Hey Everyone! I am back this week to talk to you a bit about some changes we are making to air management and combat. The first thing I want to get out of the way is that this is not a “Man the Guns” style rework of combat and management systems. Our focus on air changes have mostly revolved around quality of life and balance changes to existing systems, while largely maintaining the structures people are familiar with (with a couple of exceptions). So, let's get into it!

Starting off with a QoL change I am very happy about: Simplified Wing Deployment. Anyone who has experience with managing air wings probably has some complaints about how deploying wings works. The live system requires three clicks in the best case (four if you include choosing a base) to deploy a single wing into an empty airbase. In the worst case this requires more clicks and doing some math for creating a large wing that can later be divided evenly. Now, we are adding quick deploy buttons to the air base UI to allow deployment of a wing in a single click. We are also keeping the old deployment menu for more advanced deployment options. Also, in this menu, we have simplified the flow for deploying single and multiple wings at once.

WIP UI design of simplified wing deployment tools. Note the art style here is not indicative of a change in art direction for our UI. In the first image we see the setup that can be done to select fast deploy options from any air base.



In the second Image we see the newer version of quick deploy within the advanced deployment menu. You now have a set of filters to only show planes of a specific type, and you can now set the reinforce preference on all of the wings you are about to deploy, or individual ones.


One of the most visible changes to air management, and hopefully a big quality of life improvement for most people, is the addition of Air Groups. The first thing I want to say is this is not Army Groups or Fleets. For now, and the foreseeable future, we are not adding Air Marshals or any sort of mechanical impact to using Air Groups. Air Groups are an organizational structure and nothing more. What it will do is enable the grouping and selection of multiple air wings across multiple locations bases for easier management. These groups will be displayed when in the air map mode so that you do not have to hunt down your wings on the map when you want to interact with them.

A very much WIP view of our current air groups


Of the changes we are making, one of the most notable is moving to standardized/fixed wing sizes. This change comes with a loss of flexibility in some situations and makes managing smaller numbers of airplanes a bit more complicated. However, I think that real air combat in HoI4 is measured in thousands of airplanes and not dozens. We are currently looking at 100 sized wings for most aircraft, with size 10 wings for a few specific equipment types(scout plans, CV planes, ect). This allows us to streamline wing deployment and some other management stuff such as not having AI take up weird percentages of air bases. It also makes balance easier and fixes a few exploit cases. This may take some getting used to but I feel it improves the overall experience of managing large numbers of aircraft.

The final change I want to discuss today is an addition to the combat system. We are adding a new mechanic for intercepting planes in regions enroute to their target. In most cases, engaging planes in their target region will still be most effective. But in others, such as when range is a factor, the region being crossed has a bunch of engagement and spotting bonuses, and in a few other cases leaning into combat in an intermediary region can be a good idea.

Beyond these more concrete changes we are doing a balance pass on existing air combat mechanics. A lot of this is still too WIP to discuss, but I would like to highlight one of our objectives which is decoupling agility and speed with more impact given to speed in later air superiority fighter designs, but more on that at a later date.

As always, I wish you all the best and don't hesitate to tell us how these changes make you feel. Until next time o7

Checksum: 8e75


Balance:
- Adjusted the ship refitting cost calculation. The base cost is now a percentage of the hull cost, and the cost for any module changes are added on top of that. The same is true for tanks.
- Removed path connecting advanced light tank chassis to modern tank chassis research

Stability & Performance:
- Fixed rare OOS happening when players joined an MP game after playing a different game

Modding:
- Hot-reloading AI strategy plans will not crash the game.

Database:
- Changed the starting British Motorized Division template to use motorized - sorry, motorised - recon
- Added some bypass conditions to Czech focuses
- Unlocked fuel tank module for French cruiser submarines

Bugfix:
- Only display the ship refitting speed and cost modifiers when MtG is active.
- Added Bypass to "Demmand Lithuanian Annexation" if Poland already controls all Lithuanian states except for Memel
- Fixed units being unable to convert a move order to a retreat order when attacked
- Fixed CTD that could happen during railway gun positioning.


