Hearts of Iron IV News

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Hello there C0RAX, here!

For my first HoI dev diary, I’m here to show you the second part of the Officer Corps, a new way of personalising your military that will be included as part of No Step Back and the Barbarossa update.

In the last dev diary we explained how we want to allow you to specialise your military branches with the leadership and advisors. Today we bring to you some new features that allow you to customise how your military operates, and act as a further use for the new sources of branch experience that were hinted at last week.

You may have been wondering what all those shiny boxes with emblems were for. I'm here to tell you they are the new Officer Corps Spirits.

Spirits are a new way to specialise your military, generals and even help your division designs. Each branch has multiple categories for its spirits that affect different aspects of the way they operate. Here I have shown you the spirits of the army which provide bonuses to designing divisions or operating armies. Of course this category has analogs for both the air and navy branches.

Now we have the more direct combat effect level spirits that let you improve specific parts of your units to best match your strategy. These also let you conduct some historical moves that previously were quite hard such as using your capital ships as surface raiders without screens. And for those keen eyed readers, yes the division spirits provide tactics weight increases if you also have them selected as your preferred tactic which we will get to shortly.

Finally we have the final category for the army and navy branches, the academy spirits. Previously generating commanders was a purely random chance. Now with the academy spirits you can tailor this toward specific personality traits along with helping you generals progress in a particular direction. For the above image you can also see the new engineer officer personality trait that provides bonuses to xp generation for the engineer trait. This works in tandem with the advisor promotion mentioned last week, and adds another dimension towards tailoring your officer corps from the very beginning.

With the new spirits some are limited by either your political ideology or doctrines and so you will have to take this into account when deciding the strategy of your officers corps.

The final part of this week's dev diary brings us to preferred tactics. This new feature provides you with a tool to influence the likelihood of a specific tactic being used in combat allowing you to increase the chance of getting that favorable matchup in battle or possibly the perfect counter.

This simulates a doctrinal emphasis on doing battle in a specific way; but can also provide a tool that can be used to counter a strongly themed force.

The new window will help show you all the tactics you have unlocked from doctrines and see what effect they have on the battle. If you combine this preferred tactic with your division spirit bonus you will double the effectiveness of the tactic preference so unifying your strategic direction will help you get the most out of the officer corps.

Well that's all for this week comrades, see you at the front. C0RAX

[h3]Greetings all, Arheo here![/h3]

For my first HoI dev diary, I’m here to introduce the Officer Corps: a collection of new features that will be included as part of No Step Back and the Barbarossa update.

For quite a while, we’ve wanted to allow for more direct specialization of military branches, as well as tying together various disparate systems such as the high command, generals, military-focused national spirits, and doctrines. To achieve step one of this process, we’re giving the Officer Corps and associated mechanics a unique national interface:

(WIP, as usual)

Here, the empty advisor portraits at the top of the window are where you can now find your High Command and Military Theorist, and the advisor portraits below this are related to each branch Chief - they have been moved out of the political sub-window accordingly.

As well as UI location, there are further changes coming to all military advisors. Where previously, the theorist was the only advisor type that granted daily experience gain, all high command and branch chief will now generate experience appropriate to the branch they represent.



The Advisor rank (e.g. Expert) indicates both the magnitude of their modifier bonus, and the daily experience you will receive.

We’re also experimenting with a split political/command power costs to gate the experience ramp-up somewhat, along with some other minor changes to command power.

Behind the scenes, we’ve made a host of changes to the advisor, spirits, and commander systems. Where previously, if we wanted to create a national spirit related to having a certain character in your government, it would be entirely unrelated to having an advisor with the same name, masquerading as the same person - likewise for commanders and advisors masquerading as the same person. This has changed. These are (for the most part) now controlled by ‘characters’. This has pretty sweeping connotations for our internal content designers, as well as modders, but importantly also allows us to bring the following new system to the No Step Back release:



The introduction of a more connected Officer Corps felt like the perfect time to bring more of a connection to the Generals and Field Marshals that oversee your active forces, and the various military offices that advise your government.

In No Step Back, Generals, Admirals or Field Marshals can be assigned an advisory desk duty in addition to their status as a field commander. This will effectively add the character as a new advisor to your roster.

The type of advisor available to you is dependent on the skill level and traits of the commander you’re ‘promoting’ (not everyone likes desk duty ;) ), as you can see in the highly WIP interface below:



Here, Herr Hell can be converted to an Entrenchment specialist as he possesses the Engineer trait, and has skill level 5. Currently, both Military High Command and branch Chief roles are available.



Experience generation in general has been weighted and balanced in order to achieve a more gradual switch from peacetime generation (a strong cadre of advisors, and unit training), through to wartime. Experience generation from combat and battles has been reduced fairly significantly to account for this, as well as capped (separately from other sources). Overall, experience generation will be consistently higher than in previous versions - this was done both to mitigate the introduction of the tank designer (and thereby increased costs), and to account for the other new ways in which you are now able to spend experience, which we shall cover below.

The eagle-eyed amongst you noticed in a previous diary that the doctrine branches had been removed from the technology window - they can now be accessed from the officer corps interface, and will function somewhat differently to before. Doctrines will be unlocked directly by spending branch experience, which can still be affected by instanced cost modifiers often found in focus trees and events.

(There have been no major structural changes to doctrine layouts)

There are, in addition to the above, several new and exciting things that branch experience will be used for in NSB, some of which are handily teased in the first screenshot of this diary. Alas, we will be covering what those are and how they might affect your gameplay in a future DD.

[h3]/Arheo[/h3]

[h2]Read the full article here: https://pdxint.at/3vpJ48J[/h2]