Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I don't mind having alt-history scenarios, but the way Paradox has been handling it, some of the most retarded fanmods are more realistic than a $15 focus tree.

I've long since adopted the stance that the DLCs are basically just a preview of the tools (and a few assets I guess) that modders can use. Since even the non-silly focus tree paths tend to be far less interesting than what even vanilla+ style mods like R56 have (also all the alt-history paths tend to be kind uninteresting too).

 

[Space Satan]

we are doomed

Spoiler

Hello, and welcome back to another DevDiary about content coming in the 1.11 “Barbarossa” patch and its accompanying DLC. As always, keep in mind that the things shown in this DevDiary are still under development, so the numbers and UI might change before release.

Ever since we revealed the ship designer in Man the Guns, people have been asking about a similar system for tanks. We did, however, want to improve a bit on the ship designer. In particular, we felt that the ship designer was encouraging too many generalist designs. Part of the problem is that ships have a very long lead time before they become available, so it is difficult to iterate on the designs in a timely fashion. When your ship takes two years to build, you can’t really specialize it too much, because you can’t always accurately predict the situation in two years.

Thankfully, tanks require a somewhat smaller investment (although our QA certainly has tried to make designs that rival ships in cost), so you see a new tank design in the frontlines much sooner than a new ship, allowing you to react to new situations much faster.

Another thing is that ships usually had trade-offs between different capabilities, in the sense that the space (or module slot) taken up by a torpedo launcher could also be taken up by an AA gun, making the ship better against one or the other type of enemy. But rarely did you want a ship that had no AA or no way to defend itself against surface targets, so you always wanted some AA and some ship attack.

Tanks, on the other hand, don’t usually have trade-offs in the same way. You don’t usually design a tank, wondering if you should put on another AA gun or a second gun against surface targets (unless, of course, you are German and it's 1944).

But Tanks still have trade-offs in their design, and we wanted to represent those. Traditionally, tank design revolves around three aspects: Mobility, Firepower, and Protection. A well-armored tank is slow, a fast tank can’t carry a big gun, and a big gun requires a large tank, which is difficult to armor. During the war, different nations tried different approaches, and learned different lessons from their observations - it is no surprise that the last German tanks of the war were heavily-armored vehicles carrying massive guns, but the first post-war design was the comparatively lightly armored but well-armed and quite nimble Leopard 1.

So we wanted to make you think about these three aspects, and have it be a trade-off between them. However, in a grand strategy game, other aspects also matter more than in the typical comparison of tank designs - the best tank in the world is useless if it breaks down on the way to the battlefield (Panther fans take note), and it is even more useless if you can’t afford it. So we wanted cost and reliability to also matter when designing a tank or armored vehicle.

In contrast to ships, we wanted to make you think more about specializing your designs to fill a certain niche, and optimize it towards a specific role. While you will probably still want to have a somewhat middle-of-the-road design for your main production medium tank (one might call it “the Sherman”), there is a place for more specialized designs as well.

As part of this approach, we will be making changes to the reliability system and the armor system. The details will be forthcoming in a future dev diary (together with other combat changes), but the broad strokes are that reliability will not just affect the rate of attrition, and that the armor system will become less binary. As part of these changes, we also decided to give mechanized equipment some upgrades, so that it can keep up with tanks.

Under the new system, reliability is meant to represent both the likelihood that a given piece of equipment breaks down as well as the likelihood that it suffers catastrophic damage when hit and the effort necessary to repair it. In effect, reliability also represents the carrying capacity of a given chassis, so you effectively have a reliability budget for every chassis to work with. The more armor you put on it, the bigger the weapon etc., the more reliability drops. Heavier or more advanced tank chassis generally have more reliability (over 100% on the base chassis in some cases).

But enough of the basics, let’s talk about what you really want to know: What’s the Kampfwagenkanone Zweiundvierzig in game terms? Is the weird hybrid-electric drive of the Elefant represented? Do we get to set the exact angle of the front armor or just the thickness?

Much like ships, tanks are based on a hull (called a chassis) and a number of modules that define the actual stats of the final design. These modules act a little different from the way the ship designer works. While the main armament is fairly self-evident, other “modules” represent something like “design features”. These features are meant to be distinct enough that even someone who does not have an in-depth understanding of armor development during the war can at least understand that different armor types are good for different things.

Instead of scripting in a gigantic list of armor types with different thickness, armor is represented by a thickness and a production method: Riveted Armor is the cheapest kind, but also the weakest. Cast Armor is the strongest, but also the most expensive.
Welded Armor is a compromise between the two extremes, making it the most cost-efficient (arguments can be made either way between cast and welded armor since welding does require specialized equipment and training).

Armor thickness is changed through something much like the old, vanilla upgrade system, with up to 20 different levels. You start with being able to put up to 5 levels of armor (roughly equivalent to 50 mm of armor) on a tank, but research allows you to put more on. Higher levels of armor protection require more resources, such as steel and eventually chromium. There is no limit to the amount of armor you can put on a chassis as such - if you want to make a light tank with the armor protection of a Tiger, you can (it’s called a Panzer I Ausf. F). The amount of armor upgrades on the vehicle translates to an actual armor value based on the type of armor you have selected, so 5 levels of riveted armor are still weaker than 5 levels of cast armor - but much cheaper.

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Archangel85 · Apr 28, 2021 at 15:00

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Suspensions affect mainly reliability and speed. The most basic kind is the Bogie suspension, which adds some reliability, while Christie suspension adds quite a bit of speed. Torsion Bar suspension adds more reliability than Bogies, but is more expensive. Interleaved Roadwheels - as seen on the later German tanks - add some breakthrough, but have reliability problems (the overlapping wheels add some protection and redundancy against fire coming from the side, but are difficult to repair and maintain). Light Chassis can also select wheeled and half-track suspensions, which make the vehicle itself quite a bit cheaper, but also drop reliability.

