Today's Development Diary by Podcat

Hi everyone! Next to last dev diary before christmas, and today we are going to talk about intel. We have been talking about ways to get intel a bit in previous diaries, like code cracking, scout planes and spies but not really talked about the system as a whole. So lets get to it!

Before intel was based essentially on comparing two nations crypto tech levels and it was a flat value covering everything. To make this more interesting we are splitting it into 4 separate values: Civilian/Industry Intel, Army Intel, Navy Intel, Air Intel. These affect what you can see in our new intel ledger, that replaces the little intel bit in the diplomacy interface from before for people with La Resistance:



Each of the tabs cover each type of intel (here we have civilian/industry selected), and they also come with mapmode information. As an example in the one above we aggregate building values as you zoom out (if you zoom in you see the same by state). This can help you when figuring out where to bomb or where and what kind of sabotage can be most effective.

The more intel you have the more information is displayed, we break down the levels in a tooltip per category:



So right now I can see how many army techs have been researched, but not specifically which. That requires 70% but then you can look at their tech tree. If I had 5% more I could see roughly how many of each division template the other nation had. At the moment I can only see that they exist but no real info about what they contain.

The army intel tab also lets you get a breakdown of the enemy stockpile of equipment.

Naval and air are similar:





Naval intel mapmode is quite powerful and at high intel levels will let you see where the enemy is placing certain missions



Intel can come from many different sources, for example:
- Spy networks
- Infiltrated spy assets
- Captured enemy spies
- Radar
- Broken Ciphers
- Scout planes
- Fighting the enemy in land combat
- Fighting the enemy in air combat
- Fighting the enemy in naval combat
And probably some I forgot.

Each source has a max it can contribute and may affect different intel values in different ways. For example if you have a spy network over the enemies coast, or scout naval areas with traffic you will get more naval intel. Each source also decays over time so its important to actively do things to keep your intel levels current and make sure you combine many sources to get as much intel as possible.

Here I have multiple sources:



Do note that the biggest chunk here is me doing some quick events with rewards of intel to cheat my way to quick screenshots ;). Also note that simply being democratic and having open trade laws make hiding the civilian part of your intel hard.

Knowing what kind of build strategy, templates, tech and stockpile an enemy has can be very useful allowing you to counter and attack them in the best way possible, but there is also direct advantage from relative intel which replaces the crypto level comparison from before.



See you next week for more cool stuff, and don't forget to tune into twitch at 16:00CET where we will be showing of France for the first time (aka watch Daniel accidentally leak stuff).

Make sure you tune in to our second preview stream for La Resistance, which will be focusing on the rework of France's National Focus Tree.

Live at 16:00 CET here: https://twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

Today's Development Diary by Podcat

Hi everyone! Today we are going to start talking about changes to Intel and present some of the tools you will have at your disposal for gaining it in La Résistance. We will also go back to the Agency and talk about code cracking.

Scout Planes
Scout planes is a great way of gaining intel on your enemies. This is a new plane type that comes in two tech levels



These new planes are not capable of fighting or giving air superiority, but they have a new mission “Air Recon” which can also be performed in peace time. This mission will give you intel on nations under its area of operation, or their navy if covering trafficked naval regions. It also does spotting of ships and divisions so its a great way to figure out what the enemy is up to.



Other planes types can not do the air recon mission, although in war time other planes will be gaining you intel as well during regular operations.

Code Cracking

One of the things in WW2 that has always fascinated me was the allied efforts to break the axis codes, particularly the work done at Bletchley Park. When reading about this work you usually are told about the tough choices that had to be made, because after the enigma codes had been cracked and german messages could be read the allies were forced to only use this knowledge in limited ways. If they had not it would have tipped off the Germans that they knew and made the whole thing moot. Basically, to save the punch for when it was most needed. This is something I wanted to make sure that we captured when we started designing the new code cracking system.

To interact with code cracking etc you need to form a new department in your Agency. Under it are upgrades both for creating and breaking enemy ciphers.



The higher your decryption power the faster you can break enemy codes and the higher your crypto strength the tougher you in turn are to break.



In the above screenshot I have cracked Germany's current cipher. If they end up upgradign to a higher level I would lose some progress and have to continue the work. The 25 shown is your total decryption power and will be shared among all active projects. Right now Denmark is the only active one so gets the full attention and fastest possible code breaking.

Having a cracked code gives you some passive bonuses that are not possible for the enemy to see and confirm, such as air interception. To take full advantage you will need to commit and fully activate. Doing that gives you 30 days of full intel on the enemy as well as an assortment of other bonuses.



