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HoI4 Dev Diary - Resistance and Compliance

Hello HoI bois and ladies, welcome to the second dev diary on our upcoming unannounced expansion and 1.8 ‘Husky’ update. This update features some big changes to how occupied territory functions. The biggest part of this is an overhaul of the game’s current resistance system into what we are calling the “Resistance and Compliance” system. This should help curb a bit of power from snowballing (Hello, Germany), remove gamey early war sniping of provinces, and put a bit of a clock on world conquest runs.

The old resistance system is rather simple. Each occupied state has a suppression requirement. If you meet that requirement nothing happens. If the suppression requirement is not met then you suffer from increasingly common sabotage to factories or infrastructure as resistance strength grows. We decided we could make this more interesting and use it as a way to further control the power of snowballing.

The growth of resistance is no longer stopped by having an adequate garrison. Resistance now functions with a target system. The resistance level will grow or decay towards whatever the current target is. The target is impacted by the development of the state, the core owner still existing and other factors. Resistance activities will still scale with the level of resistance, but the garrison will now work as a shield that absorbs these sabotages. If the garrison is adequate, the garrison shield will absorb the vast majority of sabotage attempts and take losses to manpower and equipment. Not having an adequate garrison means a higher resistance target and more resistance activity making it past the garrison shield to the state.

DD_RESCOMP_COMP.png


Compliance is in some ways the opposite of resistance. It is a rating of how willing the local state is to work with their occupiers. Compliance will normally start at zero and increase slowly over time. Compliance growth will generally be slow and several factors can affect that speed of growth. As compliance increases in a state, it will decrease local resistance and give access to more resources, factories, and manpower.

DD_RESCOMP_COMP2.png


Resistance and compliance also will have various effects that are unlocked. Resistance will gain the ability to more frequently bypass the garrison shield after it reaches a strength of 25%. Reaching 25% compliance means reducing suppression requirements for the current level of resistance.

DD_RESCOMP_UNLOCKS.png


The highest level of resistance unlocks include two levels of uprising. The first is a passive malus that is applied to the state, adding attrition, decreasing move speed, and slowing org regain for occupying forces in the area. The 2nd level uprising is a full scale organized uprising that functions somewhat like a civil war. The states that rise up will gain low-quality divisions and either rejoin their former master or if that no longer exists, reestablish themselves on the map. Both of these should be somewhat rare and will require the local resistance being supported by an outside source.

DD_RESCOMP_UPRISING1.png



In conjunction with these new systems, we have reworked how occupied states are handled. Colony states will be removed as a concept and every state not controlled by a nation with a core on the state will be viewed as occupied. Occupied states will now be less rewarding for the occupier. Access to the factories and resources of the state will by default be much lower than before. However, the conqueror can get more out of the state by cultivating compliance or adjusting occupation laws. This gives a bit of granularity between what was previously colony states and cores.

Occupation laws will also be updated to work with the new resistance and compliance systems and give the player more choice. Previous occupation laws were mostly a linear system of paying PP and increasing suppression need for increasing rewards. If you could afford it, harsher occupation would almost always be more beneficial. This was also a system not a lot of people interacted with as it was hidden behind several layers of the menu.

New occupation laws are built around trying to give the player choice based on playstyle and short and longterm goals. The new laws tend towards one of three objectives: compliance growth, resistance suppression, factory/resource exploitation. Compliance growth is a longterm reward, while resistance suppression and resource gains are more short term. These laws will, in turn, be bad at what they are not concerned with. IE focusing on resistance suppression will generally not be very rewarding in terms of resources or long term compliance growth. Cultivating compliance will mean that the player will have to deal with a period of low yields and maybe a more active resistance movement. Each of the big three ideologies will also get their own special occupation laws. These laws fit the themes of the ideologies and give them some unique choices

DD_RESCOMP_OCULAW02.png


That's all we got for this week. Next week we will update the good people of these forums on what is going on with France. Secrets and things hidden will be revealed!
 
Love the new system, hoping this means that it's even more beneficial now in peace deals to puppet countries rather than completely annex them (and that the AI in peace deals actually realizes that in the appropriate cases). Been getting tired of watching as Germany just annexes all of the USSR with no downsides whatsoever, hoping that the new resistance will require so much upkeep to deal with (at least in the beginning years of the occupation) that it's more beneficial to only annex part of it and make a puppet of the rest (cause let's be honest if Germany had managed to annex the USSR they would have been dealing with tons of partisan movements for years if not decades).

EDIT: Also, assuming the uprisings work how I think they will, the Allies causing rebellions in an annexed USSR would probably cause enough of a headache to want to make a puppet as well.
 
