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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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If so, a brain symbol would be a bit more intuitive.
 
Alex_brunius said:
WW2 was mainly a war between western countries and their minor allies + Japan, so it makes sense to use these priorities for a WW2 game, right?
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True with the notable exception of China. I think most of us, yourself included I believe, would have liked to see the two Chinas have their own NF trees in the first expansion if not the initial release. I understand that this has been delayed until they can do more than simply give them custom NF trees. I believe the intent is to also be able to better represent the post WWII civil war in China. This last item will probably require some new mechanics specific to the region.
 
Archangel85 said:
The forums have repeatedly assured me that HoI needs absolutely no intelligence to play well.
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Hahaha, much lolling :). I wonder if, as AI is developed, someone for a lark will try and program one to believe everything it reads on the internet, and how that would turn out? :eek:.
 
Would it make sense to subtract war support when there is major battle loss, failed invasion, fleet destroyed etc. Seems like AI gets away with suicidal actions that in reality would have destroyed morale at home
 
Axe99 said:
Hahaha, much lolling :). I wonder if, as AI is developed, someone for a lark will try and program one to believe everything it reads on the internet, and how that would turn out? :eek:.
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With nuclear war.

On a serious note, the inclusion of stability and war support means that taking HoI4 beyond the normal 1948 end date seems more reasonable than before (where it was harder to reflect things like the resistance to Vietnam or Afghanistan).

Would be great for mods like Modern Day or an actual Cold War scenario.
 
Alex_brunius said:
WW2 was mainly a war between western countries and their minor allies + Japan, so it makes sense to use these priorities for a WW2 game, right?
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you mean south america wasn't a part of WW2 that make sense but asia countries only japan has focus tree unless paradox(and western people) think asia wasn't a part of WW2 except japan
 
xiaox said:
you mean south america wasn't a part of WW2 that make sense but asia countries only japan has focus tree unless paradox(and western people) think asia wasn't a part of WW2 except japan
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Well, Brazil took part in WW2 and indeed fought bravely.

And actually, most people I've talked to have vaguely heard of a war in China before the invasion of Poland, or that the ROC government used to rule the mainland, or know there was one, but only know of atrocities such as Nanjing. Once China was discovered in recent years to have been the fourth Allied power, there's a growing recent movement by historians to bring the role of China and the KMT into mainstream Western historiography. Paradox does understand that China played a role in WW2-they did include it and Communist China in all past HOI games.

Siam's role in the war is also included-Japan even has a focus for it, and the invasion of French Indochina is a critical moment in 1936 games. Korea can be released as a nation and Syngman Rhee and Kim Il-sung can appear if you want them too.
 
Archangel85 said:
The forums have repeatedly assured me that HoI needs absolutely no intelligence to play well.
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thanks for making me smile and laugh:D

Archangel85 said:
It's still in development and we will have to see if we can make the AI understand that it should disband units in that case (but not in this case, or if that case and that other case happen simultaneously, unless yet another case also happens etc.).
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Can we please get a delete unit command? maybe the ai can't use it but even if it is just a modding tool, it would be helpful.
 
Shatter12 said:
I'm not sure what entirely you mean by this, but you can disband and delete units in order to get the equipment and manpower back.
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Its mostly for modding. As my signature says, I am a Kaiserreich developer. One thing we want to do is that when the wars, both civil and not, happen in the mod to be able to delete some of the units once peace has arrived to represent demobilization. yes the player can do this, but we want this to affect the AI as well.
 
xiaox said:
you mean south america wasn't a part of WW2 that make sense but asia countries only japan has focus tree unless paradox(and western people) think asia wasn't a part of WW2 except japan
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The following nations fought or were important for the balance of power in Asia and have gotten focus trees in HoI4:

British Raj, Soviet, Japan, USA, Australia, New Zealand and UK.

The only notable exception is really China, but Paradox have hinted they are pretty high up in priority.
 
I hardly see how New Zealand is relevant to the balance of power in Asia especially compared to China.... even the PRC at that time with its sticks and harsh language army was more viable than New Zealand but yet it got its own focus tree wat.... I mean come on even Bugaria was more relevant in WW2 compared to New Zealand.
 
Misaka_Complex said:
I hardly see how New Zealand is relevant to the balance of power in Asia especially compared to China.... even the PRC at that time with its sticks and harsh language army was more viable than New Zealand but yet it got its own focus tree wat....
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It was more important to the naval and air power balance... Which happened to be kind of instrumental in defeating Japan ;)

But I am not claiming they were more important then China only more important then asian minors like Siam.
 
Alex_brunius said:
It was more important to the naval and air power balance... Which happened to be kind of instrumental in defeating Japan ;)

But I am not claiming they were more important then China only more important then asian minors like Siam.
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Ok so how many ships and planes did New Zealand have during WW2 and how did they play a role in defeating Japan? If you said Australia I would agree but New Zealand? I agree with you that Siam is irrelevant in history but in the game (since AI Japan can now properly go down that part of the NF tree) even Siam can be more important than New Zealand but the last time I checked Siam doesn't have its own focus tree.
 
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