Dev Diary: 1.9.1 Beta Patch Update

Today's Development Diary by Bratyn

Hi everyone, and welcome to another Beta Patch Update dev diary for Hearts of Iron 4 - La Résistance! The team has been hard at work fixing all manner of bugs, and today will see another update to the Beta Patch. The work is far from over, however, and you'll be able to expect continued regular updates to the Beta in the weeks ahead :)

I will first give the word to @bcareil, who will talk a little bit about error notifications for mod-users:

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We have noticed that a significant portion of our crashes occurred due to people running outdated mods with 1.9.1. Most of them were caused by invalid map data (e.g. provinces without strategic region).

Since those kind of issues will always crash the game sooner or later, we put in place some measures to try to fix the situation where it was possible (by adding the province to the same strategic region as one of its neighbor).

If we fail to get the map into a working state, the game will abort with an error message.

Note that these measure are, for the time being, rather experimental and will not necessarily fire every time they should. We will refine them until the release of 1.9.1 so that they do not conflict with any mod while still preventing starting the game in an inconsistent state.

The error message looks like this:

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Alright, back to me! I'll spend most of the rest of this Dev Diary delving into some of the more significant balance fixes and adjustments I've made to the Spanish Focus Trees, but for those of you who just want to see the patchnotes, they're right here:

################################## # Balance ################################## - France now starts with basic heavy tanks unlocked - France now has engineer companies attached to leg and motorized infantry divisions as well as light mechanized divisions in the 1936 start - France can no longer gain up to 7 research slots by cleverly losing a war - Death Before Surrender now is a timed spirit that lasts for 900 days. This means that, if the Civil War starts the earliest it can start, the spirit will be removed at the beginning of 1939, thus simulating a collapse of morale and speeding up the conclusion of the Civil War if it is still in progress. - Anarchist divisions now spawn with only 25% equipment (unless the player/AI went down the Anarchists branch). This should make Anarchist Spain's starting position much weaker. - 20% Reduction to Strengthen the Regime focus requirements (80k MP instead of 100k, 800 infantry eq. and 800 support eq. instead of 1k each)

################################## # Stability & Performance ################################## - Fixed CTD that can occur when a carrier ship is tranferred between countries - Added mitigation when loading a save that has invalid access rules for carrier - Fixed CTD on missing static modifier definition - Fixed CTD when define NIntel::MAP_INTEL_VISIBILITY_CUTOFFS was illformed - improved performance slightly by making some adjustments to triggers (courtesy of Yard1) - fixed some performance issues with naval invasion ai - The game will now abort if the map contains invalid data - Fixed CTD when accessing the airwings of a carrier that has been acquired through the annexation of a puppet - Fixed CTD caused by event that would kill country leaders or a country that had none - Fixed CTD when evaluating event target with an invalid state id - Fixed CTD when an airbase with air