Hi everyone and welcome back to a new dev diary. We are continuing work on the upcoming 1.5 “Cornflakes” and unannounced expansion. Today we are going to be talking about changes to synthetic refineries and resources.
Synthetic Refineries
Synthetic refineries are a great way to get access to oil and rubber for nations that end up on unfriendly terms with a lot of their neighbours (*cough* Germany *cough*). The technologies for them were however in need of some updating. Most people would only bother with the first to unlock the building unless they were a very small nation (and if so probably not a big consumer of those resources). It also felt unfair that nations that had plenty of one resource and lacked the other would need to do the same investment as someone who lacked both. Even if you had some of each, there was no good way of balancing output and you’d usually end up with a surplus of one or a deficiency in the other. To deal with this we now unlock 3 building levels at once, but the initial output of the refinery is much lower. We have then removed the previous 3 techs giving more levels and replaced them with 8 new techs that increase the output of your chosen resource. That means that if you only need more rubber you only need to research the Rubber Processing techs and can skip the Oil Processing.
Resources & Infrastructure
This is something we have been wanting to do for a long time. Each level of infrastructure now adds +10% resources in those states. This means that we can have resource amounts that actually grow later in the game. This should give you more reasons to upgrade low infrastructure areas to take advantage of the resources there, and will also allow bombing to impact normal resource gathering and not just refineries. A low infrastructure area with resources is now a great opportunity for expansion.
Together with this change we have improved the construction interface.
You can now see where resources are located and how much they are impacted. You can also see building slots which makes it so much easier to find the best places to build infrastructure without having to jump between map modes.
Resource mapmode now also indicates effect from infrastructure damage so you can spot potentially important areas for repair:
We have been rebalancing resource numbers across the world to go with this change. Numbers aren't done yet but I figure I’d spend the rest of the diary showing some areas to explain what we are working with.
British Malaya and Singapore are nerfed, but are both low infra allowing for a lot of expansion.
USA has a lot of areas where investing in infrastructure will help them grow into a monster. Texan oil for example.
As seen above, Japan has several opportunities to improve local resources now.
France generally got a bit of a resource nerf as it had a lot of very high areas and is also at decent infrastructure level.
Northern Sweden still has precious tungsten which can be expanded to help Germa...accurately simulate Sweden's complicated role in the war.
Brazil now has the potential to be a true rubber king (is that even a word?) if invested in. Same goes for some other nations in south america, like tungsten from Bolivia.
This should shake up the resource play a bit we hope. See you all next week for more updates!
Synthetic Refineries
Synthetic refineries are a great way to get access to oil and rubber for nations that end up on unfriendly terms with a lot of their neighbours (*cough* Germany *cough*). The technologies for them were however in need of some updating. Most people would only bother with the first to unlock the building unless they were a very small nation (and if so probably not a big consumer of those resources). It also felt unfair that nations that had plenty of one resource and lacked the other would need to do the same investment as someone who lacked both. Even if you had some of each, there was no good way of balancing output and you’d usually end up with a surplus of one or a deficiency in the other. To deal with this we now unlock 3 building levels at once, but the initial output of the refinery is much lower. We have then removed the previous 3 techs giving more levels and replaced them with 8 new techs that increase the output of your chosen resource. That means that if you only need more rubber you only need to research the Rubber Processing techs and can skip the Oil Processing.
Resources & Infrastructure
This is something we have been wanting to do for a long time. Each level of infrastructure now adds +10% resources in those states. This means that we can have resource amounts that actually grow later in the game. This should give you more reasons to upgrade low infrastructure areas to take advantage of the resources there, and will also allow bombing to impact normal resource gathering and not just refineries. A low infrastructure area with resources is now a great opportunity for expansion.
Together with this change we have improved the construction interface.
You can now see where resources are located and how much they are impacted. You can also see building slots which makes it so much easier to find the best places to build infrastructure without having to jump between map modes.
Resource mapmode now also indicates effect from infrastructure damage so you can spot potentially important areas for repair:
We have been rebalancing resource numbers across the world to go with this change. Numbers aren't done yet but I figure I’d spend the rest of the diary showing some areas to explain what we are working with.
British Malaya and Singapore are nerfed, but are both low infra allowing for a lot of expansion.
USA has a lot of areas where investing in infrastructure will help them grow into a monster. Texan oil for example.
As seen above, Japan has several opportunities to improve local resources now.
France generally got a bit of a resource nerf as it had a lot of very high areas and is also at decent infrastructure level.
Northern Sweden still has precious tungsten which can be expanded to help Germa...accurately simulate Sweden's complicated role in the war.
Brazil now has the potential to be a true rubber king (is that even a word?) if invested in. Same goes for some other nations in south america, like tungsten from Bolivia.
This should shake up the resource play a bit we hope. See you all next week for more updates!
. Also, brilliant DD name - there are many aspects of the HoI4 dev team that I'm a big fan of, and sense of humour is definitely one of them 
