Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Raghar]

I just today finished HoI4 as Japan. And the way I defeated Philippines was. I defeated fascist US and UK, then puppeted Philippines during peace conference.

 

[Space Satan]

DD

Spoiler

Hi everyone welcome back to another update on our post-release work on Cornflakes and Waking the Tiger.

1.5.2 Patch
The path has now been in beta for a bit and also updated. If you are brave and want to try it early to help us find problems you can go here for how to do so. Go there to check out the current changelog, but I am going to cover some stuff here too. Note that all these things are not yet in the patch, but will appear later today when the beta gets updated.

Air Balance and Changes
Based on feedback, primarily from the MP community we decided to do several changes related to the air war.

• Planes on missions now have to gain efficiency over time. Strategic bombers are slower than smaller planes when it comes to this. This was done to avoid ping-ponging and terrible microing in multiplayer where players would keep switching their bombers around to stop them from being caught. It also simply makes sense that it takes some time after a move to get organized.

• Division anti air now reduces damage to the division caused by close air support attacks, in proportion to the AA's ability to shoot down planes. This should now make divisional AA more helpful against direct attacks as well:

• We now allow a bigger bonus from close air support supporting a combat, while the penalty to defense to the enemy from pure air superiority has been reduced. The speed penalty from enemy air superiority has also been reduced as it was a little excessive. We hope these things together will incentivize CAS over fighter spam a bit.
• Strategic Bombers now only give 0.01 air superiority to make it clear thats not really their job
• The last 3 levels of radar tech will now improve hit chance for static AA guns while unlocking new AA equipment will increase their damage and all their intermediary techs will increase the protection from AA on buildings in the area. We hope this will make the techs nicer to get and help in late game defense vs bombers.

Nukes and Surrender
We have fixed a couple of things with nukes. They should now work more reliably and hurt the targets war support depending on target. The target selection is now a bit more flexible, before you had to hit specifically the VP province, but now the state is enough for things to work out as expected. In addition a nations surrender limit will be lowered when at low war support (below 50%). It scales from 0 to -30%. That means nuking will again make nations more likely to surrender, but also have other negative effects before that point.

Manchukuo
We felt the Manchukuo independence path was a little heavy handed with bonuses so it has been reworked. We basically removed most of the factories you get from focuses. Instead you get a decision after taking over the railroads to build up to 4 civilian factories. You can also solve the bandit problem by recruiting them but that means you have to endure raids for a while until you get the focus to bolster nationalism. In the Manchu branch you get to create underground gun shops which make infantry equipment massively cheaper but also reduce its reliability by a huge amount. In the 5 people branch you can raise the Manchu banners, which are large divisions with artillery support. Finally, purging the General Affairs Council lets you spend CP to prepare to seize Japanese arms depots which gives you guns and the Japanese a negative modifier for fighting against your troops.

Game start speedup
Nobody likes to wait around, particularly not devs who have to start the game many many times during a day so to help with this we now do some caching during startup that should help speed up the process after the first time you run it.

Other stuff
We are still going to add some more things before the patch is done. MEFO bills for example are currently undergoing balancing work.

We also have a really cool thing for modders, but I'll let @shultays show it off for you:

Hello everyone, shultays here. I am a programmer in HoI4 team. Today I will be introducing some new cool features/tools that we introduced with our newest patch.

Scripted GUIs
That is a feature we solely developed for our modders. This new tool will enable modders to create their own GUIs (or attach their GUIs to existing ones) and attach scripts/triggers to GUI elements in those GUIs. Here are some gifs that show what you can mod in to game now.

Everything on that gifs are modded in to the game. Here are some features that this example mod adds:

Code:
- Fuhrer Mana, a new resource for Germany
- A spell system that uses Fuhrer mana as a resource
- You can use spells targeted on your country by clicking Fuhrer mana resource
- You can use targeted spells on enemy countries by clicking them
- You can use targeted spells on your own states by clicking them
- A psuedo-focus system works independent of existing one that can boost your Fuhrer mana production
- A way to boost your research by consuming Fuhrer mana
- A basic AI that can make use of Fuhrer mana
If you want to try this mod, you can download it from Steam Workshop using this link or just download the mod attached in this post and extract it to your mod folder (under \Documents\Paradox Interactive\Hearts of Iron IV\mod). I also added a small cheat, right clicking on Fuhrer mana resource will give you free Fuhrer mana.

Here is a list of things you can do using scripted GUIs

Code:
- Create GUIs that will be visible when a certain trigger is true (for example in first gif, the player clicks on resource to pop up a new GUI) and/or when player selects a country/state (second and third gifs shows an example to this)
- By default this GUIs are not attached to an existing GUI (like first three gifs) but you can also attach them to existing GUI elements (5th gif has a scripted GUI attached to national focus tree)
- Attach effects to buttons in scripted GUIs, which will be called when player clicks, right clicks on them. You can also attach different effects while user is holding ctrl/alt/shift while left or right clicking
- Attach triggers to buttons that will disable them (for example spells are disabled when you are out of mana)
- Attach triggers to buttons/icons/texts to make them visible/hidden with certain conditions (disable research button is only visible when you actually enabled it)
- Use scripted localization in your texts, tooltips, button texts etc. You can also display description of effects you attached in tooltips
- A score based AI system that will evaluate your scripted GUIs on an interval you chose and on targets that you have filtered (for targeted scripted GUIs, like 'meteor swarm' spell GUI) and simulate clicking on buttons on the order of scores you have given to them.
- It will be available on multiplayer as well!
I created a tutorial on how to use this new system, which can be found on our modding forum following this link. It gives you a much more indepth on how you you can implement this features.

