HOI4 Dev Diary - Future and Cornflakes

[Poopfaust]

I love the air mechanic. Do not screw with that too much, if at all.

 

[Dracolithfiend]

Suggestion: Add Marches to the games music track list. Many of the songs from the era are out of copyright and can be covered by whichever one of you have a garage band.

Blood upon the risers for example...

 

[fabius]

I disagree because most of the fascist nations never fully mobilized until late into the war; others, such as Spain, were in no position to conduct any kind of offensive combat operations after their civil war. In fact, Spain's retention of so much manpower and formations has got to be one of the most obviously egregious problems in HoI4 right now.

Also, let us not forgetthat Germany desperately needing industrial and agricultural manpower leading to Tooze's quotes of Hitler planning demobilising divisions when they thought the war in the East was won. If I remember correctly, Germany even planned downsizing more than once.

 

[Wraith11B]

I did not know about that, @fabius, it was not brought up in my "Europe in the Period of Total War" course this past spring. Full source?

 

[ViKiNG-NoR]

I dont see any stuff added for the diplomacy in the future list. it would be fun to have more options in it.

 

[Axe99]

Also, let us not forgetthat Germany desperately needing industrial and agricultural manpower leading to Tooze's quotes of Hitler planning demobilising divisions when they thought the war in the East was won. If I remember correctly, Germany even planned downsizing more than once.

This is from a very, very vague memory, but I have something rumbling at the back of my brain of at least temporary thoughts of a partial demobilisation after France as well, although best take that with several kilos of salt unless someone better read/memoried has a source .

 

[Tekoa]

I know this is a game about "The War" and beating all the odds to achieve world domination, but I'd very much like to see more than just one massive war. By this, I mean there should be a core system similar to EU4 in which you can only take a certain amount of land without having to deal with an insane amount of rebels. I think that how the game is now where you fight one big war to the point that you win, and just take everything, is kind of dumb and unrealistic. It doesn't give you a chance to recuperate after a major conflict, and you most certainly will not recover your stockpile if you aren't Germany, USA, or the USSR. Not to mention, once you win the war, the game is essentially over in the sense that all of your enemies have been defeated. I'm not saying that WWII should just not happen, as I do think it should be the focal point, but only surrounded by many other events and conflicts that don't spill into the war as a whole.

EDIT: To add to this, please stop completely unaligned and unrelated countries from joining a major faction immediately. There's been too many times as Brazil that I have to join the Axis or Comintern to combat the Argentinians who join the Allies right off the bat of a declaration of war.

 

[Ravagers Prey]

I hope you guys mean what you say, this game really needs it.

 

[_Kaleun_]

• Wunderwaffen projects

Great idea, so maybe that the player can build "sepcial units"?
Normally equipment (weapons, armor, aircraft and so on) is produced by the player by assigning factories.
And these special units are like the ships, so you assign factories and create after time x one unit (in these case one sepcial unit). These special units can be railway guns that can only move to infrastructure level 8 (just as an example).
The other points also sound very interesting but I think the most potential have "Wunderwaffen" ;-)

 

[Mannstien]

• Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc.
• More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour
• A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals
• A logistics system with more actual player involvement (now you only care once stuff has gone very badly)
• Improved naval combat interfaces with good transparency to underlying mechanics (give it the 1.4 air treatment)
• Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare
• Long term goals and strategies to guide ai rather than random vs historical focus lists, visible to players
• Every starting nation has a custom portrait for historical leaders
• A way for players to take dynamic decisions, quickly. Something that fits between events and national focuses.
• Spies and espionage
• Changing National Unity to something that matters during most of the game rather than when you are losing only
• Improving peace conferences
• Update core national focus trees with alt-history paths and more options (Germany, Italy, USA, United Kingdom, Soviet, France, Japan)
• Wunderwaffen projects
• Properly represent fuel in some way in the game
• Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff
• Rework how wars work with respect to merging etc as its a big source of problems
• More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms
• More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China, South America, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Greece)
• An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.
• Make defensive warfare more fun
• Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc
• Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure
• Have doctrines more strongly affect division designing to get away from cookie cutter solutions and too ahistorical gamey setups

The underlined and bolded items are what I've been dreaming of for this game since before launch. Sure mods are great but if something needs added to the core then it's up to the development company and their wonderful spies to read our posts and Woohoo start getting them implemented....!!!!!!!! You PDX people really do listen, if your able to accomplish all of this well I think this might be just the game to play for another 10 years as long as you keep it updated to Windows 2030.... I miss Silent Hunter 3....Think I'm going to go buy a Windows XP disk on Ebay and load one of my laptops with it just so I can play SH3 with Grey Wolves Expansion again...

