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Developer Corner | Military Industrial Orgs.

Greetings all!

Today marks the first occasion since the release of By Blood Alone where we take a deeper look into what is coming next. As you may recall from the BBA development cycle, we had an early set of 'Development Corner' diaries, which serve as an opportunity for us to reveal a narrow look at a specific mechanic or design without revealing too much about the wider context of future releases. Today's offering, as well as the next couple of diaries, will be in much the same spirit - you'll just have to wait a little bit longer to get the full picture. Scandalous and polarising, I know.

/Arheo

Hello there, it's me, C0rax. Now you can get all excited because it's time for some Dev Corners in which we will show you some WIP looks into the new features we have been working on. So without further ado this week we will be looking at…


Military Industrial Organisations (MIO's)

This is all very much a work in progress (WIP), you are going to see WIP mock ups, and some details are still being finalized as well

Feature Intent and Goals

Intent:
Create a sense of a living organisation the player can interact with rather than a static bonus as with current design companies.

Why is this important you ask? Well previously we had to provide static modifiers and sometimes change them via scripted decisions or focus rewards. By creating a more organic system to upgrade your design companies you the player can now decide what these upgrades are and tailor them to fit your playstyle. Additionally we can now reward the player for using a design company as opposed to simply having you save up a resource and click a button, rewarding you for putting effort into them.

Goals:​

  • Allow the player to define their designer direction.
  • Integrate design companies into production
  • Provide a framework for national specialisms that can be used on the world stage


Military industrial Organisations (MIO’s)​

So first here is a rough structure of an MIO

contains​

  • Name
  • Icon
  • Size (Level)
  • funds (XP)
  • Task Capacity
  • Departments

departments​

  • 0-1 Design team
    • 3 departments
      • Max 13 traits each
  • 0-1 Industrial manufacturer
    • 3 departments
      • Max 13 traits each

Each departments contains​

  • Name
  • Category’s
  • Trait tree
  • Trait icons

Task Capacity​

  • Size determines how many tasks a MIO can handle
    • Researching
    • Producing
    • Designing

Defaults:​

  • 2 task Capacity
    • + scripted increases
    • + trait increases

This structure allows us to represent MIO’s in a way that expresses the specialisms of the various organisations that designed and produced war materials during the period. You can now represent a company like Bofors AB who designed and produced anti tank, anti air and naval guns seamlessly and expand each of those specialisms as you see fit. Investing in the right MIO is critical to upgrading those specialist departments in order to gain the bonuses you need for specific stats.

Task Capacity:​

An MIO of course can’t work on a number of infinite simultaneous projects. For this we have task capacity that limits how many things your MIO’s can work on balancing. This is an important thing to balance, since producing too much equipment with an MIO will lock you out from using it for research or designing equipment. For ship production this is actually important for producing ships in parallel so you might want to invest in the manufacturing department for task capacity so you can really ramp up your naval production.


Levelling & upgrades​


Research cost and Production cost is used to calculate MIO funds that it gains when it is used.
An amount of MIO Funds is required to increase your size and pick a new trait.


image2.png

image (17).png


Skill Trees
  • Split roughly along the same lines as current design companies​
  • Possibility for country unique trees​
  • possibility for content prerequisites (National focus or decision locking etc...)​
image (16).png

image (19).png

image (20).png

Departments and Tasks​

Industrial manufacturers (IM's)​

  • Assigned to production lines (Task)
  • Skill trees provide production specific bonuses

Design teams (DT's)​

  • Applied to research (Task)
  • Applied to equipment both via equipment designers and normal variants
  • Skill trees provide Stat bonuses
  • Can be applied retroactively to equipment at cost
  • A move away from pay mana get reward


So that's a lot of high-level structural talk so you understand the core concepts of the MIO Feature and so I'll now show some of the WIP flows of actually using these structures and systems.

Researching​

image8.png


image (18) (1).png


image10.png


Equipment variants​

image13.png

image (13) (2).png

image1.png

image (14).png


Production​


image (15) (1).png


Well that wraps things up for this week, I Hope you enjoyed it and as always please leave questions and comments below and I will do my best to answer them. Join me in two weeks for another dev corner showing another feature coming to you in the near future.
 
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Have you played a Multiplayer game with all majors as human players?

You sit around for 30-60 mins waiting for players to arrive. Then you still usually have 1 major not filled and you plead for someone competent to take it. Like Italy taking UK, while someone half-brained who was graciously allowed on a minor, taking Italy.

Rehosting = 2-3 players leaving the game and finding another one. AKA not a single host will rehost more than once or unless there's the game not showing in lobby bug happening.

