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Don't forget that they completely redid logistics in a way that's less resource intensive to simulate, easier for the computer to make decisions based on and making everybody freak the gently caress out because why couldn't Hitler build some Speer-sized pseudo-neoclassical monstrosity of a gas tank and fill it with enough fuel in 1936 to last him for the whole war?
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May 19, 2016 20:02
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Half the fun of the Hearts of Iron games are tracing down who is doing the complaining, and deducing whether or not the complain is viable unless you are doing anything else than playing Germany for all your playthroughs and want the game to appropriately represent the realistic potential of the Third Reich. To be fair, it also applies to the Japanese. What really pisses off Wehraboos is the idea that German military doctrine wasn't handed down by
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May 20, 2016 00:35
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National Focus: Springtime For Hitler
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May 20, 2016 00:44
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Drone posted:"Civil War historian" on the Paradox forums tends to mean "owns some Confederate flag paraphernalia" and/or is someone who is 90% likely to refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression. Of course one of the mod ideas that seems to be getting the most community interest is one that adds in the CSA.
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May 20, 2016 18:13
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Empress Theonora posted:On the bright side that opens the possibility for a US player to reenact Sherman's march with Sherman tanks, although that's probably not what the modders had in mind. I think they expect it to go the other way with some sort of Southern blitzkrieg strategy since both them and wehraboos are really into the whole underdogs who took on the world with superior strategy, willpower and genes while their opponents were idiotic butchers schtick.
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May 20, 2016 18:30
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Groogy posted:You know how to mod right? Be first and create a mod where that is the point. Then watch the forum / workshop burns. Part of me wants to see the reaction, part of me doesn't want to put in a huge amount of effort to troll them, and part of me feels like the moderators haven't done anything to deserve the ensuing bullshit.
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May 20, 2016 18:54
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Gimmick Account posted:I still like Arsenal of Democracy best. Hopefully a few of its features eventually find their way into Hearts of Iron 4. If they go for features from previous games, I hope they go big: Military and political leaders as CK2 nobility.
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May 22, 2016 18:05
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Pharnakes posted:So basically there isn't a chain of command? Fair enough, it was a bit of a mess in HOI3 although I didn't find it that bad, it was a nice idea at least. I know this is back a bit, but the HOI3 chain of command really suffered because the game didn't massively reduce or even eliminate the amount of division-level micromanagement possible at the same time. When the player can control every division directly, the simplest solution to all sorts of problems with the chain of command is that the player should control every division directly. Except for distributing bonuses it's completely flat in practice, undermining any reason to have it in the first place. If it's there, it doesn't benefit from being more complex. So having a more barebones system in HOI4 makes sense if there's still micro. I hope future expansions reduce the need for micro, but the possibility is definitely going to remain.
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May 25, 2016 04:23
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If you want tracked vehicles that support infantry by blowing up other infantry, that's self-propelled artillery.
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May 25, 2016 22:58
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ArchangeI posted:Except that self-propelled artillery had very poor armor, while assault guns are heavily armored. That shouldn't be a problem if you can increase its armor with combat experience.
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May 25, 2016 23:15
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Triggerhappypilot posted:Whether or not the StuG III is represented in-game as an assault gun or tank destroyer is of little importance. What IS important is ensuring that the StuG can be decorated appropriately: StuGs are pretty much decorations in a sense. Sure they're not hugely different, but they're different enough for someone to say "This is my division template" and that appeals to some people.
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May 27, 2016 08:20
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It's a tad puzzling why Arleigh Burke is an Old Guard but that's the silliest sort of thing to complain about.
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May 28, 2016 23:24
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texasmed posted:These revelations with respect to generals explain why we probably won't get those nifty Wikipedia links like Crusader Kings 2 has. I have a crazy idea, let's make a history war game with generals able to fill roles they actually did in history. Is that going to be DLC? Generals as CK2 nobility. I'm telling everyone it'll be hilarious if nothing else.
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May 28, 2016 23:42
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Pop and Loch Nessy posted:No one is talking about the important issues- like how many of us are creating our own swastika mod Go one further and use it on NATO counters for concentration camp guards and I'm sure someone'll love it.
