as that and train them, then swap to the "front line" version before sending them into combat you've kinda done it.
 
Naval:

Fleets which decide to return home due to damage automatically switch to "HOLD FIRE" ... but ..... not so on returning to the patrol zone ( then they switch back to "FIRE AT WILL".

A major problem since its usual that they come home smoking & burning but unmolested ( mainly as submarine) and then - before actually reaching their zone again - get in lots of unnecessary battles in the english channel and get lost.
 
its not linear, the xp retention is pretty decent to model the fact that people often made it back etc

Following up on this: in the Battle of Britain a pretty major advantage for the British was the increased survivability of their aircraft crews. Will there be any modifiers to experience loss based on location of losses? (Over friendly territory vs. over enemy territory with high resistance vs. over ocean with friendly superiority vs. over ocean with enemy superiority)
 
I'm not sure if I like having experience applied to air wings. I often don't keep air wings together and disband and create them when I move from place to place as the situation warrants. I'd like to keep them in large blocks of 1000 to crack down on micro, but often breaking them up into smaller wings is unavoidable in order to deal with smaller airbases and strained supply.

I hope that there will be some sort of function that takes into account the veterancy of your pilots when you draw them from the pool. Hell, I think having a "veteran manpower pool" should be a new feature for all branches.
 
Very cool update! The poor UK is going to have to fight hard to stay leader of the Allies.

In Single Player as UK, just beat Germany and Italy before 1942.

Even If human is not playing either US or UK; that 200 political power requirement is probably going to cause the US AI to be uninterested in doing so until after it's filled out its entire cabinet; (it's likely to fill a minster each time it hits 150 pp)

Which brings me to an additional thought: While that 200 PP is fair if the faction leader is a going concern; if the current faction leader is in a capitulated state but there is another major in the faction, that's rather steep and perhaps faction leadership should transfer away from a capitulated country to the major within the faction with the most factories for a much lower cost.
 
Please yes, tho I hope it's difficult / rare to do completely and has some down sides
You miss out on all the CW focuses and research, though that doesn't matter in SP. In MP the CW is normally manned by players, so the federation path would not only be a bad idea, it'd be impossible.
 
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?
 
How does experience work for planes? Are wings discrete objects now? Or do we need to wait for the diary that shows off a new sailor and pilot manpower mechanic?
 

Could be an interception mission type where the fleet sits at port conserving fuel until an enemy fleet is spotted nearby.
 
In Single Player as UK, just beat Germany and Italy before 1942.

Even If human is not playing either US or UK; that 200 political power requirement is probably going to cause the US AI to be uninterested in doing so until after it's filled out its entire cabinet; (it's likely to fill a minster each time it hits 150 pp)

Which brings me to an additional thought: While that 200 PP is fair if the faction leader is a going concern; if the current faction leader is in a capitulated state but there is another major in the faction, that's rather steep and perhaps faction leadership should transfer away from a capitulated country to the major within the faction with the most factories for a much lower cost.
Its trouble though if you only play mp ;)