In short: pre-game saved templates are not viable. Only in-game generation is viable in the current stand of things.
I mean that's typical of random lobbies instead of scheduled games in regular communities, but how is that relevant for saving division templates and equipment designs clientside?
 
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Have you played a Multiplayer game with all majors as human players?

You sit around for 30-60 mins waiting for players to arrive. Then you still usually have 1 major not filled and you plead for someone competent to take it. Like Italy taking UK, while someone half-brained who was graciously allowed on a minor, taking Italy.

Rehosting = 2-3 players leaving the game and finding another one. AKA not a single host will rehost more than once or unless there's the game not showing in lobby bug happening.

In short: pre-game saved templates are not viable. Only in-game generation is viable in the current stand of things.
Hello? Joe biden? CLIENT side templates have nothing to do with an mp host
 
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Hello? Joe biden? CLIENT side templates have nothing to do with an mp host
Oh really? Can you elaborate then what do you mean by "Client side" templates?

Do you mean "Let's save variants of the 1936 fighter in different combinations of modules" and offer it as a selectable choice for any player?

Or do you mean "players save a file with their personal templates that can be sent to the host for upload to his game"?

Explain please in detail what is the image you have in your head.
 
I mean that's typical of random lobbies instead of scheduled games in regular communities, but how is that relevant for saving division templates and equipment designs clientside?
You'll have to explain what "clientside" means to me.

The image I had:
1. Player saves his templates in a file
2. Sends this file to the host
3. Host starts the game with a collection of these files loading in

If the proposal is to "Let's simply have a game repository containing all possible templates players can generate" then my concern would be that the number of these combos is tremendous and would occupy much more UI than the division designer. If you start selecting only "good designs" you will suddenly fall into an arbitrary selection of "what's good and what's not"
 
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You'll have to explain what "clientside" means to me.

The image I had:
1. Player saves his templates in a file
2. Sends this file to the host
3. Host starts the game with a collection of these files loading in

If the proposal is to "Let's simply have a game repository containing all possible templates players can generate" then my concern would be that the number of these combos is tremendous and would occupy much more UI than the division designer. If you start selecting only "good designs" you will suddenly fall into an arbitrary selection of "what's good and what's not"

Obviously that's not how it would work.

You would save a division template or equipment design clientside.

You would have a button to press to open the list of these templates.

When you selected one, the game would then attempt to input the saved template or design as if you had designed it manually - if you lacked any of the required division types or modules the design wouldn't work.

It would just be a way to avoid having to design the same planes/ships/tanks/templates over and over again every game.

No information would be sent to the host, it would just be a way to save clicks.
 
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Obviously that's not how it would work.

You would save a division template or equipment design clientside.

You would have a button to press to open the list of these templates.

When you selected one, the game would then attempt to input the saved template or design as if you had designed it manually - if you lacked any of the required division types or modules the design wouldn't work.

It would just be a way to avoid having to design the same planes/ships/tanks/templates over and over again every game.

No information would be sent to the host, it would just be a way to save clicks.
Ok. But you open a huge can of worms.

1. Who is going to design the templates on the list? The devs? Who said they will design these templates to include those that you specifically will want to see?

Maybe they still like the 7 inf + 2 ART structure that is slightly outdated. And then people will complain to include "their ideal template" on the list.

If it's players updating this list, you will have a gazillion number of templates often times being the same as all the others, just having a different name(I am assuming that all players get access to the same database of templates in this situation.

If each player has his own database of saved templates, I wonder how will that get ported to the game hosted by a host other than the player that designed these templates. I am not an IT expert, so forgive me if I misunderstand the capacity of modern technology.

2. What happens if the game balance changes again(like combat widths) and all old templates become suboptimal? Devs now have to revise every single one?
 
You think far to complicated.

When a player designs a template in MP there is nothing behind it. He clicks around till he created a proposed template, which he can save if he has the necassary army xp. The amount of army xp a players has is synchronized with the host. The moment a players presses save this newly created template is now part of the gamestate and can be seen by enemy intel and will be saved.

There should be no difficulties having the files for proto-templates loaded when starting HoI4. In a multiplayer game you just select a proto-template which then fills out a proposed template, as if you would have clicked manually adding batallions and support companies.
Then the regular game logic takes over and check if you have enough army xp and after you finally saved the template, only then it gets snychronized with the host. Like I said same procedure as when you would have created the template totally manually.
 
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Ok. But you open a huge can of worms.

1. Who is going to design the templates on the list? The devs? Who said they will design these templates to include those that you specifically will want to see?

Maybe they still like the 7 inf + 2 ART structure that is slightly outdated. And then people will complain to include "their ideal template" on the list.