A perfect time to use it when launching naval invasions or starting fighting somewhere because when activated the enemy will know and ciphers will reset within 30 days. After this time you will need to crack their code again,, which probably will have had its strength upgraded.

Outside of just having a bunch of mathematicians working day and night on breaking the enemy codes you can also help them out though clandestine operations



This diary showed you more ways of gaining intel, next week we will be getting into the details about the intel changes. See you then!

At long last we're back with streams! Every Wednesday at 16:00CET we'll showcase our upcoming expansion: La Résistance for you.



Tune in to twitch, or you can watch it later on our Grand Strategy Youtube Channel!

Today's Development Diary By Podcat



Hi guys! Today we are going to be talking about collaboration, compliance and also coups as we missed covering them in last weeks dev diary about operations.

Coups

Lets start off with coups. These are now an operation and needs to be set up by your agents.



Its possible to say where you want the coup to originate, which adds some nice strategic power to it (such as targeting colonial areas that are harder to recover etc).

There are several ways to make a coup more successful, and in reverse protect yourself. A coup needs low stability, political support for the couping ideology and agents need to have prepared a network, infiltrated the government and built up the coup. So as an attacker you will want to mess with these things in advance (say by using spy missions and operations). And of course as the target, you want to keep these values up to stay safe, as well as making sure your nation counterespionage is up to the task.

We have also changed the behaviour of the resulting wars a bit so when a side wins against the other planes and ships will switch hands instead of being lost. This could often be a reason to launch small coups with no hope just to mess with the enemies navies.


Collaboration

Collaborators work similar, but opposite to Governments in Exile. They are created by an operation where agents are sent in to convert and/or support local collaborators.



This is an operation you can run more than once (although cost and time goes up every time), and for each one you will strengthen the collaborators. Foreign Collaboration governments are tracked (much like GiE) from your country screen.



The higher the value of collaborators present the easier it will be to make the nation capitulate which can be important in cases where you need to move in fast. You also unlocks levels of compliance in the new resistance and compliance system which will be transferred to regular compliance once the target nation is capitulated. This can be useful for giving you a head start on managing a lot of occupied areas by laying some groundwork before you even attack.



Speaking of compliance, we never really went into detail on how that worked before, so lets take a look now. If you need to read up on the changes coming to the resistance system as a whole though check out the dev diary here.

There are several levels of compliance "unlocks". These happen on a national level for the occupied nation.


The first unlock is “Informants.” Secret police working in the province have established a network of snitches and collaborators. This gives an increase to defense against enemy operatives in the occupied nation. The next unlock is “Local Police Force.” At this level, enough locals have been trained and are loyal enough to police their country for the occupiers. As a result, local garrison needs are now reduced. The third unlock is “Reorganized Workforce.” At this point, Life is returning to some level of normalcy and people are able to go about their daily lives and perform their normal jobs. This compliance unlock adds access to another 10% of factories and resources across the occupied nation. “Volunteer Program” is the fourth compliance unlock. This represents locals volunteering to serve in their occupier’s military and adds 10% of the population as fit for service.

The final unlock is “A New Regime”. At this highest level it is possible to create a new subject type “Collaboration Government” directly. This frees you up from policing it and ensures that it sticks to you in any peace deal you win. Getting high compliance can be a lot of effort in war time and it can be a very good idea to make sure you have collaborators in place before invasions.



Collaboration governments will mirror your map color as well to show how closely aligned they are.



See you all next week when we will look at some intel gathering tools…

Today's Development Diary by Podcat



Welcome to another dev diary for La Resistance. Today we are back talking espionage, namely Operations. These are like big impact missions that may require multiple agents as well as resources and preparation time. I also have some other stuff to cover.

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Update on the new launcher
As some of you may have noticed the launcher release got a big bumpier than we had liked. While we had fixed several issues since the stellaris launcher it seemed that HOI4 had a share of unique issues also :/ I’ve looked at telemetry and it seems like mod use is mostly back to pre-launcher-release so it seems most players are back on board with mods, but there are still reports of issues. We released a 1.8.1 hotfix for some issues at the end of last week and we are working on a few things on the game side since. I have been chatting with the team working on the launcher and they will have a launcher bugfix patch out next week (the new launcher updates without us having to update the game or bump version number). While they are mainly looking at bugs at the moment, they are also working on some UI improvements for mod navigation that should be ready during next month.

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Operations
Operations all require at least one agent to perform, and some require more than one (in fact some powerful ones require more than you might have as a non-spymaster, making their access more limited). They also all need some level of network to have been built up in preparation.



Operations all need preparation before they can be launched. This is usually produced equipment, agents or a cost in industry over time. We use this last one as an abstract representation of funneling economy into bribes, making or creating counterfeit cash etc where military equipment makes no sense.