If you have question, please tag @shultays and ask away!

Reloadable databases
This feature was always there, but it was hard to use for our modders. In our development branch, most commonly databases (some folders under common, gui files, yml files etc) are reloadable and automatically reloads when you make an edit on them. After 1.5.2., you can also enable same functionality on our release builds by adding following launch command

-debug

After that game will auto reload the database that contains the files you edited. Here is the list of all reloadable stuff:

Code:
- events
- decisions
- traits
- ai_strategy
- ai_strategy_plans
- on_actions
- scripted_effects
- scripted_triggers
- scripted_localisation
- scripted_guis
- defines
- some gui files
- yml files
Some of them have limitations, so if you are encountering some weird issues I suggest closing and relaunching the game, but otherwise they should work just fine. We are constantly trying to improve this list.

If you want to disable this feature for some reason but keep the other -debug features, you can add -nofilewatcher to launch options.

So that is all from me for now. From now on I will try to be more active at modding forums and write a couple more tutorials. So see you there!

While we are on the topic of modding we need to talk about dependencies. Sometimes you will want your mod to depend on other mods, and also require a certain loading order. Mods will usually load in alphabetical order of their file names (so the mod last in the list will overwrite the earlier). But some things may affect this so if you need a certain load order and be clear that you have dependencies this needs to be specified by including its full name in the .mod file under "dependencies". There have been bug reports etc about this, probably because we didn't explain properly how it works. The wiki page has been updated, here but essentially this is how to do it:
Code:
name="testmodB"
path="mod/testmodb/"

# this guarantees we load testmodA first before our testmodB is loaded
dependencies= {
"testmodA"
}
supported_version="1.5.2"

See you next week!

Attached Files:

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Last edited by a moderator: Today at 14:36
Reject reason to make the impossible possible!

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Eh, finally they've done something about yoyoing strategic bombers. But a change like that will only affect single-player, while in multiplayer strat bombers are still gonna be banned on every sensible server.

 

[Lone Wolf]

My God in heaven, what a modder bonanza that represents.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yea if the big modder groups weren't informed beforehand at least by now they must be salivating. Looking at the new direction the KR team is taking in Vietnam with the Waking The Tiger modding possibilities already, this is just going to further add to that.

 

[Raghar]

Tried Italy a little. First they couped Germany, thus war in Europe didn't start. (Until Hungary wanted rest of Slovakia as part of greater Hungary. When I discovered French Commune is no longer part of allies, and neither democratic Germany, I joined as well.)

These battleshis are dead. And carrier didn't survived either.

A normal day in Italy navy.

Yup torpedoed Queen Elisabeth.

 

[Raghar]

Looks like HoI4 has more bugs than ever. This stuff was found on reddit.

 

[Raghar]

So after I had 300 hours in HoI4, there are few facts.

I kinda like ComChi before DLC, their situation was quite a bit complicated.
The AI problem in HoI4 is it doesn't build enough navy. It might be understandable when it has 180 ships and 4 carriers, but when its navy gets reduced to next to zero, it should build less ground units and concentrate on navy. Of course that would make it weaker against player, but its opponents are not only player.

Second part.
The naval system is somehow working, but there are tree problems with submarines.
1. When they see carrier even carrier without planes they run away.
2. Even carrier without planes seems to have as large anti sub detection a carrier with planes.
3. They move towards the carrier and it takes ages to reach it.

A simple solution, which Pradox for some reason didn't think about is to place submarines at random location on the 2D map, and do some simple rules for them to behave so they would actually sink something without being sink without problems. Basically as it works now, when Submarines are in the same battle as surface ships, they arrive to battle when surface ships and airplanes dealt with enemy screen ships, and can attack capital ships directly. Which works as it should, but when submarines are alone, things are typically bad. Thus with random positioning of submarines at the start of combat, which would simulate better, it's important to prevent submarines into suicide into wall of light cruisers and destroyers before main fleet arrives. Which basically require bit more effort than to order ships to move forward and attack closest enemy.

Changing orders from running away from carrier group to attack carrier without escort and planes would still cause unrealistic long battles until submarine crawls into position. And I'm not sure if a fleet can simply outrun another fleet when they don't know they are in the location, or if every engagement is run until either all enemy ships sinks, or one fleet withdraws.

Then there is another bit problem. I seen a battle where one to three destroyers basically obliterated hordes of submarines without problem. Even when submarine will not be able to fight back efficiently, there should be some damage, and more importantly 20 subs can spread, hide and disengage.

Then there are also problems with representation of ASW. I feel they gave Destroyers longer anti sub torpedo range than they gave to submarines. Which causes problems.

Let's look at real world subs and theirs leaders.

RangeYd Bucket Dykers Krapf Morton Dealey Ferrall Rutters Ashley Kennedy
600-899 750 - - - 66% 33% 57% 25% 57%
900-1199 1050 50% - 42% 37% - 40% 36% -
1200-1499 1350 50% 0% 40% 50% 14% 22% 0% -
1500-1799 1650 29% 50% 33% 13% 17% 60% - -
1800-2099 1950 - 50% 0% 38% 0% 18% 33% 25%
2100-2399 2450 - 50% 25% 50% 50% 50% 60% -
2400-2699 2550 60% 75% 0% 33% 50% 63% 0% -
2700-3000 2850 - 33% - 50% 0% - - 33%
>3000 3000 48% 44% 23% 41% 21% 44% 24% 38%

As you can see from this table, majority of US sub leaders were crap. About half as capable in killing enemy ship as UK or Germans. On the other hand it's amazingly well done table that can be easily used for creating correct game model for naval combat in WWII.

