Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Space Satan]

ComChi reworked tree and mechanics

Spoiler

1. 
   
2. Hello, and welcome back to another Dev Diary covering China. Today, we are taking a look at Mao Zedong, and the country recently renamed to “Communist China”. As a little treat, we will also show you how crazy you can really get with the new decision system (spoiler alert: pretty crazy).
   
   Given the overall situation in China in 1936, the Communists certainly weren’t anyone’s favourite to win the Civil War. Mao and the Red Army had barely escaped encirclement and destruction in Jiangxi, being forced on the famous Long March that carried them to Shanxi to a new Base Area. There, they tried to recover their strength and prepare for the next showdown with the forces of Chiang Kai-Shek. Japan loomed in the background, and the basic question was simple: Who would strike first?
   
   
   
   
   
   This question formed the core of the strategic deliberations the Party found itself in. If Japan struck first, then an alliance with the Nationalists would be necessary to present a United Front to the enemy. If Japan remained passive, then the efforts should be directed against the Nationalists. And while Mao had emerged as supreme in the internal factional struggles during the Long March, he was far from safe. Others may well try to usurp his position, advocating different paths to achieve true communism.
   
   
   
   
   
   When war actually came, it came from the Japanese. Mere months earlier, one of Chiang’s top generals had taken matters into his own hand and forced Chiang (more or less at gunpoint) to sign an alliance with the Communists (this Xi’an incident is represented in game as a decision the warlords can take - which we thought worked better from a gameplay perspective than a random event that fired at some point). Finally together in a United Front, both sides lost no time in undermining the spirit of the treaty while staying true to the letter. By 1940, the United Front had become more or less a formality.
   
   Looking at the focus tree, you will note that the Communists share the right hand side of their tree with the Nationalists (modders will be pleased to hear that we now have something called a “shared focus” in script, which does about what you’d think it does). Since the the opening missions to the various countries depend on either having the same ideology or very good relations, the Communists start in a somewhat weaker negotiating position than the Nationalists. But changes in the global situation might give you new opportunities - for example if, say, Japan were to fall to communism…
   
   
   
   
   
   On the left side, the tree deals with the various internal factions in the Communist Party, from Mao and his allies to the Soviet-trained and backed faction under Wang Ming to an attempt at less radical “Social Democracy” under Zhang Lan. In the center, you are presented with the mirror of the choice facing the Nationalists - do you focus on the Japanese threat, or do you try to take the fight to the other Chinese factions and try to gain supremacy before Japan comes knocking?
   
   Representing the Chinese Communists contribution to the war presented us with a bit of a problem - they didn’t engage in open warfare for the most part, and our systems are not really made to represent offensive guerilla warfare. We wanted to give the Communists a real shot at winning the Civil War without having to resort to the clumsy and counter-intuitive system used in vanilla, where you boost party popularity in China to flip states to your side.
   
   So a few late-evening “design meetings” (beer may or may not have been involved) later, we came up with the Infiltration/Uprising system, which is a unique mechanic for the Communists. At the most basic level, it was supposed to let you pay infantry equipment to infiltrate a state. By itself, this does very little - but when you trigger the Uprising, the states you have infiltrated will flip to your side. Depending on your approach, this can cripple the other side’s war economy and strand a large part of their army in enemy territory.
   
   
   
   
   (numbers are not final)
   
   While we did want this to represent the ways the Communists executed their strategy of People’s War, building base areas from which to wage guerilla warfare, we also didn’t want to leave the other side without any way to counter the infiltration. So the infiltrated player can spend resources to try and uncover your infiltration, and, if discovered, to counter it.
   
   We then expanded the system a bit further to make infiltrating a state not just a binary infiltrated/cleared state, but actually allow you to build up a Base Area in several levels. On the most basic level, your soldiers merely sabotage infrastructure and factories when you trigger the uprising. On the higher levels, the state flips to your control and on the highest level even spawns militia units to defend it.
   
   We then adapted this system to also work against the Japanese. Countering infiltration does not remove it instantly, but only reduces the level of infiltration. It is always worthwhile, but it may not be enough.
   
   Note that this system is still in testing and might change before release.
   
   But opposition and warfare is not the only way you can win the Civil War. We really wanted to explore how the Communists could have secured their influence through political means, which brings us to the second unique China mechanic: Political Support.
   
