HOI4 Original Design Choices I disagree with that maybe should be revisited

[Shaka of Carthage]

It would make for some interesting decisions yet the main problem as far as I can see, is that whilst yes ideas like this would be quite interesting ... it will also massively increase the underlying complexity of the game in a way that can only result in slowing down the game as it progresses, and that's a touchy subject.

Agree with most of what you said. But as stated, changes like this are perhaps better considered for the future (HoI5).

The Air system is very limited and tbh I hate almost every touch I make regarding air in the game. It would almost be better if I could assign all my air forces to a Theater AI and ignore them aside from producing more planes

I assign mine to Armies and then forget about them. Also assign groups to defend specific air zones and/or sea zones and forget about them also.

The British Army was an all professional volunteer force, backed by a part-time fun club called the territorial Army, The Indian Army was similarly constructed, as were the forces of the Dominion states. This resulted in Britain finding it hard and very time consuming to get a trained and competent British 55 Division Army in the field.

Excellent description of the Commonwealth Armies I thought there were 47 divisions, not 55?
The British also rapidly formed a 'Home Guard' ... the infamous Dad's Army.

The French army operated on a conscription basis with a number of Regular divisions (including colonials) made up of professionals, Fortress divisions deigned to man the Maignot line, and three classes of Reserve Divisions

Another great description. But aren't the A class professionals vs being reserves? And their reservists were not very enthusiastic, at best war weary.

19-34 (Volunteer/Limited)
35-45 (Extensive Conscription)
46-60 (All Adults)
14-18 (All Youth Must Serve)
Unaged Not Fit for Service/reserved occupations (Scraping the Barrel)

Agree in theory, but as you mentioned its a big change to track these different classes. One thing I've played with over the years, is tying specific battalion types to each grouping. Infantry/Militia/Home Guard. But there are significant issues with this approach.

splitting out Officer manpower and NCO manpower from the private soldier?

Problem here is that it implies all officers or NCOs. The low level officers or NCOs are not what is critical. You can get most of them in a matter of months in wartime (ie 90 day wonders, shake and bake NCOs, etc). Its the field grade officers and senior grade NCOs that are critical. The cadre of a division that determines the quality of a division. While some of these specialists can come from the civilian sector, its mainly from experience. Years, not months.

Separation of field grade officers and senior NCOs, yes. Otherwise no.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

Why raise this matter?

1. You really are jumping to conclusions having no basis for those. Performance optimization is a complex topic and advice in this area has any value only if given having intimate knowledge of the architecture. You "see" the system as "slow" but you would never know WHY. May be there's some heavy processing but may be some things are done sequentially and waiting for some other tasks to finish or some locks on data structures lifted etc.
2. The main thing about performance optimization is the development costs. You can optimize pretty much anything but how much it will costs in dev/test time. Firstly how high the cost of optimization itself and is it really worth trying when the same effort can be spent elsewhere. Secondly (my understanding is HOI4 is pretty high-level (LUA)) you can always go lower-level and become more efficient but how expensive your further development will be after that. How long your team's productivity death valley will last until it becomes as efficient with new architecture as they were with the old one. All this effort will be written down from more "visible" things.
3. Another dimension is MOD-support. Do you want to somewhat limit your mod-community to only those that can skillfully work with a complex non-locking parallel model or you want to build on outside talent and reveal may be less performance efficient yet more straightforward interface that will allow people to focus on substance rather than technicalities.
4. My guess would be from a dev cost point of view such drastic changes as you propose are most expensive. You'll need to rework practically everything - from AI inner logic and execution plans to high-level game things like training and deployment, equipment production etc. And you'll kill practically all non-cosmetic mods as well - the balance will change, AI logic will change, you name it.

 

[valisk]

Excellent description of the Commonwealth Armies I thought there were 47 divisions, not 55?
The British also rapidly formed a 'Home Guard' ... the infamous Dad's Army.


Another great description. But aren't the A class professionals vs being reserves? And their reservists were not very enthusiastic, at best war weary.


....


Problem here is that it implies all officers or NCOs. The low level officers or NCOs are not what is critical. You can get most of them in a matter of months in wartime (ie 90 day wonders, shake and bake NCOs, etc). Its the field grade officers and senior grade NCOs that are critical. The cadre of a division that determines the quality of a division. While some of these specialists can come from the civilian sector, its mainly from experience. Years, not months.

Separation of field grade officers and senior NCOs, yes. Otherwise no.

I should have been clearer on the number of divisions, 55 was the plan Churchill and Ironside came up with in 1940.

With the French Series A units, were technically split in two categories, Regular and Formation units, the Formations being 2/3rd regular strength and to be topped up by well trained reservists on mobilisation.

The B and C class reserves were pretty indifferent at best, The B units in Corap's 9th seemed to be badly officered ill disciplined and unenthusiastic, according to Alanbrooke, and they certainly disintegrated almost on contact with the Panzers. Probably didn't help much that they were mostly missing their divisional anti tank and anti air weapons if we are to be fair to them.

And agree entirely with your point on the senior officers and senior NCOs, its what I was thinking and I should have been clearer.

 

[bitmode]

Firstly how high the cost of optimization itself and is it really worth trying when the same effort can be spent elsewhere. Secondly (my understanding is HOI4 is pretty high-level (LUA))

The game is in C++, can't realistically get any more low-level than that; the only LUA I'm aware of is to load the defines. But your point still remains that it has to be worth it to highly optimize something. And that quality includes the expectation of the thing staying there for good. With all the post-release development, there is little set in stone to really make such a commitment.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

the only LUA I'm aware of is to load the defines.