The main weapon has probably the biggest impact on the offensive stats of the vehicle. There are a lot of different options to choose from, but we have tried to give every weapon type it’s own niche, with realistic drawbacks and advantages, so for example the High-velocity tank guns (like the KwK 42 or the American 76mm) have worse soft attack but very good piercing and hard attack, while howitzers have very poor hard attack and piercing, but spectacular soft attack. This means that for example the early German tanks do struggle a bit against the French, which have pretty heavy armor (but suffer in other regards, mostly because of their one-man turrets).

A full list is included in the spoiler tag:
As you can see, we made an effort to not have a giant tech tree this time. The tech tree for the new chassis is about the same size as the old armor tech tree, and the other modules are unlocked primarily through the artillery tab.

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Archangel85 · Apr 28, 2021 at 15:00

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Finally, every chassis has 4 slots for “Special Modules”. These can include radios, which give bonuses to breakthrough and defense; secondary turrets for all your T-35 needs; smoke launchers; extra ammunition storage and wet ammo storage. Deciding whether or not a tank uses sloped armor also happens in this area. Perhaps most intriguing is the Amphibious Drive, which allows you to designate a design as an amphibious tank for the purpose of amphibious tank battalions (MtG owners only).

Designating designs for certain roles ensures that they are used in those subunits. Some roles require certain characteristics - for example, you can’t have an AA tank that uses a fixed superstructure. But it is completely possible to make both the German tank destroyers with fixed superstructures and the American ones with turrets and have them go to tank destroyer units. The weight class of the chassis determines the weight class of the final design, so a design on the heavy chassis that is designated as a tank destroyer is treated as a heavy tank destroyer. This also means we can represent vehicles that changed roles during the war more easily, so you can have your StuG III equivalent with a high-soft attack gun go to your armored artillery battalions in the early war, but then switch out the gun to something with better piercing and have it work as a tank destroyer afterwards.

Since we want you to optimize designs for different purposes, we also wanted to make sure that you can easily decide where a certain tank design ends up. So for example, you can follow the British approach of having fast cruiser tanks to use in armored divisions, and slower infantry tanks that go to support your infantry divisions. To do this, you tag a design with a symbol. You can then quickly select from a list of symbols in the division designer to make the division only pull equipment tagged as such. Equipment that isn’t tagged (such as lend-lease and captured foreign equipment, or equipment not tagged at all) will still be used for divisions that don’t have a specific tag requirement set.

We also took another look at what automation features were necessary for people who don’t want to spend a lot of time fine-tuning their tank designs (weird and alien though that thought may be to most of us). We do, of course, have the usual auto-design functionality. It takes the design the AI would use and offers it for approval. This has gotten some love, and there should now be some national flavor in how the AI designs its tanks. It also takes the overall situation into account, so tanks will be up-armored during the war and so on. Beyond that, we also have added an auto-upgrade function, which keeps a given design current as you research new guns, chassis etc. You can either click on a design you made in the past and upgrade it with a single click to the newest components (so a Radio I becomes a Radio II etc.), or click a checkbox to do so automatically. You don't have to pay XP for an automatic design upgrade, but you won't get thicker armor or a better engine that way. Still, we think that the combination of auto-design and auto-upgrade allows players to interact with the system as much or as little as they like.

To make the tank designs more visually distinct in the production view, we have added about 1000 new 2d icons to use for them, mostly stemming from combining parts of existing tanks in new ways (the gun of Tank A with the turret of Tank B etc.). The historical icons are, of course, still available. You can select the icon while making the design, as well as the 3d asset used to represent the vehicle on the map.

That’s all from us today for this feature. Before closing, I would like to note a few things on the subject of giving feedback. When I first started at Paradox, the direct line between community and developers was a major plus for me, because I liked the idea of talking to the community without having to run every post past three different marketing departments first. However, this kind of direct community access comes at a heavy cost for us. As many of you have noticed, we have gotten a little sparse in these forums in the last few months, or even years. The reason for this is that often we do face a debate culture that is not enjoyable to take part in, where it is taken as a given that the devs are either lazy or incompetent and where everything we do is viewed through that lens. Not only is it incredibly demoralizing to spend months of your life creating something, only to see the people you made it for tear it to shreds, it is also a debate that gives no one anything. We aren’t paid to wade through pages of abuse to find a few nuggets of useful feedback, and so that feedback is not acted on. A lot of you have access to sources in languages we don’t speak or have studied some detail that we weren’t aware of. Such feedback is very useful - just a few weeks ago someone sent me a plan of the Turkish railways in 1936 taken from an old Turkish book, so I was able to use that to update the Turkish railway setup at game start.

We’re not looking for fawning adoration (although we will certainly accept it) or a forum in which our decisions can’t be discussed with a critical eye. We want to have your feedback, but there is no point to it if it can’t be delivered with a minimum of respect for each other. If you want to have a forum where developers are willing to go and answer your questions, then it is also your responsibility to build a place where we feel welcome, and where we can disagree in a productive and professional manner. It costs you nothing to assume that we were acting in good faith. None of us wake up in the morning and go to work in order to do a bad job.


Extra Secret Spoiler: here are some tank designs QA has made over the past few months while we were developing this. Please note that the numbers on the screenshots are several versions out of date and that the issues pointed out in these shots have been fixed since then.

 

[Raghar]

On the other hand, a '33 start date would just double the prep time. Extra years is no biggie for TNO since it's got its VN hybrid thing going on, but in normal HoI you'd need to expand things quite a bit while also restricting ability to build military stuff.

I don't see any problem myself, it would also allow a few conflicts before the war to get depicted properly. And more political preparation, leading to less "meme paths".

And how would you prevent Germany to prepare for UK invasion, or make winter uniforms that can handle -40C cold?
That woudln't look like a WWII anymore, and it can be done only with proper simulations, and that typically can be handled mostly by algorithms I was developing in spare time (for simulation of state without supercomputers).