As you can clearly see things are not that simple as just a straightforward simplified explanation. Krapf would consider suicidal to fire at shorter distance than 1500 meters, thus he avoided it at all costs. Morton is destroyer killer, he shot charging destroyer and hit more times than statistic would say it's probable. And Dealey didn't wanted to waste single torpedo salvo. Dykers was simply well rounded commander capable in all situations. (But US navy had at most 1/3 of them, but more likely less than 1/10. Because US subs simply sucked. It's telling Japanese had problems with them, and caused total collapse of Japan navy.)

A simple statistic says for US Pacific navy number of torpedo duds is 5 percent, erratic 3 percent, exploded too soon 2.5 percent. A lot of them went under ship and ran into a sunset.

Well, I actually wonder why Paradox developers which should be history buffs didn't bother. In addition, there are problems like submarine chasers, aka simple easy ships, cheap to produce pesky ships capable to kill a submarine.

It's easy to simulate radical changes in sub design. Namely. Snorkel. Radar detector and anti-radar snorkel measure. Bow mounted sonar. Improved battery design. AIP.
RADAR controlled gunnery.
And in guided weapons department. Proper acoustic guided torpedoes, and Fritz-X.
(But of course simulating weapons in 52 would start to enter complexity of Command air naval operations.)


Another problem is they removed that feature from HoI2, where there was bonus for serial production and you were forced to make several ships in parallel. (Which of course took ages.)

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It wouldn't make a difference though. A player wouldn't let them rebuild after wiping out their navy. The AI of sea-going nations does switch into shipyard bonus in the late game, mind. But it wouldn't matter because it still takes years to rebuild a massive fleet from scratch and the player is not just going to sit around.

 

[Average Manatee]

You can't really switch from building an army into building a navy, thanks to the factory system. On top of that it's even worse for the AI who doesn't know how to hold ships back until it gets a proper concentration, instead sending every individual destroyer out to sea as soon as its ready.

 

[Raghar]

You can't really switch from building an army into building a navy, thanks to the factory system. On top of that it's even worse for the AI who doesn't know how to hold ships back until it gets a proper concentration, instead sending every individual destroyer out to sea as soon as its ready.

Well, dockyards work parallel with military factories. (Which is one of problems.) Thus nothing prevents ComChi to use its 5 dockyards after conquering Guanx clique to produce transports and submarines. At snail pace, but produce.

Spoiler

Basically something like this.

Steel is main limit. Then design of ship and researching doctrines. Because dockyards don't lose efficiency no matter what you do, you can put 30 dockyards on one Carrier, and get carrier under 2 years.

 

[Average Manatee]

But you can't "build less" armies and "build more" navies. To do that you would need military factories that could be switched to Naval factories. Because of this everyone's production rates are fairly set in stone, changing it requires planning years ahead of time to build up the naval yards. The AI can't even plan 2 months ahead with it's army (see AI DoWing countries when it doesn't have an army ready on the border), there's no way it could plan 2 years ahead with Navy (which oscillates between completely useless and powerful depending on unpredictable enemy activities).

Yes everyone is always producing navy off their dockyards, but chances are if you lose the naval war it's because the other enemy had more dockyards to produce more stuff with, rectifying that takes years of dockyard buildup on your own part since otherwise they'll just increase their naval lead over time.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Planning years ahead? What? I just click a button 5 times and I start to build 3x5 shipyards that will be ready within 6 months. Not to mention every major nation has additional shipyards in the focus tree, you just have to use it.

The chokepoint for building a massive navy isn't the amount of shipyards, it's the amount resources. You need fuckton of steel and oil and chromium for capital ships and you need additional rubber and oil and alluminum for carrier-capable planes. Axis countries simply don't have enough resources to put out a huge navy without compromising their land forces. And this is historically accurate so don't expect the AI to find a way around it.

 

[Average Manatee]

The AI has to plan ahead to estimate whether it needs naval bases, civilian factories or military factories. There's an obvious opportunity cost. AI can't see that far ahead to predict the difference between its entire navy being destroyed in the first week of combat vs. a good naval player or no naval action at all from a Germany that just shoots down English bombers while blitzing Russia. So all you can really do is script a certain amount of buildup, not play reactionary.

The chokepoint for building a massive navy isn't the amount of shipyards, it's the amount resources. You need fuckton of steel and oil and chromium for capital ships and you need additional rubber and oil and alluminum for carrier-capable planes. Axis countries simply don't have enough resources to put out a huge navy without compromising their land forces. And this is historically accurate so don't expect the AI to find a way around it.

Ehh, depends on your standards. If you're going for a "realistic" navy, maybe. If you just build 6 battleships at 1940 quality you'll kill an AI.

A significant additional factor in this is that the AI uses its land forces and its factories so poorly that it needs to overbuild them massively to succeed. Turns out when half your armor is sinking in the med trying to fight in Libya you end up needing a lot more oil.

 

[Space Satan]

DD and patch

Spoiler

Cornflakes 1.5.2 Patch
1.5.2 is now out of open beta and should be updating on steam next time you start up. Here is the changelog in all its glory:
################################################################
######## Patch 1.5.2 "Cornflakes" ########
################################################################

##################################
# Feature
##################################
- Now it's possible to view the 3d models in the division designer and in the tech view. Also in the division designer, it's possible to choose a preferred 3d model to be used by that template.
- Free Battleships DLC that never really worked, has been moved into the base game.
- Holding shift now creates army group fronts without creating sub army fronts

##################################
# AI
##################################
- Garrison order improvements
- Fixed AI not using its military factories to their fullest when it is not in need of equipment. Now it will produce stuff as long as it has enough resources
- an AI chinese warlord that is at war with Japan will now be very eager to join the united front.
- Added AI strategies to the Baltics and Finland to make them more eager to join Germany's faction if Germany has chosen "Safeguard the Baltics" and/or "Support the Finns".
- Made german AI focus more on non-civilian construction between 1937-40
- Some improvements for naval leader assignment to reduce reshuffling.


