Developer Diary | Quality of Life Improvements

Due to a misplaced carrier pigeon, today’s dev diary will not be on modding changes, but will instead focus on a variety of minor and QoL changes coming in the Avalanche patch accompanying By Blood Alone.

This list is by no means exhaustive: we’ll cover the more impactful changes here and still give you plenty of juicy items to discover in the patch notes.

Armor Piercing

Those of you who routinely peruse the forums may have noticed me discussing details on our change to the piercing formula, but it serves to draw attention to it here, in a more visible light.

In the Avalanche update, we’re reworking the binary nature of the piercing vs armor calculation to act in a somewhat more realistic way, as well as to make designing your divisions and equipment a little more nuanced.​

Prior to BBA, the damage of divisions making attacks against an armored target would be reduced by 50% if their piercing stat was less than the armor value of the target. In BBA, the thresholds described above will be in play.

There have been some minor changes to piercing values on equipment, but we intend to avoid making any major changes here until we see the effect of this change on player habits. Any balance changes will of course be applied in our regular patching schedule.

Piercing also plays an important role in naval combat, and we haven’t forgotten about it here. In naval combat, the piercing vs armor mechanic affects the critical hit chance (simulating penetration hits) of individual naval guns against a target, and we’ve added the following thresholds:​

You’ll notice we’ve added an extra threshold here. This goes some of the way towards simulating extreme overmatching, and brings a small extra potential bonus for super heavy guns (assuming you hit what you’re aiming at).

These values can of course be modded, and support the addition of new thresholds for those in need of atypical or more gradual curves.

Design Comparison

The ship, tank, and plane designers now have access to an additional tool when designing equipment:​

This comparison window allows you to select a variant to compare against the variant you are designing. The comparison variant does not need to have the same equipment type as the one you are designing, and assists in the creation of specialized variants with a frame of reference. The stats comparison markers are displayed in context to the design you are editing:​ Here, we’re comparing the German starting heavy tank to the Panzer II light tank.

You can select a comparison variant from among any types you own or have licensed or captured, and for owners of La Resistance from among any countries which you have matched the highest corresponding intelligence tier for.

In short, this gives you a tool with which to plan your designs in order to counter your opponents’ equipment.

War Support

In Avalanche, we’re making some significant changes to war support. Over the course of the game’s lifespan, war support has gradually plummeted in terms of relevance both due to power creep in country content (something we’re starting to take an active interest in addressing in general), and due to the ease of trading in political power thanks to war propaganda.

War support is intended to serve as an abstraction of a population’s willingness and capability to engage in the war effort, on a military and civilian level. As such, war support has one important new effect:​

Note we have also