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Developer Diary | Summer Open Beta

Hello there, it's me C0RAX.
A bit of the different DD than you’re used to this week. I'm here to introduce a new thing I will be doing over the summer. This summer for 4 weeks we will be giving you the chance to test some of the balance changes coming with the 1.13 Stella Polaris patch. These changes are hand picked for testing in order to get feedback from the community on specific changes that might have large impacts. These changes will affect all three major combat groups (Army, Air, and Navy), and vary from value changes to some new functionality and behavior so be sure to read the change list so you know what you're getting yourself into.

So let's go into how this is going to work. From July 6th until August 3rd there will be a special Summer Open Beta branch on steam, this branch will have the new changes listed below. Additionally it won't have anything new coming with Arms Against Tyranny just changes for base game and previously released DLC’s. In the last week of the test we will post a feedback form to be able to collect feedback data that we can use to analyze your responses. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t post about it outside the form, I want to encourage as much discourse, theorizing and number crunching as possible so give it a try and let us know what you think.

Now lets go over the change log.

################################################################
######## Summer Open Beta ######### Balance
################################################################

##########
Air
##########
- Excess thrust will now increase agility instead of max speed (0.5 AGI per excess thrust)
- airframes now how base max speeds to better represent airframe size speed effects
- major air rebalance pass for airframes and modules
- increased tech date for survival studies to 1939
- Improved aircraft turrets
- slight decrease in agility hit for large bomb bays
- small airframe can only take single turret modules
- adjusted turret stats so they are less powerful for fighters but better for bombers
- rebalanced thrust and weights of modules and airframes,
- added new modules
- Large autocannon
- Large bomb rack
- Armor piercing bomb rack
- 3 levels of torpedo mounting
- Added new techs for plane designer (see above)
- Combat better Agility and Speed has increased effect on air combat

##########
Land
##########
- reduced terrain combat widths slightly, change support widths also
- Super Heavy tanks are now support units. Super Heavy tanks are no longer line battalions
- Armor skirts provide 1 more armor
- Most tank chassis' now grant 10-20% more armor
- Super heavy tanks now cost more overall, but require 20 per support company.

##########
Navy
##########
- added damage reduction to piecing thresholds for naval combat
- convoy hitprofile reduced from 120 to 85 bringing it inline with new hitprofile calculations
- Ship torpedoes accuracy increased to bring them back in line with new hitprofile calculations 145 > 100
- slightly decreased AA disruption from ship AA
- removed visibility effects of super heavy bb armor
- rebalanced, ship engines
- removed visibility impacts from medium guns
- rebalanced IC costs to reflect engine changes
- super heavy armor now part of normal heavy armors
- rebalanced armors
- added cruiser armor to carriers


##########
AI
##########
- AI more likely to upgrade division in the field even with equipment deficits
- added generic AI upgraded infantry template for late game infantry
- added ENG and USA upgraded infantry templates for AI and improved their infantry templates in general

Right now let's get into some explanations.

Thrust and weight:
Let's get the big one out the way thrust and weight for planes. This change requires a bit of game explanation and some explanation of aircraft. So why affect agility, agility previously was a stat that was seldom increased but often reduced by making it something you are rewarded by not using all your thrust budget you can lessen the agility effects of modules by not loading up your entire plane creating a choice between maximizing raw damage or maximizing damage bonuses during air to air combat by bring higher Agility.

Now the aircraft stuff, so power/weight is very not intuitive for aircraft, adding more power will make a plane faster but taking weight off a plane won't make it faster since speed is almost entirely determined by thrust against drag not weight. What less weight does provide is better climb rate acceleration plus some other things. These are abstracted into agility in game. So now if you want your plane to go faster you either use a newer airframe with lower drag (higher base speed) or by putting a bigger engine in the existing airframe.

Combat widths:
Now the next big change, terrain combat widths. This is the change that originally spawned the open beta idea. These changes are generally intended to flatten the efficiencies further for combat widths while also reducing division sizes. There will obviously still be certain numbers that fit better than others but overall these differences should be less extreme.

  • Terrain = CW+Reinforcement Width
  • Desert = 82+49
  • Forest = 76+40
  • Hills = 72+36
  • Jungle = 74+34
  • Marsh = 68+22
  • Mountain = 65+25
  • Plains = 82+49
  • Urban = 86+28
Ship penetration:
Finally the last change I want to discuss is the new penetration effect for ships. To put this imply they now reduce damage directly on top of reducing critical chance. The damage reductions are smaller than for land combat but that's because they have a much greater effect on the combat but be careful defeating an armored foe with just small guns should be much harder now.