 

[Dracolithfiend]

I did not know about that, @fabius, it was not brought up in my "Europe in the Period of Total War" course this past spring. Full source?

He sourced Tooze in his post who probably has the original source cited in his book. I read the same thing in the rise and fall amongst other books I have. This was at most proposals though.

The demobilization between the fall of France and Barbarossa was likely more a shuffling of skilled trades out of the heer and young men finishing basic training to replace them.

 

[fabius]

I did not know about that, @fabius, it was not brought up in my "Europe in the Period of Total War" course this past spring. Full source?

He sourced Tooze in his post who probably has the original source cited in his book. I read the same thing in the rise and fall amongst other books I have. This was at most proposals though.

The demobilization between the fall of France and Barbarossa was likely more a shuffling of skilled trades out of the heer and young men finishing basic training to replace them.

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy - Adam Tooze

This is from a very, very vague memory, but I have something rumbling at the back of my brain of at least temporary thoughts of a partial demobilisation after France as well, although best take that with several kilos of salt unless someone better read/memoried has a source .

Thanks, yes likely fall of France.

@Dracolithfiend, agreed the France demob was likely that. But the context is crucial, the competing needs for manpower were showing already then. In addition, they were planning on redirecting resources to Airforce and Navy for anticipated US entry to war.

I'd add, some British units were very unhappy at being sent to Colonial duty instead of being demobalised after the war. Security services were very worried that the resentment fueled barrack-room communists.

Re- podcat's list. I very much like it. Yet find myself agreeing with posters who think Hoi4 needs some EUIV diplo touch. I reckon it needs more diplo for immersion, but also to help balance the snowballing of power and lengthen each game's feeling of being involved and competitive.

 

[Sir Garnet]

• A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals

• I fear imbalance from snowballing stacking like HOI3, but if the mechanism with a General under FM is about getting the better modifier of the two that could be fun and worthwhile.

More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China . . .

Please reassure me that Paradox for work on China and China's war PDX will make use of a copy of
"Kangzhan: Guide to Chinese Ground Forces 1937-45" by Leland Ness with Bin SHih,
published recently and ideal for a historical game designer. Photos for artists. Extensive OB info including TOE but also actual equipment on hand reports. Unexpected details such as description of procurement and the various arsenals and their production capacities. There is a summary history of the war in China and Burma focused in on significant operations and operational performance of particular formations and commanders that gives a good sense of the challenges involved in managing campaigns in China.

Cheers

 

[fellaz007]

I did not know about that, @fabius, it was not brought up in my "Europe in the Period of Total War" course this past spring. Full source?

Another interesting source could be Götz Aly's "Hitlers Beneficiaries Plunder Racial Welfare". One of Aly's thesis was that the Nazis were only able to sustain their war machine and their peoples goodwill by reckless plundering of occupied territories and that they could only sustained their initial momentum with each new conquest.

I.e. a "final victory" would have to be followed by a immediate demobilization. Because with no new conquest and plunder possible, the economic house of cards would have collapsed, quickly. A bit similar to what the Mongols have experienced in the Mid-Ages.

 

[fabius]

Another interesting source could be Götz Aly's "Hitlers Beneficiaries Plunder Racial Welfare". One of Aly's thesis was that the Nazis were only able to sustain their war machine and their peoples goodwill by reckless plundering of occupied territories and that they could only sustained their initial momentum with each new conquest.

I.e. a "final victory" would have to be followed by a immediate demobilization. Because with no new conquest and plunder possible, the economic house of cards would have collapsed, quickly. A bit similar to what the Mongols have experienced in the Mid-Ages.

Seem to recall Germany increasingly using inventive finance schemes- such as restricting consumer goods, and heavily regulating savings- then plundering private citizens' savings.

 

[joreri508]

examples:
- Kill country X before they join a faction so the war ends: now everyone living there doesnt mind anymore and there is no resistance
- you can never improve non-core territory compared to core.


lets look at history: when ww2 ended what would have happened if all those conscripts were not allowed to go back to their homes and were still fully mobilised. For years?

Two potential mechanics, looking at how its handled in the real world.

First, allow or force demobilisation event which lowers # conscripts available, and as a consequence automatically reduce non-prioritised divisions down to cadre size. Airwings can be reduced accordingly by percentage.

Second, the player can manually dissolve the cadres to allow some of the divisions to get fully staffed, or they can stay understaffed = non-efficient units.

 

[bERt0r]

Seem to recall Germany increasingly using inventive finance schemes- such as restricting consumer goods, and heavily regulating savings- then plundering private citizens' savings.