Simulation diverges fast, and you will have mostly ahistorical version of WWII. Considering historical version is fun to play only once, then it's too scripted and predicable and becomes boring, an ahistorical version would be better... But, any smart AI will not give 8th largest weapon producer in the world to Germany on silver plate, including money to wage war for half year, as Chamberlain did with excuse "I saved western style of live.". So yea, with proper simulation, decent AI, and start in 1928 you basically will not have WWII.

 

[Removal]

where it is taken as a given that the devs are either lazy or incompetent and where everything we do is viewed through that lens. Not only is it incredibly demoralizing to spend months of your life creating something, only to see the people you made it for tear it to shreds

they got booty blasted that the forum Poles called them out over their terrible alt-history focus trees

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

we are doomed

Spoiler

ULTIMATE DOOM

Oh dear, going full MTG with tanks is going to be a total mess on release no matter how the whole thing turns out in the end. On the other hand, I think I can see the BICE mod team's boner from my window stretching across the horizon...

Anyway, I feel that the general problem is really just that it's VERY HARD for games to make a situation where you can have specialization of something and where multiple aspects of it will be viable. The MTG ship revamp I think is a good example of this. You generally speaking always have the optimal for each ship hull (torpedoes and depth charges fast destroyers, light cruisers with crazy high spotting, etc), and most of your design choices are around what techs you can afford to do (which IMO is probably the only way in which the system can work, wherein you have to make compromises to other things if you go wholehog on something else, since having viable and accessible specializations is not happening without an extremely talented design team and a good heaping of luck). This is just going to have the same for tanks.

In general it might be worth it IMO to ditch XP as the main factor for building a variant, and instead force an initial variant and then have some more Industrial "doctrine" means of making upgraded and "upgraded" variants (say, in order to simulate the "well it seemed like a good idea at the time" type of self-defeating production run planning/chaos that the Germans used; or to just get fucking Ferdinand to happen somehow).

 

[Raghar]

Main problem with Tank design mod (they call DLC and want money for) is theirs obsession with hard attack and soft attack. 88 mm APDSFS can be lethal to most WWII era tanks (they call that hard attack). But extremely lethal is 155 mm HE (they call that soft attack). Or getting top hit by Tulip. That's not nice even for M1A2SEP. When that happens they typically say something like: We had tank there few minutes ago. Now it's in the area, there, and there, and there. And look piece is even there.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Tank designer seems like adding more complexity for the sake of it. Nothing wrong with current system. Well, same as fleet designer really. Sure, first few runs it was fun to play around with different designs, like making an uber-fast surface raider or a spotter or whatever.

Eventually though, I realize that as Allies I already have the fleet advantage so why bother. While as Axis all you need is cheap submarines or cheap naval bombers and you can keep Allies in check while you're dealing with Ivan, and once that's done you have such an industrial advantage you can dominate just by spamming level 2 destroyer or whatever.

 

[Raghar]

Tank designer seems like adding more complexity for the sake of it. Nothing wrong with current system. Well, same as fleet designer really. Sure, first few runs it was fun to play around with different designs, like making an uber-fast surface raider or a spotter or whatever.

Eventually though, I realize that as Allies I already have the fleet advantage so why bother. While as Axis all you need is cheap submarines or cheap naval bombers and you can keep Allies in check while you're dealing with Ivan, and once that's done you have such an industrial advantage you can dominate just by spamming level 2 destroyer or whatever.

It's nice Paradox is imagining the actual Russian industry will not work at 1/10 of it's actual capacity after being conquered by Germany and everything falling down. Considering most skilled Russian workers would bled out by successful German offensive, and socialistic worker morale would be called sabotage in Germany. I doubt REAL WORLD Russian industry would matter much.

Cheap subs are also quite bad idea in properly working simulation. First, real world sub doesn't have infinite number of torpedoes. Thus they are vulnerable when they move to resupply. German player would need to improve encryption and radio signal handling to prevent easy finding of sub by triangulation. (Or by deciphering sub coordinates in real time.) And it also need silent with anti echo coating, radar protected snorkel, fast submarines with long term underwater endurance. Basically everything that Germany didn't have, and cheap sub can't do.

Frankly, when Paradox can't do even a simple algorithm, I doubt they would be able to handle naval war in pacific:
roll(3) on 1 execute: Totally brutal sub blockade plan of Japan (or whatever country US would be in war with). First month of war... 120 subs are deployed around Japan, 60 around important Japan trade routes. Slightly supported by other US units because US delayed construction of carriers until it researched carrier 3. But when Paradox removed range from ship combat, carriers were replaced by destroyer/light cruiser spam. Thus AI that goes for carriers is gimping itself. (And because it don't move ships to first positions of queue, typically lacks chromium to make any carriers.)

The higher complexity from DLC would matter only for player, AI would use medium tanks, then switch to MBT, just as before DLC.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Tank designer seems like adding more complexity for the sake of it. Nothing wrong with current system. Well, same as fleet designer really. Sure, first few runs it was fun to play around with different designs, like making an uber-fast surface raider or a spotter or whatever.

I agree the whole reason Paradox does this though is because it appeals to moron multiplayer players (specifically streamers) who think more plates to spin makes the game more chaotic and causes players to slip up more. For singleplayer players probably don't benefit much from these mechanics if at all.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yeaaa, that's probably what the base game is intended for, multiplayer and streamers. Stuff like Poland-Romania-Hungary makes more sense if it's there to throw a curveball in multiplayer.

I'd still say tho that the primary thing they're selling is staying up to date with mod features. The single player audience has got to be bigger.

 

[Raghar]

Tank designer seems like adding more complexity for the sake of it. Nothing wrong with current system. Well, same as fleet designer really. Sure, first few runs it was fun to play around with different designs, like making an uber-fast surface raider or a spotter or whatever.

I agree the whole reason Paradox does this though is because it appeals to moron multiplayer players (specifically streamers) who think more plates to spin makes the game more chaotic and causes players to slip up more. For singleplayer players probably don't benefit much from these mechanics if at all.