   
   
   
   (numbers are not final)
   
   When the Communists decide to go down the “Social Democracy” branch of their focus tree, they will eventually form a coalition government with the Nationalists, which will begin a power struggle between the two parties. You can then spend political power over a number of days to build your power base in different states. Each state represents a support value, and securing the support of other warlords adds even more support. Once you have more support than the Nationalists, you can make a push for taking over the entire country, eventually annexing all of China after Chiang Kai-Shek suffers an...accident.
   
   The Nationalist player, of course, has ways to counter this, but with political power scarce, eventually something will have to give. Note that you can pursue both approaches at the same time to keep the Nationalists guessing.
   
   More details on how we did this will have to wait until a future diary, in which we talk more about the scripting behind the new features.
   
   That’s all for this week. Next week we will talk about Generals, and why we have been looking at their family tree. For now, have a look at the awesome hats the Heroes of the Revolution wear into battle:
   
   
   
   
   
   At 16:00 today, @Da9L and @podcat will show off the reworked German focus tree, attempt to kill Hitler and bring back the Kaiser! So check out the Paradox twitch today at 16:00 CET: https://go.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive
   
   Last edited: Today at 17:48
   Archangel85, Today at 17:54Report
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3. 
   ChairmanMeowSergeant
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
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[Space Satan]

Hearts of Iron Kings IV

Spoiler

Hi everyone and sorry about the late diary (Swedish winter is heavy on sickness attrition!). Today we are going to talk about military leaders and how they can now grow and be tailored to your needs!
Traits and Leader Details
When we added the chain of command feature to Waking the Tiger we wanted to make sure players care more about their generals and field marshals and feel like they grow and level up. We also wanted to add more personality to leaders. To accomplish this we now have several kinds of traits. The old traits you are familiar with are now called Earnable Traits. Something you gain by doing something, like earning the “Desert Fox” trait by fighting in the desert. Then there are General Traits which are something you select yourself to assign to leaders. These will have prerequisites of different kinds. There are also Field Marshal Traits - which unsurprisingly only apply to field marshals (remember, field marshals with Waking the Tiger now lead other leaders). Finally, there are background or Personality Traits as well. As you can see in the picture below, Manstein has a background as a Brilliant Strategist, which increases his base stats.

We are still working on the personality traits, so I won't go into too much detail on them just yet. Usually they affect the leader’s base stats or make certain traits easier to gain (so someone with a background in tanks might be quicker to pick up the “Panzer Leader” trait). We also use these to model change in nations like the “Samurai Lineage” one (more on that once we cover Japan). We also have some “status” traits like “Wounded” where a leader may be left at lower capacity after an ill fated combat or “Sick”, which can be gained by trying to develop a video game in Sweden during the winter or by staying in high-attrition areas for a prolonged time.

To make managing easier we have also updated to leader selection screen so that you can sort and filter easier (type “Panzer” in the quick search field will get you all panzer related leaders for example).

Bonuses from traits and skill levels for your field marshals transfer down as well to your divisions, but at a reduced rate (right now you get 50% of the bonus, but no number is final) and you no longer lose your general traits when you promote to field marshal. When it comes to slots for assignable traits those are gained as your leader levels up.

“The Red Phone”
Many of you may have been wondering about the new topbar icon and it’s finally time to start talking about it today. It’s a new resource called Command Power and it symbolizes the ability of the government to go in and directly mess with the military - much like Hitler would use his red phone to bypass chain of command or prioritize things. Command power is used for promoting generals, taking certain military related decisions, managing air supply, assigning traits to generals who qualify and using command power abilities to affect divisions. There are also two more features that use them we will cover in future diaries.

These command power abilities are mostly unlocked by traits and apply to divisions under the general. They cost command power to trigger and run for a certain amount of time giving bonuses or other effects which offer up some neat new tactics.

Here is a breakdown of the abilities:

Force Attack - Units gain attack bonuses, take no org damage while attacking, but take increased strength damage. They are also unable to retreat from attacks when this is active. As the active units take damage this will also hurt your nation’s war support.
Last Stand - Similar to Force Attack but when on defense. Use it if you must absolutely hold somewhere no matter what while attacking elsewhere. We also have some national flavor version of these for China and Japan.
Probing Attack - Divisions can launch attacks without losing entrenchment, but have a penalty to attack while doing so.
Staff Office Plan - Increases planning speed for the cases when you need to finish and launch a new plan quickly.
Siege Artillery - Combat bonus vs fortifications and also increases damage to the fortifications themselves substantially.
Glider Planes - Used in combination with paratroopers they let you drop more paras per transport and give them a boost to organization and defense towards enemy AA.
Makeshift bridges - Gives a substantial reduction to the river crossing penalty.
Extra supplies - Increases the time troops can be without supplies before suffering penalties.
Naval Assault Plan - Cuts down time needed to complete preparations for naval invasions.

