I’ve definitely got better after 1000 hour of figuring out how to balance those. But, I can say the day I play game where I don’t have a shortage or a massive surplus of something, will be a miracle.
When I’m on the offensive, I use the destination of the army. So Minsk, or Moscow, or Suez Assault (my artillery heavy infantry) army. When I’m on the defense aka Russia I never did come up with a good system.
Dev diary discussing Free France / Vichy France in the next expansion.
This is when I feel sorry for a game designer:
Vichy France is perhaps the best example for what I like to call “trying to fit a history-shaped peg through a mechanics-shaped hole”. They were a puppet state of Germany by any reasonable metric - except they never formally joined the war. They weren’t at war with the Allies - and yet there were several battles between Allied and Vichy forces in Syria, Madagascar and most famously Dakar and during Operation Torch. Even after the battles were fought, however, Vichy France did not join the war, and the Vichy French troops engaged there were usually repatriated by the Allies after operations were over.
Still, the DD doesn’t make clear at all how the Allies do something like Torch without going to war with Vichy France.
I think this mechanism on how you can do this. But I’m not exactly sure what that means.
Option two is to intervene militarily, in areas that you have access too. This takes the form of the border wars, allowing you (or, more likely, your allies) to take over territories from Vichy France without going into a full-blown war. Not all areas can be taken over by border wars - Madagascar doesn’t border any other state from which an intervention could be launched, so you’ll have to find a different way.
I can see them using the border-war mechanic in some places. I’ve never actually had a border war amount to anything, but it is at least a sort of undeclared war.
I don’t know how that works for a naval invasion like Torch though, and they specifically seem to rule out “border war through naval invasion” in the case of Madagascar. I guess they have something up their sleeve.
I liked this comment from the forum.
These changes look awesome!
Also great to see (as a dev myself) that things aren’t cobbled together with tape
All be impressed if they can pull off their objectives in a way that the AI can understand.
Off-map garrisons will indeed be a thing:
Suppression garrison forces will now be managed through occupation laws and a choice in what division template will be used to provide suppression. The system will then distribute manpower and equipment to states with resistance. The old, defense-related, garrison missions will persist and will be named to “Area Defense.”
That should remove a lot of busywork.
Outside of the AI being able to do anything with their navy correctly, this is probably the best change I could have hoped for. I hate suppression garrisons. They are just busywork and not abstracted in an even vaguely interesting way.
Completely agreed. They were easily my least favorite part of HOI IV.
Suppression garrisons didn’t take enough manpower or equipment to be meaningful to most nations but they did subtract from the amount of mental capacity I had to remember about that stuff.
I’m playing Russia for the first time in age and had my first experience with a border war. It is weird mechanism, but I think it will work ok for resistance stuff.
I’m also happy that they are going to make suppression garrison off map.
Awesome, France and Spain reworks already. The remaining nations on my wishlist are Italy rework, Greece, and Turkey.
I think at this point I’ll wait for Hearts of Iron Infinity. Perhaps then they’ll put all the reworks from the first X Hearts of Iron game into the game they sell originally.
They are definitely getting better at making complex focus trees and decisions. Quite a lot of detail in that one.
It seems like they maybe just upped the ante on themselves again for what a focus tree “should” be.
Mother of Focus Trees!
Some perspective, from a reddit post.
I hope it’s clear to everyone involved how clunky the presentation and UI is for these focus trees. At launch it was bad enough, but now that they are 4x the size it’s incredible that noone has been able to think of a better way of presenting them.
Yeah the sideway scrolling is a ridiculous PITA. It would be incredible to have a dynamic tree where branches not chosen disappear and it reorganizes itself into more sensible layouts.
Agreed they needs to be able to see at least one level of more or less detail. Even now it is hard to get a big picture. Not so much for your focus tree as your competitor (I make a point checking most of my rivals focus trees every 70 or 140 days).
That’s the bad news, the good news is for the first every I’m interested in playing Spain.