Higher complexity is needed for SP games. SP players love to have deep mechanics where they can mess with research teams, do something ahistorical and crazy, and do stuff that will NOT be viable against MP players. A lot of players play HoI games for conquering the world by tanks and other stuff, not because they are wehrmacht lovers, or US patriots.
Basically SP players have 3 hours to sit in front of PC and spread saliva when they are moving German and czech scientists around research bureaus, and watch public domain high res pictures of real world tanks and stuff. And create long term strategy, because they beat the game normally already, and now they wanna do something crazy.

It would be actually telling when even MP players would complain about lack of complexity. MP needs high variation to allow multiple different VIABLE playing styles. (MP games I seen used theirs own mod to correct HoI4 MP problems.) Typically SP players and pirates want HIGH complexity games, because they would find these games interesting even when they would replay them. Small children and players who are unsure of themselves wanna something simple, because when they learn them they can easily and reliable beat them.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Small children and players who are unsure of themselves wanna something simple

I taught a kid who was a big HOI2 player so that couldn't be further from the truth.
Also you're forgetting this is HOI4 which was already supposed to be a vast oversimplification of HOI3's already bad oversimplification. I don't have issue with adding complexity but frankly after the ship designer its obvious where this is heading, I don't find the ship designer all that compelling its a lot of busy work for something designed only really to appeal to min-maxers though I feel the same about the division editor nearly always opting for mods that come with events that add divisions because it feels more balanced that way. The game fails in singleplayer because the AI cannot use these systems effectively this is why I suggest its aimed at multiplayer as when fighting against a player they will likely try to optimise such systems against their opponents, the AI doesn't do that it just sticks to what ever Paradox thought the AI should build.

Meanwhile the AI still can't use paratroopers at all. Paradox has strange priorities.

 

[Average Manatee]

More player designing shit is a bad idea. It was a bad enough idea to let players design divisions. All it does is let you cheese the AI harder and force new MP players to read an additional 15 pages of the 100 page PDF of what to do to not lose instantly in 1939.

 

[what am i doing]

I don't necessarily think player designed divisions are a bad idea but if you're going to have them then you should pay a few optimization autists to design really good divisions, ship designs, etc., for the AI to use.

 

[Raghar]

Paradox has much harsher problems than introducing new types of tanks so player can play with designing stuff. AI would use pre canned tank model A, B, C. Yea now they have radio and some bonuses, but AI would throw them into meat grinder the same as old ones, and they would work even better.

The HoI4 problem is paradox wasn't able to implement tactic: Grab 30 submarines move them from US coast to some random island in the middle of nowhere that player didn't bothered to conquer, create convoy raid zones around Japan, and send these 30 submarines into it... And then hear screeching from Player and complains on forum how OP submarines are.
For example doing something like this:

Spadefish
Aug 19 1944 TAMATSU MARU Passenger-Cargo 9,589 18-49N, 119-47E Sunk
Aug 22 1944 HAKKO MARU NO 2 Tanker 10,023 18-48N, 120-48E Sunk
Sep 8 1944 NICHIMAN MARU Cargo 1,922 24-46N, 123-15E Sunk
Sep 8 1944 NICHIAN MARU Cargo 6,197 24-46N, 123-15E Sunk
Sep 8 1944 SHINTEN MARU Cargo 1,254 24-39N, 123-31E Sunk
Sep 8 1944 SHOKEI MARU Cargo 2,557 24-39N, 123-31E Sunk
Nov 14 1944 GYOKUYO MARU Cargo 5,396 31-04N, 123-56E Sunk
Nov 17 1944 JINYO Escort Aircraft Carrier 21,000 33-02N, 123-33E Sunk
Nov 18 1944 SUBMARINE CHASER NO 156 Submarine Chaser 100 e 33-07N, 123-09E Probably Sunk
Nov 29 1944 DAIBOSHI MARU NO 6 Cargo 3,925 37-17N, 125-11E Sunk
Jan 28 1945 KUME Frigate 900 e 33-56N, 123-06E Sunk
Jan 28 1945 SANUKI MARU Converted Seaplane Tender 7,158 33-56N, 123-06E Sunk
Feb 4 1945 TAIRAI MARU Passenger-Cargo 4,273 37-18N, 125-22E Sunk
Feb 6 1945 SHOHEI MARU Passenger-Cargo 1,092 38-44N, 121-23E Sunk
Mar 23 1945 DORYO MARU Cargo 2,274 29-31N, 127-41E Sunk
Apr 9 1945 LEE TUNG Cargo 1,853 37-21N, 125-08E Sunk
Jun 10 1945 DAIGEN MARU NO 2 Passenger-Cargo 1,999 43-21N, 140-40E Sunk
Jun 10 1945 UNKAI MARU NO 8 Passenger-Cargo 1,293 43-23N, 140-32E Sunk
Jun 10 1945 JINTSU MARU Passenger-Cargo 994 43-28N, 140-28E Sunk
Jun 14 1945 SEIZAN MARU Passenger-Cargo 2,018 47-03N, 142-01E Sunk
Jun 17 1945 EIJO MARU Cargo 2,274 42-38N, 139-49E Sunk

Escort aircraft carriers are supposed to kill submarines, submarine chasers are submarine doom... Yea forums would be full of people screaming about unplayable Japan.

Ship designer would be very nice, but... Paradox decided to remove engagement ranges. Because naval battles were mostly about carrier vs carrier, and they wanted some surface action. Lack of naval ranges means the ship designer is mostly useless feature. So yea. Ship designer. Naval DLC. Now game no longer care that DD is 120 nm away from CV, it can torpedo it in next hour after screen ratio drops under 100 percent.

Naval DLC removed complexity, and killed naval combat. Yea, people can play with ship designer, but that's not higher complexity, ship designer is just saving Naval DLC from being total train wreck.