Command power abilities, assignable traits and the new leader details view are part of the DLC. Most of the personality/background traits are part of the 1.5 “Cornflakes” update.

Next week we are going to, among other things, talk about how to make your troops deal with harsh weather. See you then!

 

[Average Manatee]

Hitler Mana mk2: Electric Boogaloo.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Asking the relevant questions here - will German generals have the ability to romance each other?

 

[Jarpie]

I finally started playing this as USA, turned them fascists and invaded canada, and I played far enough so there was peace conference, am I only one who hates the peace conference? some fucking AI country always takes province or two from north america, fucking annoying.

 

[XenomorphII]

Everyone hates the peace conferences. They suck and the ai always does something ridiculous and stupid.

 

[not an artichoke]

I never feel bad about using the console to tag switch and release (for future console-annexation) or gift territory (to appropriate owners). It's usually possible to fix bordergore that way, although it is annoying.

 

[Jarpie]

Any mods I should be using if I dont want fantasy germany aka Kaissereich? I installed Vanilla+ which seems good addition to base game.

 

[Jarpie]

Also is it common for soviet union to fall against germany? I've had that happen couple times now, maybe for next game I'll have to strengthen soviet union notch or two.

 

[Space Satan]

SU fares horribly because Mass Assault doctrine is the most useless of four and AI constantly shuffles divisions, losing entrenchment and planning bonus.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Right now it seems like we're at the HoI3 extremes of either Soviet Union steamrolling Germany or Germany beating Soviet Union, there's rarely an inbetween. It seems to be entirely down to how the German AI had concentrated its troops before war starts.

If you want you can take a look at BlackICE HoI4 to see how the national focus system and equipment system can be used recklessly (the mod is probably an even bigger case example of "more and more is less and less" than Supreme Ruler games).

EDIT: And really, never play without Player-Controlled Peace Conferences mod. I'm p sure it's compatible with almost anything. Once you try it, you'll never want to go back.

 

[Average Manatee]

If you want you can take a look at BlackICE HoI4 to see how the national focus system and equipment system can be used recklessly (the mod is probably an even bigger case example of "more and more is less and less" than Supreme Ruler games).

I tried a game with it. Unlocked all of the infantry improvements, spammed pure INF divisions at max width, had like 5k Soft Attack all-terrain omni divisions that steamrolled everything. BlackICE never fails to amuse with how stupid things can get.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It's a case example of what happens when the only thing guiding adding stuff is "can we" with no "should we" even considered.

Even just pure INF will end up having soooooooo many different things being produced in factories. Unless you have a gigantic number of factories it's just way, way, way too efficient compared to anything else to have pimped out terrain-specialized types of pure INF and special forces variants of INF (tho even there I have a feeling Shock Troops outperform all due to their higher breakthrough).

There's merit to the notion of having unique equipment for different countries... But not for having five bazillion of them.

 

[Average Manatee]

It's a case example of what happens when the only thing guiding adding stuff is "can we" with no "should we" even considered

That's all of BlackICE in a nutshell. I remember back in HoI3 when Hitler could have a monthly cycle that influenced random crap.

I'm not against the idea of producing tons of equipment for everything*, but there's a huge problem in balance that no one involved in producing that mod cares about. It's not just a case of "I want to add everything I can", but also a case of "everything I want to add needs to be powerful because I want it to seem important and meaningful", such that so many powerful modifiers being added sums together to create silliness.

*Aside from the issue that countries with 1 factory are kind of fucked trying to figure out whether infantry fight better with only guns or only bullets. HoI4 in general fucks small countries over due to only letting you assign discrete factory numbers rather than utilizing fractional IC amounts in production. And you can't switch the factories because of the shitty efficiency bonus being reset vs. HoI3's practical knowledge that persisted.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

That's really just a problem of scaling how many factories means small, instead of just using the super-low factory counts for smaller countries from HoI3.

 

[Space Satan]

DD: Acclimatization and special forces rework

Spoiler

Hi everyone and welcome to another dev diary where we show off stuff as we work on Waking the Tiger. Today we are going to be talking about a feature I’ve been wanting for a long time - troop acclimatization.


