Hearts of Iron 2,5 (Arsenal of Democracy)

[kris4o1993]

Аз лично много се зарадвах като видях че правят продължение на Hearts of Iron 2, базирано на стария енджин, защото тройката въобще не ми допада (може би още не съм свикнал с нея). Главните аспекти в новата игра са:

ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY - A “Hearts of Iron” Game
The ultimate World War II simulation arriving this December

NEW YORK – September 8, 2009 – Paradox Interactive are excited to unveil a brand new Hearts of Iron game entitled Arsenal of Democracy, set to release on PC in December.

Developed by BL-Logic, a development studio made up by fans of the Hearts of Iron series and active member of the modding community, Arsenal of Democracy is the ultimate World War II simulation and is described by Project Leader Lennart Berg as “Hearts of Iron II on steroids!”

Describing the idea and process behind the creation of Arsenal of Democracy, Berg goes on to say, “During the years of the Hearts of iron II lifecycle, I made a list of improvements in the forums and these became the guidelines to the new game. So we went ahead and implemented these along with many more ideas until we had pretty much replaced and enhanced everything from the original. The end result, in our very humble opinion, is the ultimate World War II simulation.”

KEY FEATURES
* Increased resolution and windowed mode freely selectable
* Totally reworked combat mechanics, new missions and realistic combat behavior and losses
* Several new technologies
* New espionage interface and reworked espionage system
* One of the most detailed economy and production system found in any Hearts of Iron game
* Realistic logistics system
* Everything is moddable
* AI reworked and now poses a genuine threat, even to experienced players
* 4 new battle scenarios

Ето и скрииншотчета:

[StrEagle]

Изглежда много добре.

[ssbg]

Екстра. Само дано да не объркат нещата...

[Toso]

Страхотна новина

[kris4o1993]

Dev Diary #2 - Missions - 17.September 2009

So it’s Thursday again, and as promised, here is the second Development Diary. Today I will tell you something about the new missions we implemented and what we changed about the old ones.

In Air Warfare we reworked Strategic Bombardment so that it is now a combination of attacks on the province Infrastructure, AA, Radar, Ports and Installations. The Attack is spread evenly over the different Province Constructions. For Special Attacks solely against the Industrial Base there is a new Air Mission called "Industrial Bombardment". This attack will be increased in efficiency through new technologies in the period of 43/44 to avoid too much destruction right at the outbreak of war. The Mission is dependent on the Strategic Bombardment Value of the corresponding Unit and is very effective in Late War scenarios.



As already mentioned on the Forums, it now costs IC to rebuild constructions quickly. We also integrated a small rebuild-for-free modifier. So if your country is, for example, completely wiped out and you either don’t want or can’t invest anything in rebuilding, the full IC, Radar, AA, Port and Infrastructure Capacity will recover completely and for free over the time span of 10 years.




We have also redesigned the way Runway Cratering works. This mission is now called "Airport Strike" and harms aircraft on the ground. Multi-role Fighters are very effective in this Mission and do a lot of damage to aircraft at undefended Airports. Of course, AA and Radar give the defender a small bonus. By the way: AA efficiency rises with the number of Radar Stations constructed in the same province.




In the Mission Details Menu, we changed Naval and Air Missions in the way that you can select the Range of Engagement. For example, if it shall be a single province, a whole area or even a complete region that shall be the target. We also added an Option so that you can now set the mission length for several years. The new "Infinite" time length button, which will result in a non-stop mission until the player aborts, should also come in handy.




In the Espionage Tab, there is a new Mission called "Naval Intelligence". When this mission succeeds, you are able to see the fleet of that country for a couple of weeks, what its mission is and what ships it consists of.





EDIT: (Lennartos)
Some things we forgot to mention:
1) you can freely select differenty unit with different stats for any mission - the limitation of different units with different range has been removed.
2) Units only fulfill missions in PROVINCES they have range to - not areas like in HOI2 - so even if you select region as a target, only provinces in range will be targets.
- The exploit wih CAS ranging 3000km in certain areas has therefore been removed.
These 2 things also make large scale missions a breeze - just select units - mission - timescale, if any - done.

Stay tuned for next Thursday's Diary when I get into the new Trade Screen and Auto Trade feature.

[kris4o1993]

Dev Diary #3 - Trade - 24.September 2009

You may have noticed that we have a new Tab called "Trade".
We put in most of the indicator- and status-interface
from the production menu
We tried to regroup and organize those elements in such a way that it would match common sense.
So the Trade Tab consists now of the Convoy System,
the Resource Depot System and also a window for making quick Trade Agreements. A country
list for quick trade partner selection has also been added.

