Dev Diary - June 17th - Patch 1.1 "Red Ball Express"

Hi everyone and hope you are enjoying Hearts of Iron! The team has been busy working on the 1.1 path that we have decided to name "Red Ball Express" (since we thought it was a cool idea from Stellaris team to use names, we will be doing the same for major patches). The idea is to have the patch out before we go on vacation in July, so expect it one of the last days of June with a open beta patch some days before to make sure it goes smoothly. I'll be presenting some of the more important stuff we have done so far, but we have of course also fixed minor bugs, optimization, crashes and the like. Next week will have a diary with the full patch log and I'll talk about the other stuff we have done also. Access to allied territory One of the biggest talked about issue has been the fact that as long as you fight the same enemy you automatically gain military access, even from other factions. This was kind of a bandaid for an old issue, and we never liked it either... so we have been listening and working on a solution. The way things work now is that you will be requiring military access as expected and the game will also alert you if you end up in a position where you are trying to move into occupied area you don't have access to (as this for democracies would liberate those nations you will need to ask for permissions, which ai will give you). We are still testing our solution, so there might be further changes still. Peace conferences We fixed a serious issue where instead of taking turns in a peace deal when there were 2 major contributors it would instead end up so that the 2nd of those gets to push through almost all changes in the peace deal. This could lead to some really weird peace deals. Now you will instead get to take turns (as well as do a little more per turn if you are close in points). Hopefully this should make peaces feel a lot more sane and rewarding. Invasions and Naval bombers When it comes to invasions and ease of reinforcing invasions into Germany we have now made Naval Bombers able to attack troop transports (before only fleets could stop them, which isn't a great option for Germany when facing the royal navy obviously), so you only really want to do invasions with sufficient control over the skies. AI has also been tweaked to prefer several larger invasions at once to pose more of a threat to players and bleed less troops in smaller invasions. I've also been looking at general balance around naval bomber and other air war being a bit too bloody, but I'll give you an update on that next week instead because it's not done. AI When it comes to further AI improvements, I'll hand over the mic to SteelVolt: This path we have taken a look at some things in the AI where relatively small effort would give a rather big payoff. A lot of this focus was around mistakes Germany was making, such as building too many dock yards and thus lagging behind in the production of military factories. Another thing we discovered that Germany did was to start using the Austrian division designs after the Anschluss, due to looking at the latest date edited. Both of these have been taken care of, but we have