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Jun 3, 2016 21:46
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Slaughterhouse-Ive posted:Maybe you can't comment on this but is AI a second-class citizen when designing these types of games? I don't mean that in a bad way. I feel like there's a pretty heavy config-driven element to AI development and you can't have AI without the mechanics in place so occasionally goofy AI behaviors don't particularly bother me as much if the mechanics and core gameplay are solid. My current work involves AI development but not games related so I love sperging out over this sort of stuff. I can say that games take a very different approach in general due to their different goals and working under different constraints. Take a look at the earliest games and you'll quickly notice that the enemies all move in fixed patterns. They might shoot bullets straight ahead or in some other sort of pattern, but they do it like clockwork. A tiny bit more sophisticated enemies add a bit of randomness, like by once in a while jumping. The randomness doesn't make them smarter, but it looks less fake. Enemies in a game like Final Fantasy just pick a random ability off a list every turn and pick a random target. Many video game bosses randomly switch between patterns. What all these have in common is that they take almost no processing power at all per frame. Games got slightly more sophisticated by adding capabilities like enemies aiming at the player or moving towards the player. There's no pathfinding yet so they'll usually just run into walls, but it's something. Another innovation is enemies having a default state, like resting or walking in a pattern and then changing the pattern to something else when the player gets too close, like chasing them. While this may sound primitive, it's actually still very widely used because it's computationally cheap and can be very convincing by combining it with more sophisticated techniques for specific applications. So play a single-player FPS, stealth shooter or whatever, and you'll notice that the enemies do various stuff when they don't notice you. That's probably a simple script running as part of their resting state. If they notice the player or something else, they might go into a searching state with the location of the disturbance as a target. They might also trigger the same state in nearby enemies as well. If they don't find anything after a timeout they return to the resting state or if they spot the player in that time they go to the fighting state. The fighting state may have multiple substates that they transition between depending on the circumstances. So if they're in the Under Cover state and the player throws a grenade, they might go into the Dodge Grenade state. Otherwise they might shoot from cover. There are actual AI techniques involved like if the player starts to run away they'll use pathfinding to follow, but special purpose heuristics often work just as well while being faster and easier to implement. They're working in a very constrained design space, and can use various techniques to further simplify things. Like the whole idea of being able to snap to cover is much easier to work with than trying to analyze the local level geometry to tell if the player's hiding behind a wall. Games have started moving to more sophisticated techniques like Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) to start giving something more resembling genuine smarts but uptake isn't instantaneous. Planning differs from previous techniques by guessing the results of possible actions and looking ahead to find an efficient combination to reach a given goal. Generating a plan is expensive but it's cheap to just follow a plan. But the big thing is that it allows some level of foresight not possible with other techniques. For a game like Hearts of Iron, AI is actually a very high priority, but the problem is that it's much harder to make convincing because it has to actually be good at some level and that's a different story. F.E.A.R. was better than previous games, but it also took advantage of techniques like soldiers shouting out things based on their goals and plans to show the player that it's happening. For the sake of performance, strategy games still need to rely on special purpose heuristics and similar techniques to take the massive amount of information to be processed and reduce it to something traditional AI can handle in a reasonable amount of time. So it's not a second-class citizen, just difficult. There are techniques that could be used to make the AI more convincing even if it's not necessarily better, but would potentially require significant additional processing power. This next bit isn't meant to be critical of the game or saying I would do it better, just effort posting about a topic I find really interesting and maybe helping people understand AI better. The paper I posted about GOAP also talked about the distinct squad level AI in F.E.A.R. The squad level AI would generate goals for each enemy within the squad which would then generate plans in response. Then it would monitor their progress along those plans by comparing the expected world state to the actual world state. The paper also notes that the squad level AI was pretty ad hoc but the same GOAP architecture could be applied to it as well so that there are squad level goals and plans. This can be further generalized into something called a hierarchical task network, or HTN. HTNs take a high level goal and recursively split it into plans consisting of lower level goals that are assigned to the agents the next level down. This process is repeated until it reaches the bottom level agents which make plans consisting of actions that they can perform. This means that there's a lot more goals to generate plans for, but each agent is working in a much more constrained world model. Each agent also monitors its child agents and the relevant world state to see if it reflects the plan, and generate a possible reason if it doesn't. If it generates a new plan, the reason makes it prefer actions that should be more successful. HTNs also map very well to military chains of command where each agent is a unit and its children are subordinate units. Only considering 3-5 subordinate units drastically reduces the search space for each unit compared to a unified AI trying to consider every unit at once. The commanding officers can provide a face for the AI, explaining why it made specific decisions and giving the player the ability to reprioritize goals. This could be accessed by a button labeled WHAT THE gently caress WERE YOU THINKING!? Soviet players would of course have additional catharsis-providing options available.  How it might play out in practice is that the player or national AI might have a goal of "Defend against possible German invasion" which is passed to the theater commanders. Each theater commander looks at their territory and creates goals based on that like "Defend the German border" or "Defend major cities" which it hands off to subordinates. If some unit isn't able to create a plan, like if it doesn't have enough troops to guard the border, it can notify the unit above it which revises its plans in turn. Those revised plans might reassign goals or reshuffle troops based on the relative strengths. If those fail, it continues its way up until someone can do it or it reaches the player, telling them that they need more troops for instance. I guess I could go into more detail but this is already pretty drat long.
