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Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

Vaarna_Aarne

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The fact it's driven entirely by economics has previously been the main problem with naval combat, it's basically like the combat in every non-HoI Paradox game. The addition of terrain features and various other details might do a little bit to it, but ultimately I really doubt you can fully work an abstracted naval combat system into something that doesn't devolve to bruteforcing. It's actually kind of an interesting thought: Has ANY grand strategy game done naval warfare well (the definition of doing it well is that one-sided curbstomps like Trafalgar and Tsushima are possible, Trafalgar especially)? Like, I play it a lot, and I can vouch that Supreme Ruler has EVEN WORSE naval combat since it's not only bruteforcing it's also goddamn untidy and indecipherable with meandering inanity in scale.

The problem that comes from naval bombers is that they require vastly lesser industrial and tech investment than boats, and presently can just rek anything that floats.

And what happened was absolute mayhem. Not only they wreck the Allied fleet, I can just leave them unattended to do their thing and pay no attention to it.
That one definately can, pretty sure the only reason to step in afterwards would be to either because you have to tell them to go bomb elsewhere (unlikely, since air war against the Allies is basically always defensive in posture, either around the British Isles and Gibraltar/Suez, or around the Pacific Islands-Philippines-East Indies island chain), or if you for some reason need to raise production to outmatch attrition.
 

Agame

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As concluded before, you either have land-based naval bombers that are worthless, or ones that completely break naval warfare. Only those two extremes are possible, and yea the dev diary doesn't give much hope this has been considered sufficiently.

I would guess there was no community feedback on that. Probably few people even try it, because it's so counter-intuitive. I didn't even try it myself until like a year of playing. I was researching naval doctrine, building best ships and so forth. But once I was bored and decided to build a stack of 2000 naval bombers, spread it into key areas and see what happens.

And what happened was absolute mayhem. Not only they wreck the Allied fleet, I can just leave them unattended to do their thing and pay no attention to it.

There was some discussion on the official forums awhile ago, so its possible they are aware of it. I think that the vocal minority of multiplayer min maxers must know about it, but possibly they like it as is, less wasting time fiddling around with navies if you just auto win with air?

It would be hilariously tragic if Paradox dont make any changes to naval bombers and invalidate the entire DLC.

Regarding the subs Im happy if they are buffed up and OP, as I dont really care about "balance", I just want to larp my Third Reich wolf packs and rule the sea.
 

Raghar

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Throwing 2000 naval bombers would mean real live WWII ships are dead right? So it's actually expected outcome.
 

Raghar

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As concluded before, you either have land-based naval bombers that are worthless, or ones that completely break naval warfare. Only those two extremes are possible, and yea the dev diary doesn't give much hope this has been considered sufficiently.

I would guess there was no community feedback on that. Probably few people even try it, because it's so counter-intuitive.
That was first thing I did. But I tend to play nations that don't have ANY navy at all, or have really small chance without naval bombers.
 

Space Satan

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DD muh fuel
We have added fuel as a resource to the top bar. With this UI element we convey a few bits of information. The numbers show the amount of time you have before being full or dry. Here the number is green and indicates that the stockpile will be full in 361 days. The numbers will become red if fuel is being lost. The green bar indicates the state of the stockpile, showing how full it is. The arrows indicate that fuel is currently being gained.

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Oil is still traded as it was previously but is no longer used in any production. Instead, excess oil is converted to fuel at an hourly rate. The trade UI has had some slight updates to take this into account. What was formerly the “production” category is now “need.” Oil now has special subcategories of this section. Active need and potential need are now represented with “A” and “P,” explained more thoroughly in tooltips. This helps give the player an understanding of how much oil needs to be traded if they wish to try and cover their current fuel needs with a constant supply from oil refining.

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Refineries have also been changed from giving Oil resources to giving hourly fuel. This both makes more sense from a historical perspective and makes it easier to control how much resource is produced by refineries. Previously, tech increases could only allow for a minimum increase of a single unit of oil. This gives developers and modders much better granular control over the output of a synthetic refinery.