##################################
# UI
##################################
- Listed save games now has proper "hover mouse over" effect
- Fixed army insignia positioning.
- New portrait of Von Lettow-Vorbeck for GER.
- The colored background on army groups along the bottom of the screen now intercept mouse clicks, not letting them click through to the map and select stuff.
- Popup windows for declaration of war, peace, and a few others will now auto-close after timeout when running a hands-off or any other case with human AI turned on.
- Added a confirmation pop up while assigning every unit in army to a different army's front orders
- Added drag & drop to reorder theater groups & pinned regions
- Added drag & drop to reorder armies & army groups
- Soviet scorched earth tactics decision now has a tooltip showing the effect
- moved check for low popular support in PRC tree to a scripted trigger to make bypass tooltips more appealing
- Scorched Earth decisions are now hidden if they would have no effect
- When choosing divisions to use as volunteers, the interface should now keep selection when game is running. Would previously deselect all, as the interface was refreshed.
- Tooltip for creating ocuntry leaders with traits look similar to how traits are displayed in the country view.
- Added timer icon showing that low efficiency can be due to air wings recently arriving in a region.
- Added an explanatory tooltip to Manchukuo seize arms decisions.
- "Field marshal traits now go red if assigned to command an army. Added tooltip that explains it when the trait is hovered.
- Added an advisor tooltip to "The Unthinkable" option.
- Fixed some trait squeezing problems in combat log screen when there are too many traits.
- Added order highlighting when mouse hovers over army shields in theater or plan execute/stop buttons


##################################
# Modding
##################################
- Removed duplicate static_modifiers script. the ones in modifiers folder is what we use now
- transfer_navy and transfer_ship effects can now use scope targets for their target (e.g target = FROM)
- Mods marked as dependencies are now loaded in the correct order
- Added on daily action (use cautiously!)
- Added validation of equipment bonus when ideas are loaded.
- Added cancel_if_not_visible parameter to decisions. Cancels a decision if it's visible trigger is false.
- Generating the exact same type of wargoal against the same country now ignores the effect.
- Enabled equipment bonus validation for modders
- Added define to tweak color of invalid trait "TRAIT_INVALID_FOR_ASSIGNMENT_COLOR".
- Added modifiers static_anti_air_damage_factor and static_anti_air_hit_chance_factor.
- Now it is possible to create your own interfaces with mods. Windows, buttons, textfields, and it's actions can now be scripted.
- Value triggers are now accessible as dynamic variables.


##################################
# Database
##################################
- Updated game credits.
- "Danzig or War" now gives core in Danzig.
- "Reassert Eastern Claims" now gives core on Memel.
- Sun Tzu Reborn achievement is now possible to achieve (requires level 9 Field Marshal).
- Communist Byzantium now has the correct flag.
- "Expand the Imperial Guards"-spawned troops for MAN are no longer locked
- Industrial Land Appropriation no longer repeatable for the same state.
- Fixed date requirements for AI values for Ichi Go and Test the Soviets decisions (AI was not prevented from taking these before certain dates).
- Reworked Anschluss bypass conditions.
- Fixed correct state for "Ostwall" forts.
- Fixed art for Japanese Last Stand command power ability.
- "Support the Anti-Fascist War" and "Guns for the Anti-Fascist War" decisions are now targeted decisions.
- Adjusted Polish and German provinces and states to make historical German WW1 borders possible, as well as adding Oder-Neisse line.
- Adjusted Vojvodina and Serbia states to make Austro-Hungarian borders more historical.
- Renamed "Alsace" to "Alsace-Lorraine", and "Lorraine" to "Franche-Comte"
- Added 1x BB tech bonus to French focus "Capital Ship Focus" to bring it in line with "Carrier Focus".
- ai strategy databases are reloadable now
- enabled Japanese equipment names for Manchukuo
- fixed a few naming issues in German name list
- A nationalist China losing a power struggle will now get a cosmetic tag to distinguish it from new nationalist China. If a warlord who has previously taken over nationalists loses a power struggle, they will lose their cosmetic tag. This should fix the 3 China issue.
- changed flavor name of a Manchukuo rifle after two hour discussion of Manchurian small arms development
- added Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck as a general to Imperial Germany
- Updated 'The People Have Stood Up' achievement to better fit description in steam.
- Updated 'My Ships Don't Lie' achievement to fit description in steam.
- Fixed a duplicate name of a German destroyer
- Fixed a few naming inconsitencies in French Division Namelists and Added new Namelist for late-war French Armored Divisions
- Elsass-Lothringen and victory points now renamed back to their French counterparts of France wins the war and retakes it.
- Several text translations has been added and improved.
- Fixed some inconsistencies in name lists for French-speaking countries.
- Renamed Communist Roman Empire to Communitas Proletariique Romani.
- Removed Zhang Lan as Nationalist Chinese Democratic leader due to previous communist committments (replaced with Weng Wenhao)
- Soviet volunteer group and flying tiger focuses now bypass if someone else has already completed that focus to avoid doubles.


