HOI4 Dev Diary - Reflections and Romania

[podcat]

Hi everyone! After a few weeks break we are finally back with weekly dev diaries covering the 1.4 “Oak” update and accompanying DLC (you are going to need to wait a bit for the full announcement on that, but hey in paradox tradition we will still be talking about stuff that will appear in it).

Why have dev diary breaks?
Many people have asked why we take breaks in dev diaries at all, and there are a few different reasons.

• People don’t like filler diaries, so if we don't have anything exciting to talk about it just means people not getting to read stuff they want and taking up the team's development time actually making stuff. I prefer not to make them if that is the alternative.
• Being in a situation where you basically finish coding on the thing you talk about the day before is really stressful and can lead to showing things you have no idea if they work which leads to further issues, so we don't do that anymore. With 1.3.3 we were working into the last minute to add improvements and thus had no real chance to build up a buffer of content to talk about for a diary.
• Several of the things we are working on are also very large things that take some weeks to complete, and it ties into the above. Two of these things are AI related and one is changes to air system as we said before the break we have been working on larger stuff for the Oak Update. Showing partial bits before all is in place is not very useful or easy for us.

Hopefully that makes things a little clearer. When we are quiet it's not because we don't love you, it's because we are working extra hard on stuff.

Lessons Learned
When we released Together for Victory, the feedback we got for the focus trees was somewhat mixed. On the one hand, a lot of people liked them because of their size and the ability to take a country down entirely new story lines. On the other hand, a lot of people felt that that the new trees wasn't adding much to the way they played. That was somewhat disappointing for us, because we had spent so much time on the hundreds of events and focuses that went into TfV, and we were wondering why exactly that was.

We started digging into telemetry data on what countries people actually played after TFV, and things got a lot clearer: About 40% of players play Germany, with other major nations following behind at quite a distance. The expansion gave the commonwealth minors a healthy bump, but still - the only content we really added for 40% of our players only happened extremely rarely in singleplayer games. Only when historical focuses were switched off, and the AI decided to go down the fascist path, did the German player get to see any new content (news events aside). And even then, the content was usually little more than an alliance request.

So that was the first big lesson: new content needs to tie back to major countries, particularly Germany. Thankfully, we had already decided that our next DLC should focus more on the Axis, so we wouldn’t have to try too hard to come up with reasons why Germany should be involved.

The other issue we noted ourselves was that the Commonwealth nations had very little interaction with each other. They each sat in their own little part of the world, mostly doing their own thing with their AI neighbours. That meant that even if you were playing one of the countries that got a new focus tree, you were surrounded by countries that still used the generic trees. All the interesting developments in your region were caused by you. We wanted to change that as well, and force you to pay attention to the world around you.

Which brings us to our first new DLC focus tree:

The Kingdom of Romania
Romania is a very curious country in the context of WWII, since they were - technically - on all three sides of the war at some point (and had the war gone on long enough, I have little doubt that they would have somehow ended up in the Chinese United Front). During the interwar years, Romania had made an alliance with Poland, and had historically been closely aligned to France. In the event, the Poles decided not to activate their alliance with Romania, in order to use the neutral state on their borders to ship in Allied troops and supplies.

This strategy did not fully work to Poland’s advantage.

Afterwards, Romania had to come to terms with German supremacy on the continent. This grew even more pronounced when France, a nation the Romanians had always considered as a model for their own country, fell to the Wehrmacht in just 6 weeks (claims that the French AI was broken have not been confirmed by historians). King Carol II approached the Germans for an alliance, bringing Romania into the Axis - but not after the Soviet Union, Hungary and Bulgaria had forced their territorial demands on Romania.

The Romanians supplied a large portion of the Axis’ oil supplies, nominally in return for German aid in modernizing their military. They also participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union, famously failing to hold the flanks of the German 6th Army during the battle of Stalingrad (in their defense, they had told the Germans it was a bad idea).

When the war threatened to move onto Romanian soil, the country switched sides again and joined the war on the side of the Soviet Union, expelling the Germans and carrying the war into Hungary.

