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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 ;)
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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.

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Cancelable Focuses
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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.

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Naval and Air Exercises
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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.

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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
 
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Both nations have map colors in HoI4 that are a part of the 390 to 700 nanometer wavelength range of electromagnetic radiation.
HoI4 is a military game, so if we assume "uniform" color density in that range, that makes white. Russian civil war confirmed!
 
VERY happy to get changes to factions, even small ones. I can already see how being able to become the leader will make the WC achievements much less of a hassle. Of course the primary use for becoming the faction leader will be the exploits it allows, but I'll be satisfied with it until a broader rework for factions and peace conferences is developed.

By the way, any ETA on the peace conference rework? It's been on your to-do list for... a while now.
 
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.
 
Great changes to faction system,even though they are small changes.While you are at it you should also let faction leader to choose if the faction is defensive or not.It would fit Allies better and would also help to modders to add NATO
 
its not linear, the xp retention is pretty decent to model the fact that people often made it back etc

Couple of questions about XP retention for air wings.

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)

2. Can you make the AI to extremely prefer to move air wings, rather than disband & recreate them ?
 
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.

Looks really cool. I take it this will be part of Man the Guns rather than Ironclad? Also how does the support of each nation in the conference work? Is it like the Power Struggle in China or a new mechanic? Also, would it be possible to have a decision to core or claim some parts of the USA if conquered, similar to the Byzantium "Triumph in" decisions? Places like the East Coast and other areas that were British or Canadian at one point?
 
The alliance leadership setting would've been soooo useful in my current Willy game. I had to join the Polish alliance and now *my* alliance has a weird name and Poland gets to lead all of eastern Europe and the Balkans against the Allies and potentially the pact of Rome. Also Willy II died before '39... :mad:
 
1) will air unit equipment be controllable by the player - i.e. can the player decide what model planes the unit should use?

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:


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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.