The best option there, so far, may be our new Auto-Trade Settings Window.
We implemented a lot of options in there so that you can customize your trades
the way you want it. You can block trading for some resources and prioritize
which you want to import.




Currently we work at the Import System which will, when its fully developed,
work with some kind of a double slider which you may have seen already in the new production tab screen shot

A top red marker will indicate how much you actually
want to import, the green bottom slider will indicate your willingness to pay for it.

So you e.g. set a high willingness and a low amount, you will mostly get in all cases
your wanted import trades. with low willingness you probably only get trades with
countries you have good relations with e.g. trades with ITA as GER.

Beside that shiny and practical new auto-trade feature, you can of course make
manual deals in the tab. All Trades now also require convoys should a direct land connection
does not exist.



For trading, money has now become more important than before.
A normal trade deal should always be paid with $'s now, and not with another resource

So summarized, you can customize your auto trade with AOD to a very large extent.

For Province Trading of occupied territory with your allies we integrated some cool
new ingame options accessible via a mouse right click. The well known Venue will appear but will
now give the additional Option to secede a non-national
province to an ally of your choice.



We also fixed some bugs regarding Unit Trading. Ships which were damaged now don't get
repaired for free when traded to an ally. They will remain the Str-Value they had
in the beginning of the trade. This was a popular exploit in MP Games
and is now one extra step towards an bug free game for us!


To give you some insight into the so frequent mentioned modability of the game, here comes some
small code excerpt showing the editable minister effect,modifiers and names.

 # personality fields:
    #
    # personality_string= the string that is placed int the minister csv files
    # name   = the localized string for the personality name
    # desc   = the localized string for the personality description
    # minister_position = HeadOfState/HeadOfGovernment/ForeignMinister/ArmamentMinister/MinisterOfSecurity/MinisterOfIntelligence/
    #                     ChiefOfStaff/ChiefOfArmy/ChiefOfNavy/ChiefOfAir/all
    #                     NOTE! if 'all' is used, no modifiers can be used




    personality = { 
        personality_string = "smiling oilman" 
        name = "NPERSONALITY_SMILING_OILMAN" 
        desc = "DPERSONALITY_SMILING_OILMAN" 
        minister_position = HeadOfGovernment 
        modifier = { type = resource_mod value = oil modifier_effect = 0.1000 } 
        modifier = { type = accept_alliance_mod modifier_effect = -0.1000 } 
        }

Stay tuned for next weeks Diary when I will talk about the new Espionage and Sabotage System!

[ssbg]

Някаква идея защо името на играта ще е Arsenal of Demcracy? До колкото си спомням това име беше заглавно за трейлър на HoI3.
Виждам, че при шпионажа има отново фактора Chance. Не го одобрявам, защото съм пръскал луди пари (игрални) за да се опитам да т.нар. Coup Nation, и накрая, понеже шанса е някакви мижави 5 процента да не успея и да ми глътне 750 валута. Като сложа и разходите за изпращането на 10 шпионина, то сумата набъбва до 1000 валута. Нямам против да има фактора шанс, все пак не всичко е на сто процента постижимо, но 5 процента да се направи държавен преврат. А стига бе. От преблизително 60 опита, само 2 са ми били успешни. При положение, че специално съм си докарвал един пункт decident, за да сменя министара на Разузнаването, с друг, който е по-заинтересуван от Coup Nation.

[Kujiro]

Това е вече по-добре след неиграемия Хартс 3

[kris4o1993]

Dev Diary #4 - Espionage - 1.October 2009

Welcome to this weeks Development Diary.
Today's topic that I will talk about is the reworked Espionage System.

As Intelligence was almost useless and impracticable to handle
in DD and Arma, we aimed to design an completely overhauled system for AOD.

Spies are now sent automatically - as long as you assign a small amount of money
to espionage AND give a targeted country at least a minimum observation precedence.

To set priorities for which countries receive more or less money than others,
we have created a system were you can give a nation an emphasize on a scale between 0-10,
ten displaying the highest one.



In the Production Screen are new sliders which determine how much money trickles down
on to the different areas - be it espionage, military or tech research.
From the money assigned to Espionage it is now further shared and divided between the countries which you gave an observation priority.



With Money assigned to a country you send spies to a nation.
When not instantly consumed for current missions, they will require a specific uphold cost which is subtracted from the total espionage budget.
Having spies in foreign countries and withdrawing them all funding will make them perform missions at a very low efficiency, and gives them a much higher chance of passive detection.

