[2022] Developer Diary | Quality of Life Improvements

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

Greetings all,

Due to a misplaced carrier pigeon, today’s dev diary will not be on modding changes, but will instead focus on a variety of minor and QoL changes coming in the Avalanche patch accompanying By Blood Alone.

This list is by no means exhaustive: we’ll cover the more impactful changes here and still give you plenty of juicy items to discover in the patch notes.

Armor Piercing
Those of you who routinely peruse the forums may have noticed me discussing details on our change to the piercing formula, but it serves to draw attention to it here, in a more visible light.

In the Avalanche update, we’re reworking the binary nature of the piercing vs armor calculation to act in a somewhat more realistic way, as well as to make designing your divisions and equipment a little more nuanced.​


Prior to BBA, the damage of divisions making attacks against an armored target would be reduced by 50% if their piercing stat was less than the armor value of the target. In BBA, the thresholds described above will be in play.

There have been some minor changes to piercing values on equipment, but we intend to avoid making any major changes here until we see the effect of this change on player habits. Any balance changes will of course be applied in our regular patching schedule.

Piercing also plays an important role in naval combat, and we haven’t forgotten about it here. In naval combat, the piercing vs armor mechanic affects the critical hit chance (simulating penetration hits) of individual naval guns against a target, and we’ve added the following thresholds:​


You’ll notice we’ve added an extra threshold here. This goes some of the way towards simulating extreme overmatching, and brings a small extra potential bonus for super heavy guns (assuming you hit what you’re aiming at).

These values can of course be modded, and support the addition of new thresholds for those in need of atypical or more gradual curves.

Design Comparison
The ship, tank, and plane designers now have access to an additional tool when designing equipment:​


This comparison window allows you to select a variant to compare against the variant you are designing. The comparison variant does not need to have the same equipment type as the one you are designing, and assists in the creation of specialized variants with a frame of reference. The stats comparison markers are displayed in context to the design you are editing:​

Here, we’re comparing the German starting heavy tank to the Panzer II light tank.

You can select a comparison variant from among any types you own or have licensed or captured, and for owners of La Resistance from among any countries which you have matched the highest corresponding intelligence tier for.

In short, this gives you a tool with which to plan your designs in order to counter your opponents’ equipment.

War Support
In Avalanche, we’re making some significant changes to war support. Over the course of the game’s lifespan, war support has gradually plummeted in terms of relevance both due to power creep in country content (something we’re starting to take an active interest in addressing in general), and due to the ease of trading in political power thanks to war propaganda.

War support is intended to serve as an abstraction of a population’s willingness and capability to engage in the war effort, on a military and civilian level. As such, war support has one important new effect:​


Note we have also improved the tooltip for war support and stability to include the base value plus any changes from events and focuses.

While at war, war support has a scaling negative effect on the stability of a country, simulating the dissatisfaction of the civilian population at the predicament they have been placed in. War support is now something you will need to care about during a war, and further changes have been made to accentuate this:

• All sources of ticking war support (weekly) have been removed or changed into flat bonuses.​
  
• Taking casualties during war will now contribute to a gradual ticking war support malus replacing the malus that was previously only used by abilities such as Force Attack.​
  
• The war support malus from strategic bombing has rebalanced to be in line with the above.​
  
• The war support malus from sunk convoys has been rebalanced to be in line with the above​

The three components described above are now the main sources of reduced war support while at war, and give you a strategic reason to pace offensives and conduct campaigns in an intelligent manner.

‘Infinite’ war propaganda decisions have now been removed. This was a trivial way to increase war support in the mid-late game, and combined with the availability of political power, resulted in very little meaningful way to reduce a target nation’s war support.

Instead of war propaganda against countries, war support decisions now target one of the three main maluses:​


These decisions will offset the maximum negative trend of each of the three negative components, and gradually increase it to a maximum of zero. In short, war support can no longer be arbitrarily increased outside of focuses, events, and unique decisions - it must instead be managed.

As you will note, the base, generic war propaganda decision currently remains, but may only be used to increase war support if below 50%.

This is a significant change we will continue to monitor, but we are happy with the results we’ve seen so far.

Armored Trains and Logistics Strike
Since the release of NSB, we (and many of you) felt that the Logistics Strike air mission was too strong. This is, in part, due to an oversight which did not apply state-level AA disruption effects to it - this has been fixed.

Correspondingly, a further issue with armored trains has been fixed, meaning that they will once again be vulnerable to damage from Logistics Strike, albeit at a much reduced rate compared to other varieties of train.

However, to further balance this out versus the current live version, armored trains have now learned to use their AA guns:​


We previously decided against this approach due to the relatively minor impact that armored train AA had on the grander aviation situation in the war, however thanks to the ministrations of one of our excellent coders, we have arrived at a solution whereby armored trains will only inflict damage to planes actively attacking them on a logistics strike mission. You will be able to track this explicitly in the air region details menu:​


AI Tank Strategy
You should now notice a somewhat more sensible use of armored divisions by the AI. The AI can now be encouraged to use tank divisions on any particular frontline, and we have added some generic situation triggers to make this happen more regularly.

Note this does not yet translate to using tanks in the same sort of pincer-encirclement that players tend to use. This is a notably non-trivial problem to solve, but is on our wishlist for future investigation.

Allied Logistics
You will now be able to open the logistics menu for subjects and faction members through the diplomacy menu. This gives you a better real-time view of your allies’ equipment situation, and helps plan a better lend-lease strategy:​


It goes without saying that any actions usually available through this menu (destroy equipment et al) will be locked for observing countries. While we toyed with the idea of making this available based on intel, this proved to be far too powerful a tool in the wrong hands.

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