In this example we are using the local resistance to saboutage resource extraction and we need to supply the operation with 250 support equipment
You can here also set the operation to just launch when ready if you do not care about timing, or if you want it to keep repeating.

Once preparation is done an operation can have multiple phases. The most common is 3 - Infiltration, performing the job and exfiltration. We have a pretty cool system for this where phases can be mixed and matched and have different costs associated with them. For example if your operatives need to paradrop into location at night it may require transport planes, but if its a neutral border perhaps only some economic bribing is needed to slip in. Operations can take quite a while to perform and will lock up your operatives during this. Operatives can also have traits that affect both chance of better outcomes as well as making them cheaper/faster.
The more times you perform an operation against a target the more difficult it gets. This kind of auto balancing simulates that the enemy will plug holes in their security based on how you have previously broken through.

There are two main types of operations: Gatekeeper ones that give you infiltrated assets, which in turn allow you access to other, more powerful operations.


Infiltration
These are all gatekeeper operations with added benefits.


(note that this resistance contact ones lets you specify a target state. Some operations target nations, some take states and others strategic regions)

Infiltrate Army - Gets you an asset inside the enemy armed forces. Gets you more info on their armies, techs etc.

Infiltrate Air Force - Gets you an asset inside the enemy air force. Gets you extra intel on their air forces, air techs etc.

Infiltrate Civilian Government - Gets you an asset in the enemies government. Gives more intel on their production, buildings etc.

Make Resistance Contacts - Get a local contact in the underground resistance. This helps boost resistance growth.



Other operations
Several of these require some form of infiltration to be in place first. Often they will need resistance networks, a certain amount network cover and other limiters also.

Steal Blueprints - Depending on the outcome and what kind of infiltration you have done you can get research speed bonuses, ahead of time or full unlocks of technologies.

Targeted Sabotage - Use your contacts in local resistance and strengthen and focus sabotage in an area

Boost Resistance - Strengthen the local resistance

Capture Ciphers - The old “steal the enigma” trick ;) Capture clues to the enemies cryptos and gain progress on cracking them. Requires that you have a crypto department.

Coordinated Strike - Allow setting up air strikes and launching a surprise attack. This will let us simulate things like Pearl Harbor and the devastation that the germans wrought on soviet air forces on the start of Barbarossa. Your agents prepare an area that will see a strong intial strike. You need to set up your air force missions before and when the operation triggers the strike will happen (and war declared if you are a nation allowed to do this). It works for port strikes and strategic bombing.

Plant False Intel - This lets you create “fake troops” to trick the enemy. These troops will look like regular divisions to the enemy, although they will disappear into thin air if the enemy gains full intel or end up in combat with them. They don’t consume supplies and are not able to capture territory. Fake troops work an all of your non-allies, but a nation needs to be picked where to seed the false information. Bonus point if you do this and put Patton in charge of them ;)



Rescue captured operative - Its bound to happen that one of your Operatives get captured while out on mission. If this happens they will be leaking intel to the enemy, but you will have the option to mount a rescue operation and get them out to safety.

There are also some things we will wait until next week to reveal...

Historical operations
We also wanted to give you the opportunity to recreate some of the more famous operations in the war. While the generic operations already cover a lot of work done by, for example, allied agents working with the resistance in France and Yugoslavia, there were a few very famous ones that didn’t really fit. Most of these are less inspirations for spy movies and more about Daring Commando Raids (™).

For example, if Germany occupies the Telemark region in Norway, they can now take a decision to begin heavy water production. The decision runs for a fairly long time, and if it completes, the Germans get a bonus to nuclear research. Historically the heavy water was fairly useless for actually building a reactor or even a nuclear bomb, but we decided that if the Germans managed to get it, they would realize that and end up pursuing a better approach.



However, any country with an intelligence agency in a war with Germany can try to sabotage the production plant if there is a certain level of resistance in Telemark. This is to allow the German player to successfully defend by keeping resistance low in the area. Historically, the British had to execute several operations to deny the Germans the heavy water. The most successful was Operation Gunnerside, which completely demolished the plant through the use of explosives planted by a small Commando unit, and which now serves as the basis for our Historical Operation.

There are a handful of other historically-inspired operations, including the German raids to capture or kill Tito and to liberate Mussolini.

Hotfix has arrived. 1.8.1 "Fork" is now live and downloadable through Steam. Checksum is aa59.

This hotfix consists of a couple quick display setting fixes and a fix for the Paradox Account login popup that should not have appeared when using the Steam matchmaking service.

Simultaneously but separately, the launcher team is working on the feedback received regarding various launcher behavior itself. And we will continue to investigate the critical issues that have been reported but not addressed in this hotfix.