In the game, Romania starts out in a fairly strong position, surrounded on three sides by countries that are either weaker or allied, and with the Soviet Union about to be concerned with itself for a while. However, her Army is fairly outdated, her industry is weak and those surrounding countries all have designs on her territory.

Romania’s tree is therefore centered around trying to maintain that territory. Historically, Romania followed a very flexible policy, negotiating with the Germans and the Allies in parallel, trying to get the best deal. This is represented in game by not locking you into an alliance branch too early. As long as you aren’t part of a faction, you can negotiate freely to get new technologies and equipment from the major powers (how you get that equipment will be revealed in the next dev diary).

Alternatively, you can be proactive and try to become the strongest power in the Balkans, surrounding yourself with a string of buffer states. That will require you to break with old alliances, but they were never going to help you anyway, right?

Romania also has several directions for how to develop its army, air force and navy:

Internally, Romania also had a number of issues, first and foremost King Carol’s attempts at steering the country. A devoted hedonist and a less-than-devoted husband, Carol was a constant source of scandals, while also considering himself the only person fit to run the state. You will have to learn how to handle him, which requires time and resources, both of which are in short supply. On the other hand, Carol has a unique new ability allowing him to recruit ministers at a lower cost. Whether or not you want to keep him around is up to you.

For people who like big pictures here is a link with the whole focus tree as one.

Increasing Immersion

Immersion from playing a nation is not just from events and focus trees, art and sound also play a role to create the right feeling and thus Romania gets new general and leader portraits as well as unique voice overs for Romanian soldiers and 3d models of famous planes and tanks

See you all next week for another diary! That one will not reveal another country, but showcase some other things....

 

[podcat]

Nice update on Romania, but......Wow.

Not one word on what fixes you are working on to solve the issues players have reported since 1.3.3? Not even a list of issues you recognize need work on? You have got to realize this was not going to make some people happy.

Like always we talk about bugfixes towards the end. Diary also tells you we have been working on some major AI stuff but that its not ready to be shown yet.

Great diary in all, and I do really like the Reflections part, but... like others have said what about the AI? It is the biggest complain of the game. SINCE LAUNCH by the way!

We work on the AI every day, as I said we reveal stuff when its ready and have already talked about areas of focus on the forum so you'll have to be patient.

The ai is a long journey. Its going to keep improving for years, there are no shortcuts.

I would like more complex systems in place rather than focus trees, more deapth is definitely needed.

As you see above people have strong opinions about AI and such. You cant really do both huge complex systems and work 100% on AI, so we balance development effort between fixes (where most time is spent on AI) and features while adding immersion and flavor through focus trees. People who make focus trees do not work on AI, but they help pay the bills for AI development.

 

[Archangel85]

Some nerf of the generic focus tree, similar to the one the Commonwealth received, with a lot of "filler" focuses to lengthen the focus tree. At least, for the fist glance.

1/ Romania gets only 3 industry focuses. Most probably 3-4 IC total, less than the 7 available from the generic tree. ROM already lacked build slots by 1937, it will be worse.

We actually considered the generic tree to be baseline for where we want the country specific trees to be, balance wise 8unless we think the country should be weaker or stronger than generic, see Indian manpower)

2/ Only a single research team focus, so apparently Romania is limited to 4 research slots.

That is under balance discussion. Personally, I would like countries to be more limited in research slots because it forces the player to make harder choices on where to put their focus, but if 4 is too harsh, we will go with 5.

3/ No "Axis/Comintern Research" focus for the Fascist/Communist political branch, unlike what the CW nations already have. Another unused feature.

There is no general research sharing, no. But you do get research sharing in various focuses, for specific topics. Allied Staff College gives tech sharing with the allies for land doctrines, for example.

 

[Archangel85]

Not to sound an a..hole, but Align Hungary option is beyond unrealistic. Hungary would demand land concessions for it to happen. They would demand the entire Transylvanian part, and giving them half would mean they think about it... There is just no realistic way to it. It is similar, if you would add a tzarist option the Soviet Union, in which the communist could elect a new tzar.
If Romania would annex Hungary and release them, than they do have an option to release them as allies, but than Romania would claim the Eastern part of Hungary, which they also did after ww1 and which they also do now. And having a weak ally is not that useful. I would take out the Align Hungary option and add a Claim Eastern Hungary option.

