We’ve finished rewriting the Military Defense AI. This work covered several areas important to making the AI nations tougher opponents. Nations will use their Sphere of Interests combined with the AI Character property Militarism Policy to influence the core of their defensive decisions. Recruitment goals are based on the strength and relationships the other nations within their Sphere. Militarism tells the AI how important it is to match or exceed a rival's military strength level. This has the effect of stimulating an arms race mentality between the Great Powers. The unit placement logic does a much better job defending borders by more effectively distinguishing friendly versus hostile neighbors. Higher Coastal Defense properties combined with increased Amphibious Assault penalties should add more risk and challenge to sea invasions. The Military Readiness system we borrowed from The Great War has been replaced with something simpler but generally similar. Readiness no longer penalizes based on a supportable number. In the new system, a Low Readiness will lower the cost and combat strength of all units. The Mobilization Rate determines how quickly your Readiness will increase each turn when you set it higher. Upgrading Transportation Infrastructure will speed up the Rate. I’ve put some effort into getting Food to be more plentiful by removing the requirement from Arms production. This change should also make Arms easier to come by. As I’ve mentioned previously in one place or another, the game balance will be a continuing process up to and likely beyond release. Please give us your feedback. A few new Events made it into the game, namely Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. We have not finished all the Events associated with the attack, but we do have the Germans creating their Reichskommissariat occupation governments as they conquer Russia. Our focus will next turn to the Pacific War since the Japanese and Americans need attention. But we will eventually get back to Europe and other areas in the World. For those who use paratroopers you might notice we’ve added little parachutes dropping out of the back of the Air Transports when you deploy Airborne Infantry. More graphical enhancements are scheduled but the priority is still on the Military systems, AI and Events. Each week we will try to include some UI or art improvements in addition to the larger goals. Our work on the Military will continue through next week but will be primarily focused on combat resolution. Like other systems in the game, we borrowed code from The Great War to get The Second World War up and running as fast as possible. In the last year we’ve replaced almost all the stand-in code and now the combat system is one of the last significant tasks. The changes could be dramatic. At the very least, we plan to greatly reduce the length of overly lopsided battles and enhance the qualitative factors in combat results. If everything goes as planned, the next update should have the basic implementation. As always, please feel free to inquire about features and changes you have questions about. The feedback from the community continues to be a huge help. We appreciate those who have taken the time to send in saved games and log reports. If you have a crash, think you’ve found a bug or maybe just noticed one of my spelling errors, post a note on Steam or email us at techsupport@factusgames.com. Visit our website to read how to get us debugging information: https://factusgames.com/pages/support. Notes for Early Access Update #4 - Added Parachute Animation to Air Transports - Increased Food Outputs for City Food Production Buildings - Removed Food Requirement from Arms & Add Metals - Increased Mechanized Farm Food Output Rate - Lowered Cost of Arms from 8 to 7 Gold Per Unit - Added new City called Ravine capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine - Removed Soviet Relations with Yugoslavia at start of game - Gave USA Motored Boats research project - Adjusted starting AI Character properties for Military Policy - Increased several region Farm Levels in USA and Canada - Lowered chance USA will enter war if France is invaded - Fixed Military Access triggers that had nation's Giving and Receiving reversed - Added German Claims to Poland - Added missing Bulgarian Axis Event checks - Added Control conditions to Vichy Events to make Free France more likely to fire - Improved issue where Free France was not allying with the Allies - Gave Free France Total War Military Policy - New Barbarossa Event - New German Reichskommissariat Events - New Continuation War Event - Added some conditional checks to improve German Eastern European Events - Fixed missing check in Italian Albanian Event - Reverted Civil War definition to be based just on region Nationality - AI will now choose between Oilers and Colliers based on naval supply needs - New Assault Penalty for Amphibious Assaults into regions with Coastal Defenses - Added new property to the encyclopedia for Coastal Defenses - Improved AI performance tracking Region Defenses - Fixed evaluation that could cause nations to devalue defense in certain regions - Fixed erroneous error placing embargos - region select panel now shows only available region mpus - AI no longer tries to unload troops involved in combat - Added current military readiness to the readiness tooltip - Added a tooltip to explain the sources of mobilization rate - Redefined "significant war" for AI soft goal - Militarism low and medium now consider military budgets during recruitment - Removed dependence of AI recruitment on "supportable units" - AI Readiness choice is now determined by War and Militarism - Redefined "too many units" penalty to be based directly off of Readiness - Added the concept of “desired military power” - AI will ignore invasion triggers from allies if they are also AI - Fixed sign error in defend nation AI