[2023] Developer Diary | Small Features #1

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

Hello there, it's me C0RAX.

This week we are going to talk about some of the small features coming with Arms Against Tyranny, these are small things that add or change the game to increase the QoL or add to the game.

So this week we have 3 main groupings;

• Division Structure
  
• Economy
  
• Presets

Division Structure First up we have division structure changes. The way you make a division has been fairly static for quite some time. With this update there are some new changes that increase the challenge and compromises you will have to make when designing your divisions.

First up we have some changes to the categories for each brigade that you choose when you pick the first battalion for each vertical column. Previously we had both artillery, AA and AT in the same category as maneuver units like infantry and tanks. This is no longer the case; artillery, AA, and AT are now in their own category meaning you need to choose how many support brigades you have and how many maneuver brigades you have. This extends to mobile battalion and armored battalion categories.


Previously there was never any real scarcity when it came to a division's battalion slots, you could generally always have whatever number of battalions you wanted in generally any mixture. Now your brigade also starts with the bottom slot locked making a 5x4 grid.this is the default state of divisions and you can unlock this 5th slot by unlocking doctrines giving you a 5x5 grid. When this is combined with the category changes you will need to think about how much combat support battalions you can bring vs vs how many maneuver battalions you you need if you want to make that large division with lots of tank and infantry you will be significantly restricting just how much Artillery, AA and AT you bring to boost your unit.



Economy
Now we are onto something many of you have seen in the focus tree dev diaries is the new modifier “Consumer Goods Factories Factor” . This new modifier exists because the Consumer goods calculation and its associated modifiers have changed.

Previously the calculation of consumer goods was calculated by adding all the consumer goods modifiers to get a percentage; it then worked out the number of factories that percentage represented against your total factory count. So if you had 5 civs and 5 mils for 10 total factories and your consumer goods modifiers total was 10% you had to pay 1 civ for consumer goods. You were then “taxed” that number of civilian factories.

This had a nasty problem in that it was very easy to first reach 0% consumer goods which was a considerable balance consideration due to it allowing faster snowballing of the economy. This easiness of reaching 0% consumer goods was then a problem because once you reached 0% other parts of the game where the reward was a further reduction of consumer goods were rendered useless since you cannot go below 0% consumer goods.

This is now done a little differently, firstly there are now 2 steps to the calculation of the percentage. First we have the base value(expected consumer goods), this works the same as the old percentage calculation; it's a simple percent value that is added up together. This generally is only set by laws so it acts as a base value that everything else modifies. We then have the consumer goods factor (the new modifier) which multiplies this value and if there are multiple factor modifiers they are multiplied together meaning that you will generally never actually reach 0% consumer goods from just the factor alone and the effect of each additional consumer good factor modifier has diminishing returns.



We have also as part of this made the consumer goods calculation round down consumer goods factories which should help minors a bit while not really being highly noticeable for majors.

For those who want a detailed copy of the calculations it's like this:

ConsumerGoodsPercent = (Base1 + Base2 + ….) *((1+Factor1) * (1+Factor2) * ….)

ConsumerGoods = Max(ConsumerGoodsPercent , MINIMUM_NUMBER_OF_FACTORIES_TAKEN_BY_CONSUMER_GOODS_PERCENT ) (ConsumerGoods * Total factories).RoundedDown

Presets And finally I kept the most exciting one till last, and that is presets for your equipment designers. Ever since the introduction of the equipment designers we have known that some players don't want to or struggle to interact with the complexity of them especially when they are new to the features or game. This was for many off putting and something they would shy away from or be continuously frustrated with, Since the game didn’t really teach you how to make a well rounded design for each role. This was doubly true if they wanted to recreate a historical vehicle that they know from their own knowledge of WW2 but didn’t understand how to translate that into the game with the designer.

What these are are premade designs for your equipment designers that are stored in the game files. When you create a new variant from a blank chassis you can press the presets button and will get a list of all the presets made for that chassis/hull/airframe. So should you open up the improved heavy tank chassis presets you will find an entry called Tiger I and you will see the picture of the Tiger I tank and if you click it all the modules and roles and values will be set for you. Should you be missing modules or upgrades the preset entry will tell you what you are missing in order to make it, then all you have to do is research those modules and then create the variant.

So now if you don't understand or want to understand the deeper workings of equipment design you can still make good use of the equipment designers just pick the tank you want and the game will make it for you. Of course if you want to try out tweaking the designs to edge your way into the world of equipment design you can do that too. Once the preset is loaded you can adjust any part of the design as normal, and if you feel lost at any point you can just load the preset back in.



Some of you may wonder why we’re not allowing you to add your own presets or saved templates. In short, this is something we’d like to do and are not ruling out for the future - historical presets are an important step towards making custom presets a possibility.

However, this feature is entirely moddable so if you want your MP mods to have all the latest meta builds there as presets you can do that, or if you want even more templates for your super in depth history mod or maybe a totally different world you can do that. These presets are defined by the templates you make normally for the AI with some new additional fields, you can now define the art and the name of the template.

That's everything for this dev diary, I hope you will enjoy these changes as much as we have. As always feel free to let us know your favorite parts.

Next week we will be bringing you more information on a new system for content along with how it will be tied into the stories you can tell with this expansion and beyond. See you next week.