Hello everyone and welcome to another dev diary for La Resistance! I should begin by introducing myself: I am Meka, I joined Paradox just a few months ago as a Content Designer. Some of you may be aware of me due to my work on Theocracies and Burgundy over on EUIV, but now I'm here to show what mischief I've been up to in my time on Hearts of Iron.
Man the Guns saw the creation of a lot of new tags, making some countries balkanisable, and almost all of the world decolonisable. Waking the Tiger saw the introduction of formable tags, a mechanic that until now has not been further utilised. However, with La Resistance, a whole slew of new releasable tags will be added to the game along with two new formable nations.
Starting with releasable tags, Man the Guns allowed most of the world to be decolonised, but Oceania was mostly left unloved with only one nation being added to the continent, leaving the rest of the disparate islands untouched and still under colonial rule. However, I have added 6 new releasable tags and one formable for the region.
The Kingdom of Hawaii was only annexed by the United States 38 years before the start of Hearts of Iron and can be released along with most of the US’s pacific holdings.
Tahiti
Samoa
The Federated States of Micronesia
The Solomon Islands
The Mariana Federation
These disparate islands may struggle to survive on their own, and so a nation who holds enough of the Polynesian Triangle will be able to unite all Pacific peoples into a single state known as Polynesia. This state will be formable by any nation listed above plus New Zealand. Unlike other formable tags, this nation can be created by dominions meaning New Zealand does not necessarily have to leave the Allies in order to form this tag.
But perhaps players wish to live out an alternate history where the Naha Prophecy was fulfilled and Kamehameha united the Pacific several years earlier. With the Polynesian Empire game rule, Hawaii will begin the game having already conquered the entirety of the Polynesian Islands and built up a fair-sized industry.
The ability to form Polynesia is a free feature, as are the releasable tags.
Along with adding these releasable nations, I did also touch up the old fragmentation game options to make the world fully split into different continents. The UK now surrenders its African, Asian, and American islands to its former colonies, Portugal surrenders Timor to Indonesia, and a few other small changes like that.
Also, armies standing around in former colonial territories is now a thing of the past and nations will now only have armies stationed in territories where they have access.
Iberia is a focal point of La Resistance and as such, a few releasable tags have been added to the subcontinent as well.
Catalonia
The Basque Country
Galicia [img{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9948323/7594ee915821a5a3d3667bec8c83ed3a28bacee3.png[/img]
Spain can of course be fractured from the start of the game by selecting the appropriate option in the game menu. However, I noticed Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia simply weren’t enough to make Iberia look “shattered” so I took the liberty of adding an “11th of November” game rule, and I will leave it for you all to speculate what that option does.
When it comes to the second formable, one must be opportunistic and take full advantage of the instability in Spain and Portugal. The Moorish people once reigned sovereign over all of Iberia, and owners of La Resistance will be able to restore the long-dead state of Al-Andalus.
Andalusia was once an Islamic Sultanate that ruled from the Iberian peninsula and a beacon of the Islamic world. Through struggles with the Catholic kingdoms in the medieval era, the Andalusians would slowly be pushed out of Iberia, ending with the conquest of the Emirate of Granada in 1520. However, the Moorish people continue to exist to this day in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria, many of whom are descendants from Moorish refugees fleeing the Spanish Reconquista.
Andalusia will be formable by any of the North African countries; Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara, Algeria, or Libya. In order to form this tag, one must occupy a large portion of both Spain and Portugal’s southern states and forming the tag grants cores on the entirety of the Iberian subcontinent.
But that isn’t the end of Andalusia. Similar to Byzantium’s “triumph” decisions, Andalusia will be able to sweep across the Mediterranean and beyond, restoring their old claims and titles.
If a player can enact all decisions relating to the Andalusian conquests of North Africa and the Med, they will be able to press on for Egypt and Arabia and declare themselves the Umayyad Caliphate reborn, granting cores on the Arabian Peninsula.
Upon doing so, Andalusia will unlock their final set of decisions, allowing them to restore the entire former claims and titles of the Umayyad Caliphate, effectively reuinifying the Islamic world.
As we have expanded the scope of Hearts of Iron, some old bits of content started to become outdated and lead to some annoying bugs, which I have dedicated some time to fixing. One key thing I have improved is the way that the British Raj interacts with different game options and Britain doing strange things. From now on, the Raj will be able to freely pursue their focus tree even if Britain forces them into independence, with some focuses bypassing, and others no longer requiring the Raj to be a subject.
That's it for today- make sure you join Da9L, Bratyn and Jojo at 16:00CET on https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive as they have a closer look at Anarchist Spain!
