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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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ashbery76 said:
The problem is bombing increases war support because grannies getting firebombed tends to make people angry.It's a game logic but not a reality one.
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Well, good strategic bombing destroys industrial potential of the state, so even if you are willing to fight, you have nothing to arm yourself. Because factories and arms stockpiles are turned in ruins.

Not the great feeling.
 
ashbery76 said:
The problem is bombing increases war support because grannies getting firebombed tends to make people angry.It's a game logic but not a reality one.
Click to expand...

That depends on the level of bombing. A few weeks of Blitz might strengthen the resolve or resistance, but tell me just how many of the homeless people on the homefront in Germany or Japan in 1945 that was "supporting the war and fully committed to fighting it" using the devs own definition?

podcat said:
War Support on the other hand represent the people’s support of war and of fully committing to fighting that war.
Click to expand...

They knew the war was already lost, and that if they tried to fight in the war there was a good chance they would not survive due to the desperate situation. They knew that going to the factories to work if it could be avoided also meant a risk due to them being primary bombing targets. They knew that buying warbonds would be a meaningless thing to do and that they needed what little they had left to survive the harsh times after the war.
 
Alex_brunius said:
That depends on the level of bombing. A few weeks of Blitz might strengthen the resolve or resistance, but tell me just how of the homeless people on the homefront in Germany or Japan in 1945 that was "supporting the war and fully committed to fighting it"?
Click to expand...

That was the end of the war when nuked or invading nations pouring in.Not really the same as a starting mechanic.
 
"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."
NIGHT WITCHES INTENSIFIES!
 
CrazyZombie said:
Just to define... IRL Barbarossa has failed.
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Just some other basic definitions.
1.) This is a game.
2.) The Germans sometimes win.
3.) It is important that both sides have a chance.

If you are looking for an historical recreation instead of a game, there are a number of good titles on Netflix or at your public library which might interest you.
 
Back to money: If "Gold" seems too limited,. it could be "Precious Metals" and include stockpiles of silver and platinum. Silver was the precious metal used by the British to pay for tea from China. The flow of silver was so severe that the British started to smuggle opium into China, in order to be paid with silver.
 
ashbery76 said:
That was the end of the war when nuked or invading nations pouring in.Not really the same as a starting mechanic.
Click to expand...

So basically when they started "firebombing grannies" you mean?

ashbery76 said:
The problem is bombing increases war support because grannies getting firebombed tends to make people angry.
Click to expand...

The first firebombing raid of Japan that I can find information about happened 25:th of February 1945. Firebombing of Dresden in Europe also happened in February 1945.

The people they are angry at will also be their own military & airforce that promised to keep them safe and their own politicians who promised they would win the war and that it would be over 4 Christmases ago.
 
I like this change, but 80% of VP seems too taxing. Not particular hard, but leads to gamier tactics if you are at war with someone on a different continent. If I'm Germany and I capture France, I either do unrealistic naval invasions of Britain early in the game to beat them, or I invade Soviet Union. If Axis has all of Eurasia + Africa under control, Allies would fold up even from afar. No naval invasion of America from Germany to end the war.

I think doing something like War score from V2 would be a good inspiration for capitulation:
Stability and War Support could be good modifiers in determining when a country will give in.
The longer the war/more successful an enemy is overall (if Germany captures Raj, Britain should do a conditional surrender) should lead to easier capitulation or a sue for peace.
 
Dalwin said:
Just some other basic definitions.
1.) This is a game.
2.) The Germans sometimes win.
3.) It is important that both sides have a chance.

If you are looking for an historical recreation instead of a game, there are a number of good titles on Netflix or at your public library which might interest you.
Click to expand...
Well, it is odd to see more or less historical Reich until 1941, when it suddenly starts pushing until Ural where meets with Japan. AI vs. AI should lead to more or less similar outcomes, if something in the world didn't change much.

Player Germany still can win. People were taking the world as Finland, Tibet and similar minors. But AI should be in "historical" situation - to be able to do what it was able to do.
 
CrazyZombie said:
Well, it is odd to see more or less historical Reich until 1941, when it suddenly starts pushing until Ural where meets with Japan. AI vs. AI should lead to more or less similar outcomes, if something in the world didn't change much.

Player Germany still can win. People were taking the world as Finland, Tibet and similar minors. But AI should be in "historical" situation - to be able to do what it was able to do.
Click to expand...
If you are mainly concerned with AI versus AI, when was the last time you saw the German AI win Barbarossa? It is a very rare occurrence but there is still a slight chance of it happening. The game would be less exciting as other nations if the outcome of the most critical conflict was a foregone conclusion.

By saying that both sides need to have a chance for a game to be good, at no point did I say that must have equal chances. Many games manage to be more historically accurate by having different victory conditions. A lot of the better known WWII strategic games only require the German player to do better than history to achieve a marginal victory. This might mean that Berlin falls in January of 46 and yet the German player "won" the game barely even if he lost the war.
 
Dalwin said:
If you are mainly concerned with AI versus AI, when was the last time you saw the German AI win Barbarossa? It is a very rare occurrence but there is still a slight chance of it happening. The game would be less exciting as other nations if the outcome of the most critical conflict was a foregone conclusion.

By saying that both sides need to have a chance for a game to be good, at no point did I say that must have equal chances. Many games manage to be more historically accurate by having different victory conditions. A lot of the better known WWII strategic games only require the German player to do better than history to achieve a marginal victory. This might mean that Berlin falls in January of 46 and yet the German player "won" the game barely even if he lost the war.
Click to expand...
As for me, I see it in the way "wars are won before declaration". If Germany manages to unite Europe in anti-Bolshevik crusade - they win. If they manage to force Allies stay neutral - they can win (or lose - lack of experience is a two-sided coin). If they manage to beat Allies first and then - turn to Soviet Union, well, they have some chances for victory (but small ones - USSR would have got all possible help of USA).
So, from my point of view Germany (as any other major) should have variety of paths to chose and depending on the path AI vs. AI war would end in one way or another.
 
Will this force democracies to demobilize after the hordes of fascism are gone? Revert their recruitment and industry laws back to peace time standard? Would be a neat feature and make world war three much more of a challenge...
 
Duke_Dave said:
Will this force democracies to demobilize after the hordes of fascism are gone? Revert their recruitment and industry laws back to peace time standard? Would be a neat feature and make world war three much more of a challenge...
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's really odd seeing this happen:

Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 11.59.30 AM.png


Didn't Britain have to rapidly disband a large portion of their army around 1944?
 
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