Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries
Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Hearts of Iron IV 48222 Bug Reports 17240 After Action Reports (AAR)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

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!
 
Last edited:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
RedArmy said:
So now what is the new normal difficulty level without bonuses nor maluses ?






Ah ah, just kidding...
Click to expand...
GRUMPYCAT.jpg

picture is updated now in the diary *grumbles*
 
podcat said:
I'm looking into this a bit. I would like to port over the system I made for Vicky 2 one day as it had a lot more flexibility. HOI however needs way more point of view logic or you will get very wierd names so we will see. Some day for sure, but dunno if its gonna be in for 1.5. if it does I will write it in a diary though :)
Click to expand...

For the time being, how difficult would it be to allow players to type in their own name for the war if desired? Even if it's just for cosmetic purposes? Or would that require a similar level of work to going the full hog?
 
podcat said:
Yeah, once we have sifted through all the data and come up with some popular combos (I bet there are) I think something like "suggested custom difficulty for <Your Nation> would be great so you dont have to keep setting it up
Click to expand...

Just remembered a BIG one.

If possible: Please allow us to change custom difficulty mid game. Often get to a point in Barbarossa (or any conflict) where the fun drops out of it for lack of challenge. A point comes where I can quit, or would continue if I could up the buffs and let them reorg for a while.

Lesser but significant:
1. A desperate defence buff mechanic like in expert AI. Allows customise buff to increase as VPs are taken.

2. For info- usually a snowball effect. When I Buff USA, I always think I have to buff Japan to help balance, then think about buffing China and Raj.
 
Would it be possible to allow a player to save a game in Ironman but only before the clock starts running on your scenario?

This would be so if you're going for achieves, etc., you don't have to reset all the pre-war stuff that you set when something goes wrong and precludes the achieve from being attained.
 
podcat said:
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.
Click to expand...
Crazy Groovy Stuff! Love the numbers!
Are these numbers MP or SP or a combination of both?

I'm curious to find out what will be used more, Civilian or Elite?

@Secret Master where you at son?

podcat said:
I can announce that we will announce the date within a week or two, to not be overly specific :p
Click to expand...
Eh, take your time. With each DD this DLC gets more and more amazing.

Thanks for all the hard work Podcat & Team!
 
What I find most strange about the telemetry is that even for 200 hours + players only 3.5% are playing on hard difficulty. Yet everywhere I turn on these forums, Steam or reddit, everyone keeps complaining about how easy the game is and how easy it is to win against the AI...

This would lead you to believe that most players choose to play on harder difficulties, to get more of a challenge, right?

But for some reason we don't. Why is that?
 
Zaria said:
Do you devs ever plan to add the "free city" of danzig to the game?
Click to expand...
When we no longer use provinces? its much too small for how we do things
 
@podcat, I laughed so hard because of this stupid cat! :)

By the way, I hope you will soon announce that central asian republics of USSR can be made free and that Mongolia can be claimed by both China and USSR. I am also dreaming of liberating west african countries, but I am not optimistic about that for the next update.
 
podcat said:
yeah japan has a custom file. A lot of nations do actually. I cant give you an exact number right now without needing to go though all of it :D I can check up on it for later
Click to expand...
Sehr gut!:D
podcat said:
When we no longer use provinces? its much too small for how we do things
Click to expand...
I assume you mean "states" not "provinces"?
 
Alex_brunius said:
What I find most strange about the telemetry is that even for 200 hours + players only 3.5% are playing on hard difficulty. Yet everywhere I turn on these forums, Steam or reddit, everyone keeps complaining about how easy the game is and how easy it is to win against the AI...

This would lead you to believe that most players choose to play on harder difficulties, to get more of a challenge, right?

But for some reason we don't. Why is that?
Click to expand...
Because these venues are made up largely of that 3.5% of total players.
 
Alex_brunius said:
What I find most strange about the telemetry is that even for 200 hours + players only 3.5% are playing on hard difficulty. Yet everywhere I turn on these forums, Steam or reddit, everyone keeps complaining about how easy the game is and how easy it is to win against the AI...

This would lead you to believe that most players choose to play on harder difficulties, to get more of a challenge, right?

But for some reason we don't. Why is that?
Click to expand...
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?
 
podcat said:
When we no longer use provinces? its much too small for how we do things
Click to expand...
EDIT: Let just post an old post I had.

It is actually a lot bigger than Monaco, Monaco is 2.02KM(Squared) in size when The free city of Danzig was 1966KM(Squared) , its only 700KM(Squared) smaller then Luxembourg which is in the game.
In terms of population Luxembourg has 295,000 people when the Free city would have around 400,000 people living in it(in 1929 so its actually higher).

Also in the Game is Macau which is 115KM(Squared) which is 1851KM Squared Smaller then Danzig.
 
Last edited:
Good fix, though why not just make this a hotfix right now? Three way wars do work, but only if you have everyone in your faction fighting in both the wars at the same time; which is how in MP you can have Japan be seperate from the Axis. Also @podcat it doesn't matter what difficulty it is unless you buff the AI substantially. As Germany on any difficulty you can take over France before they even join the allies and the UK in a matter of months in 36. Rather than making difficulty changes, increase the competence of your AI.
 
podcat said:
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?
Click to expand...

for me what is disruptive is the lag after 42_43, which makes the game tiring in higher difficulties, is there going to be any change in the AI to improve the lag?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back