Today marks the first dev diary since the release of Trial of Allegiance, so we’ll be looking back over how things went, and community reactions in a little more detail than usual. While I would have loved to have some data on player choices and interactions for today’s diary, our analytics engine is busy chugging away. So, we’ll have to hold off on that until the machine spirit has assessed the incoming preponderance of data.
The Elephant in the Room
It would be hard to talk about Trial of Allegiance without first mentioning that we’re acutely aware of its critical reception from fans. I see no reason not to be transparent about this, and I’m going to use today as an opportunity to talk about what it means to us and how we analyze reactions, so let’s dive into some of the facts:
Everything’s on Fire!
Well, actually no. Trial of Allegiance has thus far been one of our most stable releases in terms of bugs and player-encountered issues. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bugs: stuff always creeps through, but as you may have noticed by now, we’ve had an Open Beta running with a patch scheduled sometime today. The patch notes will be attached to the end of this document. Furthermore, we have another patch scheduled in next week to give us a chance to tackle more complex problems.
Due to the low incidence of bugs in the ToA content, we’re spending a bit more time on general improvements and things folks thought were lacking.
Developer’s Perspective: bugs are defects in the game - errors or unforeseen complexities that render part of the experience to not work as intended. We don’t usually consider design choices or outdated content as bugs unless they cause the first statement to apply, since that evaluation is often subjective.
Circles Within Circles
Our steam review score has taken a fairly heavy beating on Trial of Allegiance. Reviews on DLCs are notoriously hard to draw accurate conclusions from, as very few people tend to leave reviews compared to the overall number of people who bought a DLC. Trial of Allegiance is particularly notable in that regard, as there are fewer reviews overall than we would normally expect. It’s absolutely possible to theorize behind why that is, but that’s all those are: theories.
That said, we read every review. Aaand it’s quite hard, tbh. Being a venerable ancient of the internet, I could wax lyrical on toxicity, vocabulary, and dissociation, but at the end of the day folks leave reviews for a reason. The language they use isn’t as important as the sentiment they’re trying to convey, even if they don’t always know the right way to do it.
What we try and do, therefore, is to try and don our armor of not-taking-things-too-personally, and group negative reviews by common themes or sentiments.
For Trial of Allegiance, we assessed clear ‘meta’ groupings in order of weight*:
- Unhappiness about recent regional currency price adjustments
- Unhappiness about the price of the country pack
> Compared to other HOI4 expansions
> Other
- Bought it but wanted something different
> New mechanics, or
> A european expansion
- Unhappy with the quality of the release
> In relation to specific issues;
> In relation to mods
> Unclear/Unintelligible
> Unclear/Horrendously offensive
*This requires looking at global reviews, not english-language only: something we take quite seriously.
The exact weighting here changes a lot over time, but suffice it to say that the top grouping is significantly larger than any of the others, and the last grouping vice-versa.
But hang on, does this just mean we’re being review bombed by angry interest groups? Well, that would be a nice easy assumption that allows us to feel good about ourselves and go home for supper, but there doesn’t seem to be any coordinated effort here as far as we can tell.
What we can tell here is that folks commonly leave reviews for reasons unrelated to the content we made.
So, these are the findings. So far these have been presented as factual; now we take a more subjective view when it comes to reacting to the findings.
Regional Pricing
This one was a little unexpected, though in hindsight it shouldn’t have been. Looking back over recent reviews on our other expansions, we see the same trend.
In January, Paradox made efforts to normalize pricing across various currency regions according to (as I understand it) a standard used by Valve. On HoI, we saw this as a mostly administrative change, and did not, I think, ask enough questions about the effect it might have on our game-specific player base.
I am not promising any sweeping changes here for decisions that have already been made. What I can say however, is that we will not be treating any such changes as administrative in the future. We will be doing our due diligence.
General Pricing
A little more expected, perhaps, but with some important notes. The vast majority of complaints about the pricing of this release came with comparisons or in relation to other content we’ve released in the past.
While it overlaps a little with the next topic, I feel like we could have been clearer with setting expectations about what a country pack is.
Another observation here is that our fanbase seems to attach more importance to the consistency of expansion prices than we tend to. A lot of the comparisons we’re seeing are equating content made many years ago or at a completely different scale to Trial of Allegiance.
