Hearts of Iron 4 - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

My main issue with the combats in those Paradox games is they have all these complicated mechanics with events and unit specific tactics and such but they are really obfuscated and don't seem to matter much anyway (especially CK2).

 

There's nothing complicated about a Paradox game. It just takes some time for everything to soak in.

 

After MoTE I suspect that Paradox in fact does create new games sometimes since, as was said before, new combat mechanics from MoTE weren't introduced in EU4. They reuse assets, obviously, mainly engine and core mechanics but calling Sengoku or MoTE demos is a bit too much. Small games is more accurate.

 

So can anyone trace back Average Manatee's butthurt with Paradox to its source? It seems endless.

 

I know why I happen to be butt hurt - I have higher expectations of Paradox than of other big developers because I care about their games. Perhaps its the same case of tough love.

 

The only Paradox game I distinctly dislike is EU4. I'm highly cautious about HoI4 because Paradox just released EU4 and can't stop talking about it. And yes, I want their games to be good because I know they can make good games.

 

To me it's seemed like they speak of CK2 all the time even after EU4's release.

Small experiments is probably the most accurate term. EU Rome is another example of such a game, though Rome is probably the most succesful and biggest out of the more experimental games.

Going back to to the earlier mention of what I'd like to see, I'll say again that I am THIS BUTTHURT about the fact East vs West didn't come true.

 

EvW was a shame. Still, it was a community mod group Paradox hired. Those deals end up going to shit 90% of the time, so the final outcome isn't entirely unexpected.

 

Yea, it wasn't really unexpected, but I had hopes for it. At least those guys went out gracefully, unlike a certain someone from Portugal.

 

That's because CK2 is the best game of the current generation, and best paradox game PERIOD.

 

Hearts of Iron IV - Development Diary 5 - Production Lines
It's time for another Hearts of Iron IV Developer Diary, and this time I'm going to talk a bit more about production; specifically the Production Lines and How Things Get Built. All military equipment is made on Production Lines in HoI IV, so players will need to be familiar with how they work if they want to maximize their war machine.

But before we can talk about the production lines themselves, we should cover how Industry has changed in HoI IV.

First of all, we have separated industry in Hearts of Iron IV into 3 types:

Civilian industry - Used both for "Consumer goods" and building infrastructure and other buildings.
Dockyards – Used for building ships.
Military factories - Used for production of military equipment such as tanks, weapons and airplanes.

This kind of separation allows us to balance different countries' industrial strengths (the capacity to make ships is not the same as the capacity to make luxuries), and gives the player a more interesting selection of targets for strategic bombing.

Moving on to the actual means of Production, Factories no longer need Metal/Energy/Rare Materials to run. Requiring the player to gather several different types of resources in order to manage factories did not necessarily add anything interesting to the mix. Being short on any of them had the same effect no matter what you were lacking (your Industrial Capacity would shrink) and it didn't entirely make sense that you couldn't build things like Militia if you didn't have access to Rare Materials.

We have simplified the inputs to "Raw materials" which factories use to run. Raw materials act as a limit on your total Industrial Capacity. However that is not the whole Production story. Equipment also has a Strategic Resource cost, without which it takes much longer to produce. Strategic Resources are not accumulated in pools. Instead, they represent the potential flow of resources into your factories. For example if you have 10 Iron you can be building stuff that costs up to 10 Iron at any one time.

A Production Line is a standing order for a factory or group of factories to make a certain piece of equipment. Each piece of equipment has an IC (Industrial Capacity) cost and a Resource cost. The IC cost determines how much equipment each factory can produce per week, while the Resource cost determines how many resources are needed for the line to operate at full speed.