Acclimatization
We have long wanted to simulate the problems associated with shifting troops to new fronts with more extreme weather they are not used to. We currently have two types: Cold Acclimatization and Heat Acclimatization. It is not possible to be acclimatized to both at the same time, so if you take troops from the desert and put them down in the Russian winter, they will need to “work off” their heat acclimatization first before they start getting accustomed to the cold. When a division is sufficiently acclimatized, it will change its look, as you can see below. On the left are troops in winter with no acclimatization and on the right is what they will look when acclimatized.

And an example from Africa:

For most countries, we do this by switching the uniform on the 3D model to use more appropriate textures. In some cases, like where people only had tropic uniforms with short pants and the like, we replaced their uniforms to be more winter appropriate (suggestions by the art department to simply color their knees blue were sadly rejected). The new textures come with the DLC, but the core mechanic is free as part of 1.5 Cornflakes. You can see your acclimatization status as part of the unit list and its effects:

With full acclimatization you will reduce extreme weather penalties by about half. We will also be increasing the impact of harsh weather a bit to compensate for being able to avoid it now.

There are a few things that will help you gain acclimatization also. If your commander has the Adaptable trait or Winter Expert it will speed things up. There are also technologies that influence the acclimatization speed (more on that later).

Special forces
Up till now, we have had a bit of a balance issue with Special Forces (Marines, Mountaineers, Paratroopers). They were, pound for pound, better than regular infantry and many people simply replaced all their infantry with mountaineers.

To make sure special forces stay special, we added a restriction based on your whole army:

To ensure that you always know how many special forces you can field, the division designer and deployment will help you keep track:

Along with this change in how Special Forces work, we wanted to make them stand out a bit more. Six new infantry technologies have been added to improve these elite troops.

Special forces are trained and equipped for conditions that ordinary soldiers aren’t expected to excel in. The first tech will give them a boost to acclimatization speed. Afterwards, the tree splits. One option is to train your special forces harder, to improve their skills and their ability to fight for longer before having to be resupplied. The other option is to expand the special forces training programs to accept more recruits. Your special forces will be more numerous, but come with more drag and not quite as high speed. In the end though, they will still be elite forces and will be able to develop training to make them even more skilled in fighting in the harshest of conditions.

See you all next week when we return to take a look at the Chinese warlords.

Also, don’t miss out on World War Wednesday today at 16:00 CET as normal. Me and Daniel will continue our fight against communism (or the British fleet… we are still arguing about that) as Germany under the rule of the Kaiser.

podcat, 33 minutes ago
#1

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well it does make sense to do something about shuffling troops anywhere, but it does seem to me that either acclimatization will do nothing or you will have months where you just wait patiently for troops to finish bitching about the weather.

Also most special forces will be marines from now on I figure.

 

[Space Satan]

Special forces limit is for brigades, not divisions So no more Space Marine armies as we knew it.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yep, that's something I actually had to doublecheck in the screenshots since I got this nagging feeling "no way, they wouldn't think players would just add extra artillery or whatever to de-special the forces" but yes they did think of that to their credit.

 

[Average Manatee]

Ehh, hard caps are always bad. This is a sign of why HoI4's production system screws lots of things up. The obvious real solution why countries didn't make every unit trained for harsh conditions was because it was too costly (mostly in training time and recruiting standards). But since HoI4 only measures division cost by the cost of producing x rifles for x soldiers, you can't actually make Special Forces realistically expensive without equipping every soldier with 5 rifles.

Acclimatization is definitely going to be one of those "This won't hurt you much but the AI will kill itself with it" features that will take 6 months until after release to sort-of fix.

 

[razvedchiki]

Is there a mod that reads proper chain of command,div-corps-army like in ho3?

 

[Jarpie]

Is there a mod that reads proper chain of command,div-corps-army like in ho3?

Next dlc will have them, but not as detailled I think.

 

[razvedchiki]

link?

 

[Jarpie]

link?

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/hoi4-dev-diary-chain-of-command.1043825/

 

[Space Satan]

DD: gook border conflicts

Spoiler

Hello from the frozen wasteland wrapped in eternal darkness that is Sweden in December!


In the base game, the Chinese Warlords lead a rather silly existence. They exist at game start, work was clearly done to make them playable (at least as playable as any country with a generic focus tree), and when the war with Japan starts and things could get interesting - they are swallowed up by Nationalist China.