If it's players updating this list, you will have a gazillion number of templates often times being the same as all the others, just having a different name(I am assuming that all players get access to the same database of templates in this situation.

If each player has his own database of saved templates, I wonder how will that get ported to the game hosted by a host other than the player that designed these templates. I am not an IT expert, so forgive me if I misunderstand the capacity of modern technology.

2. What happens if the game balance changes again(like combat widths) and all old templates become suboptimal? Devs now have to revise every single one?
There is no public list for templates, it is template the PLAYERS make, and the game saves it clientside (your pc)
what is hard to understand
 
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There is no public list for templates, it is template the PLAYERS make, and the game saves it clientside (your pc)
what is hard to understand
What is hard to understand: is whether or not there would be issues with the checksum and compatibility with the host's version of the game: if I have a list of templates saved on my computer which the host doesn't have, wouldn't that lead to me and the host having different game versions? Not an expert here, just thinking out loud.

Because if the host opens my country from his computer he won't have these templates selectable. Which ultimately means we have differing game states.
 
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You think far to complicated.

When a player designs a template in MP there is nothing behind it. He clicks around till he created a proposed template, which he can save if he has the necassary army xp. The amount of army xp a players has is synchronized with the host. The moment a players presses save this newly created template is now part of the gamestate and can be seen by enemy intel and will be saved.

There should be no difficulties having the files for proto-templates loaded when starting HoI4. In a multiplayer game you just select a proto-template which then fills out a proposed template, as if you would have clicked manually adding batallions and support companies.
Then the regular game logic takes over and check if you have enough army xp and after you finally saved the template, only then it gets snychronized with the host. Like I said same procedure as when you would have created the template totally manually.
Ok, if that works, then that sounds great.
 
What is hard to understand: is whether or not there would be issues with the checksum and compatibility with the host's version of the game: if I have a list of templates saved on my computer which the host doesn't have, wouldn't that lead to me and the host having different game versions? Not an expert here, just thinking out loud.

Because if the host opens my country from his computer he won't have these templates selectable. Which ultimately means we have differing game states.
No? Why would you have different game versions? its literally just vanilla templates, like a 30w inf for example
 
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All this work in putting more energy into designing-building and the AI still does not know what a tank is, nor how to use it differently than a 10w infantry unit.
 
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This looks great! But with the risk of repeating something that was said in the previous past pages, such a generic MIO system would only realize its full potential if the defaults are set up in a historic way. Otherwise one may lose a lot of flavor that makes the game fun!
 
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What is hard to understand: is whether or not there would be issues with the checksum and compatibility with the host's version of the game: if I have a list of templates saved on my computer which the host doesn't have, wouldn't that lead to me and the host having different game versions? Not an expert here, just thinking out loud.

Because if the host opens my country from his computer he won't have these templates selectable. Which ultimately means we have differing game states.
Think of a client side saved template like a mouse macro.
If you load it it will do the same mouseclicks to design a template like you did before you saved it.
It’s like saving a sequence of mouse clicks locally on your computer.
This has nothing to do with single or multiplayer or hosting.
 
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You'll have to explain what "clientside" means to me.

The image I had:
1. Player saves his templates in a file
2. Sends this file to the host
3. Host starts the game with a collection of these files loading in

If the proposal is to "Let's simply have a game repository containing all possible templates players can generate" then my concern would be that the number of these combos is tremendous and would occupy much more UI than the division designer. If you start selecting only "good designs" you will suddenly fall into an arbitrary selection of "what's good and what's not"

Theres no need to send template to "host".
pre-saved templates work just a "macro".
Whe u designe a template u choose modules, stuff, and "save it".
Then a template saving will just do the same, but automatically, the software will read the file, show availiable templates, and auto-fill the modules slots with the selected one.(the allowed ones, because theres a possibility of a saved template contain a module thats not researched yet)...
Its a total client side and safe.
I don't imagine why implement it is trick.

the UI elements is already on the game: the compare template feature.
 
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Will there be any MIO events or Decisions to represent the historical private venture of different MIOs? Like Consolidated submitted the design of B-24 and the Heinkel R&D of He 178 and He 280.
 
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Can players select multiple MIOs for one Research and Design project? MIOs will then generate the historical tank/plane design template with different modules and static bonuses. It will be historically accurate and allow casual gamers to have the option to manage less in-game.
 
Okay I'm a bit late on this dev diary but I have a few question I want to ask about MIOs.

Will the MIO from the country sold/lend leased equipment came from still be present on the equipment when it arrives at another country, for example a Panzer produced by say Henschel was sent to Italy would it still have the bonuses/say it was produced by them on the equipment?

Also would there be any effects on a MIO if it had equipment designed by it built in another country via licenses?