As a totally made up example: An Advanced Medium Tank may cost 2 IC and require 1 Iron and 1 Tungsten. Each Factory produces 10 IC, so if you assigned 1 Factory to this Production Line, you would produce 5 Advanced Medium Tanks per week. If you assign 10 factories you would get 50 tanks/week. At the same time you would need to have 5 Iron and 5 Tungsten in the first case, and 50 Iron and 50 Tungsten in the second. (Again, these numbers are all purely made up, focus on the idea and not the values here.) You can only assign up to 15 Factories to any given Production Line, so you won't be able to build, say, a Battleship in one week by assigning 100 Factories to build it.

Also, do note that simply building Equipment is not the same as training and equipping a unit, but we'll cover that in a future dev diary.

Production Lines also have an Efficiency value which affects how much value you get out of your IC at a factory. Your efficiency starts out fairly low but increases as items are produced - slowly at first to represent the retooling of the factories, then it begins to increase at a linear rate until tapering off after a certain value (an S curve). You can change what a Production line produces, of course, and this normally means all your Efficiency is lost, however there are some exceptions. If you change to a modified version of the same equipment (for example, the same tank but with a larger gun) you keep most of your Efficiency. If you switch to another variant of the same chassis (e.g. you switch from Pz IIIs to StuG IIIs) you keep half your Efficiency. And if you switch within the same family (e.g. Basic Medium Tank to Improved Medium Tank) you keep a small part of your Efficiency.

Efficiency means that you will be able to produce more once your factories are humming along. So long as you can keep your workers on task and supplied with what they need, you will be able to have assembly line production that properly reflects the might of an economy dedicated to the war effort.

Our larger hope is that Production Lines and efficiency will offer players some interesting choices when it comes to deciding what to build. Should you go for a large number of weapons you can already churn out, or take a short term hit on production in favor of making a smaller number of higher quality ones? Sure, your new T-43 tank is better than the T-34, but is it really enough of an improvement to lose much of your Production Line's Efficiency when you switch over? Your PzIII tank may be obsolete, but perhaps instead of canceling their production entirely you could convert the Line to make Tank Destroyers or Self-Propelled Artillery on the PzIII chassis. Preserving efficiency in some of your factories could lead to a more diverse and interesting combination of units, and allow you to discover some parts of the game you might have ignored if you just constantly upgraded.

 

I like it. The new equipment system will better simulate that older obsolete equipment didn't just automatically disappear as new stuff became available, but stayed on the battlefield in 2nd and 3rd tier units until enough new equipment existed to outfit everybody.

I also like the implication that training and equipping units doesn't take industrial capacity(at least directly, it may still consume supplies) so countries with relatively high manpower and relatively low industry can churn out less equipment intensive units. Possibly making militia worthwhile if you have a manpower glut since I'm assuming they require very little equipment and very few training resources other than manpower. Speaking of which I wonder if we will have new resources(or facilities) tied to training capacity or if it will just be a function of time, manpower, and possibly increased supply consumption for units training.

I also wonder if they will have training exercises as a way to increase unit experience instead of sort of simulating them with a policy choice like they do currently. Doing that would give you more to do during peacetime as well as forcing you to make decisions during war time, whether to spend more time on training exercises for new units to allow them to be more effective in combat or whether to rush them to the front.

 

Yea this stuff definately looks promising and like a good addition.

 

Makes me even harder.

Looking good. Now I can properly simulate the US having several production lines of P-40s running until the end of the war for no fucking reason.

 

Ehh, consolidating resources into raw materials sounds like a really bad idea. Simulating the Axis lack of certain (hard to find) materials was a rather important part of HoI3. With a generalized resource model there is essentially no reason not to attack everyone and steal their resource deposits.

The strategic resource deal is a cool concept, but I hope the resources are generalized enough that the game doesn't end up too railroaded. One of the nice things about HoI3 is that you can choose different strategies. Germany can go naval heavy and invade the UK first. Germany can forgo tanks entirely and focus on infantry with supreme air support and strategic bombing. Germany can go 100% blitz with light armor that captures Moscow before the Soviets have even mobilized. If the strategic resource system is too constraining to the point where Germany can never have more than 10 tank factories/6 aircraft factories/4 ship factories running (and doing anything less would be shooting yourself in the foot), that's going to kill a huge amount of the variety in the game. But this is more of a balance issue than a mechanic issue, so if its problematic it can be fixed later.