For the full patch details & discussion

Hi folks,

It’s been a while since our last update on future plans for HoI, but we’re about ready to show you some of the work we’ve been doing. Before we begin, I’d like to indicate that there’ll be some differences in how we do this. As I’ve previously stated, we want to begin discussion around features and implementation details a little earlier in the process than usual. This means a couple of things.

Firstly, while we’ll be showing off some individual features, we’re not yet ready to give an overview of the entire scope of our next release yet. This will, of course, be coming in the near (ish) future.

Secondly, you’ll be getting an early look at what we’ve been working on, and this comes with all the caveats you might expect: lots of WIP design, interface, and gameplay.

Lastly, for the time being we’ll be producing these ‘design corner’ style diaries every two weeks, rather than weekly. This is likely to change as we get closer to being complete.

Before I hand over, I’ll give you a quick run down of the directive for the feature we’re looking at today: Peace Conferences. Our primary objectives are to:

• Create a system that appropriately rewards participation.
  
• Allow for conflict and conflict resolution within the scope of the conference.
  
• Create a limited ‘economy’ within conferences, where you may have to sacrifice your overall aims in order to secure immediate concerns.
  
• Produce more ‘realistic’ outcomes where the AI is concerned

And with that, I’ll hand over to @Yaboi_bobby to dive into the deeper details!


Hey everyone, over the past months we have been working to overhaul the peace conference system. It is no secret that in HoI4 the peace conference system has a number of issues with how it functions. Combining that with the fact that it is a surprisingly hard interface to learn how to use, it is rightly one of our most disliked and complained about features. We have taken a large step away from how the system currently works and I am excited to show what the future holds for peace conferences.

The first major departure we made from the old system was shifting from absolute claiming of territory to contestable claiming of territory. In the old PC system once somebody claimed a state, that was it. That claim would be locked in and no one would be able to interact with it further. Now, players may contest other players' interactions in the conference. This doesn't come without cost. Contesting claimed territory will come with a point tax, and every time a contest happens the price of interacting with that state climbs further. This effectively creates a bidding war between all parties invested in a given state. This change should have some interesting outcomes, allow mid and low level participants to have more agency, and give players the tools needed to go after the states that are most important to them for things like achievements and forming new tags.

Here Brazil prepares to bid upon Chao Boreal which has already been claimed by Argentina


Contestable bids help solve some problems, but without further changes many still persist. One of the most obvious issues was how the old system handled turn order. The old system would order countries by participation, and then go in order based upon the number of points held by participants. Where it gets weird is the fact that the order of the list would get updated after each nation’s turn. This meant that often the top two participants could have enough points when a turn ended that they would simply exchange turns between them and end up completely controlling the conference. This was in some ways a good method to allow two big faction leaders to have majority control after the end of a historical WW2, but is bad in virtually every other case.

We did a lot of thinking about turn order and how to structure the turn in general. Slowly we came to the conclusion that any system with a visible turn order, no matter how it was structured, would put people at disadvantage or advantage depending on turn order. This led to the creation of what we have been calling the “Blind Bid” system.

The main concept of the “Blind Bid” system is that everyone acts simultaneously. The way this functions is that, each turn, every conference participant uses their points to make bids. When every player has finished making their bids, all of the bids are evaluated at once. Bids have a fixed cost much like the current claims do, but now with more modifiers. In any instance where two participants made a bid on the same state, that state is marked as contested and the players involved have the majority of their points spent on the bid refunded. Each time a state is contested, it increases in cost for all subsequent rounds. This effect stacks on a state each turn in which a contested bid happens. The other side of this is uncontested bids. Each turn a bid goes uncontested, it increases in cost for everyone else except for the person who made the bid. This acts to, over the course of several turns, lock in bids as they become too expensive to realistically contest.

Brazil and Argentina attempting to resolve a contested bid on Chaco Boreal


At this point you may be thinking “Yeah OK, but I get points each turn, how does the conference end?” This leads us to the final major change: limited points. This is pretty self explanatory. Each participant will get a fixed amount of points over the course of the conference based upon war participation score. The way we do this is by distributing a percentage of those points every turn until all points are distributed. Most of the work here comes down to rebalancing war participation and finding what we consider a good point ceiling for a conference. Limited points will mean, in some cases, that loser nations survive more intact than they did previously, but this should not be a common case. In general, we think this creates a fun and somewhat tense conference experience.

