Making History: The Second World War News

Last week we took most of the restraints off military recruitment. This was done mostly because nations were being too reserved about spending money to support units. Now you may find that certain Nations build too many units. A new restraint system is coming soon along with a lot more Military AI improvements.

The AI work is currently focussed on border security, coastal sea zone defense and amphibious assaults. There are improvements to the sea invasion targeting. The AI should be applying more rational criteria when ordering an amphibious assault. For one thing, they no longer look to invade regions outside their Sphere of Interest except when defending an Ally. This should result in more sustainable operations.

Nations now place a higher priority on defending their land and coastal borders. Although there are a few layers of decisions not yet implemented, you should see a difference. The naval AI that manages coastal sea zone defense needs some attention. We find the AI is wisely putting ships into port for repairs but they sometimes leave sea zones undefended in the process. Sometimes it makes sense to stay at sea even when a ship is crippled.

We modified some of the game data to improve balancing. Some of this was in response to feedback from the community, other changes were made as a result of internal testing. For example, I have again sped up Research to make sure nations get through the tree in an expected timeframe. My goal is to get the US to drop an atomic bomb on someone. Getting this to playout at a semi-historical rate could add a nice urgency and suspense to the overall game. In other words, we’d like the nuclear gameplay to be more than an afterthought. There will be more to say about this topic later.

Work on military AI will continue to be our priority for the next release. It’s also time to implement some Operation Barbarossa events. Much of this rests on Germany’s ability to defeat the French in a timely fashion. This key strategic aim is another challenge that is driving our military AI decisions.

We did not expect to complete a full revision of the military AI system in a single week and this process could last several more. At this stage in development, we must keep the game playable, so major code changes will need to be carefully added. Sometimes portions will be kept back until we feel the impact won't undermine the player experience.

Every update will have many changes listed, too many to describe. Please feel free to inquire about features and changes you have questions about. The feedback from the community has been a very big help. Thanks.

Notes for Early Access Update #3
- Balanced AI Army Recruitment Templates
- Reduced Food Cost for Arms from 2 to 1
- Reduced MPU Growth Rates for Higher Food Infrastructure
- Balance Construction Requirements for Transportation Level 6
- Increased Regional Tax Income for Resources (Modified by Transportation Level)
- Removed Setups for Some kinds of Artillery due to UX issues
- Relabeled Army Columns from Mechanized Infantry to Mobile Infantry
- Implemented new Nation Target triggers for some Events
- Revisions and bug fixes in several existing events
- New events for Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia joining Axis or not
- New Italo-Greek War, Tripartite Pact Events
- Fixed Decal on German Rocket Artillery Model
- Added New Infrastructure Icons for Transportation and Food
- Updated Default Motorized Infantry Unit Render
- Updated Mechanized Infantry Unit Icon to Mobilized
- Added Attack Power to Coastal Guns
- Balanced Region Infrastructure properties, Transportation, Movement
- Increased Speed of Research
- Fixed bug in City content that prevented Boston from upgrading Research buildings
- Removed some Cavalry units from a few modern armies
- Modified Opportunity Attack AI
- Improved AI Sea Invasion criteria
- AI will not order Sea Invasions when target Regions are not in the Nation's sphere.
- Include enemy navies and coastal defense when looking for an overseas target.
- Only consider Sphere Infractions when nation or region is directly in sphere.
- Fix a rare Unit display bug.
- Removed map edges for the Amazon Channels so that ships can't path there.
- Added Mobile Infantry category to the military panel.
- Include Airbases in Fogged map objects.
- Added a "Target Nation" operation to the Event scripting routines.
- Fixed bug in AI evaluation that made nearby over water regions as valuable as Claims.
- Changed building reqs for research to work with higher level buildings.
- Added MPU to extract cost for resource capacities.
- Fixed AI MPU checks for expanding resource caps.
- Fixed some issues with transportation display in the encyclopedia and region select panel.
- Updated AI strength estimates for non-equipment units when determining units to recruit
- AI will no longer recruit units that they have no desire for.
- Fixed broken encyclopedia link for research in the gov panel.

