Reflections and Romania

Hi everyone! After a few weeks break we are finally back with weekly dev diaries covering the 1.4 “Oak” update and accompanying DLC (you are going to need to wait a bit for the full announcement on that, but hey in paradox tradition we will still be talking about stuff that will appear in it).

Why have dev diary breaks?

Many people have asked why we take breaks in dev diaries at all, and there are a few different reasons.

• People don’t like filler diaries, so if we don't have anything exciting to talk about it just means people not getting to read stuff they want and taking up the team's development time actually making stuff. I prefer not to make them if that is the alternative.

• Being in a situation where you basically finish coding on the thing you talk about the day before is really stressful and can lead to showing things you have no idea if they work which leads to further issues, so we don't do that anymore. With 1.3.3 we were working into the last minute to add improvements and thus had no real chance to build up a buffer of content to talk about for a diary.

• Several of the things we are working on are also very large things that take some weeks to complete, and it ties into the above. Two of these things are AI related and one is changes to air system as we said before the break we have been working on larger stuff for the Oak Update. Showing partial bits before all is in place is not very useful or easy for us.

Hopefully that makes things a little clearer. When we are quiet it's not because we don't love you, it's because we are working extra hard on stuff.

Lessons Learned

When we released Together for Victory, the feedback we got for the focus trees was somewhat mixed. On the one hand, a lot of people liked them because of their size and the ability to take a country down entirely new story lines. On the other hand, a lot of people felt that that the new trees wasn't adding much to the way they played. That was somewhat disappointing for us, because we had spent so much time on the hundreds of events and focuses that went into TfV, and we were wondering why exactly that was. We started digging into telemetry data on what countries people actually played after TFV, and things got a lot clearer: About 40% of players play Germany, with other major nations following behind at quite a distance. The expansion gave the commonwealth minors a healthy bump, but still - the only content we really added for 40% of our players only happened extremely rarely in singleplayer games. Only when historical focuses were switched off, and the AI decided to go down the fascist path, did the German player get to see any new content (news events aside). And even then, the content was usually little more than an alliance request. So that was the first big lesson: new content needs to tie back to major countries, particularly Germany. Thankfully, we had already decided that our next DLC should focus more on the Axis, so we wouldn’t have to try too hard to come up with reasons why Germany should be involved. The other issue we noted ourselves was that the Commonwealth nations had very little interaction with each other. They each sat in their own little part