Beyond the big three changes listed so far we have a number of smaller tweaks, adjustments, and rebalance to overall cost of interactions and participation. However, that topic is not worth going into at this point as it is still very much WiP. So with that I will conclude the first overview of the peace conference rework. We look forward to your feedback, hot takes, and hopefully excitement. Until next time o7

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- Added a bypass to the Free French "Form the National Committee" Focus to avoid blocking the player if they don't have 90 Legitimacy
- Fixed a problem in British Alternate Strategy Plans when historical focuses are off without a specific strategy plan being selected
- Fixed issue where Estonia and Latvia would not follow the historical focuses
- Added missing leader tooltip in Soviet focus The Glory of the Red Army. Pavel Rybalko will become a general after completing the focus, and now everyone knows it.
- Turkey no longer gets a wargoal on themselves when refusing Balkan Federation demands
- Niche Role will now be correctly set correctly when AI designs ships. This also applies to players using "auto design".
- Japanese puppets should now get the corrects name
- Fixed achievement "Better than Szent Istvan" being impossible to earn due to a an issue with the new character system
- Naval battles will no longer count towards combat duration for career profile

As you’ll be aware, it has been a while since our last dev diary, and I’m super thrilled to finally release what we’ve been working on since No Step Back.

We take great pride in our attention to gameplay telemetry that we receive from keen HOI4 players from across the globe, and our data wizards regularly furnish us with relevant information with which to steer development of features. After NSB, we were informed of a clear and scientific trend in the data:



That’s right folks, it turns out that 99.5%* of you exclusively play monarchies. It was quite clear to us that we had a mandate to finally concede to public demand, and add the long-awaited Habsburg branch to the Generic focus tree!

*These results were verified by independent election officials.
Now, regardless of which nation you hold dear, you too can find and install a local member of the Habsburg dynasty, taking part in the restoration of everyone’s favourite neighbourhood hegemony.



After discovering a stray member of the Habsburg dynasty, steer your nation to glory by choosing an appropriate spouse or accidentally inheriting some countries you weren’t aware existed.

No Habsburg tree would be complete without an edifying array of royal marriage candidates, so we’ve included plenty of historically accurate examples:



Once you have secured the bloodline, you can, naturally, expand your sights to join your relatives in other countries in vying for the ultimate prize:



As you might expect, every nation can now join and restore the Holy Roman Empire regardless of where they start.

In addition to the usual focus tree content, we’ll be expanding our ambitions somewhat! We’ll be including three new realistic continuous focuses to the Habsburg branch:




Ultimately we feel that this adds a great deal to the generic focus tree experience, importantly providing a thoughtful, plausible and historically inspired approach that you can enjoy with nations as far afield as you like.

A.E.I.O.U, folks!

UI:
- Fixed some DX11 and OpenGL UI elements being 1 pixel off by making them incorrectly positioned the same way DX9 does

Modding:
- The game will no longer show an empty "Modify Government" alert when using hidden ideas

Stability & Performance:
- Fixed CTD due to AI not being notified when a leader is removed from a country

Bugfix:
- Fixed adding or removing divisions to a general under a marshal not updating the marshal's abilities' effects
- Fixed capping of the reliability value to 100% in the Tech Details view
- Fixed a bug where character traits would sometimes duplicate on level up.
- Fixed Radio II XP cost for the tank designer being higher than intended
- Isoroku Yamamoto will no longer have an extra 'I' in his name
- Fixed a rare issue where the Japanese coal liquification focus could fail to add a refinery
- Fixes to French career profile translation
- Fixed typo in the communist party of Yugoslavia

- Added an option in the settings menu to disable cloud storage backup of your career profile statistics.
- Players that own most major DLCs should no longer see promotions for the DLC Subscription in the main menu.
- Fixed potential cloud storage issues for the career profile which could result in your statistics not being backed up.
- Fixed a potential desync issue with statistics collection in multiplayer
- Fixed the "Civil wars" stat collection for "Battle for the Bosporus" DLC.