##################################
# Balance
##################################
- Whampoa College National Focus now also adds 1 planning point to existing leaders as well as new ones
- Starting land doctrine techs now have normal tech base costs (so now at 50% of before)
- Slightly rebalanced chance of French intervention resulting from Return of the Kaiser.
- Production bonus can go negative now and slow down your equipment production
- Generals gains less XP as combats drag on (down to 10% in a month)
- Generals gains more XP if they are dealing more damage compared to enemies (up to 4x while you are doing 4x damage compared to enemy)
- added an option to Chinese provocation event that allows Japan to withdraw from the continent
- Winter War peace treaty no longer hands over Petsamo (SOV will have to get that the hard way)
- Neutral ideology is now allowed for puppets.
- Halved the extra wounding chance on the reckless trait
- Cautious trait now reduces chance to get wounded (making it the polar opposite of reckless).
- Changed mobilization impact from positive war support to 30 % (up from 3%)
- japanese ideology advisors are now only locked behind focuses for Waking the Tiger DLC owners
- Reworked the Assertiveness Branch of the Manchukuo Tree:
- added a decision unlocked from taking control of the railroads that gives 4 CIV factories over the course of a year
- removed factories from legislative council, purge general affairs and control the railroads
- purge the general affairs council now removes Kwantung veto
- bolster nationalism now allows recruiting bandits. if bandits are still active in the country, taking these decisions removes the spirit
- added a decision to local arms procurement that adds an idea giving dramatically reduced cost for small arms at the cost of reduced reliability
- removed autonomy gain from Assertiveness focus (made no sense)
- added a decision to five people armies allowing the raising (and disbanding) of Manchu Banners, represented by 5 large infantry divisions
- added a decision to the purge general affairs council allowing player to pay command power to seize Japanese army depots in the case of war, giving increasingly large injections of equipment into stockpile and corresponding attack and defense penalties to Japan for a limited time
- reduced the impact of bolster nationalism spirit
- "Changed Command Power cost for Communist China's Infiltration decisions (-0.01 => -0.2) and the Nationalist/Japanese counter (-0.05 => -0.1).
- Increased command power cost (-0.02 => -0.2) for gaining army support in preparation for a civil war. Old values were not rebalanced properly after major system rework."
- Added surrender limit penalty when at low war support. Scales from 0 to -30%.
- Reduced air superiority stat of strategic bombers.(1 => 0.01)
- Increased heavy fighters air superiority (1 => 1.25), so they are better at something that isn't shooting bombers...
- Lowered impact on speed due to enemy air superiority (-0.5 => -0.3).
- Lowered impact on defense due to enemy air superiority (-0.5 => -0.35).
- Changed cap of "Air support" modifier from CAS assisting land unit in combat from 21% to 35%.
- Division anti air reduces damage to the division caused by close air support attacks, in proportion to the AA's ability to shoot down planes.
- Corrected AA damage reduction tooltip to show numbers in red.
- Reduced factory output penalty from long march spirit for PRC (now -15%/-5%, down from -25%/-10%).
- Changed penalty from Chinese idea Illegal Regime (-0.35 => -0.2)
- Last 3 radar techs now increase aim of static AA guns by 20% each.
- Each intermediary AA tech now adds 8% damage reduction from enemy bombers.
- Each AA equipment unlock now increases static AA damage output by 10%.
- Air bases now take 50% less damage from bombing.
- Reduced negative production modifier for Canada and Australia's version of the great depression (for TfV owners).
- The German War Economy Focus now requires 50% war support.
- MEFO bills base cost reduced by 0.05 PP, added -5% Consumer Goods, and increased build speed bonuses to 25%.
- Rebalanced Nationalist Chinese Focuses: Welfare Focuses now give 10 War Support (up from 5), Democracy Focuses that gave stability or War Support have been increased to give 10 instead of 5, added a military factory each to expanding the Taiyuan and Hanyan Arsenals.
- Balanced temperatures for commando trait to < -15 or > 27.
- Chinese Scorched Earth Tactics and Industrial Evacuation Focuses reduced to 35 days.
- Made MEFO PP cost now be substracted -after- modifiers to PP are applied, resulting in a more logical tooltip, and a net PP increase for the player compared to how it was before.