In fact the Germans forced Greece to give them a loan after they capitulated which still has not been paid back:

Yet it’s important in this case to make a distinction between reparation payments for war crimes and repayments of so-called Besatzungsanleihe: monthly loans demanded from the Greek government in 1942-44 to pay for the maintenance costs of the German army in Greece and further military activity in the Mediterranean, even delivering food from starving Greece to Rommel’s “Afrika-Korps”. In early 1945, in the final days of the Third Reich, a group of high-ranking German economists calculated this “German debt (Reichsschuld) to the Greek state” to amount to 476m Reichsmarks, which would be roughly €10bn today.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/10/germany-greece-second-world-war-reparations

 

[Ringers]

Hi everyone, this week I'm going to take some time and talk future plans with you all.

Right now
With the "Oak" 1.4.2 patch out the door and the team back from vacation its time to start looking at the future. This week we started work on the next DLC which is going to be a full-sized expansion. A lot of people have been asking for more mechanics and larger changes, and this will be it. As normal the expansion will arrive together with a free update we've dubbed 1.5 "Cornflakes".

As for exactly what these will contain you will need to bear with us a bit. As I said with us getting started on it now we need some time to actually make and test stuff before we start showing it off to you. This will mean that the next two diaries (if all goes according to plan) are going to be covering other stuff while we get ready. My plan there is to get some guest writing in from people who can talk about the business and process side of the company and team.

The five year plan
Not actually a five year plan, but I want to share with you some form of roadmap on what to expect in the future. Some of you may have seen me talk about some of this in my PdxCon talk earlier this year.

Just to be super clear, this is not any form of exhaustive or final list and unless we have already done it we can't promise anythings. Priorities change etc. The point of this is to give you an idea of things we would like to do. The order of things is also not in any kind of priority order, or order we would do them.

• Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc.
• More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour
• A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals
• A logistics system with more actual player involvement (now you only care once stuff has gone very badly)
• Improved naval combat interfaces with good transparency to underlying mechanics (give it the 1.4 air treatment)
• Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare
• Long term goals and strategies to guide ai rather than random vs historical focus lists, visible to players
• Every starting nation has a custom portrait for historical leaders
• A way for players to take dynamic decisions, quickly. Something that fits between events and national focuses.
• Spies and espionage
• Changing National Unity to something that matters during most of the game rather than when you are losing only
• Improving peace conferences
• Update core national focus trees with alt-history paths and more options (Germany, Italy, USA, United Kingdom, Soviet, France, Japan)
• Wunderwaffen projects
• Properly represent fuel in some way in the game
• Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff
• Rework how wars work with respect to merging etc as its a big source of problems
• More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms
• More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China, South America, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Greece)
• An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.
• Make defensive warfare more fun
• Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc
• Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure
• Have doctrines more strongly affect division designing to get away from cookie cutter solutions and too ahistorical gamey setups

You'll notice that some of these are small and some of them are huge. I can't really talk too much details about this stuff though. That is stuff we will do once/if it makes it to dev diaries with feature highlights and has been implemented. Oh yeah, and before someone goes "why isn't improving AI on this list" the answer is that its not really something you can ever check off as done. We'll keep working on that in parallel with other stuff as we have since release.

There is no World War Wednesday stream today since the channel is all streaming from Gamescom today, but you can now check out last weeks episode on youtube to see me run the dev team as generals in a massive co-op.

Sounds like you might have read my suggestions, some good ideas in this list.

 

[Praetori]

Two potential mechanics, looking at how its handled in the real world.

First, allow or force demobilisation event which lowers # conscripts available, and as a consequence automatically reduce non-prioritised divisions down to cadre size. Airwings can be reduced accordingly by percentage.

Second, the player can manually dissolve the cadres to allow some of the divisions to get fully staffed, or they can stay understaffed = non-efficient units.

I would like cadres in general, off map, much like the recruitment/training system we have now but with added features. Preferably represented on-map on the strategic zoom level. Moving forces back and forth between the two could serve as fielding or mothballing.
Representing the standing army and the reserves.

You could in theory build a on-paper-army and see how much equipment and manpower you'd need and then field forces as you need (although training would be low or through some conscription law which assigns manpower for training without having them constantly drafted).

 

[The Gentleman Bastard]

Holy Crap.

I was not expecting a return to full-blown expansions. I just assumed country-packs was going to be the business model. This is great news!

I'm besides myself with excitement about the chain of command and espionage aspects of the game. And a supply system that encourages deeper player involvement and planning sounds great too.

Good to see the ole HOI team haven't lost their ambition.