Where are the resources? (Once again asking for a custodian team)

[Brumes Wolf]

HOI IV's daily player numbers are pretty much the same size if not bigger than Stellaris, CKIII and EU IV combined (Based on steam player numbers).

So this raises some questions.
How can stellaris be on a relatively quick DLC cadence, and also release large rework/bug fix patches regularly, while only being a fraction of the size of HOI?
Is the HOI playerbase way less monetized?
Does someone high up just really hate HOI?
Stellaris is soon going into "Stellaris 4.0", a large rework of foundational mechanics that touches nearly every aspect of the game. IMHO HOI has never had anything like this, are we ever getting a HOI 2.0? (Yes I know that incrementing the version number not magically make the product better, its about the idea).
After EU IV released several badly received updates they spend a bunch of time bugfixing and reworking existing mechanics.

Why can't HOI do any of this?

• Why is lend lease still useless in single player because the AI will only send you gear if you are missing it? The arms market was a great framework that could've been used to improve lend lease, but nothing was done.
• Why do all aircrew survive and return to the manpower pool when a plane is shot down? BBA was a great opportunity to overhaul how air warfare works, but nothing was done. (Edit: It seems this has since been fixed with a 10% loss ratio)
• Why do focus trees we paid for not get updated to the "modern standard"? Instead they get put in the base game (This is a great idea btw) so the updated tree can get sold to us again (which while fair, does leave a bad taste, especially for Germany, which we paid for twice already).
• How many people actually use the medal mechanic often? How often are spy operations besides collab used? There are many unintegrated underused mechanics like this.
• GD was an opportunity to rework how research works to be more interesting, dynamic and fresh. But nothing was done, we just got another mostly disconnected minigame.

These are just some examples I could personally come up with, don't look into them too much as they aren't the point of the post. (Some might even be wrong/out of date, again, its about the idea)

Where are the resources? I will grant that HOI is probably the most complicated PDX game to work on, possibly only rivaled by VIC3 but it is also way bigger.
Why aren't there many teams working on new content and reworks in parallel to be able to release a major expansion more than once a year?
Why do we only get some war effort patches after a major release, that barely make a dent in the number of ancient bugs, and never truly rework ancient and badly integrated mechanics.
(and I mean rework from the design stage, not slightly improve its implementation)
WE patches then stop, because focus gets shifted to the next major expansion, implying there are not enough resources to keep WE going indefinitely, while it really seems like there should be.

EU IV suffered from the same issue with lots of small unconnected mechanics and buggy releases, it should've been clear for HOI what this has lead/will lead to, Stellaris blazed the trail on how to keep a community happy with relatively rapid expansion/custodian patches, and clear, open and deep communication.
Why is HOI not using any of these lessons?

This is not meant to be a dig at any one individual, or the team as a whole. I am sure everyone wants to deliver the best experience possible, this is a rant/question about the major systemic issues that I (and I think I'm not alone here) see with the games development.

 

[Dimmie_Dumm]

• Why do all aircrew survive and return to the manpower pool when a plane is shot down? BBA was a great opportunity to overhaul how air warfare works, but nothing was done.

10% of the service manpower actually die. It's not up to naval standards where service manpower losses are anywhere between 75-98%, but it is still something positive done to the air war over the years. Maybe in few more years carrier planes will go down once the carrier is sunk, who knows v0v

edit: see 00_defines
MANPOWER_LOSS_RATIO_PLANE_SHOT = 0.10, -- The loss ratio of manpower for a shot plane.
And unlike relevant lines for Navy, this one actually works as stated.

 

[Brumes Wolf]

10% of the service manpower actually die. It's not up to naval standards where service manpower losses are anywhere between 75-98%, but it is still something positive done to the air war over the years. Maybe in few more years carrier planes will go down once the carrier is sunk, who knows v0v

As I expected some of my knowledge is out of date, 10% means 8 MP for a heavy bomber, which seems reasonable.
I still think a split between air and ground crew would be nice, especially if it does something with air crews increased selection/training requirements. But 10% is definitely a good fix.
I will put a note in the OP, thanks for the correction.