##################################
# Bugfix
##################################
- Improved Spanish translations.
- Took map wrap-around line in the Pacific into account when computing a state's center point, correcting East Siberia's center from its previous position in the Norwegian Sea.
- Stopped the Focus.IgnorePrerequisites cheat from being used in an ironman game by first turning it on in a normal game.
- Prevented various exploit methods which could pull divisions out of naval transfer convoy combat by cancelling or changing division orders.
- Fixed incorrect default of convoy efficiency when writing persistent data, which had a small chance of causing out-of-syncs.
- Fixed daily change in party popularity being inaccurate.
- Changing of ruling party to unaligned now cancel all boost party popularity
- Naval combat report will now only appear if any damage has been dealt
- Fixed naval combat report not mentioning some losses when merging with older ones in the same province
- Fixed planes shot by carrier fighters not showing in the strategic air view.
- Fixed port strikes with no participating planes
- Fixed planes shot by carrier fighters not showing in the strategic air view.
- Air permission can no longer be obtained from both side of a war and observe similar restrictions as land volunteer.
- Added nb used convoys and nb free convoys to the checksum for OOS detection
- German historical DLC now properly enabled all picture replacements for events
- Fixed a loading order issue that could mess up some triggers for ideas on starting the game
- Japanese surrender events for MAN/CHI no longer incorrectly mentions transferring Korea to MAN/CHI control.
- Return of the Kaiser event when rescuing him through war now triggers upon control of Holland state; previously triggered from capitulation which could bug out if Holland was not in a faction when it surrendered.
- MEFO bills are no longer removed if Anschluss is rushed before the bills are extended a second time.
- Drastically increased the WT generation required for UK to want to kick Imperial Germany out of its faction when having taken the "Alliance with the Shade" focus. Germany now needs to have created 81% more WT than the faction average, up from 34%.
- "Support Anti-Fascist War" decision for USA now correctly removes off-map factories again after the duration ends.
- Fixed some possible problems with text save games while writing arrays
- Fixed a crash after user directory is cleared using the launcher while there are enabled mods in it
- Fixed research all cheat not working for some of the researches
- Fixed a bunch of typos
- Added localization for 'send attaché' action in diplomacy tab/country list screen
- Fixed UI scale glitches with equipment stockpile line graphs
- added a bypass for Build up manchurian army focus in japanese focus tree
- added a bypass for Communist Chinese focus if low_popular support spirit is not present
- fixed critical spelling error in bombing damage modifier tooltip
- fix for unlocalised bypass requirement in Soviet Advisers focus
- the opinion bonus from Italian befriend Japan focus is now correctly applied to Japan
- integrate the warlord army decision now transfers any generals and only creates leaders if the target has not taken personal leadership focus
- Fixed general selection menu stating that Field Marshal can "command 5 armies" when it should be "24 division".
- Fixed tooltip for how many divisions a corps commander can control showing up when trying to assign a Field Marshal.
- Fixed invalid equipment bonus for PRC_peoples_war, PRC_maoism, CZE_naval_focus and bofors.
- Ichi go spirit targeted modifier now works against all the Chinese nations.
- Added attache relation gfx for diplomacy view
- Command power cost on abilities now displays 2 decimals.
- Fixed tooltip for integrate warlord decisions using a flag with wrong localisation.
- Fixed integrate warlord decisions effect running immediately instead of after 90days.
- Re-added localisation for custom tooltips in Chinese Industry Relocation decisions.
- Removed auto call for faction members when a country is the target of war declaration.
- Navies on convoy escort missions now try to help allies if there are no friendly convoys to help.
- Fixed 'org loss while moving' leader modifier not being applied
- Volunteers sent to a countries which became enemies, will now be sent back home (so your divisions don't fight on both sides of the conflict).
- Fixed yet another grammatical issue in texts about the attaches.
- XP is now awarded in the case of unit being destroyed with nowhere to run and for overruns it is awarded to units both in current and in destination province if enemies.
- Fixed bug where a cavalry 3d models didn't get a proper winter camo
- Fixed volunteers not properly being sent back to their rightful owner.
- Corrected British division namelist to use brackets instead of apostrophes.
- Changed scavenger trait to additive modifier
- Fixed a broken bypass in Japanese Liberate Manchuria focus.
- Changed completion trigger for 'Fuhrer directive 21' mission to include allies controlling the required states.
- Added scripted trigger for a state being controlled by ROOT country or an ally to them.
- Fixed Austria-Hungary being formed multiple times as a result of ""Rekindle Imperial Sentiment"" focus.
- Fixed Austria-Hungary news event referring to ""Austria-Hungary taking the lead"". Now correctly refers to country's old tag.
- Re-Forming Austria_Hungary now flips government to Unaligned and makes Otto von Habsburg country leader.
- Hungary can now choose ""Tade Deal with Germany"" focus with non-Fascist Germany.
- ""Break the Anglo-French Colonial Hegemony"" focus now also correctly gives claims on Palau, Papua, and Samoa.
- ""Reinstate Imperial Possessions"" and ""Reintegrate Luxemburg and Alsace-Lorraine"" focuses are now also available if France is puppeted or if Germany owns Alsace-Lorraine.
- ""Reinstate Imperial Possessions"" and ""Reintegrate Luxemburg and Alsace-Lorraine"" focuses now rename Alsace-Lorraine to Elsass-Lothringen, Strasbourg to Strassburg, and Mulhouse to Mulhausen.
- Greater Hungary can no longer be formed if Austria-Hungary was formed via the ""Rekindle Imperial Sentiment""-spawned decision.
- Fixed panzer_leader trait not gaining xp if a non-armor unit was participating in the combat. Now it gains xp if more than 40% of the army under the leader control's is armored at the time of the combat.
- Reworked the AI's pathfinding algorithms, so it should now take more reasonable routes, when it comes to combinations of land and naval transportations.
- The battle plan window is now hidden in naval and air map mode.
- Fixed drag and drop causing 'new army' portrait to ignore clicks
- Added temporary penalty for assigning airplanes to a new region or receiving reinforcements.
- It's no longer possible to capture naval/air equipment when it gets destroyed in land combat.
- More fixes in the texts translations.
- Fixed a wrong tooltip in Manchukuo Five People Armies focus.
- Fixed two wrong cavalry division names in British name lists.
- "Danzig for Guarantees" now renames Poznan to Posen, if accepted.
- Added bypasses for "Align Hungary" and "Align Romania" focuses, if they are in Germany's faction.
- "Reinstate Imperial Possessions" and "Reintegrate Luxemburg and Alsace-Lorraine" now also transfer Alsace-Lorraine to Germany.
- Nuking now uses the highest VP in the state when calculating war support penalty instead of specific province nuked. Multiplier from infrastructure is now calculated before they are destroyed.
- Drawing defensive orders now takes army groups into account when counting divisions, so it displays the correct number of divisions that will be assigned.
- Fixed tooltip of panzer_leader trait for the xp gain.
- Fixed cancel_trigger for timed decisions not removing, but instead executing remove_effect if the mission was completed.
- Fixed guaranteeing nations not being auto-called into war when neither the guaranteeing country nor the attacking country are in factions.
- Yalta Conference event now should allocate correct states to DDR and Poland.
- MEFO bills now gives a 20% construction speed bonus to military factories, dockyards, forts and coastal forts, air and naval bases, AA buildings, and Radar stations, instead of -20% consumer goods.
- MEFO bills now renew every 180 days instead of every 90 days.
- MEFO bills - Slightly increased the base political power cost and the political power cost ramp-up.
- Unaligned Germany now loses MEFO bills when the German civil war begins (but is not required to pay for them). MEFO bills and mission are now transferred to the Nazi side of the civil war.
- Unaligned/Democratic Germany now gets a temporary "Rebuild the Nation" National Spirit that gives -20% consumer goods bonus for 365 days, when completing the "Rebuild the Nation" national focus.
- "Rebuild the Nation" national focus now takes 70 days to complete, up from 35 days.
- Previous "Rebuild the Nation" national spirit has now been renamed to "National Revitalization".
- Fix issue where scripted events that try to add countries to a civil war were silently doing nothing if world tension is too low. The world tension check should not automatically apply to scripted events; the country should just be directly added to the war, which is now once again the case.
- Fixed nuke events referencing the wrong states/leaders.
- Fixed a spelling error in a tooltip for Attaches.
- Fixed navy leaders not gaining xp.
- Fixed a news event referencing a Hungarian king that didn't necessarily exist.
- Added an appropriate Apostrophe to King's Own Cavalry division.
- Warlords that have inherited the Incompetent Officer national spirit from Nationalist China can now take the decision to get rid of it.
- The Japanese kodoha national focus path will now only invite Japan to the axis once.
- Countries on the winning side of a war but occupied by a different faction can no longer be marked as untouched, allowing them to be annexed or puppeted by the occupiers even if the actual enemies never did any damage to them.
- Unit leaders go into cooldown when you disband the army now.
- Capped minimum supply consumption to 0.05, so it's no longer possible to get it negative and suffer huge penalties.
- Forced countries entering into a dependency relation to cancel any war relation they have between them.
- Fixed the Call Ally diplomatic action to have the recipient join the correct war.
- Clarified Treaty with USSR" requiring "Anti-Soviet Pact" to not have been taken.
- Army group orders now does not mention number of unit information in them.
- Made the call ally tooltip properly indicate when a civil war is not joinable by an ally due to low world tension, just as it already does for the other country if they want to initiate a join war action.
- Call to war and join war actions in the diplomacy screen no longer show every individual war relation in the list of wars, but just the primary one.
- Allowed a country to be invited into peace conferences even if some of their faction allies are at war with the winners of the war, as long as the country being invited is at peace with all the winners and at war with the losers.
- Fixed a bug that caused a navy leaders not gaining experience.
- Fixed killing encircled units not giving intended amount of flat experience gain.
- 3d model viewer > Camera moves a bit towards up when you zoom into the model.
- 3d model viewer > multiple technology views being open at the same time, are no longer showing the same model.
- 3d model viewer > Fixed unit models shown on map, not being updated for allies when you select a custom model
- 3d model viewer > Several other improvements.
- 3d model viewer > Reduced min zoom levels for 3d model viewer.
- 3d model viewer > Non infantry equipments does not use fallback infantry models in tech window anymore.
- Fixed drag and drop for armies in the same army group.
- Fixed bug in a war relations being broken after loading a save.
- Fixed war members calculation that incorrectly excluded friends in a war due to not being in the main faction, which could incorrectly lead to premature capitulations.
- Fixed Dispersed Industry IV translation.