But frankly naval warfare requires someone who have some clue about naval warfare. Part of naval warfare are vulnerable supply lines which prevents US parking 12 BIG CV + other ships near Japan coast and bomb every Japan ship to the bottom of the sea. HoI4 doesn't even try to simulate interception between patrol area and supply port.

 

[Raghar]

More player designing shit is a bad idea. It was a bad enough idea to let players design divisions. All it does is let you cheese the AI harder and force new MP players to read an additional 15 pages of the 100 page PDF of what to do to not lose instantly in 1939.

Well, is it worse than reading 20 pages of special rules for MP game? MP game communities are small part of HoI4 players. Most MP communities are toxic and harmful, so why should HoI4 developers care?

 

[Average Manatee]

More player designing shit is a bad idea. It was a bad enough idea to let players design divisions. All it does is let you cheese the AI harder and force new MP players to read an additional 15 pages of the 100 page PDF of what to do to not lose instantly in 1939.

Well, is it worse than reading 20 pages of special rules for MP game?

It's not worse or better because you have to do both.

Most MP communities are toxic and harmful, so why should HoI4 developers care?

I have no idea why anyone would want to play MP in HoI4, but I outlined why its bad for SP and MP to cover all bases. HoI4 devs should care about something.

 

[Space Satan]

Spoiler

Hi everyone and welcome back to another dev diary! Today is about various changes that affect combat and units. With the Barbarossa update we want to shake up the meta a bit and also change a few stats and other aspects to make using the tank designer more interesting and rewarding.

High Command bonus changes
For a long time now unit bonuses from high command have confused people. Most expect that they apply to battalions, when in fact they apply only if their target unit type was “the majority type”, which was basically a weighted type count. They also could overlap, so infantry, mountaineers and artillery would apply to the same units letting you stack stuff in ways that was never intended and quite unintuitive.

This system has now changed, and divisions get bonuses based on their composition, this is a straight up ratio based on the number of non-support battalions of each type, so a 2x artillery 3x infantry division will be 40% artillery 60% infantry.
Battalions are always classified as a single type for this (even though some are scripted with multiple types) based on this priority:
cavalry > armor > artillery > motorized > mechanized > infantry

The exceptions being rocket & special forces, which both act as an addition, so if the 3 infantry divisions in the example above were mountain units, then the division would also be 60% special forces and if the 2 artillery are nebelwerfers it'd also be 40% rocket

When counting the battalions of armies (ie when we have an actual unit and not only a division template), battalions that lack equipment will count as less, so a Light Tank battalion with only half it's tanks will count as 0.5 battalions (and not count at all if without tanks). The total sum of the compositions will still end up 100% (unless every battalion is without equipment).

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podcat · May 5, 2021 at 15:00

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In conjunction with these changes, we have also been looking at reducing the overstacking penalty. We hope that this will alleviate some of the need to have divisions that are the perfect width for a given province. But at the same time, smaller countries should now be able to specialize their division width to suit their home terrain more appropriately.

Breakdown (numbers not final etc etc)

• Plains
  • Standard 90
  • Reinforce 45
• Desert
  • Standard 90
  • Reinforce 45
• Forest
  • Standard 84
  • Reinforce 42
• Jungle
  • Standard 84
  • Reinforce 42
• Hills
  • Standard 80
  • Reinforce 40
• Marsh
  • Standard 78
  • Reinforce 26
• Urban
  • Standard 96
  • Reinforce.32
• Mountain
  • Standard 75
  • Reinforce 25

One of the major things that make larger divisions like 40 width armor hit disproportionally harder than smaller ones is also how targeting and damage works inside combat in relation to the enemies defense. Essentially the larger divisions make more efficient use of concentrated damage as it punches through defense. To solve this we are doing a few things. First of all we are weighting the targeting towards wider divisions being more likely targets and also when picking targets to try and match it to have wider divisions spread damage over smaller rather than always concentrating it. They will probably still hit harder, but combined with width changes and other downsides of larger divisions it should make it less clear cut.
However, this part isn’t quite done yet though so I’ll cover it again in more detail in one of the “bag of tricks” diaries in the future when i see how it pans out, but I figured it needed to be mentioned now That said though, to wet your appetites here is a little tease from a debug mapmode in development...
1620214309589.png

Our goal is that this creates interesting tradeoffs when designing equipment and will make you have to consider if its worth switching a strategy focused on speed and firepower towards reliability when operating in bad weather and tough areas like the Russian winter or in northern africa or jungles.

Oh, and I figured now might be a good time to point out that there will be a future diary on weather changes and other cool related stuff, so these changes aren't completely in isolation. But one step at a time

But before we go, a few words about the studio...

Studio Gold
Hello everyone, my name is Thomas, but perhaps better known as @Besuchov here

As you saw here we have recently reorganized ourselves a little, moving from a big centralized Stockholm studio to splitting ourselves into Red, Green and Gold. This is mainly an internal org shift to make sure we keep our growing organization firmly focused around making good games. You shouldn't notice too many differences in the short term, we are still PDS making GSG on the Clausewitz engine, but it does mean that we can align each studio to the particular games. Since you will hear the studio names every once in a while, I just wanted to say who I am and what the studio is responsible for.

My role is Studio Manager, which means I'm accountable for the long term success of Studio Gold and working with things like management, staffing, and long term plans. Studio Gold has as its main focus Hearts of Iron (but we may or may not have some secret other stuff as well). Directly making the games though, that's still the job of Podcat and the team, but I intend to do my best to create an environment where we have the best chances to make great games together.

For me this is coming full circle at Paradox. I started as a programmer in 2004 and one of my first tasks was to work on Hearts of Iron 2. Since then I've done various things including being lead programmer for Hearts of Iron 3 (and Victoria 2), Project Lead for EU4 and more recently Studio Manager for PDS. Next to EU, HOI is my favorite game and I'm delighted to be back in a place where I can focus on fewer games and where that game is Hearts of Iron. You will see more of me in the future even though I will mostly take a backseat to the team working on the game.