 

[Hidler201]

I like stellaris!

 

[Markusmiless]

Stellaris is soon going into "Stellaris 4.0", a large rework of foundational mechanics that touches nearly every aspect of the game. IMHO HOI has never had anything like this, are we ever getting a HOI 2.0?

Well from memory, from day 1 that made the AI and economy system in stellaris very moddable. Now not as in making mods (of course there too) but they made it so that it can be specifically largely overhauled for the needs of new mechanics and such. So it getting fundemental reworks of mechanics is going to be easier than HOI4.

And HOI4 has had a major rework for one major mechanic: Supply.
Which went from state-based to connection-based (though still basically starting from capital).

Not to say that I disagree with you here, but I believe that it is an important little note to make.

 

[AGASHOOD]

I still don’t get why you can put 40k fighters in a single airzone and everything is fine, but the moment you use more than 4 aircraft carriers, suddenly the skies are too crowded

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

And HOI4 has had a major rework for one major mechanic: Supply.
Which went from state-based to connection-based (though still basically starting from capital).

Not to say that I disagree with you here, but I believe that it is an important little note to make.

Basically Barbarossa Patch is one of the best overhauls ever happened in HoI4. Even for NSB, a lot of community feedbacks were implemented by the devs (missed ya, Bratyn).

 

[Brumes Wolf]

Well from memory, from day 1 that made the AI and economy system in stellaris very moddable. Now not as in making mods (of course there too) but they made it so that it can be specifically largely overhauled for the needs of new mechanics and such. So it getting fundemental reworks of mechanics is going to be easier than HOI4.

And HOI4 has had a major rework for one major mechanic: Supply.
Which went from state-based to connection-based (though still basically starting from capital).

Not to say that I disagree with you here, but I believe that it is an important little note to make.

You are right, to add to your point and be entirely fair I quickly skimmed the changelogs of the major updates and noticed something:
7 Years ago WTT Sort of reworked the event system into decisions (One could also just call this an addition though) and reworked national unity which has been very well used in all aspects of the game.
6 Years ago in MTG naval warfare saw an large overhaul with the addition of the taskforce system.
5 years ago LR reworked resistance and cores .
3 years ago NSB had the supply rework.
2.5 years ago BBA reworked the long suffering peace deal system.

HOI IV is about 8.5 years old, this means that we haven't seen any major reworks for pretty much the most recent 30% of its lifetime, and some previous reworks left long resented issues (like all the naval issues people complain about) that still have not been addressed.

HOI used to be able to at least try and rework/improve existing mechanics, but it seems like this stopped, what changed? Too much accumulated tech debt?

 

[Danny5072]

HOI used to be able to at least try and rework/improve existing mechanics, but it seems like this stopped, what changed? Too much accumulated tech debt?

1

Due to development focus on nation-specific content rather than sound generalized mechanics, various random clutter and badly designed one-off features have accumulated to a sort of critical mass (see my recent thread about focus trees for a better explanation); from this state, fixing some fundamental mechanics would require going over a lot of junk code, which is a massive monkey job, and it's unreasonable to expect that this will ever happen.
For example, let's say the devs decide to improve coring system by generalizing it to something like in Kaiserreich (claims automatically become cores at x% compliance). To do that, they will need to remove every single 'add_core' from all focuses, decisions, and events. They will need to remove or rework every single formable or nation-specific minigame that gives cores. Including reviewing some truly ancient code like the v1.0.0 event that spawns Slovakia after the Fate of Czechoslovakia (which you can still use to core the whole world as Slovakia, YouTuber named sejozwak has a 7 hour stream doing just that). This is a lot of freaking work. Especially for something that can't be sold as DLC.
There was a point earlier in game development where introducing a general mechanic would bring massive convenience to players and devs, and make all future content easier to implement, but now is too late.