What makes you think Hungary gets to have a say in the aligning part?

 

[Archangel85]

I really like the need to manage your country. War is a political act and politics & national events limited what the leaders could do.

Now from a story telling point of view at what level are we playing the game? I know you have said at the level of Churchill, Hitler & Stalin before so we should not micro things too much, but I do know if that is the story telling point of view. I am also not sure how you view King Carol as just a Head of State and you are playing as Head of government or are you playing as a minister managing the Head of State/Government?

I have been very conflicted on this & the story telling in the game. I am not sure if it even matter as will players care you are jumping back & forth in preservatives from event to event?

We have been discussing this a lot recently. We are trying to sharpen the narrative position of the player as the "Government". That is not the leader, but the entirety of the decision making group. The country leader is outside of that group and might be thrown out, depending on your choices. Have you ever watched Yes, Minister? The player is Sir Appleby.

 

[Archangel85]

As a Romanian I read with interest the Developers Diary When I saw that the next update will includes Romania. However When I Started to read the text I had observed some mistakes about the historical stuff:

When Romania had switched sides, it had switched from Axis to Allies. After Yalta Conference Churchill promise Romania to Stalin with the condition to keep the democracy in Greece (also Romania was the last East-European country which entrated under Soviet influence in 1947).​

Moreover when I had saw the Focus named ''Michaels coup'' I start putting myself some questions and I hope that the Paradox Dev. team will help me to find some answers. Here are my questions:

• What that mean? That focus will make Romania Constitutional Monarchy again? (If it is not that would make sense because Michael was and is a defender of democracy).
• What ''Force abdication'' means? Because Carol 2 has abdicated after appointed as the new king his son Michael and as prime-minister Ion Antonescu (who wasn't a fascist and also suppres the fascist movements, but in game terms it can be named a ''fascist''). In this scenario monarchy wasn't abolished and the monarch was used as a popular fugure. On the other hand, the communist obliged Michael to abdicate.
• How ''His Majesty's Loyal Government" works? It would make sense only if Carol II is still in charge as a King, because as I said above, Michael was andhe is a democrat.
  
• As I said before Antonescu wasn't the main fascist representant in Romania. The head of the Movement Leginonary was Zelea Codreanu (killed in 1938 by Carol II becouse he was envolve in political assasionation) and after him came Horia Sima (Who Was not in good relations with Antonescu). In this context would you include some events?
• And my 5th and my last question is that if you will add some events about 1937 elections? ( Historically that parliamentary election showed the political instability between the democratic parties: they didn't succeed to form a democratic cualition and prime-minister for a short perdion become Octavian Goga, a man with pro-fascist ideas. And open the way to a short political crisis )

King Michael's Coup is fairly high up the tree, but it is intended more as an emergency option. Historically, King Michael was a mere figurehead from 1940 until 1944, when he led a coup that deposed Antonescu and put him in charge, switching sides to the Allies in the process. We don't expect you to take it unless you are in a situation where you need to replace the government RIGHT NOW. Force Abdication and handle the king both focus on how you would deal with King Carol and his...lifestyle. His majesty's loyal government is another branch where Carol remains in charge throughout, though you get a way to make him less extravagant near the end of the branch.

 

[podcat]

But I agree with Meglok here. It's kind of ironic (or maybe their point was to soften the blow of a DD on Romania) that Podcat acknowledges the criticisms about the mixed reviews on TfV, (IE Most played nation = Germany, then Majors, then Minors. Minor's Focus Tree improvements ony matter to Majors when AI Historical Mode is off) then gives us a DD which is a focus tree for Romania (an interesting minor no doubt). So I think Meglok is right in expressing disappointment with this as their intro dev diary to 1.4 when some of us in the community are really hoping for and expecting something that is really going to affect the gameplay of the most played nations.