For countries that will not have enough fuel production during wartime to meet their needs, developing a healthy stockpile is an option. Most nations will not start with a large stockpile capacity. Stockpile potential will be reduced by economy laws for many nations. Also, increasing stockpile capacity requires some investment, and will take space away from industry through the production of silo facilities. Japan is a good example of a nation that may run into a situation during the war when their usage far outstrips their potential fuel gain, so they will need to have a decent reserve of fuel if they want to fight the US in the Pacific.

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To help understand what is going on with your fuel stockpile and to manage distribution when fuel has become tight, we have added fuel as a special section to the logistics tab. This includes a breakdown of usage by military branch of the military and the ability to control who gets priority for fuel distribution. A special variant of the stockpile menu used for other equipment shows a breakdown of fuel consumption by day, month, and year as well as a breakdown of the state of the stockpile over time.

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The logistics support company has also been changed and will help with keeping your armor fuel usage more manageable.

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Motorized Artillery Units

When Hearts of iron 4 was released, it featured a very large number of possible battalion types that you could use to design your divisions. However, there were a few unit types that were pointedly absent. For example, if you wanted to make a motorized infantry division that was a faster version of your regular infantry division with line artillery - you couldn’t, unless you were okay with slower speed.

Part of the reason for this was the feeling that a motorized artillery unit didn’t have enough of a drawback to be a meaningful choice - it would just be better than regular artillery, and the added cost of a handful of trucks was not a major issue if you were building trucks anyway.

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With the addition of fuel, that has changed. Now it is a long-term decision to motorize more of your force, and it requires more planning as your army suffers increasing penalties if you can’t meet fuel demands. So we decided to add motorized artillery units in regular artillery, rocket artillery, anti-air and anti-tank flavors. They are, by and large, identical in firepower to their horse-drawn versions but require 50 trucks each, have a roughly 50% bigger supply footprint and, of course, require fuel to run properly.

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No special tech is required to unlock motorized artillery; having motorized equipment and the respective artillery type researched also unlocks the motorized unit.

That’s all for today, tune in next week when we talk about changes to research and show off the new naval tech tree!
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Ability to assign fuel priority is a good thing tho.

Also that's gonna break BICE folks heart, adding in a Motorized Artillery units into the base game. Now they'll have to make you produce tires on top of artillery trucks. to make up for it not being an original for the mod (yea yea, MotArt's in a bunch of other mods too).
 
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Ability to assign fuel priority is a good thing tho.

Also that's gonna break BICE folks heart, adding in a Motorized Artillery units into the base game. Now they'll have to make you produce tires on top of artillery trucks. to make up for it not being an original for the mod (yea yea, MotArt's in a bunch of other mods too).

Just tires? I would have expected BICE to at least require a supply of specific engines and artillery barrels of the proper caliber. Fully utilizing the variant system of course, so you could spend army XP to upgrade your tire print geometry for better grip that improved terrain penalties and so on.
 

Agame

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Pdox, some years ago: We don't need to add Fuel, Oil is all we need.
Sometime later: Fuel is back!

Paradox, what are you doing?

Yea its a syndrome with modern game devs:

"Guys you know that stuff you liked from a previous version of the game? Well you were wrong to like it, we know better than you, its actually shit so we are removing it."

Then a few years later they bring it back due to "popular" demand... And then there is always the conspiracy theory that they now have a nice and juicy DLC feature they know people will throw money at them for.

The real problem here is that fuel mechanics in previous HOI has always been irrelevant. For example as Germany every game you just play the trade market for a few years before the war starts and build up ludicrous stockpiles, and then ignore fuel for the rest of the game. I can see here they are trying to implement a stockpile "cap" to make it harder to get this overwhelming advantage. But I seriously wonder if a competent German player will ever face the historical difficulties that the German army had with fuel shortages.