Wanted Something Different
This one is a real games-industry conundrum. Traditionally, if you bring something to market that doesn’t interest everyone, the uninterested ones avoid it. Not so here.
We knew that South America would be a divisive topic amongst the fanbase: some regard it as important, some do not. We calculated that this would make these nations perfect for a country-pack release instead of a full expansion - including mechanics in something that may not interest everyone would put fans in the situation of having to purchase something they did not want.
And, uh, that backfired a bit. Overwhelmingly, reviews in this category are asking where the mechanics are, or why we’re spending time on X instead of Y.
Importantly though, we aren’t gonna change that. We will sometimes have country pack releases, and they will not contain mechanics, though perhaps there’s some middle ground for tech/unit/other additions.
This all comes with a big but: the Juno team who created Trial of Allegiance are not the only ones working on HOI4. Creating content packs is not being done at the expense of other things. We aren’t ready to talk about exactly what’s coming yet, but simply put: we have mechanical expansions in the pipeline that are being built at this very moment. Outside of expansions, we have even more big stuff happening for HoI in the very near future. Watch this space.
Developer’s Perspective: Even if we wanted to, making two mechanical expansions in parallel would be a significant technical challenge. Some games are built to make that easy! HOI is not one of them.
Quality of Release
This is predominantly the stuff that reviews traditionally focus on. Was the delivered content good/bad/neutral? The nature of this is subjective, and these reviews are really where we can act by making changes and fixes. Below you’ll find the patch notes for our first iteration on ToA’s content, with more to come soon.
Overall what we’re seeing from players that stated an active interest in South America is a trending positive reaction. There are some key problems raised to us from highly invested players, which we’ll do our best to address. There are learnings we want to take into future country packs or war effort patches, including but not limited to:
- Shared branches were one of those things that made sense at the time, but in hindsight we should have avoided.
- People love map changes more than I thought humanly possible.
- Power creep is real, and we should have a balance reckoning sooner rather than later
- We can do more with units, tech, and non-focus content without being explicitly ‘mechanical’ in nature. This was sort of on our radar already, but player feedback confirms that.
As I mentioned above, this has been a very bug-light release, but if an issue is plaguing you then please let us know through the usual channels, and we’ll spend any time left over on making other improvements to ToA’s content.
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Stuff That Doesn’t Really Help
Reviews that are empty/irrelevant/insulting/contain mysterious dwarven chanting are not going to be useful to us. When I say that we read all reviews, I’m not kidding - but if there’s no actionable text, we can’t do anything with it. Of course, it is your right to maintain a practice of critical ambiguity, I’m just saying it won’t produce results.
Reviews and comments that set up a strawman and try to assign a motive to the decisions we make serves only to create a rift between developers and community. We love this game as much as you do, and while it would be naive of me to assume that every discussion can be equally polite and constructive, I do believe that it is better if we let people represent themselves.
Of course, the vast majority of you understand this.
In Conclusion
From my perspective, team Juno had a cracking debut release, and I’m beyond proud of what they accomplished. The strategic side of things is where we’ve fallen short, and that is my cross to bear.
Finally, the reason I’m saying any of this stuff is to give you folks some context. This is hopefully an insight into the thought process that collectively happens behind the scenes at HoI HQ.
I’ll be around to try and answer any questions!
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Below, you’ll find the patch notes for the update coming sometime today:
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######## Patch 1.14.2 "Bolivar" #########
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# Bugfix & Gameplay Additions
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- Presets in the equipment designer should not be blocked because of so-called negative stats
- Blockade runner now requires fighting with at least one >37 knot ship
- Added a decision for fascist Chile after completing the focus "Forge a New Chilean Identity" to change the national flag to the Patria Vieja based one, due to popular demand.
- Added Felipe Molas López as advisor for Paraguay
- Valentino Riroko Tuki's trait has been buffed, and RAP now gains slightly more things when released and chosen to be played as a part of the Araucanian-Chilean civil war.
- Blockade runner is now actually obtainable
- Flourishing economy for Paraguay no longer expires
- Revenge for the Triple Alliance and Rekindle old gripes now gives wargoals against both actors in a civil war if BRA or ARG is in a civil war
- Fixed an issue where two designer companies for Chile wouldn't have icons with AAT disabled.
- Fixed a bug where Bartolome Blanche would go to the revolting side in the Araucanian civil war despite the non-aligned side still meeting all the requirements to keep him.
