Those do look like some great changes. The research is the real meat and potatoes, the amphibious tanks a garnish. They’re only going to be situationally useful, but the hardest thing about developing them would have been creating the new icons, I would imagine.
I wonder when this sucker is going to ship (no pun intended)? I’m in the mood for more HOI4, but the Paradox DLC paradox has struck again!
With my luck, I’m sure the HoI4 and Stellaris expansions will be released on the same day… right at the start of a crunch period at work.
Oh, how I can relate! I’d love if they were able to release them by EOY so I can binge over the holidays. But you’re probably right. :)
I’ve been holding off on a new playing a new HOI game also. I’ve got 1200 hours and it seems to me that both the developers and I are running out of ideas.
What sort of sucks is I’m not sure I can really imagine a better grand strategic WWII game.
I am hoping that the core changes to ship design and naval combat will be good, once we actually get to see them. I do agree that a lot of the stuff they have shown lately seems to be fairly small-bore. Still there are a lot of solid changes already revealed for the next release.
I think they made some really good high-level decisions when designing the game, especially the economic model. Still, there are some very large implementation problems that I wish they would look at. Things like an AI that sometimes tries to do force concentration. Battleplans that don’t rapidly go off the rails. The interactions between org, width and unit size that make no sense.
Really I can’t shake the feeling that the AI at the tactical level could be miles better. When I am doing unit micro, I am making very local decisions and pretty simple heuristics and it is much much more effective than the typical AI “cover the whole line evenly then attack everywhere” heuristic. I feel like they started with the wrong concept of how the AI should look at the problem and have been trying to tweak that since the start.
I like the concept. I’m not sure the particular modifiers make sense, but I don’t know the big picture. Hopefully the next week’s DD clears it all up.
What is the current wisdom with regards to division composition? No more 7/2, right? Should the Anti-Air and Anti-Tank be only support companies or brigades? Or were they nerfed like regular artillery was?
Artillery was nerfed, but I’ve found 7/2 to still be solid. Full infantry divisions are more viable now for holding lines, though.
I think this depends on how big your infantry divisions are and what they are facing. AA and AT are very efficient width-wise, so I like to put them in the line if possible. But maybe support or no AA is needed if you plan on maintaining air superiority. And how much AT you need depends on what type of tank divs you are facing.
I am a bit annoyed by line Art, since they take 3 width and 3x as many guns as support Art, but don’t do that much more soft attack. I think line Art should maybe be 12 guns and 1 width. Artillery battalions were usually 12 guns, not 36.
I generally don’t bother building either AA guns or Anti Tanks because of the limits of research, except for Russia. I wondered why they cut the number of guns for support artillery in 1/2, I guess to give minors, and countries like China a little more staying power. It definitely makes adding support artillery a must have for pretty much all of your divisions.
I think 7-2 is still viable basic infantry division, even nerfed artillery still has lot of soft attack/per width and per production point. Once you get to 40 width I’m using 12 Inf, 5 Art, and 1 Antitank. except for I throw in a tank or Tank destroyer for selected divisions.
My biggest issue right now is research, they keep adding things to research, and with the possible exception of Russia (and I have not played her recently) its pretty much impossible to keep things up to date. Things like heavy fighter, tactical bombers, radar techs, and AA guns and Anti tanks I just never have enough slots to research.
I like the general idea of what they are doing, but I wonder how well it will play in practice. The idea of having your small ships out on patrol and calling in the heavies once they spot someone is pretty neat. Not clear if they are doing subs in a completely different way or they are part of this model as well.
Wow. They surely aren’t being shy about thinking big with these changes. It sounds like a complete overhaul of the entire naval layer. Very cool.
I’m excited I’ll definitely stop mostly playing German, and play more Japan, US, or UK after this patch.
I would like to see them have a warning button popup when there are certain areas where your convoys are getting torched and provide potential routes that your shipping could take (at a cost) to try and reduce the amount of tonnage being sunk. Sort of like a setting where you could say if you are losing more than 100k tonnes/month on a route to let you know.
I’m going to guess the Expert AI guy is going to have a lot of new material to work with with this, but this sounds really cool.
I’m really worried that the designer stuff, like mines, is going to add a lot of micro to the game without having a real benefit outside of some multiplayer scenarios.
That said, the designer is sexy and I can’t wait to play with it. I just don’t really expect to ever use it ast he defaults will likely suffice for me.
I am also a bit worried about AI, but the designer stuff looks so interesting! Especially if they eventually expand it to AFVs and aircraft.
While I do worry about the AI I figure I can just crank up the computer advantages another notch and enjoy the new ship designer.
I’m a tinkerer at heart. It’s what sucks me in to strategy games and why I end up spending 90% of my time in the mechbay or character builder or what have you.
Strangely, I tend to hate unit designers in the majority of strategy games, especially scifi ones. Just give me some templates and let me roll. For some reason, HOI4 is the big exception to that. Perhaps it’s because of how well designing divisions ties into the other systems of the game, like production, industry, resources, etc.
I’m curious to see how I’ll end up liking the ship designer. It sure sounds really cool and also sounds like it’s more than “Min/max to find the optimal ship!”. I can see uses for cheap ASW destroyers, minelayers, etc.