As someone who really enjoyed TfV and pretty much never plays Germany, I'm kind of sad to hear that the development is going to be Germany-centric from now on, but if that's what the community wants I'm very happy to be receiving new content. Really glad to see Romania is getting some flavour too.

Reading these two I think I should have been clearer. The Point was not that we should be germany centric, but that we should do things that interact with major nations, like Romania does a lot. So that means that several of the majors get to interact with the new content even if they dont play that one nation. Of course, Germany is the most popular so it makes sense to put stuff there.

Thanks for the diary Podcat. Nice to see these additions. The reflections are interesting, but you must know that a least a small part of the German domination in terms of nations played is in part due to their frequent quick fail against SU.

Even in patch versions where germany was beating soviets with a decent frequency had no real difference in % playing germany so that doesnt seem to impact.

- Mr. Lind, based on your knowledge of how the development of HOI4 goes, how much time do you think would it roughly take to improve the game to the point when people will generally stop telling others to stay away from SP game? I'm not talking about pleasing everyone, but specific major problems that the game has since what looks like 1.0. A rough, general estimate.

Looking at telemetry numbers we are already pleasing the majority very well. We keep getting more and more active players playing more time. If we are referencing a previous discussion on people with 1k hours played telling people not to play on steam reviews that is a minority who sadly might be scaring away some new blood, but clearly cant stop playing the game either. So its already happened and I can't give you an estimate. As for those I dont think there will ever be a point no matter how many years we put into it where they will be 100% happy. Player skills increase faster than you can code a better AI so its simply an impossible task. We have improved the AI a lot, and the biggest stuff was probably 1.3 where people started having issues beating the AI who had actually played a bunch.

What I don't think you understand is the AI is the biggest problem of the game, and has been since launch. It's the thing that's most complained about, and what most of the bigger threads have been about since launch.

Which is why I talked about it in the diary but said we couldnt give you details yet. Although even in dev diaries where 50% of it was talking about AI in the past I'v had people complain that we arent talkign about ai ;D

EDIT: Just to drive the point home that criticism of this dev diary is not just haters hating. If Podcat conducted a poll (preferably SurveyMonkey, but twitter if he must) laying out the possible topics for this Dev Diary that he was willing to discuss, where do you think Focus Trees or Romania would've weighed in at?

Look, as I said in diary we talk about stuff that is completed. The list would have had 2 options, and the 2nd part wouldn't make as much sense to talk about without the first (Romania), so I couldnt really have polled it.

Where do I start... The community is not "perfectly content" to let the modders do their thing. For example, look at the number of people who say one should use No Man's Land "because vanilla sucks". They have the mod, and they still complain about the base game. Note that I agree that some lands should be impassable, my point really is that people would also complain if Paradox let the modders do some of their work.

Second, when people assume nothing has been done because they don't have the details here and now, that's tiresome. If Podcat hadn't talked about the minors, would people also assume no work is done on them?
The current complains are worse than that, because Podcat DID say they worked on the AI. He said it everywhere, including this DD.

Criticizing the game is fine. Talking like this DD somehow vindicates the opinion that the game is bad is nonsense. Would people feel better if artists and designers had done nothing at all? I can guarantee that it wouldn't make the AI improve any faster.

Just going to quote a good post full of truth.

Great diary! I hope you guys are planning something for Turkey too. It seems like Turkey is the most played generic country.

China is the most popular of the generics. I think Brazil is more popular than Turkey as well, but I could remember wrong. They are close at least. The reason we are not doing china as part of this update is that it really needs to come with some big code changes to work well. Stuff we decided not to do for this one because we think improving ai instead is more important.

 

[podcat]

Is there a list of what each of the national focuses in the Romania tree actually do? Hard to get excited about it without having anything beyond a picture to look at. Also would allow us to provide feedback beyond just reviewing the names and paths.

We will be doing some streams further on when we actually play and showcase them.

Ok...thanks but you still didn't answer me at my last 2 questions . However keep the great work!