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Jun 4, 2016 23:01
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bewbies posted:lol how is this even possible British lookouts saw so many periscopes sticking out of the water they assumed they were something else?
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Jun 8, 2016 23:34
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Main Paineframe posted:The current air zones system does work for some things, particularly air supremacy - "look at air map, put more fighters in red zones until they turn green" is incredibly convenient but depends rather heavily on having a simple, baked-in airzone system. Air zones could also be defined by certain high-level objectives like "Over Naval Yards in Northwest Germany" to determine both where to bomb and where to defend. Different air zones could overlap or change (like a "Over The Front Lines Of This Battle Plan" air zone) but so long as they are reasonably easy to define and are meaningful to players, they're potentially useful. The options from HOI3 wouldn't be bad if it were possible to lay them out once and then refer back to them, but you've got to redo them every single time. That's where the biggest problem with air and naval combat is: The player really needs to be able to lay out high-level plans and policies rather than forcing them to either relinquish all control or to micromanage everything to death in order to enact their plans.
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May 14, 2017 23:22
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If it's like previous HoI games then it's coming up with what seems like a reasonable distribution of equipment and so long as unit creation and resupply matches well enough it works. I think a planning system for the AI would help where it comes up with goals then figures out what it needs to fulfill them. If it wants to invade Denmark then it creates an internal object to track that figures it needs say 15 divisions. If it can't allocate from other fronts then it makes a goal to train and equip however many divisions. If there's not enough equipment then it makes a goal to get more which can be resolved by manufacturing more or requesting lend lease. Then the manufacturing balances all of the goals it has to figure out the real needs, knowing that may make some goals take longer to resolve.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:12
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Psychotic Weasel posted:Interesting that they want to bring back the chain of command stuff. Wonder how that will work out in the end. Most of it seemed like pointless busy work in HOI3. If it actually helps organize larger battle plans by creating a field marshal level one that's broken into general level plans then it might be useful. HoI3 also allowed for air wings to be assigned which gives a good hook for at least CAS and fighter coverage in the battle planner. That's what I'm looking for in a grand strategy game: Using the organization to drive the lower level decisions. I don't care about the precise details of providing air cover for my armies but I do want a way to say "these armies need air cover" like by handing the aircraft to the appropriate field marshal. A good chain of command system should allow for that sort of stuff.
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Aug 23, 2017 16:40
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ThomasPaine posted:I did try a USSR game but really I was just overwhelmed by the sheer scale of everything and wanted to try somewhere smaller before having to manage hundreds of divisions/fleets/air wings at once. My go to for a bit was South Africa because they're fairly small but can industrialise pretty quick, and I assumed kicking the Portuguese/Belgians out of Africa would be a lot easier than it ended up being. At the moment I'm trying a Hungary annexing Austria game, but the Anschluss happened just as I was about to win the war last time so that's dead in the water. Yeah. I just finished a USA run through and that's why I want chain of command. After a certain point I don't want to deal with anything smaller than a couple dozen divisions or a thousand aircraft. I want to just give some high level guidance, maybe click down to review how the lower levels are handling it in certain areas and deal with everything else. There's still a huge game even if I were to somehow avoid directly controlling any of the individual units.
