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HOI4 Dev Diary - War Changes and Game Difficulty

Hello everyone, last week we covered the last of the new focus trees, so from now on we will focus (heh) on new features and changes again. Today we are going to start off by talking about changes to how wars work as well as sharing some very interesting telemetry data!

War Changes
When we planned out Waking the Tiger, we knew that we wanted to solve several issues with wars once and for all. The game wasn’t really set up for 3-way-wars and it tried to stop you from 3-way wars as much as possible, and if it failed some pretty nasty bugs could happen. Wars could in certain cases end up either having to force friends into war, or drop people from wars which usually really messed up both multiplayer and singleplayer when it happened. It was all just a nasty and horrible mess on the code side as well.

Our changes effectively mean that now every two nations at war have their own little war and we instead present wars as a summary of sides that make sense. How you look at a war as a player shouldn't really look any different now. This was a massive change that has taken us a lot of time (and quite a bit of sanity), but I am confident that it will have been worth it with all the issues it has solved and freedom for players it will enable (particularly for mods that like to do a lot of wars from events and focuses where there was a big chance of things working out wrong - not naming any names).

When playing, the biggest changes you will notice is that wars merging now is a lot smoother. War score, casualties and such are properly tracked and retained. Its now also possible to fight 3-way wars (or more) so we can handle Axis vs Comintern vs Allies vs The Japanese co-prosperity sphere etc.

The war interface has also gotten a bunch of changes:
Screenshot_1.jpg

  • You can now filter nations like minors, capitulated, or nations who aren’t called in yet
  • We show nations that could be called in, but aren’t in blue (so you can see that the soviets have not called in Republican Spain yet), this is instead of the old interface where there was separate lists, now a button appears if you yourself have the power to call them.
  • We group up factions and summarize stats for them for easier comparisons
  • The interface lets you pick among your wars, but there is also a War Summary that collects all war allies and enemies in one big page. The interface also scales with your screen size, so it's much easier to get an overview of large complex wars now.
Screenshot_2.jpg


One of my favourite new things is that we show a breakdown of the casualties, so you can see how many casualties you caused for a specific nation:
Untitled-2.jpg


Difficulty Settings
We are slowly building up better and better telemetry on HOI players and I really love to share it with the community when it’s surprising, and this one surprised me a lot actually! It turns out that close to 40% of players prefer to play on the lowest difficulty setting. I would have expected this to be quite a bit less!

difficulty.jpg


As number of hours you play goes up people migrate away from recruit a bit. So for players with less than 50 hours played, 60% of them use Recruit and after playing 200+ hours only about 28% still use Recruit. Veteran shows the largest relative change. For beginners, it is 1.4% who use it and it goes up to 3.5% for 200+ hour players. The vast majority use Regular. It's the difficulty setting that doesn't give you any bonuses or penalties so this is usually what people prefer. My design philosophy is to try and stay away from direct combat bonuses and such that will make you learn the game in the wrong way. I prefer buffing things that allows a player to play more sub-optimal, so faster research (or slower so you must make more optimal choices), smaller losses on efficiency when changing production lines or less impact of lack of resource and such. It's also important to only affect the player as you don't really know which of the nations will end up on their side or as enemies. For example, in HOI3 depending on country it could actually be easier at harder settings, since certain nations were advantaged by that in an allied role.

So what are we doing about this? First of all we are adding two more settings (the gods of symmetry demand it!). A new difficulty before Recruit called Civilian and a new harder difficulty called Elite.
upload_2018-1-24_16-16-49.png


I also thought I would mention that we haven't really analyzed the custom difficulty settings yet but plan to in the future. I always recommend them to tailor your game. Say if you want a particularly strong Soviet to fight as Germany.

See you all again next week! Also don't forget to tune in to World War Wednesday at 16:00 CET where we start a new campaign to show off all the new stuff in Waking the Tiger as a Chinese warlord on the rise!