Thanks for asking actual questions about the tree btw. I am not as well read-up on this as @Archangel85 but while alternate politicians that were there a short time can be very interesting they also take quite a bit of time to do, so we need to make prioritization calls and they usually go in favor of people who spend more time being available etc.

 

[Archangel85]

Ok...thanks but you still didn't answer me at my last 2 questions . However keep the great work!

Unfortunately not. It was originally intended in a very early draft of the tree, but had to be cut for time. It is a sad fact of game development that you usually only have time to do less than half of the things you want to put in.

 

[Archangel85]

Are the "Narrative Events" only added to the Kingdom of Romania so far, or will others be added to other nations (ie: the Majors).

Only for the new countries so far, but i suspect we will add more of them in time.

 

[Archangel85]

We already told you next week will be about mechanics.

 

[Archangel85]

On the contrary, I think it is a major boon that devs are allowed and supposed to interact with the community directly, rather than getting the reader's digest version through an intermediary. We do have a community manager in @BjornB, but I'm not too sure if it will help people if he just comes by every now and then and nods politely while you tell him what we already know. There is only so many times you can tell people "It's being worked on" before they stop believing you.

 

[podcat]

The policy as I understand it (@podcat or other Devs can correct me if i am wrong) is that the Dev Diaries are for things largely settled. Not works in progress. The twitter posts & other random forum posts can be of things that are works in progress, not officially released. So the sneak peaks are not fully ready to be explained.

No, to be fair to @Gwydion5 that was a 3rd option. I could have gone over the twitter content in more detail, but considered against it since I had already shown it and felt it would be better coming back later to remind people. Also people told me they would be super mad if all the first diary was about was talkign about the twitter teasers ;P

@podcat

Will old DLC countries also get increased immersion in the future? Right now I am thinking about the Poland - United and Ready DLC. Poland is still missing voice overs and there are only generic admiral portraits. Heck, while at it some names on the focus tree could also use some adjustments.

As a former soldier in the Polish Army I could come down to your office and help you with the voice overs all for the cost of one beer!

Are you in sweden? its not totally impossible to arrange maybe

will paradox make focus trees only for a few countries or are you planning on doing for almost every country in the game?

I would love all nations to have a different tree than generic, but obvisouly this is a very long term plan to get more immersion in. It might be that for some nations it makes more sense to make "area" trees where several nations get something more appropriate for their area as well.

I was responding to a post that basically said there is no central repository where people can see a list of issues that the dev team has already acknowledged.

This has come up before and been answered, basically it would take a lot of work from our side to make such a list. We obviously can't give people access to our internal issue tracking system (and lists of 1000+ things are also not useful or easy to get an overview of as a consumer). I don't know if a little thread would help, because we wrote in the previous diary basically what we were looking at for AI and people didn't read it there, and I cant be repeating the same things in every diary either, and even if we show a little thread people would expect us not to work on anything not specifically written there and be worried.

Currently if you are looking for acknowledged issues the clearest way is to look in bug forum at threads with the paradox icon (pdx employee answered), then they are acknowledged and in our internal lists for sure.

 

[podcat]

So let's apply some deductive reasoning here.

• They ran around 20 simulation games and did not notice AI Germany being beaten by Russia in most games by 41, definitely by 42.
• They ran around 20 simulation games, did notice AI Germany being beaten by Russia in most games by 41, definitely by 42 and published 1.3.3 anyway.
• They ran significantly less than 20 games, so few that they took AI Germany losing in 41/42 as a fluke instead of a consistent outcome.
• They did not run any simulation games.

Now I for one believe PDS as a software game development company has enough experience developing software to have good enough QA processes to catch something as big as AI Germany losing consistently to Russia in 41. So the 1st line of deductive reasoning just doesn't make sense. Which leaves us with the last three options as being possible, which one do you think it is? You could add another option if you think there is one.

I'm pretty sure we had already discussed this in the feedback thread on the AI already, and keeping on topic is nice, but sure:
As I said Germany has statistically always lost to soviet union in all our patches, sometimes more sometimes less. We ran our games and it shows germany failing earlier than before.