2

Money. HOI4 is Paradox's mass market cash cow. Counter-intuitively (paradoxically) that means there is no incentive to devote more resources to it. GoE is a massive embarrassment but people still paid for it. Ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

[LastButterfly]

I still don’t get why you can put 40k fighters in a single airzone and everything is fine, but the moment you use more than 4 aircraft carriers, suddenly the skies are too crowded

The game is full of bandaids that hide its issues and hold the thing together.

One of the most glaring for me is the rule that you can't start a naval invasion if you don't have 50% control over the seazones it goes through. When you think about it, it's completely stupid : what exactly is preventing me from putting my cargos full of men to the sea even if I don't know what's in the sea ?
What should prevent spamming invasion is the fact that an invasion force going through an uncontrolled area would get caught and sunk. But the naval system isn't actually capable of doing that very well, and without the magic rule of "you don't control the sea enough, you're not allowed to depart", many invasions would still go through fine. And so instead of improving the naval system to make it able to do what it's supposed to do, a bandaid was slapped onto the whole thing to make it bearable.

I honestly believe HoI4 is at this point so full of such makeshift measures stacked on top of eachother that it might have passed the point of "doing maintenance is no longer possible". It might be just too big a mess at this point, and since a mess is increasingly harder to maintain, it keeps getting bigger and even harder to maintain. This is in part why I don't believe a good naval rework is even possible. Navy has been getting its own rules for how it works compared to the rest of the game, that re-adapting it in hindsight would be an absolutely colossal work. Any "rework" can realistically be no more than additional bandaids on top of bandaids.

 

[Markusmiless]

5 years ago LR reworked resistance and cores .

I'm amazed I forgot this one tbh
Long gone are days of putting a random guy on a horse in a town to keep it in line.

 

[General Tao]

I'm amazed I forgot this one tbh
Long gone are days of putting a random guy on a horse in a town to keep it in line.

I'm still angry about this. We went from random guy on horse with an actual on map presence to tedious minigame which you check maybe twice a year to make sure all your captured cities have interwar light tanks on every street corner, behind every bush, and watching the local populace, machine guns at the ready.

"Ah but the performance hit!" They said. Well now we have a bunch more totally unnecessary puppet nations trying the best each clock cycle to create terrible infantry to give their overlord, who neither needs nor wants them. Performance?

 

[Brumes Wolf]

'm still angry about this. We went from random guy on horse with an actual on map presence to tedious minigame which you check maybe twice a year to make sure all your captured cities have interwar light tanks on every street corner, behind every bush, and watching the local populace, machine guns at the ready.

This could've been fixed very easily at any point by just giving us the ability to choose a resistance level, which the game would then automatically change policies to meet, thereby removing the annoying micro.

 

[Brumes Wolf]

I honestly believe HoI4 is at this point so full of such makeshift measures stacked on top of eachother that it might have passed the point of "doing maintenance is no longer possible". It might be just too big a mess at this point, and since a mess is increasingly harder to maintain, it keeps getting bigger and even harder to maintain. This is in part why I don't believe a good naval rework is even possible. Navy has been getting its own rules for how it works compared to the rest of the game, that re-adapting it in hindsight would be an absolutely colossal work. Any "rework" can realistically be no more than additional bandaids on top of bandaids.

If Stellaris can change how their pops and planets work twice during its lifetime, while that is a foundational part of the game, then its definitely possible for HOI to rework some relatively separate mechanics like naval warfare, it really does seem like an issue of resources and strategy, with no efforts currently being put into reworks, not of technical feasibility.
If it really isn't feasible to fix things then the devs should just come out and say that there will be no major reworks, so the community knows what to expect.

 

[LastButterfly]

If it really isn't feasible to fix things then the devs should just come out and say that there will be no major reworks, so the community knows what to expect.

