License production and map changes

Hi everyone! I hope you had a nice Easter break :) Today we continue showing stuff for the unannounced DLC and the Oak (1.4) update. For those who haven't been following, the main points of the Oak patch is to get some big difficult changes through for the AI, helping us with things that have long been problems, as well as make air warfare a much more pleasurable experience (more info on these in later diaries as they are still in progress right now). The main topics are License Production and changes to the map. Enjoy!

License Production

As we mentioned in the previous dev diary, nations will now have a new way of acquiring the equipment they need. If a nation lacks the required technology to produce what they need, they can request a license to produce foreign equipment, such as tanks, airplanes or guns, in local factories. Historically, this happened in various forms, ranging from full local manufacturing to assembly of foreign vehicles with or without adapting the designs to use locally sourced parts. The famous Swedish Bofors 40mm was extensively license produced and the Canadian Grizzly tank was a locally produced variant of the Sherman M4 design. In the game, a nation with good relations with a foreign nation can request a license to produce the foreign equipment. The types equipment a nation is willing to license out is dependent on their relations. Germany, for example, may not be willing to license out their latest tank or fighter designs to other nations, but would be happy to provide Panzer IIs to friendly or neutral nations.

National Focuses will also be able to provide licenses, or provide bonuses to license production. In the last dev diary, we showed you the Romanian National Focus Tree. Some of these focuses references License Production, including the Acquire Fighters focus, which triggers the Fighter Competition event.

Producing licensed equipment will not be quite as efficient as producing your own designs, however. A cutting edge licenced production will have a noticeable output penalty, but a design a few years old will be almost as efficient to produce as your own technology. If you aren’t in the same faction as the owner of the design, you will also receive a little bit less technical support and manufacturing assistance.

Licensing equipment also give you a research bonus if you want to unlock making your own. This feature comes with the yet-to-be-announced DLC.

Map update

Different terrains are important, but it was not always as easy to see the difference between them as it could be. For Oak we have updated and changed map textures to make this much clearer. Particularly hills and mountains were in need of this, but forests also got a bump in clarity.

Impassable areas

A common problem that seems to pop up no matter how many times we think we have solved it is AI over-committing to Africa. There has been a lot of community feedback on this and we were hesitant to just make a hole in Africa as some mods do, but we still felt something needed to be done so we decided to go with a slightly different approach in Oak and have implemented a new kind of impassable areas. It's fairly realistic that large troop movements can not be done through Sahara in HOI4's time frame, so we have decide to block them off for troops and