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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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!
 
Yeah, that would be excellent! At least creating more variety of economic laws, economic decisions, probably consumer goods factories could give some bonuses, for example stability, because they produced things needed by populace but now they're rather a malus

I don’t want to go back to the consumer goods system from Hoi3. At. All. And that doesn’t make a ton of sense compared to real life.

But the rest of the economy being overhauled would be really great. That was the one advantage I saw in games like Making History II. I want to see a fleshed out economy that works really differently in Communist, Fascist, Democratic, and third world economies.
 
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And how does this not allow for that to happen? Do you really want week after week of dev diary going “Hey, we fixed this bug” and then having a patch dropped on us that adds mechanics we have no idea about?

I think he wants to have no new features what so ever and just an update focused entirely on fixing bugs and optimization. Of course one can do both, add new features and fix bugs and make it more optimized.
 
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I'm glad that resistance is a focus for the next update. Here are my thoughts on what can be added to what was revealed today:

1) Supply depots and infrastructure changes. Supply depots would be like airfields, and can be programmed to cache equipment using the same mechanic as setting up air wings. Guerrillas can steal from it, and armies can capture their contents if they move quickly enough. There would be two types of infrastructure: intra- and inter-state (i.e., roads vs rails). This would allow guerrillas to choose between targeting supplies sent to units within the state (say, there's a battle nearby), or those passing to other states (weaken from afar). If one infrastructure is overloaded with supplies, then the other acts as a safety valve, but at lowered efficiency.

2) Player and AI should be able to direct targets of attacks, just like how strategic bombing can be guided.

3) Pro-occupation militias are probably the most effective counter to guerrillas, and were used liberally by Germany and Russia. These need to be a thing, or at least abstracted in some way.

4) Communism should have the most buffs for spreading resistance, Fascism should have the max number of countering it. Communism historically used guerrilla/insurgency tactics offensively, and this should be as integral as a congress system (something the French and USSR both need).

5) Monarchists should have bonuses to reducing autonomy and annexation, to set them apart from other ideologies. Royalty inherently see all of their subjects in familial terms, and all royal houses in this era had a dim view of racial/class warfare. In fact, one might argue that they were less concerned with race than the democracies!
 
I like this dev blog a lot, it should definitely limit from minor nations growing into huge blobs in a matter of 2 years, and it definitely should limit the 'gamey' wacky world conquests.

Just a thing I'd like to ask/say:
how will formable nations options will be possible to achieve? As for what I'd want to say, it would be great idea to being able to execute nation forming decision only when all required provinces are neutral or compiled.
 
I don’t want to go back to the consumer goods system from Hoi3. At. All. And that doesn’t make a ton of sense compared to real life.

But the rest of the economy being overhauled would be really great. That was the one advantage I saw in games like Making History II. I want to see a fleshed out economy that works really differently in Communist, Fascist, Democratic, and third world economies.
Well, maybe you're right, but I'm rather frustrated with democratic countries being weaker than their totalitarian counterparts. I understand that at military industry and manpower that's quite realistic, but Consumer Goods Factories malus makes them worse and less effective even in civilian industry, which is not so realistic in my opinion. Maybe at least they should enjoy limited economical bonus or stability bonus?
 
Which results in a rather... whitewashed picture of the consequences of the game's "Strategic Bombing" action.

If Paradox doesn’t want to be called a [redacted] simulator and decides to limit everything to either military casualties or property damage, then that’s acceptable. Anybody who takes HOI4 as an accurate history lesson is an idiot.
 
Well, I guess that's fascism, communism and democracy. What about non-aligned? Maybe even some different decisions for oligachy and despotism?

I think they mentioned that there are options that all ideologies have access to, just that Fascism, Communism and Democracy have unique options. I image the broad range of ideologies that Non-aligned makes it difficult to nail down a unique feature, which may be easier in the future with a potential politics revamp at some point, as its on the cards that the devs want to improve it.
 
I think they mentioned that there are options that all ideologies have access to, just that Fascism, Communism and Democracy have unique options. I image the broad range of ideologies that Non-aligned makes it difficult to nail down a unique feature, which may be easier in the future with a potential politics revamp at some point, as its on the cards that the devs want to improve it.
Yes, I know that are options that are available to everyone, I just would like all ideologies to be represented. Maybe all non-aligned (both oligarchies and monarchies) can have decision that increase compliance growth rate or simply increase compliance, for example, oligarchies probably could bribe local authorities or something like that, and monarchies maybe can do some royal marriages or visits of the royalty or smth
 
Will occupation rules also be fleshed out in this expansion? Right now no one can really explain which nation gets to occupy what, especially when there are multiple wars involved. It's currently very incoherent.
 
Great, hopefully we will be able create RK Moskow, Caucasus, Siberia and Generalgouvernment to be able to manage those territories easier, also rk ukriane should not require parts of General gouvernment and Vinnytsia and Odessa as they were annexed by Romania, also fix the borders so that when romania annexes those 2 regions they have the borders at Bug river please.
I am looking forward to this update as it looks very promising, the French tree is the best looking tree in the game so far.