Hi everyone! The team is now back from the holidays and polishing on La Resistance. Today its time for a classic “bag of tricks” diary covering various small changes. The theme is quality of life here.
MEFO Bills Ever forgotten to renew MEFO bills as Germany? Yeah me neither! But just in case someone does we got you covered. Now you can opt out or back in if you changed your mind, at any point during each cycle.
Construction queue We have changed the default behaviour for the construction queue. Now when adding say a new factory construction it will be placed just below the last non-repair entry (rather than at the bottom). This removes a lot of extra work with having to reprioritize things and still allows you to put specific repair jobs at the top of the queue with no issues. There are also new shortcuts in those rare situations where you might prefer sending to end of queue directly.
Exercise auto stop Exercise now has 2 setting states so that you can either keep the old behaviour (keep training past max level and get XP) or hold shift when activating it and it will automatically stop when hitting the max level. This also works for ships and planes and its a nice relief not to have to babysit exercises when you aren’t after XP.
Decision Notifiers Since we added decisions in Waking the Tiger the amount has been growing and we have been using them in more and more cool and creative ways. This has meant that the number of choices have gone up and some stuff has needed to change to make sure notifications are actually helpful for you. Firstly we have made notification numbers more visible and clear for both decisions and the espionage agency. Secondly its now possible to right click the decisions button to reset the available count. This means that after that only new ones will show up in the count. They can of course be switched on/off individually like before but if you are like me this saves a ton of clicking, and now it will impact what the notifiers show unlike before where it was only tied to separate alerts.
Allied Naval Invasion Alerts Invasion alerts can be critically important for you to notice if an enemy is about to make a successful landing somewhere and you need to react. Previously it was difficult to help out nearby allies as alert were only for your own controlled shores. Now we have 2 new alerts mirroring the old ones for allies so you can bail out Mussolini when he's in a pinch ;)
Civil War Surprises During a normal war you have time to set up your plans and get units into place fast, but in civil wars this is not so. With the spanish civil war in focus this expansion we wanted to make sure we made this less stressful for players, so now if any civil war happens the AI will wait a short while to activate its plans giving a human player time to organize or pause if they want. Its not a long break but its enough where it feels a lot more comfortable to play against now.
Zoomable & Searchable Focus Trees We already went into this in detail back here. But since then we have improved the UI to make filtering better and set it up for old trees as well to make finding things easier. This below is for Mexico and lets you highlight stuff related to rebellions and church authority as special filters on top of the regular filters:
Thats its for this week! Today we are also starting up streaming again. Me and Daniel (mah leaks) are going to show off as much as we can of the Espionage system at 16:00CET. See you then!
Olá everyone and welcome to another dev diary for La Resistance! Let me begin by introducing myself: My name is Manuel, I’m from Spain and I joined Paradox as a Content Designer for HOI a couple of months ago (just on time to attend PDXCON, yeah!).
I’ve been working on the implementation of Portugal for La Resistance. The original design of the focus tree was made by Portuguese professor Pedro Santos. He came with what I consider to be a really interesting idea, where the political branch of the tree has multiple possible interactions with the Spanish Civil War.
While I worked on Portuguese Events and Decisions, the whole tree was implemented by our producer, Vachon (big kudos to her!). We tweaked the design of the Focus Tree a little bit, specifically the communist branch, which we felt was a bit dull compared to others, and the SCW-related branches to make them properly interact with Spain. Now I’m the one who will polish the tree and will attempt to get rid of all those lovely bugs our great Betas are reporting. Talking about Betas, our freelance artist @Indyclone77 is the one to blame for all the wonderful Portuguese event pictures and new icons you are about to see in the focus tree and national spirits, he has done an amazing job not only in making all that cool art, but also in providing crucial feedback during the development, so big kudos to him as well!
Before going on, please note that balancing is still a work in progress, so there may be changes in what you are about to see.
So I’d like to start talking about the National Spirits Portugal will start with in 1936:
Unreliable Army: Representing the poor state of the Portuguese army during the period of the First Republic, which historically led to a major reorganization in 1937, it provides some penalties to Division Organization, Recruitable Population Factor, War Support and Division Attack, so you want to get rid of this before entering any conflict (probably not the best idea to join the Spanish Civil War only to see how your disgusting Spanish enemies defeat your unprepared troops and occupy your precious mainland in a blink...).
Unstable Republic: During its 16 years, the First Portuguese Republic saw the inauguration of nine presidents and 44 cabinet reorganizations. Even during the Ditadura Militar there were several failed coup attempts. In 1933, after Salazar’s creation of the Estado Novo and the new Constitution approved in a referendum, Portugal’s stability slowly increased (maybe the censorship system and the different police forces that repressed all kinds of dissidents also helped a little bit with that). So another no-good spirit applying penalties to your Daily Political Power Gain, Stability and Construction Speed. You will be able to remove it through the different political branches, and you will probably want to do it ASAP.
