Developer Diary | Division Commanders & Unit Medals

Welcome back to today’s feature dev diary on a series of interconnected subsystems being added to the game in By Blood Alone.

One of the major points in my first roadmap dev diary was that I felt quite strongly about the inclusion of further roleplay and immersive elements in Hearts of Iron. What I’ll be showing off today is intended to fulfill a small part of this bullet point.

Those of you with keen memories will recall an early teaser I posted here. Some of you guessed correctly, and in BBA, we’ve introduced a dynamic system for naming battleplans. For many major nations, battleplan names can be provided through a list of locations, resulting in a historical series of operation tags which will be applied when plans are created:​

Of course, the war does not always proceed historically, and battleplan names can also be generated from several component lists for instances where a historical variant cannot be found. These name lists are fully moddable, and can be unique to countries. In some cases (ie; Soviet Union) a different naming convention can be utilized to represent the somewhat uninventive approach to naming operations that was used in reality:

Naturally, in the spirit of roleplaying, these operation names can be modified in-game, and you can replace the text with whatever operation name you desire. This will apply to any sub-orders derived from the initial drawn line:

If unset, naval landing and paradrop orders will have a unique pattern to remain unique.

This system however, goes further than a simple naming convention, and ties into another addition being made to BBA.

Division Commanders

In BBA, we’re replacing the standard method of recruiting new generals out of thin air. Instead, every division will be created with a commanding officer upon game start, or when they are trained:

These are predominantly generated from country-specific namelists, however in some cases we have set these individually for starting divisions. When a new unit is created, they will be provided a randomly generated character name and portrait. To accommodate the increased use of generic portraits for these, we’ll be adding a large quantity of additional generic portraits for owners of BBA. The work involved in creating these is not insignificant, so for now we’ve limited ourselves in adding portraits to major nations only.

You’ll be able to get an overview of all division commanders in your army within the officer corps screen:

In an effort to avoid unnecessary micromanagement, we’ve made a few important decisions. Division commanders themselves will not directly confer bonuses upon the divisions they command, however the divisions they command will now earn and log a record of important actions they may perform during the natural course of a campaign:

Important actions such as taking a capital, securing a high-value victory point, and more, constitute actions for which a unit can be awarded a medal. It is expected that over the course of a campaign, many units will qualify for receiving medals, often several - the system is not driven by scarcity, as we do not intend for players to micromanage individual actions, rather to manage the macro-level step of choosing when and what to award their units.

As mentioned above, division commanders will not explicitly confer bonuses, however the medals awarded for action will. Medals are intended to act as a pp sink for the mid-late game, as we find a lot of players tend to end up with a significant amount of this