That’s all, see you all again next week for more dev diary goodness!

 

[Raghar]

Armor > Piercing
Unit takes half damage (as it currently works)
Armor < Piercing and Amor > 0.75 * Piercing
Take damage between half damage to normal damage by difference in value
Armor < 0.75 * Piercing
The unit takes normal damage
Lets break this down with an example:
A panzer division has an armor value of 52
Its being attacked by an infantry division with some anti-tank guns. Their piercing is 60
If this was the old system this armor would be worthless and not reduce damage at all
Now because its close enough (between 60 and 45), so you get roughly half of the normal effect around 25% reduction of damage.

It's incredible Paradox don't bother with using actual guns. Like German ~40 mm peashooter.
37 mm AT
Penetration at 500 m 31, hit chance against tank sized target - 100 percent with trained crew.
Penetration at 1000 m 22, hit chance against tank sized target approximately 85 percent.

50 mm AT
500 m - 79
1000 m - 60

75 mm AT L34 (adapted from French guns)
500 m -82
1000 m - 66

75 mm AT L48
500 m - 123
1000 m - 109

Now, these are basic values that can be used as a part of combat system. For example in EU combat, they have artillery, cavalry, and infantry phases. While that stuff is horrible brutal abstraction it's probably better than

if(4*a < 3*p){return 2;}
if(4*a < 4*p){return 1;}
return 0;


damage = BulgarConstant[penetration]*...

Which is a simple code similar to code Paradox is using.
As you can clearly see, it's easy to create a decent combat model for WWII era combat. Developer has even choice between historical settings, and balanced settings aka settings when both sides got a brain.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

50 mm AT
500 m - 79
1000 m - 60

75 mm AT L34 (adapted from French guns)
500 m -82
1000 m - 66

75 mm AT L48
500 m - 123
1000 m - 109

You're implying that Paradox built a simulation though. Cool idea but clearly for a better more deserving game.

 

[Space Satan]

DD about euroniggers

Hello and welcome to another dev diary for the Barbarossa patch! Today I’m back with you to talk about not one, not two, but three new focus trees coming with the upcoming expansion: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia!
Baltic States Map.png

Baltic Total Focuses.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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Starting up with the industrial branch, each Baltic state was in something of a similar situation economically; relying heavily on foreign investment and equipment for their industry and armed forces. As such, each Baltic state may decide if they wish to put their faith in the democratic nations to supply their economy, or the Axis powers to fuel the war machine.
Baltic Industry Branch.png
Attract Workers.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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Lastly, by modernising their industry, the Baltic states may become much more self-sufficient and end their reliance on foreign powers to fuel their war machine. They may expand raw resource production in their nation, which for Estonia and Latvia means the development of their on-map resources.

Lithuania however was uniquely very reliant on its agriculture, and thus starts the game with a variant of the “Agrarian Society” national spirit which can be slowly turned into a great benefit via their industrial tree.
Natural Resources.png
Estonia civil war.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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The Balts can either choose to rely on the Soviet intervention or attempt to reconcile relations with the Baltic lower classes and try to maintain their independence while establishing communism on their own.
Restore Workers Republic.png
Lithuania Belarus Soviets.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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If you are independent however, Belarus must be acquired through adversarial means. The Baltic state must propagandise support for unification in Belarus similar to the Spanish Civil War garrison control system. When time runs out, Belarus will be released and fight a civil war; the victor will be annexed into either the victorious Baltic nation or the USSR.
Latvia Belarus decisions.png
Baltic Socialist Republic.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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From there, they may use their newfound strength against Scandinavia and Poland and achieve communism across the entire Baltic Sea.
Baltic Warpath.png
Poland focus icons.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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We originally planned to have Poland get an off-map reactor to essentially get them control of 1 nuke during play as an exile nation. This to reflect their role in the nuclear project, but we were already a bit on the fence on if this was too immersion breaking for the gameplay purpose, and it seemed many of you thought so too so we removed the off-map reactor and moved the focus to the industry branch.
Poland atomic bomb.png
Karl Albrecht I.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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Habsburg Path.png
West Slavia.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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Karl Albrecht I was known for the service he provided to the Polish army, and it’s unlikely that willingness to serve would vanish upon becoming King. So, as Soldier-King, he will gain a plethora of unique personality traits as well as becoming a field marshal.
Soldier King.png
Demand Habsburg Rule.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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Galicia-Lodomeria represented Habsburg rule over Poland and as such, Karl Albrecht may restore the Diet of Galicia which as well as giving the Royal Sejm national spirit, moves the nation’s capital to Krakow. While this centralises the capital between Poland and Czechoslovakia and surrounds the capital in defensible hills, the old Polish capital is also very close to the German border and may prove an easy target…
Diet of Galicia.png
Cossack King Event.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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The final thing I'd like to mention is that during testing we noticed that it was quite a chore to scroll back and forth between the Polish tree with it being so wide, so I implemented a system where the Polish tree automatically compacts itself when you've chosen a political path.
Tree compacting.png
Meka66 · May 12, 2021 at 15:00

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That’s all for this week, next week we will be covering the paths unique to each Baltic state and for now I’ll leave you with this teaser.

 

[Jugashvili]

It's incredible Paradox don't bother with using actual guns. Like German ~40 mm peashooter.
37 mm AT
Penetration at 500 m 31, hit chance against tank sized target - 100 percent with trained crew.
Penetration at 1000 m 22, hit chance against tank sized target approximately 85 percent.

50 mm AT
500 m - 79
1000 m - 60

75 mm AT L34 (adapted from French guns)
500 m -82
1000 m - 66

75 mm AT L48
500 m - 123
1000 m - 109

Now, these are basic values that can be used as a part of combat system. For example in EU combat, they have artillery, cavalry, and infantry phases. While that stuff is horrible brutal abstraction it's probably better than

if(4*a < 3*p){return 2;}
if(4*a < 4*p){return 1;}
return 0;


damage = BulgarConstant[penetration]*...