Now let’s look at the Portugese Focus Tree and talk about the different paths a player can choose from:
See an enlarged version of this image on the forums
As you can see, the general structure varies a little bit from the standards of other trees, where you have clear separate branches for industry, military forces and politics.
Let’s start with the colonial branch, shall we?
Through the first focuses, Portugal will receive big bonuses to non-core manpower that will prove really useful in the early stages, since Portugal’s initial manpower is really low. The player can then choose between integrating the African colonies (which will also provide some extra manpower), or allowing them to form their own governments and puppeting them (something that will be appreciated by other democracies in the world).
There is also a sub-branch that joins the industrial one, developing industry and infrastructure in the African colonies.
Regarding Industry, by continuing the public works initiated by Salazar’s regime around the early 30s, Portugal will gain access to the first focus that will provide her first extra research slot (take into consideration that Portugal starts with only two research slots, so it seems just fair for her to get an early focus to fix that). The player can also choose between a fast development of the civilian industry receiving more factories or, with a slower approach, invest in future development getting some nice bonuses to industry research and construction speed.
Portugal can also improve infrastructure and resource extraction industries on the mainland and, of course, there is a focus representing the construction of dams, something Iberian dictators liked very much to do.
And then we have the military industry sub-branch, where the player can get (much needed) military factories and some useful bonuses to production and research for aircraft, vehicles and artillery. Make sure you don’t miss the extra research slot “hidden” between all these industrial focuses!
The first focus on the Naval Branch will unlock decisions to buy ships from either The United Kingdom or Italy. If they accept to build your ships (make sure you have good relations with them before activating the decision!), you will then be presented with three different options to choose from.
The central and left sub-branches focus on Convoy protection and submarine warfare, providing a number of research bonuses for destroyers and submarine warfare, as well as adding a couple of dockyards to boost your naval production. These sub-branches then merge, eventually leading to a focus that unlocks Portugal’s third and last research slot (for a total of five).
The right side of the naval branch is focused on the production of the big ships, as well as fortifying the vulnerable Portuguese possessions in the Atlantic Ocean and Asia.
The Army Branch, although fairly small (don’t worry, you will find more military focuses under the Political Branch), will help Portugal to get its army in shape for the conflicts to come. The first focus removes that nasty Unreliable Army National Spirit and leads to some research and production bonuses in the next focuses. Finally, you will have to choose between building heavy fortifications in Lisbon, or creating a light fortification line along the coast.
Now, let’s take a general look at the whole Political Branch before getting deeper into each of the sub-branches:
In the right, we have the “cautious” approach to the Spanish Civil War. Here you won’t be able to join the SCW until you have swapped to a communist government. It’s a much slower approach, but after the war, you can pick different focuses to interact with foreign countries, including one that will grant you a war goal against Spain, in case their ideology is no longer desirable for you.
If you go with Strict Neutrality you won’t be able to interact in the SCW, but you will gain some nice boosts to your industry, production and Democracy support via the British, as well as some recurrent decisions to purchase equipment from them.
In case you go with Estado Novo, you will have to choose between Strict Neutrality (mentioned above), Support the Nationalists and the Monarchist branch.
Support the Nationalists, as its Republican counterpart, will allow you to support Nationalist Spain and send volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. You can join the SCW against the Republic in further focuses, and also intervene in Spain after the civil war if the Spanish government does not match your ideology.
National Syndicalism will pave the way to become Fascist, leading to some interesting focuses: You can either join the Axis, or claim that Portugal will be the nation that finally unites the entire world under the same rule, ideology and faith (this will provide a powerful National Spirit, but it will also annoy some people around the globe).
Refuse the Naval Blockade unlocks a decision for countries at war with the United Kingdom, by which they will use some of your convoys to carry supplies where they cannot reach, increasing their War Support and, of course, diverting the production of one of their factories to meet your needs.
In the case of a Carlist Uprising happening during the Spanish Civil War, you can support your Monarchist friends in Spain and join the war against all those disgusting Communists, Socialists, Anarchists and Fascists (a lot of people to deal with in the Iberian Peninsula).
And that’s all from me, I hope you enjoyed the dev diary and make sure to stay tuned for the next one. Anyways, we wish you all a merry Christmas and very happy New Year. See you all in 2020!
Tune in to https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive on Wednesday @16:00CET for part 2 of our in-depth look on what is coming for France in our upcoming expansion: La Résistance.
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).
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!