Is it? May be AI uses LUA as well, does it not? I don't know the internals of HOI but adding RT byte-code interpreter just to load the defines is kind of an overshoot IMHO. And @CraniumMuppet mentioned external AI mods are using LUA extensively.

 

[CraniumMuppet]

Is it? May be AI uses LUA as well, does it not? I don't know the internals of HOI but adding RT byte-code interpreter just to load the defines is kind of an overshoot IMHO. And @CraniumMuppet mentioned external AI mods are using LUA extensively.

The AI code is in c++
Specific high level strategies are in the common folder and it uses the HoI scripting language, which is not related to LUA.
I meant that big mods usually have a lot of evaluations running, not necessarily AI (although that can be included) but also effects, targeted effects, on_actions, custom GUIs, variable manipulations etc. Usually the bigger the mod, the more custom stuff they implement, of course this eventually adds up to the overall performance degradation; somethings might be benign and some might really hog performance. Modders also all use the HoI scripting language and not LUA


But the scripting that CD's is not related to things like AI pathfinding, frontline management etc, which is what people commonly confuse the work that CD's do with that of programmers.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

@CraniumMuppet thanks for such an extensive answer!

PS HOI4 is a great game btw!

 

[Sourlol]

A lot of game mechanics in hoi4 assume the player is trying to Shepard their nation through a tumultuous time in world history. The game works really well if you immerse yourself in that role play.

but after your first play through or time seeing the AI make a bonehead strategic decision—you start to bring your knowledge of history into the game—is ‘knowing’ you will be at war by 1940. And you start making precognizant Decisions.

that’s where this idea that “fascism is better” comes from. Or that democracies are weak. France in MP often will not build any factories in France and instead build entirely in here colonies—I refuse to believe average Frenchmen, already prone to strikes, wouldn’t go to the streets if in 1939-1939 the French Govt didn’t invest a single new dollar on development within France and instead did “foreign” direct investment into indoChina for 3+ years.

we can’t stop players from knowing history, but the devs should design such that there is a lot more malus’s plastered on the player who leans too heavily into making meta decisions because they know that in 3.9 years of game time Germany is invading Poland.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

France in MP often will not build any factories in France and instead build entirely in here colonies—I refuse to believe average Frenchmen, already prone to strikes, wouldn’t go to the streets if in 1939-1939 the French Govt didn’t invest a single new dollar on development within France

Why not agree on it in MP house rules? Or you want to leave people playing for France with no choice but follow the path you like?

 

[goodcigar]

Seems like some good ideas in OP's thread which I've thought myself in the past. The Frontline mechanic definitely needs more controls to be very useful.

1. Attach one Division to another.

2. Avoid terrain command: at all costs or try to.

3. Prefer terrain command. For example tank Division on Plains.

4. Set limits of Frontline expansion.

5. Set roles for a Division. For example set a Division as an anti-tank Division.

6. Ability to give battleplans names. Like Operation Barbarossa.

 

[Voigt]

@CraniumMuppet But CDs do some high-level ai work, don't they? Meaning creating the ai_strategy_plan for new nationsm creating some ai_strategy for nudging production and the big part doing ai_weights for decision and events.

Those AI things are seperate from pathfinding and frontline management sure, but those are still AI things?

 

[Qwerlancer]

Not talking any game mechanics. At pure game design view this is an appropriate WW2 wargame should be:

Assuming player is Germany, going historical way, start at 1936.

Game difficulty design:
Very Easy - Before 1946 Germany still has a chance to win
Easy - Before 1945
Normal - Before 1944
Hard - Before 1943
Very Hard - Before 1942

 

[CraniumMuppet]

@CraniumMuppet But CDs do some high-level ai work, don't they? Meaning creating the ai_strategy_plan for new nationsm creating some ai_strategy for nudging production and the big part doing ai_weights for decision and events.

Those AI things are seperate from pathfinding and frontline management sure, but those are still AI things?

Correct.
It's a bit more nuanced. CDs can nudge the AI towards certain behaviors and there are some mods that does this really well (Expert AI for example).

Same goes for events, decisions, focuses etc. Most of what I see as criticism for the AI from the community more closely relates to lower level AI behavior such as Frontline management, prioritization of theaters, shuffling of troops etc which is not something CDs handle.

Usually these lower level issues in my experience does not always have clear simple answers on how to tackle since the AI doesn't have eyes in the same way as players do.

What I personally think most players issue with the AI is not necessarily that the AI is hard or easy, but rather that the AI sometimes inhibit behavior that we as humans see as "weird", so immersion is lost. Like "that's not something that a human would do" so it kinda breaks the illusion of playing against a real enemy

It's kinda the same when you exploit the AI in a similar way in Civ or Total Warhammer. Games in general struggle with AI and trying to have it behave as humans do.

Games like Dark Souls or the Witcher have a bit of an easier time because they are more isolated and can read player input. The enemies does not have to think far ahead, they just need to kill the player. AI in strategy games needs to think 2,3,4 steps ahead. I'm by no means any expert though, but it's generally a hard issue to fix because the fix isn't always clear.

A hard rule like "never cycle attack" can be implemented, but it's not always clear that it is not beneficial, like pinning down. Not that HoIs ai is without criticism, but a lot of suggestions about "stop the AI doing X" is usually not as simple a task at it may seem because its frought with what ifs and edge cases.

That's not to say that we should not seek to improve AI in games in general.