Which is a simple code similar to code Paradox is using.
As you can clearly see, it's easy to create a decent combat model for WWII era combat. Developer has even choice between historical settings, and balanced settings aka settings when both sides got a brain.

I don't think that is a good idea at all. I can see the appeal -- with WWII, we've got so much specific information at our fingertips that it can be tempting for a game dev to become some sort of demiurge, to recreate "reality" in the game engine. But reality is infinitely complex and no bottom-up system will ever be able to truly encapsulate it.

For instance, here we've got the typical proving ground figures treadheads know and love -- angles, ranges, armor thickness -- which provides objective data for when a "pen" is achieved. But a penetration, especially during the early war, was not synonymous with a kill. In fact, tank kill counts for the early war are very unreliable because tanks could be penetrated several times but remain functional -- under such circumstances crews would often "play dead" until they could safely withdraw under cover of darkness, so that a tank that might have been accounted as a kill by the other side was not, in fact, lost.

Likewise, "shooting range" figures for accuracy mean little in real-life circumstances. Is it a clear shot? Has the ATG been spotted by the tank's infantry screen? Are the crew in good condition or have they been stunned by a Stuka attack or artillery barrage? Not to mention that tanks were sometimes abandoned intact by their crews under certain circumstances due to mechanical breakdowns, running out of fuel or becoming bogged down. And this doesn't account for petrol bombs, bundled charges, teller mines, etc. that were often sufficient for mobility kills or to get crews to bail.

All in all, I already dislike the game's use of specific tank models for production and believe tying it to specific anti-tank weapons would be even more decline. A game played at the global level with divisions as the smallest unit of manoeuver should not concern itself with such things as individual weapons.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It's incredible Paradox don't bother with using actual guns. Like German ~40 mm peashooter.
37 mm AT
Penetration at 500 m 31, hit chance against tank sized target - 100 percent with trained crew.
Penetration at 1000 m 22, hit chance against tank sized target approximately 85 percent.

50 mm AT
500 m - 79
1000 m - 60

75 mm AT L34 (adapted from French guns)
500 m -82
1000 m - 66

75 mm AT L48
500 m - 123
1000 m - 109

Now, these are basic values that can be used as a part of combat system. For example in EU combat, they have artillery, cavalry, and infantry phases. While that stuff is horrible brutal abstraction it's probably better than

if(4*a < 3*p){return 2;}
if(4*a < 4*p){return 1;}
return 0;


damage = BulgarConstant[penetration]*...

Which is a simple code similar to code Paradox is using.
As you can clearly see, it's easy to create a decent combat model for WWII era combat. Developer has even choice between historical settings, and balanced settings aka settings when both sides got a brain.

I don't think that is a good idea at all. I can see the appeal -- with WWII, we've got so much specific information at our fingertips that it can be tempting for a game dev to become some sort of demiurge, to recreate "reality" in the game engine. But reality is infinitely complex and no bottom-up system will ever be able to truly encapsulate it.

For instance, here we've got the typical proving ground figures treadheads know and love -- angles, ranges, armor thickness -- which provides objective data for when a "pen" is achieved. But a penetration, especially during the early war, was not synonymous with a kill. In fact, tank kill counts for the early war are very unreliable because tanks could be penetrated several times but remain functional -- under such circumstances crews would often "play dead" until they could safely withdraw under cover of darkness, so that a tank that might have been accounted as a kill by the other side was not, in fact, lost.

Likewise, "shooting range" figures for accuracy mean little in real-life circumstances. Is it a clear shot? Has the ATG been spotted by the tank's infantry screen? Are the crew in good condition or have they been stunned by a Stuka attack or artillery barrage? Not to mention that tanks were sometimes abandoned intact by their crews under certain circumstances due to mechanical breakdowns, running out of fuel or becoming bogged down. And this doesn't account for petrol bombs, bundled charges, teller mines, etc. that were often sufficient for mobility kills or to get crews to bail.

All in all, I already dislike the game's use of specific tank models for production and believe tying it to specific anti-tank weapons would be even more decline. A game played at the global level with divisions as the smallest unit of manoeuver should not concern itself with such things as individual weapons.

Another thing is that by providing data that is both precise and that has the benefit of hindsight, it means that the numerous stabs in the dark that were made before and during the war will never ever happen because the player can see they simply don't work. Good examples would be the interwar multi-turreted tanks, Japanese superheavy battleships (the then unknown obsolescence of battleships in turn ties to the wider problem of WW2 games that if you'd actually make it realistic but still give players wide freedom to deviate, the only winning move is not to play; or because of realism you'd have no choice but to go to war because it was an ideological inevitability of nazism and Japanese fascism), and Porsche's catastrophic electric drive train.

There's already other problems that arise in not representing severe structural weaknesses, like in case of Germany fundamental problems in relation to mass production (just taking a look at a photograph of a Tiger being assembled after a photo of a T-34 or Sherman assembly line should give someone plenty of "WHY IS EVERYTHING SO WRONG" pointers with the Tiger production) and the general chaos and rivalries in upper echelons of military command and government. Also having Göring tell you fucking lies all the time.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Spoiler

Hi everyone and welcome back to another dev diary! Today is about various changes that affect combat and units. With the Barbarossa update we want to shake up the meta a bit and also change a few stats and other aspects to make using the tank designer more interesting and rewarding.

High Command bonus changes
For a long time now unit bonuses from high command have confused people. Most expect that they apply to battalions, when in fact they apply only if their target unit type was “the majority type”, which was basically a weighted type count. They also could overlap, so infantry, mountaineers and artillery would apply to the same units letting you stack stuff in ways that was never intended and quite unintuitive.