That means there is little use for the Nationalist player to really interact with them, since they are going to be absorbed anyway when the war starts. This made the Nationalists' situation quite a bit easier than it was historically. So in order to really represent the problems the Nationalists faced, we had to make the Warlords a bit more dynamic - and while doing that, we also made them a bit more interesting to play.


It’ll still be possible for the Nationalist player to unite the country and take over the warlords - it will just take effort and resources that the Nationalist player may or may not be able to spare.

We still knew that the Warlords tree would be a bit of a sideshow, so we decided that all 5 warlords (Shanxi, Xibei San Ma, Sinkiang, Yunnan, Guanxi Clique) would get the same focus tree, and that it would be somewhat smaller than what we would do for a normal country (instead of a splinter region).

However, we also wanted the player to be able to make a difference and not be stuck with the rather small and restricted warlords focus tree forever. The core idea behind the focus tree is therefore to give the warlords a way to win the struggle for supremacy in China, take over national leadership, and ultimately gain access to the full Nationalist or Communist Focus Trees. This turns them into more fully-fledged contenders in the Chinese Civil War.

To do this, you have three basic options: you cooperate with the Nationalists, side with the Communists, or you strike out on your own (with an option to approach Japan later).

If you decide to ally with the Nationalists (as most warlords are scripted to do in historical mode), you get to build up your realm a little and fix some of the problems in the administration. Once your powerbase is secure, you can decide to join the political struggle and make a play for the leadership of China in the political sphere.

This uses the same mechanics we have outlined in the Dev Diary about Communist China, and if a political power struggle between Nationalists and Communists is already ongoing, a warlord will simply join into the struggle. If you win the struggle, and claim national leadership, your focus tree will then switch to the Nationalist Chinese focus tree.

Siding with the Communists starts out very similar, but the end game is different: instead of joining the political struggle directly, you appeal to the bigger Communist: Stalin. Getting the support of the Soviet Union won’t come cheap, though, and there is no guarantee that whoever leads the Communist party of China is willing to just accept you taking over. Should you succeed, you will be able to annex Communist China, giving you their troops as well as their focus tree. But beware: Stalin will come to collect his due.

Lastly, the option to strike out on your own is clearly the most difficult of all, making an enemy out of both sides - but it offers you the chance to claim China as your own, without having to make compromises. While you can try to make a deal with the Japanese, there is no guarantee that they will accept, and in any event you would only be trading one overlord for another. This approach also blocks off any chance of joining the political struggle inside China, meaning that you will have to fight for it.


However, since facing the nationalist armies in the field may be a bit too much despite all their many weaknesses, we have decided to expand on Border Wars a bit, giving independent-minded warlords a way to expand some territory while keeping the risk manageable.


Border conflicts start with someone staging an incident between two states (yes... they have to border each other). This costs some PP and fires an event notifying them that they need to position troops or risk losing control of the state.

After a bit of time has passed, whoever staged the incident gets a decision to escalate the situation further. If this decision is left alone for too long the incident is forgotten and nothing more happens.

To escalate the incident to a border conflict the instigator needs to place troops on the border and select the decision. Divisions from the two states start fighting in a limited form of combat with special rules such as terrain giving less bonus, lower combat width and so on. The country that first initiated the incident is considered the attacker.

The fighting will continue for a good amount of time, and if no one has emerged victorious by the time it runs out the conflict is considered to be a stalemate. This awards both sides with a bit of army experience and the defender with some PP for having successfully defended the territory. This is sort of a soft loss for the attacker, but does not come at a major cost other than the PP wasted on initiating the entire incident.


If the attacker wins the conflict, they seize control of the state and are awarded PP for their success. If the defender wins they gain a lot of PP, army experience and research bonus to land doctrine. All of the outcome effects are scriptable and there is a good chance we will add, tweak, or change them after more play testing.

Both attacker and defender can choose to escalate the conflict further at the cost of addition PP. Doing so gives a combat bonus, allow more troops to join the fighting and pushes the conflict to the brink of all out war. Both sides can back down at this point, but this results in losing the border conflict. It might however be worth taking a loss over an all-out war you cannot hope to win.

If any of the sides chooses to escalate the conflict further, the other side will be notified and not long after, war breaks out.

Next week, we will answer the critical question of what exactly the airspeed velocity of an unladen tiger is.