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HOI4 Dev Diary - Fuel

Hi everyone! We have now been working on Man the Guns for a bit and it is time to kick off dev diaries again!

For those who missed it, Man the Guns is the expansion we are currently working on. The main theme is naval warfare and it will be accompanied by the 1.6 ‘Ironclad’ free update. There is no release date yet. We will let you know when we can commit to a date :)
So without further ado, rev up your engines! Today we are going to be talking about fuel...

Fuel is something we originally decided to abstract into the production of vehicles in HOI4. The reasons for this were twofold: It simplified things, making the game easier to get into and learn and it avoided issues with fuel stockpiling in HOI3 (I’ll get to that later). I still think these were worthwhile tradeoffs with the gameplay impacts it had, but some areas, particularly naval warfare, never felt right without an overall worry over a supply for fuel, which essentially drove Japanese war planning historically. This in combination with a feeling that our fans can for sure handle a little nudge towards complexity now kinda cemented the idea that we couldn’t really make a naval expansion without expanding on this area.

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(no numbers are final etc ;))

Land
Fuel is used by trucks, tanks and other land equipment with engines in your divisions. They will use much more when fighting and moving than when stationary or during strategic redeployment (in fact right now those consume no fuel, but that might change with balance work). A division carries a bit of fuel with it ( much like how supply works), so there is a short grace period if cut off. If a division is in bad supply it will refill its fuel more slowly (meaning you won’t be able to attack or move rapidly as frequently), and you might even be unable to refill at all if totally cut off. Being without fuel will negatively affect the stats of the battalions that need it as well as severely impact speed depending on how low they are.
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Air
Your active air wings will consume fuel. The amount will naturally depend on the type of plane (strat bombers love to guzzle down that fuel) but also what mission type. Planes on interception will be very fuel efficient as they only take off when there are enemies attacking ground targets or bombing etc. Transport planes on air supply missions will also be able to deliver fuel to pockets etc. When low on fuel air wings suffer big efficiency penalties.

Sea
Running a lot of active capital ships is something you will need to be careful with in Man the Guns. These behemoths will be going through your fuel stockpile like starved baby whales on the teat. To handle this and make fleets act more realistically and in a more controlled manner we have changed quite a bit here, so stay tuned for future diaries. The main point is that big fleets are costly to run and you will need to make decisions on how to best utilize them and how much to fit into the rest of your fuel use. Speaking of, you’ll be able to control who gets first dibs on fuel through prioritization just like with equipment (but we are also working on adding extra controls on top of this so you can more easily balance between the different branches of the armed forces). A fleet that is low on fuel will suffer penalties to its stats as well as operational range.


Production
Fuel is produced from unused oil, and equipment that used to use oil now no longer need that to be produced. I am currently looking into possibly adding copper or another resource in its place (and in some other places), but we will see if that ends up being a good idea or not ;) Will let you know. Anyways, if you are low on fuel there are several ways to go:
  • Acquire more oil rich states.
  • Increase infrastructure on your own oil rich states.
  • Trade for foreign oil.
  • Build synthetic refineries.
  • Lend leased fuel.
  • Capture enemy stockpiles.
  • Research improved oil to fuel conversion technologies.
  • Each unit of oil you have access to use your current techs to generate a certain amount of fuel. This fuel is then put into your stockpile for use by your forces.
Screenshot_2.jpg


Stockpiling
Fuel is possible to stockpile, in fact it is necessary if you can’t guarantee a steady stream of produced fuel during wartime. The size of your national stockpile will depend on the number of states and their infrastructure, your economic law and if you have built Fuel Silos. This is a new building that takes up shared slots and will probably provide the majority of your stockpile space. It is also a building that can be damaged from bombing etc. which in the worst case could lead to a loss of fuel. Capitulating enemy neighbors is also going to be a good way of acquiring more fuel as it will work just like seizing their equipment stockpile in that respect.

upload_2018-6-27_11-41-38.png


HOI3 also had stockpilable fuel, and there it was quite a problem. As a beginner you did not know how much (or even that you had to) stockpile and as an experienced player there was no issue in making a stockpile big enough that you wouldn't ever have to worry. In HoI4 we are aiming to force a tradeoff between building up your industry and increasing the stockpile (have to spend civilian factories to get more oil from trade instead of building more factories) as well as trying to keep the total amount you can stockpile within reasonable bounds. Our goal is fuel as something you’ll need to consider for all your operations and playing it really safe will mean less industrial output in the long run.