Rejected diary titles:
  • Dan Lind's "War and Peace (Book One of Four)"
  • War (screen), What is it good for?
  • I guess we don’t need to spend all the work we do on improving the AI after all
  • War. War sometimes changes
  • You can't fight in here. This is a wargame forum.
  • Players online usually lie about the size of their conquests
  • You get a war, and you get a war! Everyone gets a war!
  • Maybe finally Quill18 can now play competitive multiplayer without getting shafted by a war-merge bug!
 
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yeah its a very interesting question my guess is:
- forum community is still a very small part of all owners, so even if you all play on max difficulty the number would still work out
- people dont like to say they play on lower difficulties
- people may be using custom difficulties a lot more as some ppl said, nerfing your production isnt always fun, so may be better to buff the enemy
- MP players are 14%, and wouldnt really be using this right so that affects numbers too especially if a lot of good players go to play MP instead as a challenge

but yeah its very interesting, what do you normally play on for SP?
Do the difficulty statistics include players that use mods? That could also be your answer right there, I think most advanced users looking for a challenge would sooner turn to a mod like Expert AI or Black Ice than stick with vanilla but turn up the difficulty slider.
 
One big help which should be relatively easy to program is to give us a warning icon in case any resource is overimported. It is very easy in case of switching production lines or building refineries or conquering states with resources.
Or just give us a checkbox that lets trade automatically manage itself. Clicking to add another 8 of whatever every time another factory finishes is just annoying busywork.

There could be another box/radio button next to each nation in the list to toggle whether the autotrader is allowed to buy from them or not, to prevent trading with nations you don't want to give your business to, and another radio button to toggle them as being higher priority than others so the autotrader prefers to trade with them. This would be miles better than the current system and much easier to use.

I liked how in HoI3 you could automate a lot of systems if you didn't feel like dealing with them at the time. In HoI4, you can now even automate the combat, but the automation of trade was lost in translation somehow, even though trade is a much simpler system where 90% of the time you're basically just finding whoever has resources available and buying them for a set price. In HoI3 there were multiple currencies and many more variables to consider, but in HoI4 trade is dead simple, so I think it's the perfect job to let the computer handle. Optimally I'd like to look at the trade screen as little as possible and have the "low on resources" alert pop up never, unless I'm completely out of Civilian Factories to trade. I hope @podcat and co. consider this in a future update to the trade and production system.
 
Do the difficulty statistics include players that use mods? That could also be your answer right there, I think most advanced users looking for a challenge would sooner turn to a mod like Expert AI or Black Ice than stick with vanilla but turn up the difficulty slider.
Yeah I suspect mod and country choice explain a lot of that.
 
Or just give us a checkbox that lets trade automatically manage itself. Clicking to add another 8 of whatever every time another factory finishes is just annoying busywork.

There could be another box/radio button next to each nation in the list to toggle whether the autotrader is allowed to buy from them or not, to prevent trading with nations you don't want to give your business to, and another radio button to toggle them as being higher priority than others so the autotrader prefers to trade with them. This would be miles better than the current system and much easier to use.

I liked how in HoI3 you could automate a lot of systems if you didn't feel like dealing with them at the time. In HoI4, you can now even automate the combat, but the automation of trade was lost in translation somehow, even though trade is a much simpler system where 90% of the time you're basically just finding whoever has resources available and buying them for a set price. In HoI3 there were multiple currencies and many more variables to consider, but in HoI4 trade is dead simple, so I think it's the perfect job to let the computer handle. Optimally I'd like to look at the trade screen as little as possible and have the "low on resources" alert pop up never, unless I'm completely out of Civilian Factories to trade. I hope @podcat and co. consider this in a future update to the trade and production system.

Well, there are still some strategic decisions here. You may not care about all of your production enough, that you want to spend civilian factories for the speed up. For example navy is not key to your strategy, so you let your dockyards produce something, but not at max speed by importing too little oil. Or the import would require dangerous convoy routes. I would say that the game is simplified enough that trade is not too much burden for the player, especially the focus of HOI4 is indeed the industry aspect of war.
 
It's just a green blob on a map. Why would Hitler go there?