##################################
# Stability & Performance
##################################
- Fixed small memory leak.
- Fixed uninitialized variable in graphical settings, which in theory could cause an undefined game behaviour.
- Fixed CTD when loading a savegames which was related to the air wings.
- Fixed OOS caused by "local resistance" data not being properly cleared.
- Improved initial loading time a bit. The naval distance calculations are much faster, and is done only once (or whenever a game changes has been detected that could affect the naval distance calcluations). At every next game start, the loading process skips the naval distance calculations by just loading the cached data.
- Fixed peace conference behavior and crash in the case that one or more of the winners have been occupied by a different winning faction.
- Fixed SS recruitment crashing the game under very specific circumstances.
- Fixed CTD when asking a lend lease to some AI countries within the first day of the game.
- Puppets surrender with their overlords and any other majors even if they have been in the war for fewer days than normally required to surrender. This fixes a crash elsewhere when transferring the puppet in a peace conference.
- Attempt to gracefully skip over opponents who are no longer at war with each other when cleaning up war relations at the conclusion of a peace conference. This avoids crashes when multiple peace conferences get initiated and completed simultaneously, especially due to scripted white peace events.
- Ensured all buildings in the newly-changed Polish and German states are present in those states, to avoid crashes.
- Fixed CTD on create_unit effect with invalid template name. Now shows an error instead.
- Mod files created through the launcher tool, are now UTF8-BOM to avoid errors when using the file later.
If you want to read more see the last couple of diaries for highlights

What are we doing now
We are now beginning work on the next expansion and the next big update 1.6 'Ironclad'. Its too early to share any details or hints what they will be about tho so go mad with speculation based on the name (madagascar focus tree? wut!? o_O... well out patch names seldom tell you much). Below is an update on our long term roadmap though which might give some ideas. or not.

