[2023] Developer Corner | Military Industrial Orgs.

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

Greetings all!

Today marks the first occasion since the release of By Blood Alone where we take a deeper look into what is coming next. As you may recall from the BBA development cycle, we had an early set of 'Development Corner' diaries, which serve as an opportunity for us to reveal a narrow look at a specific mechanic or design without revealing too much about the wider context of future releases. Today's offering, as well as the next couple of diaries, will be in much the same spirit - you'll just have to wait a little bit longer to get the full picture. Scandalous and polarising, I know.

/Arheo

Hello there, it's me, C0rax. Now you can get all excited because it's time for some Dev Corners in which we will show you some WIP looks into the new features we have been working on. So without further ado this week we will be looking at…

Military Industrial Organisations (MIO’s)
This is all very much WIP, you are going to see WIP mock ups, and some details are still being finalised!

Feature Intent & goals

Intent:

• Create a sense of a living organisation the player can interact with rather than a static bonus as with current design companies.

Why is this important you ask? Well previously we had to provide static modifiers and sometimes change them via scripted decisions or focus rewards. By creating a more organic system to upgrade your design companies you the player can now decide what these upgrades are and tailor them to fit your playstyle. Additionally we can now reward the player for using a design company as opposed to simply having you save up a resource and click a button, rewarding you for putting effort into them.

Goals:

• Allow the player to define their designer direction.
  
• Integrate design companies into production
  
• Provide a framework for national specialisms that can be used on the world stage

Military industrial Organisations (MIO’s)
So first here is a rough structure of an MIO;

Contains

• Name
  Icon
  Size (Level)
  funds (XP)
  Task Capacity
  Departments

Departments

• 0-1 Design team
  
• 3 departments
  
• Max 13 traits each

• 0-1 Industrial manufacturer
  
• 3 departments
  
• Max 13 traits each

Each departments contains

• Name
  
• Category’s
  
• Trait tree
  
• Trait icons

Task Capacity

• Size determines how many tasks a MIO can handle
  -Researching
  -Producing
  -Designing

Defaults:

• 2 task Capacity
  
• + scripted increases
  
• + trait increases

This structure allows us to represent MIO’s in a way that expresses the specialisms of the various organisations that designed and produced war materials during the period. You can now represent a company like Bofors AB who designed and produced anti tank, anti air and naval guns seamlessly and expand each of those specialisms as you see fit. Investing in the right MIO is critical to upgrading those specialist departments in order to gain the bonuses you need for specific stats.

Task Capacity: An MIO of course can’t work on a number of infinite simultaneous projects. For this we have task capacity that limits how many things your MIO’s can work on balancing. This is an important thing to balance, since producing too much equipment with an MIO will lock you out from using it for research or designing equipment. For ship production this is actually important for producing ships in parallel so you might want to invest in the manufacturing department for task capacity so you can really ramp up your naval production.


Levelling & upgrades
Research cost and Production cost is used to calculate MIO funds that it gains when it is used.
An amount of MIO Funds is required to increase your size and pick a new trait.




Skill trees

• split roughly along the same lines as current design companies.
  
• possibility for country unique trees
  
• possibility for content prerequisites (national focus or decision locking etc…)

Departments and Tasks

• Industrial manufacturers (IM's)
  
• Assigned to production lines (Task)

Skill trees provide production specific bonuses

• Design teams (DT's)
  
• Applied to research (Task)
  
• Applied to equipment both via equipment designers and normal variants
  
• Skill trees provide Stat bonuses
  
• Can be applied retroactively to equipment at cost
  
• A move away from pay mana get reward

So that's a lot of high-level structural talk so you understand the core concepts of the MIO Feature and so I'll now show some of the WIP flows of actually using these structures and systems.

Researching


Equipment variants​



Production
Well that wraps things up for this week, I Hope you enjoyed it and as always please leave questions and comments below and I will do my best to answer them. Join me in two weeks for another dev corner showing another feature coming to you in the near future.