This system has now changed, and divisions get bonuses based on their composition, this is a straight up ratio based on the number of non-support battalions of each type, so a 2x artillery 3x infantry division will be 40% artillery 60% infantry.
Battalions are always classified as a single type for this (even though some are scripted with multiple types) based on this priority:
cavalry > armor > artillery > motorized > mechanized > infantry

The exceptions being rocket & special forces, which both act as an addition, so if the 3 infantry divisions in the example above were mountain units, then the division would also be 60% special forces and if the 2 artillery are nebelwerfers it'd also be 40% rocket

When counting the battalions of armies (ie when we have an actual unit and not only a division template), battalions that lack equipment will count as less, so a Light Tank battalion with only half it's tanks will count as 0.5 battalions (and not count at all if without tanks). The total sum of the compositions will still end up 100% (unless every battalion is without equipment).

Screenshot_3.png

Screenshot_2.png
podcat · May 5, 2021 at 15:00

" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; max-width: 100%; color: rgb(216, 216, 216); font-family: "Source Sans Pro", -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Fira Sans", "Droid Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; background-color: rgb(29, 64, 88); cursor: pointer;">

In conjunction with these changes, we have also been looking at reducing the overstacking penalty. We hope that this will alleviate some of the need to have divisions that are the perfect width for a given province. But at the same time, smaller countries should now be able to specialize their division width to suit their home terrain more appropriately.

Breakdown (numbers not final etc etc)

• Plains
  • Standard 90
  • Reinforce 45
• Desert
  • Standard 90
  • Reinforce 45
• Forest
  • Standard 84
  • Reinforce 42
• Jungle
  • Standard 84
  • Reinforce 42
• Hills
  • Standard 80
  • Reinforce 40
• Marsh
  • Standard 78
  • Reinforce 26
• Urban
  • Standard 96
  • Reinforce.32
• Mountain
  • Standard 75
  • Reinforce 25

One of the major things that make larger divisions like 40 width armor hit disproportionally harder than smaller ones is also how targeting and damage works inside combat in relation to the enemies defense. Essentially the larger divisions make more efficient use of concentrated damage as it punches through defense. To solve this we are doing a few things. First of all we are weighting the targeting towards wider divisions being more likely targets and also when picking targets to try and match it to have wider divisions spread damage over smaller rather than always concentrating it. They will probably still hit harder, but combined with width changes and other downsides of larger divisions it should make it less clear cut.
However, this part isn’t quite done yet though so I’ll cover it again in more detail in one of the “bag of tricks” diaries in the future when i see how it pans out, but I figured it needed to be mentioned now That said though, to wet your appetites here is a little tease from a debug mapmode in development...
1620214309589.png

Our goal is that this creates interesting tradeoffs when designing equipment and will make you have to consider if its worth switching a strategy focused on speed and firepower towards reliability when operating in bad weather and tough areas like the Russian winter or in northern africa or jungles.

Oh, and I figured now might be a good time to point out that there will be a future diary on weather changes and other cool related stuff, so these changes aren't completely in isolation. But one step at a time

But before we go, a few words about the studio...

Studio Gold
Hello everyone, my name is Thomas, but perhaps better known as @Besuchov here

As you saw here we have recently reorganized ourselves a little, moving from a big centralized Stockholm studio to splitting ourselves into Red, Green and Gold. This is mainly an internal org shift to make sure we keep our growing organization firmly focused around making good games. You shouldn't notice too many differences in the short term, we are still PDS making GSG on the Clausewitz engine, but it does mean that we can align each studio to the particular games. Since you will hear the studio names every once in a while, I just wanted to say who I am and what the studio is responsible for.

My role is Studio Manager, which means I'm accountable for the long term success of Studio Gold and working with things like management, staffing, and long term plans. Studio Gold has as its main focus Hearts of Iron (but we may or may not have some secret other stuff as well). Directly making the games though, that's still the job of Podcat and the team, but I intend to do my best to create an environment where we have the best chances to make great games together.

For me this is coming full circle at Paradox. I started as a programmer in 2004 and one of my first tasks was to work on Hearts of Iron 2. Since then I've done various things including being lead programmer for Hearts of Iron 3 (and Victoria 2), Project Lead for EU4 and more recently Studio Manager for PDS. Next to EU, HOI is my favorite game and I'm delighted to be back in a place where I can focus on fewer games and where that game is Hearts of Iron. You will see more of me in the future even though I will mostly take a backseat to the team working on the game.

That’s all, see you all again next week for more dev diary goodness!

Oh okay, bonuses from high command were confusing, so they changed them to bonuses that are also confusing but in a different way.

 

[Jugashvili]

Another thing is that by providing data that is both precise and that has the benefit of hindsight, it means that the numerous stabs in the dark that were made before and during the war will never ever happen because the player can see they simply don't work. Good examples would be the interwar multi-turreted tanks, Japanese superheavy battleships (the then unknown obsolescence of battleships in turn ties to the wider problem of WW2 games that if you'd actually make it realistic but still give players wide freedom to deviate, the only winning move is not to play; or because of realism you'd have no choice but to go to war because it was an ideological inevitability of nazism and Japanese fascism), and Porsche's catastrophic electric drive train.

There's already other problems that arise in not representing severe structural weaknesses, like in case of Germany fundamental problems in relation to mass production (just taking a look at a photograph of a Tiger being assembled after a photo of a T-34 or Sherman assembly line should give someone plenty of "WHY IS EVERYTHING SO WRONG" pointers with the Tiger production) and the general chaos and rivalries in upper echelons of military command and government. Also having Göring tell you fucking lies all the time.

Absolutely. One of the things that gives the early war its charm is the lack of convergent evolution which made forces more distinct and unique. In HoI4, conversely, the game encourages you to skip light tank development as much as possible and, in fact, if I recall correctly there even is a German focus that allows you to skip light tanks altogether. What initially seems like a bit of harmless pandering to treadheads ends up having a harmful effect on the game as a strategic-level experience. Many such cases!