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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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@Secret Master @Fulmen In an MP game, if the Axis could spare the men to take the Middle East, how hard are the Axis winning?
Losing the Suez is a big deal, but provided the Allies still hold their ground elsewhere, they can bounce back. Although at that point a lot depends on the US and Russia.

Germany can't spare a lot of tanks to guard Egypt, so often the Allies will retake it with overwhelming armour* around 1942, provided there's no rush to D-Day and the Axis plane count has been bled enough.

*That's typically a dozen or more divisions of South African heavies, American and sometimes British mediums and Canadian mechanised.
 
Will this fuel implementation also be used for motorized, mechanized, and tank divisions? It would be neat to have that function. When you run out of fuel, your tanks/motorized/mechanized units won't be able to move, or they move extremely slowly and fight less effectively.
 
Will this fuel implementation also be used for motorized, mechanized, and tank divisions? It would be neat to have that function. When you run out of fuel, your tanks/motorized/mechanized units won't be able to move, or they move extremely slowly and fight less effectively.

This is the case, as you can read in the relevant dev diary. Link

Fuel is used by trucks, tanks and other land equipment with engines in your divisions. They will use much more when fighting and moving than when stationary or during strategic redeployment (in fact right now those consume no fuel, but that might change with balance work).
 
The separation of pilots and planes would be a real improvement for a few reasons, I think. At the moment, I see literally hundreds of obsolete aircraft being used well into the war; in reality this would have been both impractical due to the number of trained pilots required and deeply undesirable as a virtual death sentence for the poor pilots selected to fly the obsolete units. A pilots reource could act as a simple cap on the number of planes deployable, and represent a valuable resource to be developed and shielded. Maybe, eventually, an air-sea-rescue mission might be added to increase pilot "trickleback".
Agreed. CSAR (or air-sea-rescue) could be a support unit like the field hospital company.
 
All the changes and new things look great. But, there is one change I really wish you would implement. Giving us back Air Force generals instead of aces. You could use the same system, but instead of an ace, you unlock a General, that would give you the bonuses.
 
@podcat about the experience loss for air wings being reduced for friendly territory, I've had a couple thoughts on that.

1. Fighting over sea zones, could be affected by naval/air superiority - if you have naval and/or air supremacy in an area, then search and rescue missions are more likely to be possible. Maybe something as simple as having air/naval superiority makes it count as friendly territory.

2. Fighting over enemy occupied territory, could be affected by resistance strength - i.e. occupied France, if the Resistance is strong in an area, they might be able to conceal downed airmen and arrange for their extraction.
 
@podcat about the experience loss for air wings being reduced for friendly territory, I've had a couple thoughts on that.

1. Fighting over sea zones, could be affected by naval/air superiority - if you have naval and/or air supremacy in an area, then search and rescue missions are more likely to be possible. Maybe something as simple as having air/naval superiority makes it count as friendly territory.

2. Fighting over enemy occupied territory, could be affected by resistance strength - i.e. occupied France, if the Resistance is strong in an area, they might be able to conceal downed airmen and arrange for their extraction.

I really like this idea!

Makes a lot of intuitive sense and also a sneaky way to strategic bombing a little more expensive (in essence, it would make defensive aviation more cost effective).

Wald
 
I really like this idea!

Makes a lot of intuitive sense and also a sneaky way to strategic bombing a little more expensive (in essence, it would make defensive aviation more cost effective).

Wald

+1.
Just one or two more variables in the equation, what could go wrong?
 
also again: no idea if this had been addressed yet but suppersmall nations ESPECIALLY puppets counting as majors is really annoying. spain not giving in after germany is defeated is acceptable i guess... but SLOVAKIA COUNTING AS A MAJOR? WHY?!
so please stop puppets being able to count as majors.

off topic rambling:
hmm now i think about it what could also be cool is if a faction is defeated and puppets had 1% or less participation they are simply ignored in the peace deal. mostly thinking about india or australia getting a ticket to safety. also countries that were puppets by force and dragged into a war they never wanted? also this would help against the whole thing of a country being able to annex a whole country so easily.
or another idea: resistance stays to build up on large chunks of non-core provinces even after the war. the only way to stop this is releasing that core as a puppet with a decision or something. since for example the russians wouldn't take so kindly upon german occupance even if hope if liberation was already gone. something among the lines how mutinies work.
 
Cancelling focuses makes me so happy. So many times the situation has completely changed leaving me miserable. And allowing the control of a faction to change is awesome too. It always seems silly to have the UK run the allies when the US is in the war.
 
Will there be a way to get rid of seeing outdated planes and the planes of every country you've ever capitulated when creating new airwings? It's really annoying scrolling through 30 types of aircraft to find the right one.
 
You will be able to scrap equipment however that will take 3 months or something to do so that you can not just scrap everything before you capitulate to deny enemy your equipments.
 
@podcat
Something kinda small on my wish list: the 3D models for certain vehicles are not the vehicle that is in the division. Example, if you build stugs the model shows a panzer 4. When you have alot of different types of divisions, its difficult to tell who's, who IMO. Are there plans to add better model representation in the future?
 
Now the only thing preventing me from creating NATO as the US at the end of the Second World War is the ability to rename the faction!
 
Does that mean that Tannu Tuva can take over the Comintern once the pesky Soviets surrender? SIGN ME UP FOR THIS.
 
You will be able to scrap equipment however that will take 3 months or something to do so that you can not just scrap everything before you capitulate to deny enemy your equipments.
This is true, but it doesn't stop the obsolete models being listed in several places, such as "in the field equipment" lists and such like. It would be a really nice QOL adjustment to have them disappear except as "obsolete production options".