Thresholds and damage are as follows

Pen to Armor ThreshholdCritical Change FactorDamage Factor
221
111
0.750.750.9
0.50.50.7
0.10.10.5
000.3

##########
HOTFIX
##########
07/07
- hotfix for legacy damage reduction for ships was conflicting with new system (they will now add to each other) set legacy value to 0
- hotfix for missing agility mods for bomb bays

10/07
Naval Combat:
- fixed damage reduction happening before stat initialisation
- fixed +1 to threshold values for ship penetration
issues reported here

- updated combat width defines as per
- implemented type 2 combat widths as per
- improved some templates for planes
- balance pass on new modules
- rebalanced dismantle and conversion costs for BB engines
- adjusted damage reduction thresholds for ships

That concludes the run down of the upcoming “Summer open beta” and it's coming to you tomorrow!. I hope to see you try it out and give feedback on the changes. See you next week for more Arms Against Tyranny content coming your way. It's going to be a pretty one.
 
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Wait, wasn't the whole point of different combat widths for different terrain types the opposite of this? I thought the idea was to encourage the creation of specialized divs, are we know moving away from that?
I personally think that the idea of creating division sizes based on specific terrain types is very niche and not that practical in all around gameplay and enjoyment of the game.
 
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If Super Heavies are now support companies, are there any restrictions on what they can do/be in? Paradropping Super Heavy Tanks would be really stupid for example.
 
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Do the 3 new Torpedo Mount modules fix the issue of Torpedoes being the only plane weapon that only lose their weight when not mounted, but still keep their agility penalty on non-naval missions?
 
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I personally think that the idea of creating division sizes based on specific terrain types is very niche and not that practical in all around gameplay and enjoyment of the game.
I mean, that's a valid point. But in that case, there shouldn't be any difference between the terrain types at all. So by introducing this difference, the devs actually decided to take a step in the other direction (towards specialization) and openly said as much.
 
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I mean, that's a valid point. But in that case, there shouldn't be any difference between the terrain types at all. So by introducing this difference, the devs actually decided to take a step in the other direction (towards specialization) and openly said as much.
I dont feel like im forced to do that and im fine with beeing penalised in mountains, jungles marshes and stuff, because that is just part of the balance and it effects everyone. The ability to get slightly creative with the width in a specific situation is cool, and it not beeing forced onto you is a good thing tho.
 
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carriers are not untouched both carrier planes are changed and the carriers themselves
Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant that carrier mechanics are not changed. Putting cruiser armor on a carrier doesn't really change that we still can only have 4 carriers per battle at a threat of negative value (as opposed to diminishing returns which I advocate) which is unrealistic (see battle of Leyte Gulf). I wrote a bigger thread about it but basically I think having 6 carriers should give us something like 4.5 of carrier's value (above 4) as opposed to 6*0.6=3.6 as it is currently (less than 4)
 
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Hello there, it's me C0RAX.
A bit of the different DD than you’re used to this week. I'm here to introduce a new thing I will be doing over the summer. This summer for 4 weeks we will be giving you the chance to test some of the balance changes coming with the 1.13 Stella Polaris patch. These changes are hand picked for testing in order to get feedback from the community on specific changes that might have large impacts. These changes will affect all three major combat groups (Army, Air, and Navy), and vary from value changes to some new functionality and behavior so be sure to read the change list so you know what you're getting yourself into.

So let's go into how this is going to work. From July 6th until August 3rd there will be a special Summer Open Beta branch on steam, this branch will have the new changes listed below. Additionally it won't have anything new coming with Arms Against Tyranny just changes for base game and previously released DLC’s. In the last week of the test we will post a feedback form to be able to collect feedback data that we can use to analyze your responses. Of course this doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t post about it outside the form, I want to encourage as much discourse, theorizing and number crunching as possible so give it a try and let us know what you think.

Now lets go over the change log.

################################################################
######## Summer Open Beta ######### Balance
################################################################

##########
Air
##########
- Excess thrust will now increase agility instead of max speed (0.5 AGI per excess thrust)
- airframes now how base max speeds to better represent airframe size speed effects
- reduced terrain combat widths slightly, change support widths also
- major air rebalance pass for airframes and modules
- increased tech date for survival studies to 1939
- Improved aircraft turrets
- slight decrease in agility hit for large bomb bays
- small airframe can only take single turret modules
- adjusted turret stats so they are less powerful for fighters but better for bombers
- rebalanced thrust and weights of modules and airframes,
- added new modules
- Large autocannon
- Large bomb rack
- Armor piercing bomb rack
- 3 levels of torpedo mounting
- Added new techs for plane designer (see above)
- Combat better Agility and Speed has increased effect on air combat

##########
Land
##########
- Super Heavy tanks are now support units. Super Heavy tanks are no longer line battalions
- Armor skirts provide 1 more armor
- Most tank chassis' now grant 10-20% more armor
- Super heavy tanks now cost more overall, but require 20 per support company.

##########
Navy
##########
- added damage reduction to piecing thresholds for naval combat
- convoy hitprofile reduced from 120 to 85 bringing it inline with new hitprofile calculations
- Ship torpedoes accuracy increased to bring them back in line with new hitprofile calculations 145 > 100
- slightly decreased AA disruption from ship AA
- removed visibility effects of super heavy bb armor
- rebalanced, ship engines
- removed visibility impacts from medium guns
- rebalanced IC costs to reflect engine changes
- super heavy armor now part of normal heavy armors
- rebalanced armors
- added cruiser armor to carriers


##########
AI
##########
- AI more likely to upgrade division in the field even with equipment deficits
- added generic AI upgraded infantry template for late game infantry
- added ENG and USA upgraded infantry templates for AI and improved their infantry templates in general

Right now let's get into some explanations.