"Access to the factories and resources of the state will by default be much lower than before."
So happy to see this. Really hope it does as you say slow down Germany's equipment gain in the early-mid game.
 
i hope this new system make developing france in MP actually again something that can and should be done to get more time instead of being a free super boost for germany.
 
interesting. And I smell espionage in this update.
 
every state not controlled by a nation with a core on the state will be viewed as occupied

What if an owned non-core state has cores from several countries?

Also, how does keeping your directly controlled colonial empire as say, France or England, compare to cheesy strategies such as releasing them as puppets and reaping the rewards from that, with little and sometimes no negative consequences at all?

In HoI2 you got dissent when releasing countries, which scaled according to your sliders (which included ideology), and in some cases had a default added cost which could be very high for some countries (e.g. IIRC you got another 15 or 25 dissent through event for releasing Scandinavia).

IMO manually releasing countries in this timeframe should generally by default be a bad idea and incur a significant stability and maybe war support and governing ideology hit.
 
That seems reasonable.

I'll have to probably do a complete rework of Germany's production and resources under the new system and see what works.

If I have to make tough choices, I consider that a success. But the Devs should know now that if I have to put 3 million men in western Europe to get 90% of the factories and resources in France, Benelux, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland, I will probably still do it.

I want those factories and that steel and tungsten; we'll get the manpower from somewhere. (Looking at you, Desperate Defense.)
I wonder if Reichskommissariats will be more attractive now.
 
But the Devs should know now that if I have to put 3 million men in western Europe to get 90% of the factories and resources in France, Benelux, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland, I will probably still do it.

If I were writing the system, the max you could get at 100% compliance would be less than 90% of factories, and the max you could get at "screw compliance, I want results now!" would be considerably less than that. But we will see!
 
State by state ideology seems overly complicated to me without a lot of gain in game play. It could also make balancing historical game progression, which is already not trivial, even more bananas.

Respectfully, I'd beg to on the latter point. While I do believe that state ideology would be better with an ideology/party rework with more choices (albeit between the resistance rework, the likely civil war rework, and some of the MtGs mechanics like Blackshirt Marches and Congress, it would already have plenty to work with now), given there are only four ideological choices, party popularity doesn't do much beyond stab boosts, and the states that would see the most ideological drift would be in Western and Central Europe, I don't believe it would throw balance off too much.
 
Stuff like the Four Days of Naples happened without external intervention - all through some absolutely brutal German repression (Hitler personally ordered Naples to be razed to the ground when it didn't comply - wink wink nudge nudge), which drove the citizenship to stealing German and old stock Italian weapons and rise up in rebellion. Successfully - the German garrison was forced out of the city, and the Allies would march in an already liberated Naples.

I could see something like that happening but that may be more dependent on how Italy is re-worked for that specific incident.
 
How do places such as Newfoundland, Malta, Gibraltar, Falklands ect fit into this? Where they are not cores of their owner but compliance was never really in question.
 
Hey! I noticed that states with high resistance will have higher attrition. I have some questions!

Will this affect unit AI pathfinding? For example: Would they try to avoid a state with high attrition if it meant a longer route to get to a state?
In addition, would they prefer to use a naval landing rather then going by land if all states in the way are high attrition?

If this is not the case, is the player expected to micro their units path finding to have them avoid high attrition states?
 
This is great improvement over the previous resistance mechanics. Props to the Devs. :)

Anyways I have some questions for @podcat and @YaBoy_Bobby

1.) if a state has multiple claims to it what happens than? Hypothetically lets go with Flanders which is occupied by Germany but has a claim by Flanders and Belgium how does the resistance and compliance work?

2.) what happens if you make a puppet state in the area? does this go away or is resistance still something the puppet has to deal with?
 
@YaBoy_Bobby - Excellent Diary, thank you. :)

With these changes, will there be different troops, or support companies available to handle the new resistance options?

MI-5, Gestapo, KGB?
Radio Detection Trucks, informants, the like?
 
Stuff like the Four Days of Naples happened without external intervention - all through some absolutely brutal German repression (Hitler personally ordered Naples to be razed to the ground when it didn't comply - wink wink nudge nudge), which drove the citizenship to stealing German and old stock Italian weapons and rise up in rebellion. Successfully - the German garrison was forced out of the city, and the Allies would march in an already liberated Naples.

Naples, Paris, Warsaw.

I'd like to see resistance growing exponentially as troops get closer. Maybe the level of control from neighboring states could be inversely proportional to resistance strength?