Today's Development Diary by Podcat



Hi everyone, as the coronavirus apocalypse grips sweden the HOI dev team have reverted to to our baser instincts... no longer chained to our desks our programmers roam the streets stealing gasoline and lines of code from weaker gangs of programmers. The content designers have started worshipping stacks of photocopies of Rommel's "Infantry Attacks", and QA are now hunting bugs using spiked clubs.

Ok, not quite ;) But the team, as well as all of paradox, is currently working from home to help limit COVID-19 spread, also as many have pointed out.. less meetings and less pants! its a win-win situation :)

Today, like last week we have another update on the Beta patch.
[h3]
Updates since last week[/h3]

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# Features
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- Operatives can be disbanded to free up operative slots and recruit different operatives

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# Balance
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- Increased minimum surrender limit to for a country to 20%
- Decrease Base manpower lost in resistance attack to 2.5% from 3%
- Increased compliance decay to give cap of 90% compliance to non democracies.
- Changed compliance loss on state changing hands to 25% from 10%
- Decreased fielded manpower requirement from German "Demand Sudetenland" to 725000 from 750000
- Improved Resistance Suppression when using "Brutal Oppression" from 65% to 75%
- Decreased compliance from collab regime operation to 20% from 30% on normal result and 50% to 40% on excelent result
- changing ideology now halves compliance
- Reduced the Compliance requirements for the Anarchist coring decisions to 50%, down from 60%.
- Increased the cost of Concessions to the Anarchists decision to 150 PP to bring it more in line with its intended purpose as an 'emergency' delay rather than a permanent one, and also made it require either of the Nationalist factions to exist. This means that once those are defeated, there is no stopping the Anarchist uprising anymore.
- operative gained from faction members now is reduced for counties that lacks industry

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# Stability & Performance
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- Prevent CTD when attempting to display the airwings of an airbase the player does not have access to
- Fixed abort to trigger on more cases where invalid map data is detected
- Fixed CTD on invalid naval terrain type for a strategic region
- Fixed CTD on invalid state definition
- Fixed CTD that could happen when re-ordering ship names
- Fixed CTD when displaying the tooltip of the join faction diplomatic action
- Fixed CTD when a autonomy_state has not been correctly loaded
- fixed unnamed gui objects possibly causing crashes and added an errorlog
- Blocked execution of white_peace before game start, along with error log explanation, instead of CTD.

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# UI & Graphics
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- Fix infinite production of ships not assigning names properly in the UI
- Ensured the Abdication Crisis timed mission will now appear at the top of its decision category, for convenience.
- Fixed the Boost Ideology window to work with more than 4 ideologies
- The list of aces to pick from is now sorted to have compatible and free aces at the top
- Releasing puppet no longer creates a new operative slot that disappears again after unpausing
- fixed some graphical issues with frontlines
- fixed operative nationality flags not properly positioned when there are more than 2
- Reduced excessive digits in percentages in various occupation tooltips
- improved operative slot tooltips to see where you are gaining your slots from
- During peace conference, collaboration events are delayed until after and non-news events are hidden

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# AI
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- allies no longer ask SOV for military access
- fixed ai not upgrading templates of existing units
- fixed some issues that resulted in ai preferring producing earlier ships
- ai ITA no longer releases Libya as a collaboration government
- ai will try not to pick closed economy laws if it has large allies

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# Modding
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- fixed accessing variables using other variables not working ( such as var_name:var_name2 )
- added seed = var support for scripted locs random list & random list effect
- laws/ministers can be now modded to use list view instead by adding use_list_view = yes to their idea group
- fixed country_resource_cost_ modifiers not applying correctly
- fixed state resource cost modifiers not showing in tooltip if there were no other resources
- country total resources can go below zero now
- The game no longer aborts due to map errors if launched in debug mode, to allow access to the Nudger
- The game now displays a pop up when reaching the main menu if it detected invalid map data when launched in debug mode
- added on_operative_recruited & on_operative_created on actions
- fixed invalid error logs with tag aliases
- added army_experience navy_experience air_experience country variables

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# Database
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- Renamed Elastic Defense focus to Rebuild the Lines of Torres Vedras for better flavor.
- Fixed "Catalonian Occupation Zone" to properly refer to a "Catalan Occupation Zone", instead.
- Fixed decision requirements in the Abdication Crisis timed mission.
- fixed a number of issues with the French Legitimist Monarchist branch
- Fixed flavor text in the Spanish Independence War news event
- fixed some issues with Japan's head of intelligence advisor
- dismantling the Maginot Line now removes the "Protected by the Maginot Line" national spirit. The Extending the Maginot Line Focus now requires this spirit.
- fixed an issue with Yugoslavian Fighter/Bomber competition event chain having unlocalized strings
- Added missing name for Concessions to the Anarchists decision.
- Fixed Soviet Union seizing Spanish gold reserves even if the gold was never relocated.
- The French "Economic Devolution" focus now displays the correct effects after it is taken

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# Bugfix
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- Renamed Franco's old portrait to prevent it from being used unintentionally by the game.
- Units now correctly divide units into fallback orders that originate in friendly territory and pass through neutral territory.
- fixed another illusive gentleman being available when the first one is taken
- army templates with >10 terrain adjusters will now create a scrollbar in template editor guis so all can be visible
- Random generated female aces now get properly gender flagged
- Made ideas database loading more resilient to script error
- fixed a case where you can steal ships
- fixed sometimes not getting used factories back when canceling an operation
- Made the distribution of states for the Carlist and Anarchist uprisings more reasonable, especially when finishing the SCW early and therefore owning a lot of states before rising up as the Anarchists.
- Requesting Foreign Manpower Garrison support no longer overflows.
- Fixed an issue where territory wasn't assigned properly in the Japan surrender to China
- fixed a rare edge case where Communist China could attempt to infiltrate itself
- Lina Odena is now properly considered female when being referred to in text. Also updated her name to have the proper diacritics.
- fixed usa fascist party popularity being set incorrectly after civil war
- annexed countries will be removed from wars now
- fixed access relations getting cancelled after a while
- fixed factory tooltips in country occupation view
- fixed collaboration government not having a proper name in some cases

If you want to see past changes and full changelog, check out the Beta Patch thread here as well as info on how to start playing on it. Its pretty stable.

Some highlights

Due to popular demand its now possible to fire spies and put someone else in their slot.



The operative will be put back in the pool and you need to wait for a timer to get the slot back to recruit someone else (or get a previously recruited agent back).

We noticed that the code we had put in to stop people from loading broken mod maps also stopped modders from using the ingame nudger tool to fix those issues. That has now been fixed in this update and it will let people access the nudger again as well as making the warnings clearer. We have also added more detailed logging to help people fix their problems. On top of a popup we also have this info when attempting to enter single player.