I think maybe they were on the right track with the production abstraction of resources, but obviously it needed some extra complexity around consumables such as fuel. I dont really think simply shoehorning in the old stockpile mechanic is the best way to go, but clearly its the simplest way to please the masses who need muh fuel.
 
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I think maybe they were on the right track with the production abstraction of resources, but obviously it needed some extra complexity around consumables such as fuel. I dont really think simply shoehorning in the old stockpile mechanic is the best way to go, but clearly its the simplest way to please the masses who need muh fuel.


Yes, you make good points.

But doesn't fuel deteriorate with time??
 

Space Satan

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Can your resource stockpiles be attacked by strat bombing or capture?
They said you can bomb them, but I suppose most will protect it with tons of AA so it hardly be worth it.
the problem with fuel for me is that japan and Germany will hpard fuel like crazy and there will never be a situation japan was put in, when they had fuel reserves for several months before they started the war.
 

Space Satan

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DD. Research rework
Hello, and welcome back to another Dev Diary for Man the Guns. Today, we will talk about some changes we have made to the tech and research system.

The biggest of which is, of course, the new tech tree for ships and other naval equipment. It is quite extensive, adding over 50 new technologies. Smaller changes and additions have been made to the armor and infantry tech trees through the addition of amphibious armor and to electro-mechanical engineering through the addition of Fire Control Systems.

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Many of these techs do unlock new modules, but some do not - ammunition techs, fire control methods and damage control training amongst other don’t, and instead provide passive bonuses. This makes them quite valuable as you don’t have to build or refit a ship to make use of them.

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The industry tree has also been expanded to accommodate fuel refining and storage. As one would expect, the new technologies improve the ratio of oil converted to fuel, giving you more fuel for the same amount of oil. The oil branch of the synthetic refinery tree no longer increases the oil output of each refinery but instead increases the amount of fuel generated by each synthetic refinery (synthetic refineries are not required to generate fuel if you have natural oil production!).

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Since this adds quite a bit of research to an already pretty full research tree, we have taken some steps to offset this increase.

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The first is that we have made a 15% increase to research speed across the board. The second is that a lot of the research in the new naval tech tree (as well as all the doctrine research) benefits from the research with XP system that gives you a fairly significant research boost if you have enough XP of that type to spare. For things like fire control methods and damage control training, researching without XP is significantly more time consuming to represent the lower effort spent during peacetime rather than learning from, well, experience.

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Lastly, we made some changes to how research bonuses are granted and how ahead of time bonuses are handled. Regular research bonuses are no longer reducing research cost but instead boosting research speed. A previous 50% reduction in cost is now a 100% boost in speed. Ahead of time bonuses have been changed to apply a flat reduction in years rather than a reduction to the penalty, so a 1944 tech with two years of reduction would be treated as a 1942 tech for the purpose of calculating research time.

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That is all for today. Next week, we will take a look at some of the art and music coming in Man the Guns.
 

Agame

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Using XP to boost research is a great idea, representing "in the field" experience.

But the global 15% boost is just retarded, so now any country that ignores Navy just gets tech even faster? Wut?
 

Space Satan

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Other branches got more additional research as well, what's the problem? Majors, save for GER, FRA and USSR are navy-heavy. UK, USA, Japan, Italy. Now they'll have to divert their resources to more research.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Bigger question - do they fucking have one unpaid intern working on this shit? It's been like a year since the last DLC.
 

Agame

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DD: "When Japs Attack"

Hello, and welcome back to another Dev Diary from the frozen wasteland that is Sweden in January. Today, we will have another short AAR of a naval warfare scenario, similar to the one we did earlier about raiding and submarine warfare.


This was played as an MP game between me and Niall (@Ceebie), with me defending the Empire of Japan’s honor against Niall’s filthy American imperialists.


