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HOI4 Dev Diary - Stability and War Support

Hello everyone! Today we are going to be talking about National Unity, or rather the fact that it no longer exists…

National Unity
National Unity first made its appearance in Hearts of Iron III, basically as a mechanic to make France surrender at an appropriate time (when Paris fell essentially). It was largely moved over to HOI4 unchanged. While it does accomplish what we wanted it's also a very restrictive currency to work with design wise. A player who is winning doesn't really care what their NU is, making a lot of focus choices meaningless in those instances (or almost, there is always that time your country gets blanketed in nukes and someone dropping paras on one of your big cities seals the deal in multiplayer). We wanted to model different nations better and make sure we could do more interesting focuses and events where picking a loss of NU wasn't always the better choice compared to giving up, say, political power. So what's the answer?

Stability and War Support
These are two new values shown in the topbar that replace National Unity. Stability models the people's unity and support for the current government. War Support on the other hand represent the people’s support of war and of fully committing to fighting that war. As an example Britain in 1936 would be a pretty stable nation, but with very low war support. A nation like France would be much more unstable and with equally low war support, while Japan would have high war support and also high stability (mostly due to the emperor’s influence).

Stability average is 50% and nations with higher stability than that gain bonuses to industry, political power and consumer goods. Once you drop below 50% there are penalties instead as well as lowering your surrender limit (although nothing as extreme as how NU affected things). Strong party support helps increase stability, but being in a war - no matter how well supported - is going to lower your stability. Stability also works to protect against coups against your nation as well.

War Support has several passive effects and also limits several of the laws. You can’t switch to full War Economy without enough war support for example.

Note that in the picture below France is getting +30% war support because they have been attacked by Germany. An offensive war on the other hand for Germany actually hurts their war support. This comes with some interesting balancing effects:
  • Democracies challenging Germany early over Rhineland etc would put themselves as attackers, forcing them to fight hindered by the war support penalty.
  • Fascist or aggressive nations will generally have more initial war support but are likely to be surpassed by democracies in a defensive war when it comes to war support.
  • Defensive nations will be able to ramp up army sizes faster due to mobilization speed while attackers need to play a bit more carefully. The return of “national pride” from HOI3 in the form of combat bonuses on core territory will help here too.
Speaking of mobilization speed, you no longer get a chunk of manpower instantly when enacting conscription laws or other changes to recruitable manpower. Instead how quickly the manpower is made available by the law change is controlled by your mobilization speed. The higher the war support the faster new manpower trickles in.
pasted image 3.png


The air war also affects things as successful enemy bombing (or nuking) will lower War Support. Shooting down enemy bombers will offset this somewhat, as people are seeing you fight back against the enemy.

Here is an example on what can happen in a nation with low war support and low stability in a war. The severity of these particular options depends on exactly how low your stability/war support are. Here it's pretty bad.
pasted image 2.png


For Germany a good way of raising war support is to pull off its diplomatic expansions without being opposed:
pasted image 1.png


War support is also affected by how your allies manage. If a major ally surrenders it will lower your war support, so make sure to keep your friends in the war. On the flip side successfully capitulating major enemies increases your war support.

There are also some new ways to affect War Support and Stability outside events, ministers and national focuses that we aren't ready to show off yet ;)

See you again next week!
 
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You are right @Archangel85

The Emperor was a limiting factor. Like I said Japan was not endanger of a Communist Revolution and is more stable then the French government. Where I see strong stability & low war support is in the U.S. in the 1936-41 period, we all know the reason why this changes. And strong stability & strong war support in the USSR.

There was much more respect for the system & stability in Britain I would say than Japan. Yes. I know of some of the major strikes in Britain at the time. I would just at the start (have NFs that can increase stability for Japan?) say the U.S., Britain, Germany & USSR are more, in some cases much more, stable than Japan. And Japan is more stable than France, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia & Austria. So maybe start at the middle of the pack in stability?
 
So does war support affect how quickly a nation surrenders by modifying the number of VPs that need to fall?

I'm interested in how this affects the United States and how the axis could win.

True enough that war support against Japan would be high after pearl harbor, but if Germany/Italy threatens the continental US I don't think that support would remain.

If a nation is in two wars, I take it war support for both wars will always be the same?
 
The changes are incredible!
Love the stability system (you guys should probably give the "Kaiserreich" some credit though).
Love the war support even more. I always wanted that in the HoI-games. It should make a difference if the US is pearl harboured or if it aggressively dows Japan. In reality that would have been a game changer, in HoI it doesn't matter one bit. Now it will matter big time!