The more money you direct in espionage to a specific country,
the faster your Intel-Teams are trying to get a new spy in.
Also, the more spies you have, either in a foreign country or in homeland counter-espionage, the higher your mission efficiency is.

A great feat is also that you are now able to select multiple Missions on the same country. This comes in very handy: once you check all the jobs which should be performed, they will continue to be performed until you stop them. Of course, more missions running simultaneously on the same country requires a huge and steady stream of money.

The overall option to be able to set the espionage system on some kind of
"cruise-control" is really sweet: After making your adjustments, you can easily regulate the system via the funding slider in the production tab.

We also wanted to include in this weeks DD some extra goodies for you :
the new loss statistics. It was finished last week. Enjoy the screens.





Stay tuned for next weeks diary when I will get into the nuts and bolts of Logistics, ESE and Carried Supplies.

[muzicantini]

Nice.

[kris4o1993]

Dev Diary #5 - Logistics, ESE and Carried Supplies - 8.October 2009

Welcome to the 5th Edition of the AOD Dev Diary.

Today's topic is all about supply and logistics. You may have noticed that supplies are now carried together with a unit. There are bars for the status of the carried amount, to be specific,
there is a bar for supply and a bar for fuel. Units that only use supplies will not carry any oil with them and thus will not display that bar.
Each Division carries supplies & oil for about 30 days (this is a moddable value), so if a division gets cut off, it will be able to sustain itself for around a month. However this feature could devalue encirclements, and to also promote a combined air-land focus, the carried stock is destroyable by air interdiction. Your CAS units are very effective at this, giving them a further role on the battlefield.



The supply efficiency, i.e. the rate at which a unit receives more supplies is now more dependent on the ESE level and the supply line back to the nearest supply depot (which is in most cases still the capital). TC is still there, and now it models the maximum limit a nation is capable in transportation.
Be aware that going in the red now means a drop in ESE. Any unit fighting with low stock will receive combat penalties; so attritional battles on low ESE units will prevent them from fighting effectively. Just think of superiorly equipped but critically low ESE Japan against numerical superior china - there was a reason the interior of china was so hard to conquer.
Anyways, make sure you're keeping an eye out on the TC; and your trucks will keep on rolling.

For ESE calculation we implemented a completely new mathematical algorithm, which traces terrain, infrastructure, ports and also takes estimated & actual throughput and neighbouring areas into account.
So, actually you will now have a hard time supplying that complete 6th Army through that single & muddy mountain dirt road.



Naval Units on the other hand carry roughly half a year’s worth of supplies and do not get resupplied at sea. They do resupply very quickly at ports but while at sea the over all supply situation on the home front does not affect them. Fleets auto return to their home port when supplies and/or oil is running low, and then continue with their mission afterwards.

Another new feature is that supply usage depends on unit actions. A unit garrisoning some quiet backwater and a unit fighting on the front are completely different things, so we made a lot of modifiable values to correctly simulate this.
The division supply usage rate can be seen by an indicator in the unit menue.
Let’s look at what this means for naval units. Take a submarine for example; it should be able to sail roughly half a year under peacetime conditions. However after just a few engagements it will need to come by a port for resupply. Land units caught in a pocket will not be able to sustain any more than a weeks worth of fighting without seriously diminishing their stockpile, reducing their ability to mount serious resistance.



Resource and Supply convoy routes are now displayed in different colours and with nice looking arrows for faster recognition.
Also the danger level of sea provinces is shown (last time a convoy of your alliance was attacked) If a sea province has a too high danger level it is avoided by transports, so it is now possible to blockade provinces and even sea regions with enough forces. Units stationed on islands are now far more vulnerable if you do not control the seas.



As stated previously, there are espionage missions that detect naval vessels, and enemy convoys. Enemy convoys will also be shown in the supply map, but for a limited duration.

Stay tuned for next weeks DevDiary, were im going to talk about Production and an alle new feature : Buildings.

[StrEagle]

Е това да виждаш противниковите конвои е яката работа.

[kris4o1993]

CLICK --> Dev Diary #6 -Production & Buildings - 15.October 2009 <-- CLICK

[kris4o1993]

CLICK --> Dev Diary #7 - Land Combat - 22.October 2009 <-- CLICK

[kris4o1993]

CLICK --> Dev Diary #8 - Naval Combat - 29.October 2009 <-- CLICK


CLICK --> Dev Diary #9 - Air Combat - 5.November 2009 <-- CLICK