- Fixed an issue where taking any of the Promote Spanish Immigration decisions as Chile would permanently block the player from taking any further immigration decisions.
- Support the Spanish republicans no longer spams the error folder
- Historical AI behavior setting for Uruguay no longer disallows achievements
- Fixed an issue where Paraguay could take a focus before taking the prerequisite focus
- You no longer require French Somaliland for the Chilean empire achivement
- USA should no longer guarantee Monroe countries in addition to having the Monroe spirit if Trial of Allegiance is on, unless Tension is > 90%
- Replaced some Uruguayan spirit icons with nicer ones
- Italy now joins the war when France proper is being invaded by Axis troops, or on the historical date
- Reshuffled priorities for building slots for URG/PAR to make it less likely that the capital hits the 25 slot limit
- Paraguay river navy gets properly removed upon capitulation
- Fixed Oscar Escudero Otárola having his name backwards
- 'Reach out to Soviets' in the Argentina tree now checks if the Soviet Union is communist.
- Election event will now only fire if Brazil has completed 'Repeal the National Security Laws'
- Made the requirements to get Senor Hilter slightly easier.
- Added the correct Mechanized tech icons for Brazil
- Fixed an issue where Argentina and Chile could not use their modern small aircraft icon for carrier aircraft.
- Added a fix so you can now see that Prestes will become country leader with the 'Align with Moscow' trait.
- Added a check to Argentina's 'Support the Spanish Republicans' focus so it can only be taken if the Spanish Republic exists.
- some more portrait tweaks for minvervino, valentino and dartnell
- Added a check to the Juan Peron focus to make sure he is still recruited. Also added tooltip to event to make it more apparent he will not be available.
- Argentina can now peace out all UK allies when taking the Falklands
- Modified requirements for 'Revise Treaty of Roca-Runciman' in Argentina focus tree. Now accessible to communists after civil war.
- New Edelman portrait added and minor tweaks to previously existing portraits
- Fix for the Cisplatine war achievement not working.
- Fixed snake smoked achievement file names.
- Nerfed some of the recruitable population and supply in Communist Argentina
- Merged two instances of a duplicated Brazilian admiral/advisor
- Added fix to prevent elections from firing if Vargas is still country leader
- Eugenio Gomez portrait updated to show the right person
- Neglected state and Cangaco state modifiers will now be removed when another country owns the state.
- Fixed an issue that was preventing players from inviting countries to the Org of American states faction and made it easier to see how to integrate countries into US of South America.
- Updated some focuses that were not adding cores to new states.
- Added a fix to make sure that Support the Spanish Nationalists isn't available if they win the civil war
- Added chief of army for those without ToA for Argentina
- Removed "Fascism on the rise" decisions for Argentina
- Made Fascist demagogue advisors available from game start in Argentina
- Brazil and Argentina now have full access to their respective intel agency icons
- Improved tooltip for Align with Moscow focus
- Beneath the shadow of the Triple Alliance and Rekindle old gripes no longer instantly white peace PAR/URG, giving them the option of continuing the war without being teleported back
- Fixed confusing Tooltip for blockade runner
- Peru can no longer go to war with Ecuador if subject
- Chile can no longer create their own faction is subject
- Mexico can no longer invite Peru to their faction if they are at war with Ecuador
- Normandy is now part of Chile's decisions to core France
- Manuel A. Rodriguez no longer has a duplicated localization key and is recruited when ToA is disabled.
- Added fix that prevents players from taking "Demand Compensation From Spain" if Spain does not own Equatorial Guinea
- Fixed an issue with Argentina's starting plane having the wrong icon.
- Fixed a bug where "TAG makes aggressive moves on Uruguay" event fires twice
- URSAL focus now grants cores to Brazil
- Fixed a bug which required reloading the game to show hidden Senor Hilter focuses
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# AI
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- AI now motorizes supply hubs if needed, even if they are controlled by allies or puppets
- The ai should no longer be as willing to send volunteers to the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia for all of eternity.
- Limiting some italy ai strategies for only when in faction with germany
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# Modding
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- Removed the check on negative stats that disabled create_equipment_variant and AI equipment creation
##################################
# Stability & Performance
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- Improve performance in resource computation.
- Various minor optimisations across the game (infrastructure etc)