Looking at reasons it was because soviet union no longer:
1) built really trash motorized divisions
2) no longer wasted lots of troops on neutral borders
3) nations overall now value their own safety over helping allies (goal: italy should better protect itself and be less soft underbelly)
Basically soviet AI had improved a lot. Germany's also improved, but soviets more. The big issue for germany was front shuffling halting their push and letting soviets overwhelm and push them back. Japan and china also had front shuffling issues limiting them, but about in equal measures so that helped to delay the conflict.
Because we changed production quite a bit we looked at that, but it did not have a very large impact on AI performance overall. It may have slightly impact things, but if so the smallest of several options.

To clarify, the reason a germany losing earlier is bad is that for minors or non UK-allies they may not have time to involve themselves in the conflict which diminishes their experience if they are trying for the historical war. We then looked at consequences and options:

1) Nerf Soviet union - Since a vast majority play germany, or end up fighting the soviets this would make their experience worse. It also feels wierd to nerf a nation for AI reasons rather than player reasons when fighting them. removing some AI improvements were also on the table, but is clearly a bad idea.
2) Buff Germany - Most people already consider germany easy to play and there are also buff sliders available so we didnt consider this a good option
3) Fix front shuffling for good and rewrite logic for how AI nations should manage exp forces - Downside is that this is not quick nor easy. both a long term problems since the start of HOI4 (and hoi3 too to a certain extent). We estimated 3-4 weeks of work if all went well.

We felt 1 and 2 would negatively impact the majority of players and 3 would take so long we couldn't wait a month to release the patch. We also looked at the feedback from the 2k or so players who had been testing the open beta of 1.3.3 for a week (I think it was?) and while there was some comments on germany soviet balance it was a minority while majority seemed to like things. So we released the beta as is with some minor tweaks and in the next dev diary we talked about how we were making front shuffling our top priority.

Was it the right choice? Up to you to decide. I think so.

 

[Archangel85]

Tbf Bjorn's primary contribution, other than sharing the odd tweet, seems to be telling people that either they stop being angry and impassioned about products that they've spent as many as $100, $200 or $300 on, or they will be on probation; that and being a delight to watch in EU4 Dev Clashes.

What you really need is someone that gets you into a meeting, stares you down, and says "Look HoI4 lads, people are really pissed off about A, B and C, it's the only thing we've been hearing about for the last 6 weeks, so we're going to give them something". I know the PDX structure seems fairly loose, but basically, you need a boss. That's the 2 cents really. People hate on publishers but in this sort of scenario, a publisher may actually be the thing you need...

Marketing and Brand Management from the publishing side already have a lot of input on the Dev Diaries and have signed off on the Dev Diary schedule. We had that meeting. We agreed that this was the way to go.

The problem with the way a lot of devs 'communicate' with their members, is that they're completely human in the way they do so. They cherry pick the comments they want to hear, and deny or scream 'la la la' at all the things that don't rub them the right way. For example, this 16 page thread is by large people complaining about a DD that took 6 weeks to produce and despite all that time, didn't really give us anything that substantial. No one is disputing the amount of work that goes into Focus Trees, or how pretty this one is. But the point (whether the posts mention the AI or not) is that a focus tree was not the breaking news we expected.

And really, this would have worked nicely as one of the final DDs before the release of the DLC/Patch.

If you didn't have anything substantial this week, another week of radio silence would have been just fine.

Given how people complained last week, I dare say another week of no DD would have led to torches and pitchforks. The simple fact is that the Romanian focus tree is perhaps the only new part of the game that is not currently completely broken. People seem to believe we have a written AI dev diary sitting around somewhere. That is not the case. You'll get it when it's ready.

 

[podcat]

Currently 53 disagrees, 42 agrees, 1 helpful. The proof is in the pudding, and clearly it supports what I'm saying. Infact the only reason I've fallen down this rabbit hole of a poo thread is because I felt the community was being unfair to Meglok (and others) for voicing legitimate criticism.