Starting as Japan, I immediately face a number of issues that should sound very familiar: I have very limited resources, particularly in terms of oil. This is now a much bigger issue as I can still happily build ships and airplanes and tanks, but I won’t be able to run them for free. However, if I want to upgrade my ships (and knowing Niall, I absolutely do), I will need naval experience, and China is unlikely to provide me with a lot of it. So I need to run training missions for my fleet, which gobbles up fuel at a rapid pace (I could only take out my main fleet units for a few brief weeks before the fuel situation became critical).


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At the same time, while I could trade for more oil, it will cost civilian factories which I desperately need to build up my own industry or to trade for steel to continue my military buildup. I decided to keep the trading for oil to a minimum in order to more quickly build up my industry and increase the size of my fleet.


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My first target is, of course, China, and we start the war with them in the middle of 1937. It quickly becomes apparent that I underestimate the Chinese. Fighting rages hard along the border for several weeks, and a number of naval landings that attempt to force the AI to draw troops away from the main front are quickly contained by local garrisons, but at least not pushed back into the sea. Part of the problem is that the fleets tasked with invasion support contain some of my battleships, which eat up absurd amounts of fuel, and my attempts to turn the tide through prolific use of air support eat into my fuel supplies even more.


By early 1938, we are slowly grinding forward and have managed to inflict serious casualties on the Chinese, but my fuel stockpile has shrunken to just 30 days of current use. I curtail air support to only support my main thrust and send the naval forces providing shore bombardment back to port. Progress slows, but eventually we link up with the landing forces, at least saving me from an embarrassing early defeat. The massive amounts of Land XP also allow me to run through the doctrine tree quite a bit faster than Niall could ever hope to. Sadly the war in the Pacific will not be fought on land.


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It would take until early 1941 for the Chinese to fall, even though the writing is on the wall by the middle of 1940. I blame the poor infrastructure and awful terrain in China - my leadership is, after all, beyond any reasonable doubt.


In the meantime, Niall has been quietly modernizing his fleet and has started his rearmament. While a good amount of his effort is spent on helping out the British in Europe, I have no doubt that he has something in store for me. While I was deeply engaged in managing the war in China, I received some out-of-game intelligence (Niall bragging in the kitchen that his destroyer swarms would annihilate me) that makes me realize that my fleet lacks some key capabilities. The starting Japanese light cruisers are fairly mediocre, most have been built during the 20ies and are not up to the task of winning a firefight against the likes of a Brooklyn Class cruiser with no less than 3 light cruiser battery modules. What I do have is a lot of torpedoes, and I invest a little into researching upgraded torpedoes and better launchers. The Japanese Long Lance national spirit gives me another perk, as it negates the enemy screening to an extend, which means that my torpedoes can hit his capitals even through 100% screening.


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So while I was slowly grinding my way across China, I also decided on my buildup strategy:


  • No new battleships, since they eat up a lot of fuel and I have enough to cover my carriers. However, I did later decide to build at least one Yamato-class as an insurance against Niall developing modern battleships.

  • A force of 4 light carriers. Japan starts with two (Ryujo and returning fan favourite Hosho), with two Zuhio class building. While these only carry 40 planes each, they will be used to provide cover for operations in and around the Dutch East Indies.

  • A force of 4 fleet carriers, with another force of 4 joining later. Akagi and Kaga will be joined by 2 more Soryu class carriers and form the main strike force in the Central Pacific.

  • A heavy emphasis on air defense and torpedoes. After researching dual purpose main armaments, I design a new destroyer class with improved AA and better torpedo armament. These are joined by a quartet of light torpedo cruisers from the Japanese focus.

  • Lots and lots of Naval Bombers to damage the enemy during the approach and pick off stragglers. Once the battle is fought, his damaged ships would likely try and find a close naval base for repairs, so having naval bombers ready to attack them in port would let me finish them off.

  • Once I identified the fleet’s weakness in defense against destroyers, I also designed a version of the Mogami Class heavy cruisers dedicated to light gun support. I built another 4 of these.

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The fleet’s main objective, however, is to provide support for landings to seize resource rich areas in the Dutch East Indies. To protect the sea lanes to and from these islands, I will need to secure the Philippines, and that is where things get a little dicey.