@podcat
Please consider adding casualties to the war support calculation. The Soviets had an extremely high casualty tolerance, partially due to being attacked. Germany also didn't face too much dissent despite the high casualties. The US probably had a rather high tolerance due to the CB. I doubt that the public would have accepted high casualties in an aggressive war without CB.
You could simulate it with a weighted calculation: x*party_modifier + y*national_modifier + z*CB.
Germany would have a high factor because of "fascist", "German tradition" and a mediocre CB (Danzig). Soviets would have a higher value, chiefly due to being attacked.
Don't know if it would work out as planned, but it might be worth considering it. The mentioned war support factors are mostly static (NF, event, minister).
 
Alystrius said:
HOI4_phone.png

What is this little telephone all about? o_O
Click to expand...
It's the WW2 german varriant of twitter, called "twitler". Where you can keep up to date with hitler's snide pokes at independent media and legitimizing his next military targets!

"We're going to take back danzig! It's gonna be great, believe me!"
 
I think Japan should be your other "test case" alongside France for these new mechanics. If you can't make Japan capitulate with a bunch of fighting and two nukes, the mechanics need tweaking until you can.
 
Gort11 said:
I think Japan should be your other "test case" alongside France for these new mechanics. If you can't make Japan capitulate with a bunch of fighting and two nukes, the mechanics need tweaking until you can.
Click to expand...
In theory the "white peace" mechanic should finally become working too. Who has ever seen such outcome in HOI4?

While, for example, if USSR manages to throw Japanese forces out of Manchuria and the continent in general, official Tokyo is very likely to seek for peace.
 
A question on the negative effects of enemy bombings: in actual practice, terror bombings don't cow populations but instead tended to stir them to continue fighting on. For example, the Blitz of London and the carpet and fire bombings of German and Japanese cities only served to further encourage each recipient to keep up the fight and overcome their hated enemies. Suffering strategic bombings would seem to encourage a nation's resolve to fight to the bitter end, not reduce it. Would it not make sense that receiving bombings would increase support for the war, not reduce it?

As an extra thought, the long term drain of war could have the opposite effect, as seen in the Great War. The blockade of Germany withering down the range of their food supplies made them more receptive to an armistice. Japan's impending food crisis for 1946, in part due to the US submarine blockade of strategic petroleum resources, due to the 1945 rice crop failure may have been a greater motivator to surrender than their twin nuclear bombings.
 
CrazyZombie said:
In theory the "white peace" mechanic should finally become working too. Who has ever seen such outcome in HOI4?

While, for example, if USSR manages to throw Japanese forces out of Manchuria and the continent in general, official Tokyo is very likely to seek for peace.
Click to expand...
Agreed, if Britain is out of resource for a long enough period, London will have no choice besides conditional surrender.
 
CrazyZombie said:
In theory the "white peace" mechanic should finally become working too. Who has ever seen such outcome in HOI4?

While, for example, if USSR manages to throw Japanese forces out of Manchuria and the continent in general, official Tokyo is very likely to seek for peace.
Click to expand...
How hard would it be for a novice modder to make it so that the USA to make peace if the UK falls?

Thinking about making my own personal extended timeline mod where the axis wins WW2 setting up a WW3 between Germany, Italy, USA as largest powers, but having the axis successfully invade USA in WW2 and imposing terms on US is a problem.
 
Archangel85 said:
Germany didn't have elections, true, but the Nazis were very aware of public morale. They were very worried that the German population would stab them in the back like they (thought) it had in 1918, and made sure to keep the sacrifices the general population had to make to an absolute minimum until Stalingrad. War support is not just approval rates, it is the willingness of the population to bear the rationing, the extra shifts at the tank plant, the willingness to buy war bonds, the likelihood that they will pull strings to get out of the draft or volunteer and so on. Basically faith that a war would be winnable and that your side is morally right.
Click to expand...

But none of those things are in the game. Rationing, extra shifts, war bonds, draft etc.
In game the Nazis are never worried about the German population.

There is a rather large disconnect. Real world things that are not in game are still not in game but yet somehow with this new update it won't matter if they are in the game or not because it is just going to make the game better?

I love new things added to the game. The more the merrier I say. However, when I take the information provided and then turn it into real world HOI4 gaming practice, I don't see/understand the improvements.
I am hoping someone can translate the new system into real world HOI4 and explain how this system is better than NU?
I've read nearly every post in this thread and still don't understand how this is in any way an improvement. It may be different but for three years 1936 - 1939? I don't know I'm trying to see the benefits but I just don't see a single one.
 
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