The five year plan
As I said last time we did this, its not actually a five year plan, but I want to share with you some form of roadmap on what to expect in the future as well as follow up what we have been up to. The list below was posted when we started on Waking the Tiger and 1.5, so stuff that is crossed off we now consider handled.

Just to be super clear, this is not any form of exhaustive or final list and unless we have already done it we can't promise anythings. Priorities change etc. The point of this is to give you an idea of things we would like to do. The order of things is also not in any kind of priority order, or order we would do them.

• Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc.
• A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals
• Every starting nation has a custom portrait for historical leaders
• A way for players to take dynamic decisions, quickly. Something that fits between events and national focuses.
• Changing National Unity to something that matters during most of the game rather than when you are losing only
• Rework how wars work with respect to merging etc as its a big source of problems
• Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff
• Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure
• More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour
• A logistics system with more actual player involvement (now you only care once stuff has gone very badly)
• Improved naval combat interfaces with good transparency to underlying mechanics (give it the 1.4 air treatment)
• Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare
• Long term goals and strategies to guide ai rather than random vs historical focus lists, visible to players
• Spies and espionage
• Improving peace conferences
• Update core national focus trees with alt-history paths and more options (Germany, Italy, USA, United Kingdom, Soviet, France, Japan, Poland)
• Wunderwaffen projects
• Properly represent fuel in some way in the game
• More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms
• More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China, South America, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Greece)
• An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.
• Make defensive warfare more fun
• Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc
• Have doctrines more strongly affect division designing to get away from cookie cutter solutions and too ahistorical gamey setups

Also some new ones since last time:

• More player control over rules. HOI is played in many different ways and say competitive MP and single player rulesets often clash
• More usage of drag and drop and QoL like this. For example controlling template lists.
• A more robust and expansive mapmode system. Having a player mapmode in MP would be helpful etc

You'll notice that some of these are small and some of them are huge. I can't really talk too much details about this stuff though. That is stuff we will do once/if it makes it to dev diaries with feature highlights and has been implemented.

 

[fantadomat]

Are any of the interesting mods up to date? Mainly the kaiserreich and the one about the great war.

 

[Space Satan]

Seems like next patch will ne a naval patch

 

[Raghar]

Seems like next patch will ne a naval patch

• Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc.

• A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals

• Every starting nation has a custom portrait for historical leaders

• A way for players to take dynamic decisions, quickly. Something that fits between events and national focuses.

• Changing National Unity to something that matters during most of the game rather than when you are losing only

• Rework how wars work with respect to merging etc as its a big source of problems

• Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff

• Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure

• More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour

• A logistics system with more actual player involvement (now you only care once stuff has gone very badly)

• Improved naval combat interfaces with good transparency to underlying mechanics (give it the 1.4 air treatment)

• Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare

• Long term goals and strategies to guide ai rather than random vs historical focus lists, visible to players

• Spies and espionage

• Improving peace conferences

• Update core national focus trees with alt-history paths and more options (Germany, Italy, USA, United Kingdom, Soviet, France, Japan, Poland)

• Wunderwaffen projects

• Properly represent fuel in some way in the game

• More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms

• More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China, South America, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Greece)

• An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.

• Make defensive warfare more fun

• Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc

• Have doctrines more strongly affect division designing to get away from cookie cutter solutions and too ahistorical gamey setups

So in about two years when it would be released as freeware it would be decent game... BTW HoI2 works on current W10.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Kaiserreich has a new version up.

 

[Space Satan]

Battleships are the new meta

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

They were always meta though. The shore bombardment buff alone is fucking huge. It's just that they are not a good long term investment, because late game the AI has tier-3 naval bombers in every possible area and the surface ships are getting wrecked.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I would argue that the naval meta was and still is heavy fighters and fighters. Everything else builds on air superiority in area of operations.

 

[Average Manatee]

Battleships were always the meta along with super battleships. I've killed 60 ships with no losses in a single battle once.



TL;DR Armor reduces damage enough that they'll almost always escape from battle before being destroyed unless the enemy is full Battleships and/or Carriers themselves, and their massive concentration of firepower means enemy ships get BTFO instantly before having a chance to bug out. Having all the same ship type is best since they'll stay together and absorb damage together, which then makes them even more survivable.

It's actually better than the video depicts since you'll quickly attain maximum XP on your ships and way better admirals which means they rape everything (admirals boost hit chance which is essentially the only "weakness" of battleships). Basically the only way to fuck up with pure battleships is if you go AFK and get bombed to shit over a few months without autorepair on.

Carriers still generally beat land-based planes since land-based planes are arbitrarily limited to only helping once per battle where Carriers can run dozens of missions. Even Carriers loaded with pure fighters will outdamage naval bombers.

 

[Raghar]

Battleships are the new meta

Just to explain what happened there:

This plane shot down 21 fighters with it's rearward facing gun, damaged Hood, destroyed US carrier, and then shot slow ass Devastators A3 with its forward facing anti-tank cannons. Which destroyed all enemy carrier air wing, and allowed these three highly advanced battleships to enter firing range, dispose of damaged Hood, which got one shot back, and obliterated second battlecruiser and enemy battleship along with three Heavy Cruisers, and destroyers at the cost of one lost battleship. Then they closed on three UK carriers and blew them out of water.

If UK carriers lost air wings because of land based planes during previous combat operations, and these CAS caught US carrier by surprise, while land based fighters provided cover and cued them to location of carrier group, it's quite realistic.

 

[Raghar]

BTW, this is interesting. Why nuke Romania?

Edit:

Situation had development.

ComChi are inocent. At least with that declaration of war on Belgium.