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 48296 Bug Reports 17270 After Action Reports (AAR)
Previous dev diary Next dev diary
Show only dev responses

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!
 
Last edited:
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Sort by date Sort by reaction score
Pyro157 said:
Didn't Britain have to rapidly disband a large portion of their army around 1944?
Click to expand...
First of all, they would be unable to arm such army. Ok, let's pretend, they somehow managed to do this. But how in the name of all gods they manage to feed it? Simply feed.

One of HOI4 critical problems as for me is that AI is unable to understand concept of reasonable minimum. If it has armament, it won't store it as reserve, no, it would start training of another dozens of divisions. If it has some unassigned manpower... Well, look above.

It will continue to build and field thousands of plains, tens of thousands, it would build ships just to build ships. Damn, about what do we talk, if even Romania would have 100 divisions if stays untouched until 1941.
 
CrazyZombie said:
First of all, they would be unable to arm such army. Ok, let's pretend, they somehow managed to do this. But how in the name of all gods they manage to feed it? Simply feed.

One of HOI4 critical problems as for me is that AI is unable to understand concept of reasonable minimum. If it has armament, it won't store it as reserve, no, it would start training of another dozens of divisions. If it has some unassigned manpower... Well, look above.

It will continue to build and field thousands of plains, tens of thousands, it would build ships just to build ships. Damn, about what do we talk, if even Romania would have 100 divisions if stays untouched until 1941.
Click to expand...

It keeps trying to produce EVERYTHING and running out of resources/factories/convoys. AI USA having -264 Steel is very common.
 
its just a theory, but i noticed that the infoblerb about war support in the first image obscures most of the middle alert icon, is that an old icon or is this new in the dlc? as well as a new button on the menu tab with a little zero on it. any ideas?
 
Pyro157 said:
It keeps trying to produce EVERYTHING and running out of resources/factories/convoys. AI USA having -264 Steel is very common.
Click to expand...
Well, coding the priority of production with some number of possible production strategies to chose could help AI a bit. Like, focusing first of all on the light arms and equipment, then, if can afford - on the artillery and in similar way.

Also could be interesting if AI was able to use it's factories in a flexible way - overproduce light arms 2-3 times and throw everything to the tanks. Or planes. Or whatever else. That's what I was talking about - produce sensible minimum and switch to something else.
 
I would understand why the French would have high war support when they are directly attacked by Germany, but in the historical case where France goes to war over a guarantee of Danzig I don't see how the French are going to have high war support.
 
Any idea if/when a beta might be available??
 
WW2Dude said:
Shouldn't there be at least a way to core privinces like EU4 at least. Costing political power. Just an idea.
Click to expand...
For some states, maybe, tied to focuses and/or events. Like Soviet Union can technically make all former parts of Russian Empire own cores, with population, having to accept "game rules", serve in the army and etc. Same can be done with some states in Asia - from Eastern Turkestan republic to Mongolia and Manchuria as 17th republic of USSR.
 
Sorry, apparently we aren't supposed to be talking about this.
I just wanted to say that I disagree with bombing lowering war support. Going into World War II, theorists believed that this would be the case: that you could bomb the enemy into submission, that having your house destroyed would make the war seem not worth the cost. Instead, what they discovered in surveys following the war was that having your family and friends killed by invisible forces from the sky only enraged you: that bombing raised the morale of the enemy instead of lowering it. This, in addition to the fact that it came to be considered inhumane, is the reason that terror bombing disappeared as a tactic used by major powers following the war: it simply didn't work. If anything, it made the war last longer. Obviously, indiscriminate bombing of civilians is still used in warfare (the most notable recent instance is in Aleppo), but the goal here is no longer to demoralize, but to destroy. Large-scale bombing raises the enemy's morale and their support for the war. It shouldn't be otherwise in game.

Also, I know this was heretofore an EUIV reference, but will this event actually affect stability now?
20170422202722_1.jpg
 
Last edited:
These look like very good changes. I was never a big fan of national unity, for many of the reasons listed in the DD, so I'm glad to see it replaced. Stability and war support seem much more realistic and dynamic. I'm really getting excited for this patch.
 
Pyro157 said:
It keeps trying to produce EVERYTHING and running out of resources/factories/convoys. AI USA having -264 Steel is very common.
Click to expand...
I always see the US importing rather then changing their laws. They always manage to run out of steel; and are always at Free Trade. To me, it would make sense to change the economy law rather then waste civilian factories (albeit the US has a substantial amount). This is more down to the AI being stupid rather then it being smart; as it uses the PP for other things and imports rather then keeping the law at Free Trade for the boosts.
 
One thing that might make sense is to have some manpower tied up when you build anti-air defenses. The large number of combat troops in German that were taken out of the war manning flak cannons was significant.
 
Mr Thursday said:
One thing that might make sense is to have some manpower tied up when you build anti-air defenses. The large number of combat troops in German that were taken out of the war manning flak cannons was significant.
Click to expand...
In the late war women served there, just as Hitlerjugend and "hiwi". Also in USSR women were used for manning AA artillery as common practice.
 
podcat said:
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.
Click to expand...

Interesting changes. They should help better model individual nations and the conditions of the Great Depression and early war.

podcat said:
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.
Click to expand...

Hopefully this will help to address the divisional spam and the ai filling the deployment queue with dozens of divisions it can't equip that steal reinforcements from deployed divisions at the front.

podcat said:
The air war also affects things as successful enemy bombing (or nuking) will lower War Support.
Click to expand...

This concept presumes a vastly improved air combat ai. Otherwise defeating the ai will become even more trivial.

podcat said:
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.
Click to expand...

I hope this means you are addressing the inability of the ai to respond to enemy actions inside the borders of it's allies. Germany twiddling it's thumbs while Italy burns will be even more unacceptable with this new system.

Don't get me wrong, if this is implemented well dumping NU will be a big improvement over the current system. But it is going to require a big improvement over how the ai is currently working.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back