A new version of The Second World War is now live. This week we’ve made some big changes to the AI military recruitment system. We noticed a lack of unit recruitment by nations that were in the midst of war. Turns out the AI was being stingy about spending money. We relaxed or removed many of these restrictions. You should see a lot more aggressive recruitment and a more challenging AI as a result.

The aggressive recruitment strategy might have unforeseen impact on the game balance. We’ll make modifications as needed. There were also some incorrect assumptions in data that blocked certain units from ever being built by the AI. With that addressed, a greater variety of units and 3D models should populate the map.

Pretty much all the units have had their combat properties tweaked. Getting this right will take time and we definitely want to hear from the community on what feels right and what doesn’t. On that note, we were able to get in a few of the suggestions from the forums like fixing a fighter model with the wrong propeller. That was an easy one. Other ideas and bug finds have been catalogued to address right away or consider for later. One user pointed out some oddities in the Sphere of Influence system. Our analysis led us to schedule changes that will make the AI less trigger happy in regions they have no real interest.

For next week we plan to continue with military AI. We’re working on getting nations to be smarter about deciding when and where to fight. There’s also a long list of features and bugs that we must whittle away at. Since our goal is to update the game on a weekly basis, this means we only have 4 days of work between each release. On Friday - as long as everything goes well, we begin a code build in the morning that takes several hours to finish. While that is churning. The team meets to discuss game design and implementation goals for the next update. Hopefully by 5PM EST a new release will be ready to go live.

Notes for Early Access Update #2:
- AI considers “in production” units when using AI recruitment templates.
- No long limits military recruitment versus Food Labor concerns.
- Removed MPU check when AI looks to recruit equipment units.
- AI will recruit beyond their ability to support the units to ensure enough troops.
- Remove budgetary considerations for AI recruitment.
- AI will always choose a unit to build if they want to build one.
- No longer move to readiness None when out of money.
- Balanced AI Recruitment Templates for Army, Air and Navy.
- Revised combat properties for most units.
- Update AI region/city control caching before determining AI military % issue.
- Human subordinates are allowed to auto accept trade proposals from their masters.
- Colony trade orders can now be set up from the global production tab.
- Global production tab trade buttons now say "Trade Order" for player colonies and protectorates.
- Colonies and protectorates now show their master's gov type in the ideology score mapview.
- Fixed formatting issue with ethnicity display in establish new nation panel.
- Fixed stack overflow crash when rendering ethnicity list in the region transfer panel.
- Fixed issue limiting artillery recruitment.
- Color code auto trade buttons based on auto trade state.
- AI will consider giving unclaimed regions to nearby colonies.
- Fixed rare error when a cached pathfinder can reference a dead nation.
- If a transport is in port, unload the troops onto the land region and remove the ferry target.
- AI no longer requests regions from an ally of an enemy.
- Include dependencies in white peace.
- Fixed American Fighters III model that was missing 3rd propeller.
- Revised Quebecois Fascists Flag Set.
- Balanced AI Recruitment Templates for Army, Air and Navy.
- Swapped Corvette and Frigate in the Tech Tree.
- Fixed some errors in data causing Fortification III to become available too early.
- Further easing on Research Point requirements .
- Increased price of Arms.
- New event for Japanese Invasion of Indochina
- New event for British Occupation of Faroe Islands and Iceland
- Added time based Military Access & Non-Aggression Pacts
- Added mechanized infantry to new unit class so AI will build
- Fixed mechanized infantry not showing up in the encyclopedia
- Fixed missing oiler and collier Unit Icons
- Removed food maintenance for field artillery

It’s been a week since we released The Second World War and began the Early Access pre-release phase. Overall, the launch went very well. Some players did experience a memory crash but this issue can be addressed through game settings. We’ve changed some of the default settings to minimize future problems. Along with the remaining feature work we will also be doing optimization and performance improvements wherever we can.