Please make sure to disable any outdated mods in case you have problems running the game!

1.8.0 "Fork" is now live and downloadable through Steam. The last four digits of the checksum are 3241 (the new launcher displays a much longer full checksum; the in-game version will still show just the four digits).

Since 1.8.0 does not contain any major game mechanic changes, it should be save game compatible with 1.7.1. But if you for some reason want to remain on 1.7.1 or older,here are instructions for reverting to patches since 1.5.4, or special instructions for 1.5.3 and earlier.

Please make sure that any mods you are using are updated for 1.8.0, or your game might not run properly (seriously). Due to a few complications that we only noticed very recently, mods will not be properly shown in the new launcher the first time you run. But if you launch the game and run to the full menu, exit, and then relaunch, they should show up correctly. See this thread for more information.

If you discover any bugs in patch 1.8.0, please report them in the bug report forum as usual.

Today's Development Diary by Podcat



As Wednesday is upon us so is a new dev diary! Next week we will be back with more espionage, but today is about a small surprise patch as well as improved Focus tree navigation.

1.8 ‘Fork’
Fork you say? I thought you said 1.8 was going to be Husky? Due to technical requirements having to do with updating to the new paradox launcher we had to jump a big number other than going to 1.7.2 like we had planned. This means that 1.9 will instead be Husky which is the big update coming together with La Resistance.

To read the full changelog for the patch, click here.

To summarize, the big points here are: Stability, submarine balance and a new launcher

Submarine balance
Later tier 3 and 4 subs were simply too good compared to destroyers designed to hunt them. They have been nerfed a bit and increased in cost and destroyer upgrades improved. Large empires should now also have a bit easier time as we better control the amount of convoys in each battle and have fixed a bug where convoys would actively hurt the sub detection abilities of their escorts making it really tough in big battles.



New launcher
We much like Imperator, EU4 and Stellaris have now also moved to the new launcher.
Since wargamers are a traditional bunch you might be asking why a new launcher is happening. There are several reasons:

• Platform independence. We want to be able to exist on multiple platforms eventually and the current one is limited and not really capable of doing it very well.
  
• The old one is really limited in how we can communicate with you. Now we can link to multiple news post for example.
  
• It frees up the dev team (us). We never really had the time to work on the launcher and as the place setting up mods and such there have been a ton of requests for features (such as mod groupings and presets) that we just never have the time to do. With a dedicated team working on a unified launcher across pdx games they will have more time for stuff like this and we can worry about the game itself. I have great hopes for lots of cool improvements in the future and make sure to let them know in comments what kind of features you would like to see.
  
• We got a neat continue button now directly in launcher so you can save time getting back on your previous session ;)
  
  
  
  
  
  Go here to read details about the launcher changes and what the mean for modders and player.
  
  The tl;dr for players though is that you need to start the game, run it to the main menu and then quit and restart. Without this your mods wont show up. This will clean up old mod configuration and prep everything. Mods will still show out of date until modders have updated the supported version, but we haven't made any changes that will break them so 1.7.1 mods should still be ok, despite them saying they arent - so no panic ;) If you do have issues please post about them in the above linked thread about the launcher rather in here (its still cool to discuss the launcher here though).
  
  The patch itself releases later today (late afternoon). That is all about the patch, lets move on to highlight some neat stuff coming in 1.9 'Husky'...
  
  Focus Tree Navigation
  As our focus trees have gotten larger finding things in them or simply exploring them has gotten harder. To solve this we are adding several things to the national focus screen (btw UI here is still a bit WIP and may change)
  
  
  • Zoom - You can now zoom in and out to the mouse pointer much like on the map. Its a nice way to get around on big trees (*squints at the spanish focus tree*)
    
  • Filters - toggling various filters can let you easily spot where industry is located, or things related to particular national spirits you are trying to get rid of or modify. These are tagged manually on focuses so its something modders will be able to use also.
    
  • Free Search - on top of filters we also have full free search. It goes through tooltips automatically and picks out focuses. This is a more advanced and powerful version of Filters and quite nice for finding specific things fast when you know what you are looking for.
  
  
  
  This is me searching for industry related stuff in the Chinese tree. It also shows some of our default filters on the right. Several nations have special filters to help highlight specific mechanics. So China has "Inflation" as a filter, the commonwealth nations have a filter to help spot affecting independence etc. We hope this is going to make getting into new focus trees a lot easier!
  
  Here is an example of zooming out about half way on China:
  
  
  If I place my mouse pointer somewhere I can still see tooltips and zooming will zoom to the cursor.
  
  
  See you all next week for another diary!