I think there are two factors here
1) Its off topic. It isnt discussign the content at all so its not very constructive
2) Meglok is a forum veteran, he has 3.6k posts and posts a lot in popular threads and dev diaries. He has surely read the last diary where we talked about what AI issues were our priorities after 1.3.3. In fact he comments on page 3 of that diary saying how much better SP has gotten with the patch.

anyways guys, I hear ya. You'd have loved to know it all right away and hear about AI stuff, I explained (I thought) why we arent ready to show off that. Seems when people actually discuss Romania and diary content they like the stuff they see.
See you all after easter next week for next diary!

 

[podcat]

Any chance for more AI DDs like the ones Steelvolt did leading up to 1.3. They were absolutely fascinating regarding how the AI was thinking the way it would.

We have 2 or so planned at least before release.

Hey Paradox is nice to hear new news about HOI 4 I would like to hear your option about adding new strategic Resources like Uranium, Heavy Water into HOI IV? Is stupid that every Country can build Nukes without access to these resources...

Yeah, I actually miss those two from HOI3 as well. They made for strategically interesting stuff for areas you wouldnt care about otherwise.

Not impressed. Pimping focus trees is just in-house modding. How about some new functionality? There are troves of great suggestions in the forum. Leave the modding to the community and start coding!

The person making a focus tree isnt a programmer, so while the ones we do usually come with some new code feature they are light on programming need compared to a big feature. The advantage of this is that we can spend a lot of programmer time on free patch features like working to improve the AI, or redoing air interfaces etc that the community has been requesting.

could you guys give south america some more love? they are actually the most boring continent to play

its a pretty popular area that can get very interesting to the balance of power in the world so they are definitely pretty high on our list of nations we want to give the focus tree and immersion bump treatment.

 

[podcat]

So onto some other broken aspects that are imbalanced in the game...
Now i know Paradox has shown they care 90% on single player games, i would love them to try to play MP with their community. To talk and experience MP games, to understand that majority of MP games that go past 1937 are team speak games with large rule sets. To create balance. The fact that there are games with 30+ rules, some with 4 page google documents etc etc. Its insanity, these rule sets are made via experience in hundreds of games to try to create balance between the 3 factions to try to create a historically focused games that last more than 30 mins. Now a example of a quiet universal MP rule across all decent games is the 1 Arty/AT/AA per 10 width division rule. Here are a few others...No Coups, No unwanted political boosting of players, no political boosting of AI, no trading for resources that are not needed eg. boosting Frances factories Why are they well loved and universal? Because without it the game breaks beyond belief. In my opinion should be included in a tickbox for MP games to make it impossible for people to break these rules.

Being able to set several "house rules" as game options is for sure something we want (for our own MP as well) and we'll probably do it some time in the future. We consider work on AI more important right now though.

Haha of course it is, but it is used all the time..With one industry bonus you can keep juggling it to research the every industry tech giving the bonus to all other commonwealth countries which then again help the other commonwealth countries and it goes on and on. It is a well known exploit in MP games, but to the SP guys out there the tips i will give you is that it is called 'juggling' and it can only be used with generic bonuses like industry and armor techs. It can't be used for land doctrines for example.

Other than that you can figure it out yourself. I'm sure the dev's know this exploit.

actually not sure if we have something that easy to exploit reported. if you dont want to tell everyone how it works PM me details so I can check with the database. We have actually put in some more anti cheating stuff to help the MP community (vs ppl hexediting and such), but probably am not going to cover that in diary in detail because I dont want to turn it into a competition to beat

 

[podcat]

@podcat

Please give this some love:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ne-decisions-after-creation-of-pocket.994666/

see comments, but I checked and it seems to fix itself/do it correctly when I run with our dev code. We've done a lot of work on frontlines so that probably explains it

 

[podcat]

@podcat

If it is not a secret, can we expect more economic stuff in the future (maybe not right in the next DLC), some diplomatic depth and everything like that?
And another question - are there plans to expand major focus trees for more ideological paths for really ahistorical stuff to happen, controlled by player?

Gonna turn around and be sneaky and ask what you mean by economic stuff exactly. Civilian, military, production?

Yes also we have long term plans to expand major countries as some of them can be a bit restrictive