Since I bet this will be the first question, fuel is going to be in the free update, but there will of course be features in the paid expansion that tie into it (stay tuned for more diaries!).

We are still working on all things fuel so I’ll wrap up here. Hopefully it gave you an idea of what we have done and are planning to do. I’ve saved some interfaces talk for future diaries, and also, be aware that many things could end up changing based on gameplay feedback. Rest assured though, I’ll keep you updated on stuff like that in these diaries up to release. This is not really anything out of the ordinary, but I usually keep systems like this that need long term balance and iteration for later. Fuel however ties into a lot of future topics, so I wanna make sure you are all clued in :)

Now for something completely different...
I assume nobody has managed to avoid having their mailbox fill up with fun updated privacy policies and things related to the new European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). During all this a really smooth looking lawyer dog in the smartest little suit I have ever seen came over to visit us from Brussels. He told us there are a bunch of regulations we too need to follow in our games… so to make sure we remained Good Boys in the eyes of the law we have added a couple of things to Hearts of Iron IV. The most important is to include our Privacy Policy in the game and making it easy to find.
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Legal texts are long and boring and nothing has really changed in how we do things. So I would rather spend my time answering questions here and writing the rest of the diary, so I will refer you to check it out ingame or here if you want to.

What I would rather talk about is how gathering data from players is useful to us. Because it is. Super useful! Without telemetry we would be resorting to guesses and risk only the most vocal minorities to be heard. For example, telemetry data is one of the major things we look at for deciding what nations to develop focus trees on. We get data on how popular difference choices are for focuses, letting us spot balance issues or unpopular paths that could use some love and care. We can spot if new out of sync errors are introduced in multiplayer in graphs and get crash reports automatically uploaded to help us fix problems easily. All this, combined with a scoopful of forum reading, is what helps us steer this ship, so thanks for helping :)

Oh I almost forgot, because we had to make the GDPR compliance hotfix we managed to sneak in a fix you guys have been asking for. We solved an issue for a case in China (similar things could also happen elsewhere) when a nation had both a takeover and inherited wars (like when seizing ownership in the Chinese power struggle) and was at the same time occupied. As a Japanese player this would lead to the less than happy situation of seeing your occupied areas flip back to the enemy and leaving troops cut off from supply. We also fixed a crash issue that was reported in some big mods. The patch should be releasing shortly.

Next week some of the team will be on summer vacation (including me!) but Bratyn is going to be here to talk about all the awesome stuff he has been doing with Britain, so don't forget to tune in!

  • Fuel for Thought
  • The Rise of Legal Pooch: GDPR always strike twice!
  • How we sell your personal data to Big Pharma for cocaine in 3 easy steps!
  • We have updated our fuel policy
  • Starved Baby Whales on the Teat is actually the name of the HoI 4 punk rock band playing at PDXCON 2019
  • Fuelling your conquests
  • Some of your data is belong to us, if you are okay with that
  • Help us help you help us
  • Our coders call it Nightmare Fuel actually
  • Adding fuel to the fire that engulfs the world
  • Anyone doing a dramatic reading of our privacy policy may request one Admiral to be added to the game
  • Proudly Introducing Gasoline Mana
 
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Now you use oil to get fuel. If you have let say 100 oil that may be converted to 2500 fuel for example (depending on you technology). If you purchase 100 extra oil you will now have 200 oil and get 5000 fuel every day. There is a limit how much fuel you can stockpile so any extra above your limit will be lost so you have to build more silos if you want to store more fuel. For countries that have large amount of oil, fuel storage is probably not that important because they will produce so much fuel anyway.
 