While I have little doubt that my forces can take over Sumatra, Java and Borneo, Malaya might be a tough nut to crack, and I know that Niall has already started to fortify the Philippines. I have researched amphibious armor well in advance and with China now pacified, I start to turn up production in an attempt to give my marines a bit more punch and hopefully allow me to seize a foothold even against heavy opposition.

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Thinking ahead, I also research improved naval bombers and the next generation of carrier planes. Once my main objectives are secured, I will use swarms of naval bombers to hold them down while I move my fleets to stage two and take on Australia.


To give myself some more time to buildup, I delay my attack on the US until early 1942. This allows me to form a second strike force of two fleet carriers (Shokaku and Zuikaku, both repeat Soryus as I was unable to scrape together enough XP to design an upgraded carrier).


The first battles are very encouraging. Whenever my patrols find one of his scouting units, my strike fleets sortie and make short work of them, Niall’s vaunted Destroyer swarms being no match for my upgraded cruisers and destroyers. I am somewhat confident that I can attrit his screening forces faster than he can replace them, which would eventually force his fleet to remain in port or eat absurd numbers of torpedoes.

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Things quickly turn a little chaotic as my strike fleets and patrols intercept a number of troop convoys. While I first thought that these were going to the Philippines, they instead turn out to be trying to seize islands in the Central Pacific. Things don’t go well for him, as he has decided to keep his battleships and carriers on strike duty instead of covering his invasion convoys. Several divisions are effectively destroyed at sea, and the remains fail to gain any footholds.


At the same time, my invasions in the DEI, supported by the old battleships Ise and Hyuga, have run into stiff opposition while attempting to land in Borneo. I shift some tactical bombers into the theater to help break the stalemate, and we are starting to make progress. The two-pronged assault succeeds in establishing a foothold, but it is a reminder that Niall has not been idle and is ready to fight for every inch of ground in this vital area.

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While my marines still struggle to make landfall in the Philippines, a bigger drama unfolds in the Bismarck Sea. Niall has finally unleashed his main strike force, after one of his patrols found my carrier fleet.


The Battle of the Bismarck Sea does not go particularly well for the Imperial Navy. With several battleships detached for minor repairs, the US Navy breaks through my screening units and manages to do an end run on my carriers, sinking all four for no capital ship loses on their side. The survivors straggle home, many ships badly damaged during the ferocious engagement as my battle line attempted to screen against the full might of the US battlefleet.

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However, Niall’s victory has come at a steep cost. Most of his battlefleet is badly damaged, and he has nothing to follow his success up with. More than that, I still have 6 carriers in reserve (2 fleet, 4 light), and several hundred naval bombers scouring the Bismarck Sea means that he has to risk his battleships again to sail them to safer harbours for repairs. Several of them take further damage as they retreat, many of them out of the battle for almost a year.

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While Niall has blunted my offensive power quite severely, he has nothing to interfere with in my operations in the DEI, which were the main objective. Trying to use the Philippines as an unsinkable aircraft carrier has become next to impossible as trying to supply it with fuel would cost him too many convoys and tank his war support. The Japanese conquest of the southern resource area won’t quite be the lightning strike it was in history, but it is as inevitable as the rising of the sun.

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With hindsight, my performance in the naval war thus far comes down to:

  • Lack of radar allowing Niall to get the drop on me in a critical moment

  • Lack of training due to fuel concerns

  • Insufficient coverage of the seazones with naval bombers failing to disrupt the enemy on the approach

  • Not enough screening vessels to protect my carriers against his battle fleet. Although Yamato sunk several ships and survived to fight another day, spending the same amount of 3 heavy cruisers would likely have yielded better results

  • Good performance of my light forces when engaged on equal terms

That is all for today. Tune in at 1600 CET for another stream with an indepth look at fuel.

Still no fucking release date from these lazy fucking fuckers... I mean how long are they gonna work on this thing, is it one guy making it?
 

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