Yeah, but this team's communication sadly involved a lot of "stay quiet, look away, maybe they'll forget"... so I'm not expecting such things.

 

[Nikolai II]

This could've been fixed very easily at any point by just giving us the ability to choose a resistance level, which the game would then automatically change policies to meet, thereby removing the annoying micro.

I don't even check it twice a year, I just set it once to "Local Police Force" for everything and set some kind of cavalry unit there. Then I get notifiers if I need to produce more weapons or beg/borrow/steal some manpower for it (and a "high resistance" that can be used to remind me to move around some agents if I have some free).

If I really want to optimize then the "new regime" event tells me it's time to change from local police to civilian oversight.

 

[Herennius]

I'm still angry about this. We went from random guy on horse with an actual on map presence to tedious minigame which you check maybe twice a year to make sure all your captured cities have interwar light tanks on every street corner, behind every bush, and watching the local populace, machine guns at the ready.

"Ah but the performance hit!" They said. Well now we have a bunch more totally unnecessary puppet nations trying the best each clock cycle to create terrible infantry to give their overlord, who neither needs nor wants them. Performance?

I personally actually like the occupation minigame and thinks it is an improvement over the old system

However, what I absolutely dislike about is the AIs very limited ability to play it - their occupation law choices are neither particularly efficient nor do they appear credible in terms of roleplay, up to the point of the AI not even able to consider Secret Police, because the to-be-added decision logic was never added: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...on-law-v1-12-5b273-beta-1-12-12-456f.1553460/

And then Götterdämmerung added the RK puppets which are even worse: Not only do they suffer from foremention poor logic for picking a occupation law...no...on top they waste their scarce manpower by employing it in unneeded frontline divisions: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...selves-and-become-resistance-country.1727280/

Sadly, both bug reports linked above haven't even received a confirmation label yet, which means that it is not even likely or at least clear, if they are on the devs radar at all

 

[General Tao]

I personally actually like the occupation minigame and thinks it is an improvement over the old system

However, what I absolutely dislike about is the AIs very limited ability to play it - their occupation law choices are neither particularly efficient nor do they appear credible in terms of roleplay, up to the point of the AI not even able to consider Secret Police, because the to-be-added decision logic was never added: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...on-law-v1-12-5b273-beta-1-12-12-456f.1553460/

And then Götterdämmerung added the RK puppets which are even worse: Not only do they suffer from foremention poor logic for picking a occupation law...no...on top they waste their scarce manpower by employing it in unneeded frontline divisions: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...selves-and-become-resistance-country.1727280/

Sadly, both bug reports linked above haven't even received a confirmation label yet, which means that it is not even likely or at least clear, if they are on the devs radar at all

I mean, you say it's an improvement, but then go on to give several, dare I say, compelling reasons as to why the previous system was better

Its fine, I've accepted that we aren't going back. It does simplify the problem....sort of

 

[William9113]

Custodian team is just such a common sense idea that the aversion to it is baffling. Keep your golden goose clean and healthy or your golden eggs are in jeopardy.

Literally just one or two devs working full time on fixing older bugs, prettying up old focus paths that are outdated, and adding a few extra options to older mechanics would probably be enough (needs to have more effort put into it than the urban warfare “rework” though, I could have sketched out those tactics in like 15 minutes)

 

[herr anfsim]

If Stellaris can change how their pops and planets work twice during its lifetime, while that is a foundational part of the game, then its definitely possible for HOI to rework some relatively separate mechanics like naval warfare, it really does seem like an issue of resources and strategy, with no efforts currently being put into reworks, not of technical feasibility.
If it really isn't feasible to fix things then the devs should just come out and say that there will be no major reworks, so the community knows what to expect.

I like the idea, but isnt part of the problem that PDX have more or less painted themselves into a corner, in the sense that too much of the games "workings" is based on focus trees, causing significant reworks of the game to have a lot of unforeseen consequences, and making the amount of content that could do with a rework almost unlimited.