Hi everyone! I hope you had a nice Easter break :) Today we continue showing stuff for the unannounced DLC and the Oak (1.4) update. For those who haven't been following, the main points of the Oak patch is to get some big difficult changes through for the AI, helping us with things that have long been problems, as well as make air warfare a much more pleasurable experience (more info on these in later diaries as they are still in progress right now). The main topics are License Production and changes to the map. Enjoy!

License Production

As we mentioned in the previous dev diary, nations will now have a new way of acquiring the equipment they need. If a nation lacks the required technology to produce what they need, they can request a license to produce foreign equipment, such as tanks, airplanes or guns, in local factories. Historically, this happened in various forms, ranging from full local manufacturing to assembly of foreign vehicles with or without adapting the designs to use locally sourced parts. The famous Swedish Bofors 40mm was extensively license produced and the Canadian Grizzly tank was a locally produced variant of the Sherman M4 design. In the game, a nation with good relations with a foreign nation can request a license to produce the foreign equipment. The types equipment a nation is willing to license out is dependent on their relations. Germany, for example, may not be willing to license out their latest tank or fighter designs to other nations, but would be happy to provide Panzer IIs to friendly or neutral nations.
National Focuses will also be able to provide licenses, or provide bonuses to license production. In the last dev diary, we showed you the Romanian National Focus Tree. Some of these focuses references License Production, including the Acquire Fighters focus, which triggers the Fighter Competition event.
Producing licensed equipment will not be quite as efficient as producing your own designs, however. A cutting edge licenced production will have a noticeable output penalty, but a design a few years old will be almost as efficient to produce as your own technology. If you aren’t in the same faction as the owner of the design, you will also receive a little bit less technical support and manufacturing assistance.
Licensing equipment also give you a research bonus if you want to unlock making your own. This feature comes with the yet-to-be-announced DLC.

Map update

Different terrains are important, but it was not always as easy to see the difference between them as it could be. For Oak we have updated and changed map textures to make this much clearer. Particularly hills and mountains were in need of this, but forests also got a bump in clarity.

Impassable areas

A common problem that seems to pop up no matter how many times we think we have solved it is AI over-committing to Africa. There has been a lot of community feedback on this and we were hesitant to just make a hole in Africa as some mods do, but we still felt something needed to be done so we decided to go with a slightly different approach in Oak and have implemented a new kind of impassable areas. It's fairly realistic that large troop movements can not be done through Sahara in HOI4's time frame, so we have decide to block them off for troops and avoid any case where AI may be tempted to commit more troops there than what makes sense. It seems to help the axis AI out a lot and creates more interesting small-scale fighting for players as well. Right now there is no way to un-impassable these areas, but I feel like its a logical step in the future where people may be playing past the WW2 era to be allowed to do some expensive project and build a highway across.
We have also set up several borders as impassable to block passage across some areas of the Himalayas and others mountain ranges in that area (Afghanistan now is even tougher to take with more border choke-points like the Khyber Pass). While you can't enter impassable areas controlling surrounding areas will flip impassable states so if you control Africa it will look that way on the map also without say a hole in the middle.

Also don't forget to tune in at 16:00CET on www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive today where me and Daniel present the final episode of Paradox News Network (only true news!) dev MP with the Millennium Dawn mod. See you next week for more diary goodness where SteelVolt will be talking about AI stuff! Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Hearts of Iron IV Wiki Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive

[ 2017-04-19 10:13:52 CET ] [ Original post ]