Civilian/dock/military factory distinction sounds good, though I hope that the civilian factory is strong enough to give you ample choice in 1936 whether to become a naval power or a land power. Otherwise the same railroading issue as above.

 

Have they said yet if we will finally be able to ship equipment to allies/friendly neutral powers? Because this sounds like we might actually be able to have the US be the Arsenal of Democracy.

 

I really, really hope so. Shermans, Shermans everywhere.

 

I love the idea of having my shitty Panzer Is getting destroyed by T-34s just like in real life, awesome dev diaries so far.

 

Which type, the upguned one? 85 mm gun was MUCH better than 75 mm one.

 

They aren't really being consolidated though, they are being split into strategic resources. There should be a strategic resource for every hard to find material that was necessary for war production so the game will still simulate certain countries lacking certain resources. Seeking access to(or denying an enemy access to) those resources should still be a factor in which targets you prioritize.

It would be overkill if you had separate strategic resources that were necessary for production on top of 3 different raw materials. With the introduction of Strategic resources there isn't really much of a need to have to track energy, metal, and rare materials separately. Especially since strategic resources would already be representing the rare materials resource and portions of the metal resource. They would be an unnecessary complication that doesn't really add much to the gameplay that the strategic resources aren't already adding.

The thing that concerns me is not being able to stockpile strategic resources. While I can understand how it can simplify gameplay and be more intuitive, it takes away some of the pre-war gameplay of HOI3(Stockpiling resources you know you will need for the war when your industry gets a massive boost) and the wartime consideration of how long your stockpiles will last.

 

Another major thing is that they need to spread out those resources a lot more evenly or minors will be 100% useless.

 

If everything is just raw material and it's not possible to starve Germany or Japan of resources than we're really deviating from history. How are you going to starve Germany of "Raw Material"? And who decides how much "Raw Material" a country should get in the first place?

Something tells me Finland isn't going to do well by this...

 

We must not have the same understanding of the dev diary. As I understand it you will be able to starve countries of resources just like it worked in HOI3. Raw materials are still stockpiled and consumed by IC when they are used. Just instead of IC consuming 2 Energy, 1 metal, and .5 rare resources they will just consume x raw materials(Most likely 1 raw material for ease of use). If a country doesn't have enough raw materials they will not be able to use the IC just like it works in HOI3.

Rare resources just serve as a limit to what you can build with that IC. No aluminum and you won't be able to make airplanes for example and you would have to build something else, like infantry equipment.

Presumably by bombing or capturing the provinces that produce raw material or attacking naval convoys of that are carrying them. Same way it works in HOI3.

The same way they did it in HOI3. One part looking at the historical industrial output and access to resources and one part gameplay and balance considerations.

 

You will definitively have starving out. If you only have enough steel to make 500 tanks per year, you can only make 500 tanks per year.

 

With 3 resources in HoI3 the world produced enough of all 3 to keep all nations running at full capacity, but doing so required trades from one section to another. These trades were broken in war time and the Axis ran at a heavy deficit in metal and rares.

In HoI4, if there is only 1 resource, what is the trade deal going to be? Either Germany runs at a raw material surplus and doesn't need to trade, or Germany runs at a deficit and can't trade, because there is no other resource that they run a surplus in to trade.

That's not the way it works in HoI3, and it's not the way it worked in real life. The Axis was starving of resources just to run their war machine. Taking Axis land is basically impossible for the Allies, and convoys aren't made between same-continent sources (not that attacking convoys reduced resource transportation anyway, it just killed convoys). The whole game of the Axis is to conquer the world before their economy runs out of steam of its own accord.

Strategic resources can't be exhausted like that though. The only way to lower strategic resources will be to invade europe and capture them.