[2022] Dev Diary - Telemetry and data

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello there, the time has come to do a fun dive into what you've been playing the game as a community. So over this diary we are going to look into some of the trends and statistics we seen from our telemetry and see how we use it to gain insights in current player trends when working on HOI4. The wonderful data team have been working to get us all the information we wanted and I hope you enjoy seeing some of their great work. As a forward point, as with any data collection we do not store any personal information or anything that can used to identify players in accordance with GDPR.

So first of we will start with something fun, can you guess what this graph is telling us.


If you guessed this was us spotting the continuous naval production focus exploit being discovered you get a gold star, although it seems some of you are still very much into using the focus.


With telemetry we can work to understand our players by seeing how you play and this lets us form an experience players will enjoy. we see this in many ways, for example we can see by player difficulty settings players really shy away from the harder difficulties.



We can also see how players are reacting to new content, here we can see the soviet union and Poland grow and maintain solid new highs in terms of sessions played. Germany still remains you favourite major to play, and for those of you that like playing minors the PRC seems to be the country to go for.



Now lets get into some more specific game related data, player play behaviours are something that always interesting to know. You might think you know what most players are doing from discussions on various discussion platforms, streams and videos, however what's even better is knowing for sure what the meta and average player does.

For example many people really need to check their infantry equipment stockpile late game


Seriously players really enjoy making infantry equipment 3


Alright that's allot of graphs, and we know graphs are not how we get views, so lets take tried and trusted top 5's for spin.

We will start with rapid fire round of nukes so.

Top 5 target nations:

• Germany
  
• Soviet union
  
• Japan
  
• USA
  
• England

Top 10 Target provinces:

• Tokyo
  
• London
  
• Berlin
  
• Hiroshima
  
• Moscow
  
• Nagasaki
  
• Washington
  
• Osaka
  
• Nagoya
  
• Paris

Top 5 countries nuking:

• Germany
  
• Soviet union
  
• USA
  
• England
  
• Italy

As we can see players are really not very imaginative with their nuke targets or they share a strange wish to nuke all the same places. Please also let me know why you really like nuking Paris in the comment below.

We can now take a trip over to something newer, its that new shiny toy the tank designer. I must say if there was a meta with tank design someone forgot to tell players because the only consistent design trend has been making cheap flame tanks.

So here we have your favourite modules for each category over the last month



How about your favorite Tank role designs, featuring some monster MBT design that players love.



You guys also have some erm "interesting" collective opinions when it comes to amphibious tanks.


We have also see that about 10% of you and only about 4% of total designs are made with auto design, this is something that reinforces our desire to improve this element of the designers.


Alright lets get into some more gritty details. first off we have been seeing how player designs have been changing since release in response to changes in patches and the design meta developing.


Next up lets see how you've been using those handy preferred tactics, it neck and neck over what players think is the best one for the army.


But you have a clear favourite for generals.


But what about all those new focus trees, well lets take a look at how you traverse focus trees. here we look at what exclusive choices you are making when playing with the new focus trees. As a community players will always trend toward the path that lets them expand and be independent so most of the breakdowns are as expected. however its also very useful to know what specific choices players make within these paths.








Construction now, when to switch to MIL's from CIV's is always an topic for debate. as we can see though the change happens on average quite early with the first year averaging at 13.17 CIV's built. This is consistent over most majors outside SOV, with many being much more extreme than the average.



Additionally you always need more railways and infrastructure.




Finally I'll bring us to Division meta. this might be surprising but meta divisions while definitely popular, are not as ubiquitous as online discussion would have you believe.



As you can see we have the usual suspects of the 10-0's, 7-2's and 14-4's but they are nowhere near dominant in the average game.
The situation becomes even less unified once we take support companies into account




That wraps it up for this Dev Diary, If you have anything specific you're interested in from this brief overview let me know and maybe we can do a deep dive in future.

{LINK REMOVED}For the full diary and discussion click here