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Aug 24, 2017 17:50
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Having one extra layer feels like the best compromise. Soviet players shouldn't need to waste a huge amount of time setting things up but they also can't manage individual divisions. Doing the same planning but with groups of 24 divisions is much more tractable. I also liked the ability to attach air and naval units to the chain of command in HoI3 but that's probably not in the cards. It would make America more manageable to have a chain of command for its billions of planes and ships and planes on ships.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:10
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An army template designer sort of like the division templates would go a long way to help. Sorta like it gives a list of division templates and you could pick three armored and twenty one infantry and it'll add divisions to the army until it reaches that composition. It's also a good place for telling the computer that some divisions should be used for breakthrough, some for garrison, some front line and so forth. Then creating a new army is just picking a template and a commander.
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Sep 14, 2017 15:53
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Main Paineframe posted:It's entirely an organizational thing, but it's a useful one. There's no bonus or buff or other gameplay advantage from using it, but it makes it a lot easier to tell which army is which on the right-side and bottom listings of armies. There's also the potential of other future conveniences like HoI3 let you hand off certain commands to the computer. It had some serious problems in that implementation but if it was possible to hand off all the detailed management of a theater or specific armies while giving high level guidance, it'd be amazing.
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Sep 15, 2017 15:28
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StarMinstrel posted:I was thinking the other day that I would get behind a system where boats are like equipment, your fleets are planned through a system similar to the division, and then assigning a number of these to the zones you want. If unnassigned, they go back and repair at the nearest port. I feel this would remove a lot of the tedium micromanaging of the fleets. Something like that. Since I like playing the United States, I'm partial to a two-layer system of fleets and task forces. In this case, a fleet is similar in concept to a theater with a home port, a set of zones that it's responsible for and a collection of ships. The actual fleet doesn't sail around the map, but is instead an administrative unit to keep things manageable. Task forces are the actual groups of ships that sail around and do stuff similar to what fleets are now, but drawing from the fleet's pool of ships using something similar to the division planner. So a fleet could be set up to have three (for example) task forces with a specific set of ships per task force. If it can't spare the ships it could send out a smaller task force or only two task forces. Scrambling the entire fleet could create a mega task force for a relatively short period of time while allowing obsolete battleships and the like to serve as a fleet-in-being otherwise.
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Dec 5, 2017 07:27
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Give Germany and the Soviets national focuses to improve their associated doctrines early on. Use repeatable national decisions costing experience to grant 50% off the next doctrine researched for everyone. Maybe also allow for production experience with specific models after hitting max efficiency to be used in addition to combat experience. Build a million tanks and you probably have a good idea how to make the engine a bit better.
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Jan 9, 2018 19:46
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Just go as the US with civilian difficulty and strengthen USA cranked all the way to the top. Every possible option will be available at once and you don't enter the war until you want to enter the war. See what thousands of strategic bombers do to Germany. Make EVERYTHING mechanized. Launch a naval invasion of Venezuela. Nuke the rainforest when it fails. Learn a bunch of bad habits and giggle the whole loving way.
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Apr 7, 2018 02:39
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I was just thinking this morning that the game could really use some sort of anti colonialist stuff to complicate the rest of the world. Is there any way to set up a civil war where one side wins if they get all the victory points in the area they have a claim on instead of having to launch Operation Sealion from Nairobi?
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Jul 4, 2018 21:34
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Regarding the naval invasion thing, just being able to name, plan and share operations among allies so we'd have advance warning of what they're planning would be huge. They don't even have to be big elaborate joint operations if there's some sort of propose operation option and some way to launch them at the same time.