I see, damn when you think about it Vanilla Hearts of iron 4 without all the DLCs and expansions is basically like a demo. man the guns isn't out yet but from what I've see with new Naval mechanics and Fuel system the game will only get better and better from this point on.
 
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One more step to make this game what it should have been 2 years ago, although there is still a lot to do comparing with previous hearts of iron. This saga should never have been simplified so much, the arsenal of democracy was a good starting point and even hearts of iron 3 had a lot of good things.
 
I contest adding furl opens a can of worms.

I thought fuel was part of supply. Now that tanks need fuel, shouldn't gun need bullets, planes need missles, troops need food and drinks?
 
gqqnbig said:
I contest adding furl opens a can of worms.
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No, fuel was abstracted by making vehicles require oil to produce them. Then the idea seemed to be that since we had vehicle attrition, you would need more fuel to maintain offensives anyway since vehicles you used had to be replaced.
 
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Archangel85 said:
The Royal Navy switched to oil firing well before WWI. Germany was never in any danger of running out of coal, making it a largely useless ressource for them because they don't have to care about it. Neither does Japan (coal was one of the few things Japan was largely self-sufficient in). That means neither nation needs to trade for coal or care about conquering more coal. Neither do Britain, France or the US have to care about coal. Not sure about the Soviet union, but never heard that they were close to running out. Copper was a much more sought-after resource.
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That is completely false. Germany did produce large amounts of coal but it was one of their most consumed resources of the war too. Coal was used in their trains, factories, power plants and that's not including civilian consumption. The Germans had lots of coal, but not enough.

This also relates to oil, something they also lacked badly. Even with coal being a crucial resource and lacking in some areas, they went through a costly process of converting coal to oil because the germans lacked oil that much.
 
This Fuel addition looks awesome. Maybe an idea to incorporate fuel into every aspect of the game is to make factories consume some fuel when working. This would solve the "Civilian consumption" since factories making consumer products require some fuel. This also means that during peace time when you can trade for oil you can stockpile alot of equipment so you can shut down some factories if you are in need of more fuel on the front when you cant trade for it.

Apart from that i have a question regarding supply companies. Will fuel usage increase or decrease with this company? Since the fuel looks like equipment (you can capture it) and so will not benefit from the -% supply consumption since it's not part of supply but equipment. The 100 trucks from that company will consume fuel. This would put them in a weird situation since supply trucks did deliver fuel in the war, whereas with this system it will seem like it will only increase the fuel consumption of a division. Maybe a rework of the supply company to maybe give them longer grace periods on both supplies and fuel instead of lowered consumption. This would make more sense anyway since you can bring extra fuel/supplies in those 100 trucks. But those trucks do not really make you use less supplies.
 
Glooze said:
This Fuel addition looks awesome. Maybe an idea to incorporate fuel into every aspect of the game is to make factories consume some fuel when working. This would solve the "Civilian consumption" since factories making consumer products require some fuel. This also means that during peace time when you can trade for oil you can stockpile alot of equipment so you can shut down some factories if you are in need of more fuel on the front when you cant trade for it.

Apart from that i have a question regarding supply companies. Will fuel usage increase or decrease with this company? Since the fuel looks like equipment (you can capture it) and so will not benefit from the -% supply consumption since it's not part of supply but equipment. The 100 trucks from that company will consume fuel. This would put them in a weird situation since supply trucks did deliver fuel in the war, whereas with this system it will seem like it will only increase the fuel consumption of a division. Maybe a rework of the supply company to maybe give them longer grace periods on both supplies and fuel instead of lowered consumption. This would make more sense anyway since you can bring extra fuel/supplies in those 100 trucks. But those trucks do not really make you use less supplies.
Click to expand...

Factories consuming fuel is a bit unrealistic.
 
