[2019] Dev Diary: Sub Balance + New Launcher

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/394360/announcements/detail/1611654584239447839]here[/url].

Today's Development Diary by Podcat[pdxint.at]



As Wednesday is upon us so is a new dev diary! Next week we will be back with more espionage, but today is about a small surprise patch as well as improved Focus tree navigation.

1.8 ‘Fork’
Fork you say? I thought you said 1.8 was going to be Husky? Due to technical requirements having to do with updating to the new paradox launcher we had to jump a big number other than going to 1.7.2 like we had planned. This means that 1.9 will instead be Husky which is the big update coming together with La Resistance.

To read the full changelog for the patch, click here. [forum.paradoxplaza.com]

To summarize, the big points here are: Stability, submarine balance and a new launcher

Submarine balance
Later tier 3 and 4 subs were simply too good compared to destroyers designed to hunt them. They have been nerfed a bit and increased in cost and destroyer upgrades improved. Large empires should now also have a bit easier time as we better control the amount of convoys in each battle and have fixed a bug where convoys would actively hurt the sub detection abilities of their escorts making it really tough in big battles.



New launcher
We much like Imperator, EU4 and Stellaris have now also moved to the new launcher.
Since wargamers are a traditional bunch you might be asking why a new launcher is happening. There are several reasons:

• Platform independence. We want to be able to exist on multiple platforms eventually and the current one is limited and not really capable of doing it very well.
  
• The old one is really limited in how we can communicate with you. Now we can link to multiple news post for example.
  
• It frees up the dev team (us). We never really had the time to work on the launcher and as the place setting up mods and such there have been a ton of requests for features (such as mod groupings and presets) that we just never have the time to do. With a dedicated team working on a unified launcher across pdx games they will have more time for stuff like this and we can worry about the game itself. I have great hopes for lots of cool improvements in the future and make sure to let them know in comments what kind of features you would like to see.
  
• We got a neat continue button now directly in launcher so you can save time getting back on your previous session ;)
  
  
  
  
  
  Go here to read details about the launcher changes and what the mean for modders and player.[forum.paradoxplaza.com]
  
  The tl;dr for players though is that you need to start the game, run it to the main menu and then quit and restart. Without this your mods wont show up. This will clean up old mod configuration and prep everything. Mods will still show out of date until modders have updated the supported version, but we haven't made any changes that will break them so 1.7.1 mods should still be ok, despite them saying they arent - so no panic ;) If you do have issues please post about them in the above linked thread about the launcher rather in here (its still cool to discuss the launcher here though).
  
  The patch itself releases later today (late afternoon). That is all about the patch, lets move on to highlight some neat stuff coming in 1.9 'Husky'...
  
  Focus Tree Navigation
  As our focus trees have gotten larger finding things in them or simply exploring them has gotten harder. To solve this we are adding several things to the national focus screen (btw UI here is still a bit WIP and may change)
  
  
  • Zoom - You can now zoom in and out to the mouse pointer much like on the map. Its a nice way to get around on big trees (*squints at the spanish focus tree*)
    
  • Filters - toggling various filters can let you easily spot where industry is located, or things related to particular national spirits you are trying to get rid of or modify. These are tagged manually on focuses so its something modders will be able to use also.
    
  • Free Search - on top of filters we also have full free search. It goes through tooltips automatically and picks out focuses. This is a more advanced and powerful version of Filters and quite nice for finding specific things fast when you know what you are looking for.
  
  
  
  This is me searching for industry related stuff in the Chinese tree. It also shows some of our default filters on the right. Several nations have special filters to help highlight specific mechanics. So China has "Inflation" as a filter, the commonwealth nations have a filter to help spot affecting independence etc. We hope this is going to make getting into new focus trees a lot easier!
  
  Here is an example of zooming out about half way on China:
  
  
  If I place my mouse pointer somewhere I can still see tooltips and zooming will zoom to the cursor.
  
  
  See you all next week for another diary!