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Jul 8, 2018 13:54
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1. The important thing is the combat width, which determines how many divisions can enter a fight at one time. Due to how the game mechanics work, generally 10, 20 and 40 width division are the best because they're even divisors of the usual one province combat width, which is 80. 9/3 is really bad because it's 27 which means 3 divisions won't fit in a single fight. How you lay out the division doesn't matter. Support artillery doesn't count against combat width, so it's handy for 10 width mini-divisions. 2. Cavalry is generally considered not that great, but I like making them 10 wide and using them for low priority garrisons or including an MP unit and using them to oppress the locals. They're also not bad if you're fighting terrible troops in the middle of nowhere, like the Afghani border as the Soviets. Motorized is just fast infantry and if you can afford it, it's nice to upgrade the ones in your armored divisions to mech. 3. Pure gun units have almost no organization so anybody looking at them wrong will cause them to retreat. It's far preferable to have air superiority over AA, but AA can also serve as decent anti-tank. Some people are fans of adding Heavy TDs to their infantry. 4. Just go with medium or heavy tanks in your armored divisions. Lights are what you lend lease to allies in the middle of nowhere once you stop producing them. You probably want logistics companies since tanks eat supplies up like crazy. 5. Germany's not winning naval wars anytime soon if you're picking a fight with all your neighbors, so submarines and naval bombers is a reasonable bet. 6. Lend lease older airplanes to allies. If you don't have fighter cover, your naval bombers are going to get shot to poo poo. Naval bombers will attack convoys but won't attack fleets on their own. 7. Balanced doesn't hurt, but there may be options that are better in some situations. With carriers, go for deck space since that's what they're there for. As America, I like giving strategic bombers max range and going with the option to increase strategic bomber range by 50%.
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Jul 16, 2018 23:36
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Ideally I like to have a 50% research bonus to grab some tech extra early and then blow as much XP as I can to improve it further in whatever direction immediately. That way you get the biggest relative advantage as early as possible while saving on retooling penalties.
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Jul 17, 2018 17:01
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Related to German Naval Strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSjmtDSm7qQ
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Jul 19, 2018 02:38
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A little late but those custom game rule sliders could be interesting to support "Strengthen $UNIT" so maybe cavalry ends up being amazing. That way nobody can just hop on in knowing that certain options are traps and there's a bit of uncertainty figuring out what tanks are decent at for instance. Sticking a number of special forces slider in there would be nice, too. Making the AI understand the implications is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Aug 3, 2018 00:36
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Hey Archangel, how hard would it be to add a modifier when it's possible to just ford the river on top of all the bodies? edit: Also a tech for clothes that are better able to clog up the treads of tanks. 1337JiveTurkey fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 22:21
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Also just randomly thought of this, but we really need alt-history technologies. Especially death rays based off the Ark of the Covenant.
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Aug 14, 2018 02:54
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0/5 Mod. Didn't call it Shin-Raj.
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Aug 16, 2018 03:47
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I think part of what makes it easier to understand why TD doctrine was controversial is that the original concept was more like this than the later designs which feel more like quirky tanks than anything else.
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Aug 29, 2018 20:39
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Admittedly there's no reason I should have done it in the first place, but if you switch to an alternative doctrine, you lose everything that resulted from the original. So if you go from day bombing to night bombing, you lose everything afterward in the tree even though you researched it earlier. 
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Aug 30, 2018 09:59
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chairface posted:USSR has those too. I just leave em fat until I have Army XP to burn paring em down to 20w. Until then, enjoy sending fatass mountain divisions as volunteers to other peoples' wars. If you want to throw a wrench into Italy's plans as early as January 1936, shipping a couple of those fat gornostrelkis into Ethiopia plus some air support works wonders.
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Sep 4, 2018 18:41
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ThomasPaine posted:How do you send air support as volunteers? Also, does ensuring Italy loses in Ethiopia necessitate invading the Italian mainland or is there some sort of event to end the war once you've kicked them out of Africa? The former seems... a big ask. Sending air volunteers is something one of the more recent add-ons included. You can only send something like 40 aircraft but every little bit helps. Once Italy is kicked out of the Horn of Africa, they eventually relinquish all claims and (at least in Road to 56) take a pretty nasty stability penalty with Mussolini offing himself.
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Sep 4, 2018 18:56
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I hope making and reinforcing task forces is going to be easy because it sounds like there's going to be a bunch of them for large naval powers. Just sitting there and selecting six destroyers and one light cruiser (or whatever your patrol TFs are like) over and over and over would get old fast.
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Oct 17, 2018 20:29
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