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HOI4 Dev Diary - Bag of Tricks #3

Hi everyone, today it's time for another bag of tricks diary (the previous two can be found here and here). Let's jump straight in!

Attachés
Sending a military Attaché is a new diplomacy action coming in Waking the Tiger. It’s something you can only do while you yourself are at peace and the receiver is at war. It requires good relations and ties up a lot of your command power. In exchange you get army XP back as well as intel so you can see the receiver nation’s war. This is a pretty good way to get XP if you are a nation that isn’t able to send volunteers for example. The receiver gains also benefits from the attaché:
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Sending attachés will make any country the receiver is at war with dislike you, and they may issue a diplomatic protest that can seriously hurt your standing with them as well as cause a stability loss depending on the relevant ideology (so if you refuse a demand from a communist country, you will lose stability depending on the strength of communists in your country).

Extra ground crews
Another good place to spend command power when you don't need it for your armies is by prioritizing strategic air areas to receive extra ground crews. A prioritized area get +10% efficiency for planes operating there which can be great in certain areas to allow your planes to fly more effectively. Prioritizing ties up 20 Command Power per area while active.
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This ability as part of 1.5 Cornflakes and thus available to all.

Historical Army Insignias
As part of the effort to make the game feel a little more immersive and allow you to better recognize your armies, we have added Historical Army Insignias to Germany, France, Britain and the US (the Soviet Union and Japan didn’t really do Army Insignias). They can be assigned to any army like any other army insignia but won’t take the army color. All told there are 18 German icons, 11 British icons, 8 US and 3 French ones as well as 10 shared icons that are available to everyone else (some of them are locked to certain ideologies).
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If this is a popular feature, we might consider expanding it to include historical division insignias also in future DLCs.

Volunteer Air Wings
In Waking the Tiger will be possible to send volunteer air forces. Where before you could only lend-lease planes and hope the AI knows how to use them, you now get to control them yourself (you can still lend-lease planes as well, of course). This means you can have the Condor Legion or The Flying Tigers and help out your own volunteer forces.
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Rather than being sent to another theater like with regular volunteer forces you simply get access for a certain amount of planes to base in and operate in the receiver nation and you can just transfer them as normally. The amount of planes you can use depends both on the size of your airforce and the receiver airbase capacity.
Speaking of Flying Tigers, they actually get a special decision. China can invite the Flying Tigers which will unlock a decision for USA where they can decide to respond. This will both give fighters to China as well as increase their volunteer cap allowing them to send more wings over to assist.
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I’m home with stupid winter influenza so today we got @Da9L and @Archangel85 playing historical Japan in World War Wednesday, so tune in at 16:00 CET if you want to see how that looks or want in-depth info about focus tree design!

Next week we will be taking a look at a hopeful little empire on the rise for Waking the Tiger…
Best possible use of the new Historical Army Insignias:
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Extra ground crews
Another good place to spend command power when you don't need it for your armies is by prioritizing strategic air areas to receive extra ground crews. A prioritized area get +10% efficiency for planes operating there which can be great in certain areas to allow your planes to fly more effectively. Prioritizing ties up 20 Command Power per area while active.
You can prioritise target area? So if I send 5000 bombers to level New York and base them in Faroe I get extra ground crews there? Either I am grossly misunderstanding how is is supposed to work or that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
 
Maybe in an Ahistorical game?

Unlikely, as the event occurred in 1933... so unless there's a mod with an extended timeline and a League of Nations mechanic it is doubtful.
 
Huzzah for army and potentially divisional insignias! The added historical flavor will be delicious. Along with the deeper "chain of command" organization improvements being added, I'm getting very interested in this again.
 
I remember when I asked about the ability to mod in extra Army identifiers in order to use historical US Army insignia... You're welcome, @podcat @Archangel85 ;)
 
For the attache system, could we perhaps get an option to choose a general or admiral to send on the attache, and have them gain experience during that assignment? Particularly in multiplayer, could be a good way to help allied countries build up some generals to counter the level 7-9 german, Italian, and japanese field marshals that are typically already on the board by the time the Germans invade France.

Are any changes being made to army xp in regards to exercising? Specifically, what about the "train 1 division" strategy for producing a pile of army experience? The way general/admiral experience, division experience, and army experience have worked in HOI4 has long been among the more exploitable systems in the game.

Division experience being broken up into "cliff" combat bonuses rather than a single sliding scale of combat bonus has always annoyed me. Oh, you took some minor losses in that first battle as a regular division? Now you're only 99% trained, so here's a full 25% combat penalty going forward.
 
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Nice info in the DD. 1.5 and Cornflakes sure look like a huge improvement in HOI4.
 
Do be honest they add to many great things in this patch and dlc i really dont want the dlc this soon :D

From the stream it really looks like that the Patch/DLC isn't finished by any means. Maybe in a month or two that will be a different story but if you ask me it looks like they are "MAYBE" 50% the way through there cycle/polish? All depends on what their sprints look like.
 
About air warfare, plz could we get something that prevents us (and AI also) to continuesly change the region where a whole air army is working ? I mean, at least something like a minimum time before our air units get efficiency in the new ordered air region (maybe 1 or 2 days ?) and more after an air unit has moved air base...

It is so unimmersive and gaming AND painful to endlessly check where the AI/player did ordered its/his air units stack in order to do the same to suit the situation for now...
 
Looking good! This will give people some stuff to do during peacetime, which is always appreciated.

Something that would be cool: Give armies the same treatment as divisions when it comes to naming them.

No more Army 12, but different names for different countries.
 
Those all seem like great quality of life improvements. Well done.

I think volunteer air wings look the most interesting because they will let small nations potentially have a substantial expeditionary impact despite their limited manpower. Is that what was intended?

Also, I cannot imagine that the historical insignias will NOT be popular, so I look forward to seeing more of them show up in the game.
Of course they'll be popular! They dangled historical details in front of a bunch of history geeks, what did they think was going to happen?