Slavicist said:
Factories consuming fuel is a bit unrealistic.
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developers dont want to add coal or energy in a more free concept becose they said in ww2 theres no mayor country have low production of coal, and is a partialy true.
The idea of energy for induestries is more related to limit the CF and MF playes and ai could build.
I dont agree with the use of oil for factories, energy could be nice but if CF also consumes something that need code changes.
But thats not enought to limit the factory construction.
I understand you could build factories as URSS, for germany should be much expensives and for usa in open liberal market should be extremly expensives, so they could spam from event emulation the kind of economy they have.
 
Would the development team consider using a similar mechanic for food supply? Food and fuel are both consumed on an hourly basis.

My thought is: farms and nitrogen refineries. Farms would be like dockyards and produce food, horses, and fodder, while nitrogen refineries would produce ammonium nitrate for both fertilizer and explosives. Farms could also be trade-able like civilian factories, giving agrarian nations something to export.

For a production icon, a red barn would go well with green military factories and blue dockyards. ^_^
 
I agree to your proposal from historical and economical viewpoints. However...aren't we opening a can of worms by doing that? Strategical bombing of farms (o.k. - silly)...would such a thing be possible? Starving out divisions? Such a mechanism could go somewhere against some rules or off-limit topics!? It is really correct to point out, that agrarian countries still are somewhat lacking as civillian factories are almost the only means of export - and they even do not have that. I can see a challenge leading a 3rd world country out of colonialism into a more industrialized future without overlords while the big nations are whacking their heads. But things like Coffee, Cocoa, Tea and other cash crops as well as produce are not modelled in the current game.
 
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DocDesastro said:
I agree to your proposal from historical and economical viewpoints. However...aren't we opening a can of worms by doing that? Strategical bombing of farms (o.k. - silly)...would such a thing be possible? Starving out divisions? Such a mechanism could go somewhere against some rules or off-limit topics!? It is really correct to point out, that agrarian countries still are somewhat lacking as civillian factories are almost the only means of export - and they even do not have that. I can see a challenge leading a 3rd world country out of colonialism into a more industrialized future without overlords while the big nations are whacking their heads. But things like Coffee, Cocoa, Tea and other cash crops as well as produce are not modelled in the current game.
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food could work as in some mods does, as a restriction for units str (and them their stats) when lacking and if you set in production lines as a restriction in production. you dont need to starve units nor pop. a unit with no ration still have a level of str by manpower and other equipment (should be twicked).
and rations as equipment is right. ammo is something wich needs system similar to fuel system, but more important than ammo as stock should be a restriction in factories for the ammo production effect requesting some production slots.
 
kaguravitro said:
developers dont want to add coal or energy in a more free concept becose they said in ww2 theres no mayor country have low production of coal, and is a partialy true.
The idea of energy for induestries is more related to limit the CF and MF playes and ai could build.
I dont agree with the use of oil for factories, energy could be nice but if CF also consumes something that need code changes.
But thats not enought to limit the factory construction.
I understand you could build factories as URSS, for germany should be much expensives and for usa in open liberal market should be extremly expensives, so they could spam from event emulation the kind of economy they have.
Click to expand...
Maybe not mayor countries but there certainly are minors who lack coal. A country they should be familiar with for an example, Sweden.
 
I wonder, whether coal should be introduced nevertheless. Factories were a mixture of manufactories and 'modern' factories with electric equipment/machinery. Maybe at higher tech level you might need energy. It could also come from hydro plants. I know of some places in Germany that were targeted by the USAF to disable power. So big rivers and coal could provide for high-output factories using high-tech machines. This would give nations something to think of before rushing construction tech. Do you have enough energy to power all the new tools?
 
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TheDungen said:
Maybe not mayor countries but there certainly are minors who lack coal. A country they should be familiar with for an example, Sweden.
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yes alt hist were very interesting with coal. also if some way uk fall, all puppets comes in a deep crisis
 
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