Hello there, the time has come to do a fun dive into what you've been playing the game as a community. So over this diary we are going to look into some of the trends and statistics we seen from our telemetry and see how we use it to gain insights in current player trends when working on HOI4. The wonderful data team have been working to get us all the information we wanted and I hope you enjoy seeing some of their great work. As a forward point, as with any data collection we do not store any personal information or anything that can used to identify players in accordance with GDPR.

So first of we will start with something fun, can you guess what this graph is telling us.


If you guessed this was us spotting the continuous naval production focus exploit being discovered you get a gold star, although it seems some of you are still very much into using the focus.


With telemetry we can work to understand our players by seeing how you play and this lets us form an experience players will enjoy. we see this in many ways, for example we can see by player difficulty settings players really shy away from the harder difficulties.



We can also see how players are reacting to new content, here we can see the soviet union and Poland grow and maintain solid new highs in terms of sessions played. Germany still remains you favourite major to play, and for those of you that like playing minors the PRC seems to be the country to go for.



Now lets get into some more specific game related data, player play behaviours are something that always interesting to know. You might think you know what most players are doing from discussions on various discussion platforms, streams and videos, however what's even better is knowing for sure what the meta and average player does.

For example many people really need to check their infantry equipment stockpile late game


Seriously players really enjoy making infantry equipment 3


Alright that's allot of graphs, and we know graphs are not how we get views, so lets take tried and trusted top 5's for spin.

We will start with rapid fire round of nukes so.

Top 5 target nations:

• Germany
  
• Soviet union
  
• Japan
  
• USA
  
• England

Top 10 Target provinces:

• Tokyo
  
• London
  
• Berlin
  
• Hiroshima
  
• Moscow
  
• Nagasaki
  
• Washington
  
• Osaka
  
• Nagoya
  
• Paris

Top 5 countries nuking:

• Germany
  
• Soviet union
  
• USA
  
• England
  
• Italy

As we can see players are really not very imaginative with their nuke targets or they share a strange wish to nuke all the same places. Please also let me know why you really like nuking Paris in the comment below.

We can now take a trip over to something newer, its that new shiny toy the tank designer. I must say if there was a meta with tank design someone forgot to tell players because the only consistent design trend has been making cheap flame tanks.

So here we have your favourite modules for each category over the last month



How about your favorite Tank role designs, featuring some monster MBT design that players love.



You guys also have some erm "interesting" collective opinions when it comes to amphibious tanks.


We have also see that about 10% of you and only about 4% of total designs are made with auto design, this is something that reinforces our desire to improve this element of the designers.


Alright lets get into some more gritty details. first off we have been seeing how player designs have been changing since release in response to changes in patches and the design meta developing.


Next up lets see how you've been using those handy preferred tactics, it neck and neck over what players think is the best one for the army.


But you have a clear favourite for generals.


But what about all those new focus trees, well lets take a look at how you traverse focus trees. here we look at what exclusive choices you are making when playing with the new focus trees. As a community players will always trend toward the path that lets them expand and be independent so most of the breakdowns are as expected. however its also very useful to know what specific choices players make within these paths.








Construction now, when to switch to MIL's from CIV's is always an topic for debate. as we can see though the change happens on average quite early with the first year averaging at 13.17 CIV's built. This is consistent over most majors outside SOV, with many being much more extreme than the average.



Additionally you always need more railways and infrastructure.




Finally I'll bring us to Division meta. this might be surprising but meta divisions while definitely popular, are not as ubiquitous as online discussion would have you believe.



As you can see we have the usual suspects of the 10-0's, 7-2's and 14-4's but they are nowhere near dominant in the average game.
The situation becomes even less unified once we take support companies into account




That wraps it up for this Dev Diary, If you have anything specific you're interested in from this brief overview let me know and maybe we can do a deep dive in future.

- Added a Career Profile where players can view statistics about their playthrough
- Added promotion for the new DLC Subscription