This week we spent a lot of effort on improving the way the AI manages the production of factory outputs like Steel and Rail Capacity. We’re trying to get them to produce more and trade more. It may take a few rounds to get the balance right. Please let us know if you think the AI is doing a better job with this.
We continue to make adjustments to the Annex logic so nations will liberate their friends and replace the governments of their enemies. The AI is directed to establish governance based on a character property we call International Policy. There are 4 settings: Imperialist, Expansionist, Ideologue and Neutral. The decisions are also influenced by technology dominance and governing ideology. We want the AI to form coherent states based on the mindset of nations during this era. A few oddball cases will still exist and sometimes that makes for good gameplay. As with most systems in Early Access, we will not declare it done until we release.

The Workshop will be officially turned on with this release. Many of our users like to create mods and we want to support their efforts. The Editor is being kept up to date as new features are added to the game. This might cause mods to incompatible so beware. You may want to wait before investing a lot of time into a large scale project. We decided not to expose the Event editing section since these are still being changed and new Triggers will be added in the next couple of weeks. It will be including at some point in the next few weeks.

And finally, I’ve received a few comments about the choice of music in the game.
I understand the Spaghetti Western style is not accurate to the period. But there’s something about those old Sergio Leone movies that I aesthetically associate with WW2. Maybe it’s because the majority of movies I've watched about the war were made back in the 60's. Since this is Early Access I figured I could try something a bit different. And I do intend to add in some moody ambient tracks to soften things up. If it’s super annoying to most people, I'll swap them out when we release. Until the, every gun makes its own tune.

Next week we have a stack of things to work on, we are hoping our main focus will shift away from the Economy and on to the Military AI. I’ll be on the forums answering questions and making comments when I feel I can be useful.




- Added +/- indicators to top bar supplies.
- Lowered points required for most research projects (To Speed up).
- Increased Ethiopian Starting Units.
- Re-added Atheism as Soviet Religion.
- Relocated Wurttemberg Airbase.
- Fixed Music reference errors that kept a few songs from playing.
- Some trigger typos fixed (Thanks to our community spelling skills).
- Added missing unit icons for Colier, Troopship and Oiler.
- Changed Compressed Terrain option to default to On.
- Changed registry location for game settings to Making History SWW.
- Updated World Demand values for capacities.
- AI now considers all resource demands for 2nd and 3rd order production.
- Balanced Resource Costs and Output/Turn Factors.
- Balanced Higher level Transportation Infrastructure properties.
- Starting gold for new subordinates is now deducted from the Master's treasury.
- Annex Puppet now transfers resources and units to Master Nation.
- Updated Status Quo Peace deal annex logic.
- The AI Pre War region list is now based on owned regions.
- Added turn length option to Military Access Event Triggers to keep the AI from ending the treaty.
- Implemented forced Military Access treaties to Soviet Baltic triggers.
- Added fallback unit position index for air patrol units if they don't have a valid one.
- Disallow splitting air groups that are based off of carriers.
- Fixed pixel noise around main menu Buttons.
- Added some New Notification images.
- New Triggers Started: Lend Lease, Bulgaria, Chain Home.
- Added more silent Non-Aggression pacts at start.
- Fixed bugs and made improvements to many triggers.
- Removed Expansionist Policy from all starting nations, added triggers to turn these on.
- Changed Commonwealth nations from Imperialist to Ideologue - except UK.

Making History: The Second World War is officially for sale on Steam as an Early Access title. The game is mostly feature complete and stable. The Early Access process allows us to finish the game with input from the community. For a small independent company like Factus Games, this has many advantages. We do not have the staff for intensive testing so the community does help us find issues that might take longer to find in house. More importantly, the end phase is typically dominated by AI and game balancing. These are areas where players can provide valuable feedback and influence the final product.

There’s still a lot of work ahead for some areas of the game and still more we want to improve before the final release. We plan to get new game updates to the community on a weekly basis. During the pre-release period it’s possible saved games could become incompatible after an update. However, we will try hard to avoid that from happening. It’s difficult to say exactly how long the pre-release period will last. We expect it to be no more than 2 months.

This is the first of what we hope to be many games developed at Factus Games. Thanks for your support.