Yes, it's basically an OPM and not even a fully independent one at that . . . . . but it could fit on the map (just split the Danzig state into a single-province state for Danzig with the rest staying with Poland as Gdynia), and it would be historically accurate.

I'd rather see the historical 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland as something that can happen in-game TBH if we're going to focus on things that matter to Poland, but there's certainly scope for doing both.
 
I'm with you, but you have to realize it's far more difficult than just turning an AI fix switch on/off. They've already said it's a continuous sort of project and they'll continue to tweak it. Pretty sure in this topic, or somewhere else there was mention of a diary regarding AI as well.

All cool, I was just a bit unsettled by the part of this post where the podcat said
"I guess we don’t need to spend all the work we do on improving the AI after all"
 
I like everything here, but I have 2 suggestions maybe to consider for down the road.

1. The AI is not a matter of penalties or bonuses to most players. I myself have almost 500 hours on this game and find it pointless to play a game with permanent penalties for a nation. Minor nations are pointless to play and playing a major power is a bit frustrating because everyone else somehow beats you to researching the same tank or rifle. I understand that's the point but it isn't very enticing to start a game like that. I have never seen an AI use airborne. Or successfully invade territory that I had an army ready to contest. I want to be out thought. I want the AI to challenge me in tactics. Not beat me with numbers because they will always beat me with the permanent penalty. I'd consider reviewing your AI for future updates. I myself will continue to play Regular because I want to out strategize my enemy. Not struggle for an unknown reason.

2. The political system is a bit boring. I know this is a military sim but.... Playing a country 10 times gets boring with the same focus tree. If there is a way to build on what this DLC is added I would like to see it. As of right now I would suggest adding or making monarchies an actual ideology. One it would be nice to push for that. To have a king or ruling family. Second it would be nice to have to convince a monarch to join your cause/faction. As a prime example Hitler did this with the young Hungarian Prince. Let a monarchy be able to grow on its own. Becoming democratic should be a constant struggle of holding majority power in your country. Internal worries, while becoming fascist or communist (or a monarchy) should have a constant problem of national security. Clearly Italy and Germany had their people go against them. Italy was practically fighting a war with 50% of the country hating Mussolini.
All I am trying to say is allow for politics to play more of a prewar strategy. I see the DLC is adding this which is a great first step :D

And a side note, please don't let the territory disputes be a China only thing. Every country that ever existed to this day (like Armenia or Russia for example) has a territory dispute. Please please please allow this to be a tool for any nation to try and justify for. When I play Germany and want to conquer the "old empire's" territory, I really like not starting WWII over Danzig. All I want is Danzig. Allow us to have a territory dispute over it please!

Anyways, it looks great and really looking forward to this DLC! Keep up the great work guys!
 
And a side note, please don't let the territory disputes be a China only thing. Every country that ever existed to this day (like Armenia or Russia for example) has a territory dispute. Please please please allow this to be a tool for any nation to try and justify for. When I play Germany and want to conquer the "old empire's" territory, I really like not starting WWII over Danzig. All I want is Danzig. Allow us to have a territory dispute over it please!
While I do think limited wars should be possible in some places, Danzig is not one of them, the traumas of Poland’s partitions made the odds of Poland cedeing Danzig peacefully basically 0.
 
While I do think limited wars should be possible in some places, Danzig is not one of them, the traumas of Poland’s partitions made the odds of Poland cedeing Danzig peacefully basically 0.

Yes but Danzig could've been taken by fascists. They still had a major German population their and even fascism growing. Germany could've supported a Danzig rebellion. This almost came to be.
 
That looks great but I still miss a feature and that is a statistic ending screen for wars. I realy want to know how much casualties I had, how many planes and tanks did I built and how many did I lost. Also it would be nice to have an overview of my own lost ships and enemy destroyed ships.
I've been looking for that since the release of HoI4. Maybe it is possible to store these information in a log file so you can analyze the data in an external tool. Just a suggestion.
 
If a Country have a shared industrie part with a athsor country and it change it's focustree to a athsor focustree. Will the shared part pay complete if it is?