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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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Hope you are all having a nice day.

Cheers for the DD Podcat, hope you and the team are having a nice day as well :D. It's a nicer day now that there's a HoI4 DD in it :).

a new repair system for ships

Woot! It's an even nicer day now - you could say the day has had some important repair work carried out on it. Looking forward to whatever system you and the crew come up with :cool:.

- Pumping Iron: Scharnhorst Edition

The inspiration for posting this pic - it's Scharnhorst at Gotenhafen in the second half of 1942, possibly undergoing repairs or (more likely, given that the machinery is running) undergoing trials post-repair for machinery difficulties after her run-ins (mines and collision) earlier in the year.

Scharnhorst at Gotenhafen small.jpg


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

I'd say this is the tease of the week :p

Unironically invading the middle-east as a democratic nation is becoming more and more appealing every day.

During the late 1930s, Britain, France and the USA had (via corporations and resource concessions and whatnot) access to almost all of the oil coming from the Middle East - so strictly speaking three shouldn't be a need to invade them. Maybe if we're lucky, down the track there'll be some way of modelling this in HoI4 (Britain's pre-war strategic thinking relied significantly on oil from Abadan, in Persia/Iran, for example).
 
It would be nice to be able to manually remove certain types of equipment from divisions and air wings, and also turn off automatic upgrading. Say, I want to have certain wings only use old planes, maybe for training purposes or because it's a low priority region. In the current system the game will forcibly reinforce those wings with newer models when it runs out of other wings with a higher priority to reinforce. So if you want to stop this, you constantly have to make sure there's enough understrength air wings for the game to reinforce

This, very much this.
 
I love the bags of tricks because all the little changes really add up and make a difference! Also I know you said you aren't ready to talk about fleet stuff yet, but I still will say that a fleet designer like in Stellaris that we can automatically replenish or create would be great! Also danish bicycles plz.

What if they went full stellaris and implemented not only the fleet designer like stellaris, but completely threw out naval combat and replaced it with something similar to stellaris, only with ships on an ocean instead of ships in space?

Would make naval combat extremely interesting, and mechanics more opaque!

Wald
 
I would advocate doing it just as land units are done; when the equipment is changed, the experience level drops by a fraction.
But that's if you change battalions. Upgrading equipment to a newer model of the same type doesn't affect division's XP IIRC.
 
its not linear, the xp retention is pretty decent to model the fact that people often made it back etc
Good. Maybe also make XP/manpower retention higher if the airplane was lost over friendly territory? Not only is it realistic (e.g. UK managed to save the core of the RAF during the Battle of Britain thanks to mostly fighting above its own area), but it also emphasizes the asymmetry between offensive and defensive air warfare.
 

Here, have some ETA :)

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Edit - just being silly here of course. I suspect we'll know when they want us to know, and that asking won't change when that'll be, but I could be wrong :).
 
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.
 
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.
Darn. There went my dreams of conquering the world as Luxembourg, leader of the Western World. I guess the filthy yankees or brits now will try to usurp me.
 
Here, have some ETA :)

5a3b23abe1272f707c06138e-thumb-256x256.jpeg


Edit - just being silly here of course. I suspect we'll know when they want us to know, and that asking won't change when that'll be, but I could be wrong :).

Lol. Haven't seen them in the shops in a long time.
 
will it be limited, similar to how the AI is blocked from doing coups to the player's country?

Actually the AI doesn't do any party boosting and coups outside focuses and events. That's why i don't do it manually either in SP, it's unfair. They also don't do coup defense.
 
Air XP? Finally.

However, I would prefer a centralized pilot training system/pool instead to having micromanage tons of air wings.
 
But that's if you change battalions. Upgrading equipment to a newer model of the same type doesn't affect division's XP IIRC.
Well, it couldn't be identical, since air groups/geschwader don't have battalions, obviously, but a shift per plane replaced with a new model would make sense.
 
because not everyone pauses the game, and some effects fire when selected not when ticked. givign you 10 days is more flexible
Yeah, but I mean, it would let you cancel those focii that are otherwise fixed.
 
because not everyone pauses the game, and some effects fire when selected not when ticked. givign you 10 days is more flexible
Yeah, but I mean, it would let you cancel those focii that are otherwise fixed.
 
because not everyone pauses the game, and some effects fire when selected not when ticked. givign you 10 days is more flexible
Yeah, but I mean, it would let you cancel those focii that are otherwise fixed.
 
It would be very cool if you could set an amount to produce on equipment for your troops or for planes, like you do with ships, because I forget things very easily and its quite annoying producing five million Panzer 1's in 1944 and then lose the front because of that.