Thrust and weight:
Let's get the big one out the way thrust and weight for planes. This change requires a bit of game explanation and some explanation of aircraft. So why affect agility, agility previously was a stat that was seldom increased but often reduced by making it something you are rewarded by not using all your thrust budget you can lessen the agility effects of modules by not loading up your entire plane creating a choice between maximizing raw damage or maximizing damage bonuses during air to air combat by bring higher Agility.

Now the aircraft stuff, so power/weight is very not intuitive for aircraft, adding more power will make a plane faster but taking weight off a plane won't make it faster since speed is almost entirely determined by thrust against drag not weight. What less weight does provide is better climb rate acceleration plus some other things. These are abstracted into agility in game. So now if you want your plane to go faster you either use a newer airframe with lower drag (higher base speed) or by putting a bigger engine in the existing airframe.

Combat widths:
Now the next big change, terrain combat widths. This is the change that originally spawned the open beta idea. These changes are generally intended to flatten the efficiencies further for combat widths while also reducing division sizes. There will obviously still be certain numbers that fit better than others but overall these differences should be less extreme.

  • Terrain = CW+Reinforcement Width
  • Desert = 82+49
  • Forest = 76+40
  • Hills = 72+36
  • Jungle = 74+34
  • Marsh = 68+22
  • Mountain = 65+25
  • Plains = 82+49
  • Urban = 86+28
Ship penetration:
Finally the last change I want to discuss is the new penetration effect for ships. To put this imply they now reduce damage directly on top of reducing critical chance. The damage reductions are smaller than for land combat but that's because they have a much greater effect on the combat but be careful defeating an armored foe with just small guns should be much harder now.

Thresholds and damage are as follows

Pen to Armor ThreshholdCritical Change FactorDamage Factor
221
111
0.750.750.9
0.50.50.7
0.10.10.5
000.3

That concludes the run down of the upcoming “Summer open beta” and it's coming to you tomorrow!. I hope to see you try it out and give feedback on the changes. See you next week for more Arms Against Tyranny content coming your way. It's going to be a pretty one.
When is the next dev diary that talks about the new focus trees?
 
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I really like these changes!! The air changes are really well done. Would you be considering an artillery rework any time soon? A reduction in combat width to 1 and a reduction of arty per batallion(of course stat reductions and rebalancing would be required). I would also like to see Pack arty or a "mountain gun" equipment type introduced. Norway would make good use of that. India and Romania also already have focuses for it and instead of it being a behind the scenes terrain buff for those countries they could actually get a new equipment type that other countries could buy from them via license or the new weapons market.
 
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Is there any chance that tank armour type will get rebalanced?

ATM rivet armour seems to be the meta because it's too easy to overcome the armour penalty of rivets by adding armour ticks, leaving you with a net cost saving on the design.
Riveted is too cheap comparable to other armos. It should be -5% or something like that.
 
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I personally think that the idea of creating division sizes based on specific terrain types is very niche and not that practical in all around gameplay and enjoyment of the game.
I get the feeling a lot of HOi4 devs think players are microing everything at speed 1 for the entire war.
 
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I mean, that's a valid point. But in that case, there shouldn't be any difference between the terrain types at all. So by introducing this difference, the devs actually decided to take a step in the other direction (towards specialization) and openly said as much.
If there is one optimal combat width, then all division designs will have to try and reach that optimal combat width. That limits design choice, and is how we get the 20/40w meta. If there is no clear optimal combat width, then design choice opens up considerably more. Let's say you're planning on fighting in mountains on the beta version, so you want the combat width to fit as well as possible. Well, 65+25=90, so maybe a 30w division, or 18w, or 15w, or 10w... Maybe you don't think you'll have additional combat width, in which case a 13w division would work fairly well. Maybe you think you can attack from 3 directions most of the time, well then a 23w division would work. That's 6 different combat widths that can potentially work quite well in mountains.

Compare that to the current combat widths, where you want 25w in mountains. If you don't have 25w divisions specifically made for fighting in mountains, you are making some sort of mistake. Less choice, less interesting design freedom.
 
its as listed in the the penetration to damage table in the change log



To put this imply they now reduce damage directly on top of reducing critical chance.
Wasn't this already true? I know the wiki isn't the end all be all but I was under the impression armor always mattered for reducing damage when not pierced, as did the COMBAT_ARMOR_PIERCING_DAMAGE_REDUCTION define.
 

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I was under the impression that naval armour already reduced damage in previous patches. Is this new naval armour system basically replacing this old system or was the old system not functioning like in the image below or will the two systems somehow be working together?

Anyway, great work giving some love to some of the older features in the game.
Screenshot 2023-07-06 at 10.29.37 AM.png
 
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Nice changes. Haven't played in a while but will be watching this.