Announcement and AI Update #1

Time flies and suddenly its Wednesday again, and Wednesday means diary time! As you might have noticed we just announced Death or Dishonor , so that together with the 1.4 update is going to be today's topic! After that you can dive into technical AI details with SteelVolt. 1.4 "Oak" Update As normal the DLC will be accompanied by a free update, this time called 1.4 "Oak". We wanted to make sure to take this time to deal with some big, complicated and difficult things that the community had been asking us for for a long time. First up is improving air gameplay, the other is the AI. After the 1.3 update there were a couple of areas identified where the most important was German AI performance. We started digging into that and there were a couple of hurdles to solve. 1) First of all divisions along front lines were not fighting as effectively as they should which led to a lot of "shuffling" and fronts slowing down massively. That meant that Germany struggled a lot versus soviet union. 2) Axis minors did not manage expeditionary forces very well when it came to helping out Germany. 3) In some cases Africa could end up as a big battleground draining precious axis materiel and weakening them (this one we solved with impassable sahara, check last diary). 4) Unit usage such as garrison and template and production management were far from optimal. SteelVolt will be filling you in on 1-2 of those above today. The rest and further details for Oak will be covered in future diaries. Death or Dishonor Country Pack While we buckled down on the AI our brave content designers have been working as part of our long term plan to flesh out the world with unique national focus trees and extra immersion. We felt that the kind of expansions we have been doing/planning were of quite different types so we wanted to clarify that. So a bit like how Leviathans was labeled a Story Pack the HOI4 version will be "Country Pack". A country pack then is an expansion that isnt a full $15-20 (DoD is $9.99) and that focuses sharply on a specific set of countries or region. For Death or Dishonor this is Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia - Nations swept up in the turmoil of mid-century europe and faced with pressure and threat both from allies, axis and comintern. Nations that could have gone many different directions leading to interesting "What if" scenarios while letting people who want to relive history get behind the wheel of nations like Romania and partake in operation Barbarossa etc. The pack also contains new features like Equipment Conversion (StuG:s!) and equipment licensing, things that we felt was well in line with the theme of these nations. More details here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCBmzi0ik-A AI Update #1 with SteelVolt Friends! Here we are again. It has been quiet these past couple of months, but we have been hard at work nonetheless. We were graced with time to catch up with some of the technical debt we had worked up earlier, and getting this time has really been a blessing. Several aspects of the AI has undergone substantial improvement and in a couple of cases major reworking in order to not just improve how they work now, but make it easier to work with for future expansions and improvements. The first major part I want to talk about is what we call the unit controller, or what you may know as the