War Effort Patches | Open Beta

Greetings all!

Shortly, we'll be releasing the first of our slightly revamped monthly updates in the BBA cycle, which we're terming 'War Effort' patches. This is to distinguish between hotfix material and major updates, and to get everyone accustomed to a certain process and expectation. As per usual, we're going to run a short open beta on these changes before they're pushed to the live build.

As you read the patch notes, it may become evident that we're tackling some different stuff to our usual maintenance patches. While the usual bugfixes and balance are present, we're also extending these updates to include the addition of changes to older content. We have not yet settled on a defined scope or cadence for these 'War Effort' updates, but it is our intention to continue providing small upgrades to older country content that we may not revisit for some time, in one way or another. We'll be making selective use of the suggestions forum here, as there are often productive threads on these matters.

While the content changes are something we've wanted to tackle for a while, these patches give us a great opportunity to react to the general balance situation with relative speed.

What We Want From This

To summarise, you can expect monthly updates to contain a variable bucket of the following sort of things:

- Bugfixes - Small QoL tweaks and changes - New gameplay perspectives and focuses for some countries with older content - Gameplay balance changes - Career profile balance changes

What This Is Not

In the spirit of expectation control, there are a few things you can expect these updates not to contain:

- Large changes to major systems - Non-fix changes to key calculations (combat, production etc) - Feature level implementation

This is partly to ensure that mod support during these small updates remains manageable: we will reserve larger changes for major version iterations.

Why Open Beta?

The context behind our use of open beta branches is often misunderstood. We use these as an extra step to verify the changes we have made in a public setting, and to give mod teams a chance to adapt to any upcoming changes. An open beta will often transition to the live branch without any intermediate changes - this means we were satisfied with the integrity of the changes we made. We don't use feedback on open betas to get more changes and fixes in, unless there has been a regression from live content introduced in said beta. This does not mean such feedback is of no value; if we consider such feedback valuable and achievable, it may be added to a future monthly update.

Patch Notes

Balance

- India now has access to a new focus and series of lengthy decisions which allow the offset of the Agrarian Society national spirit - Imperial Associates can now become spymaster of their faction - Manchukuo focus 'Hoankyoku' now grants a free Spy Agency if unbuilt, and a national focus granting +1 free operative slot - Two new one-use war support decisions added, which simulate the effects of radio and film industry propaganda - One new focus added to Romanian air section: 'White Squadron' - Air supply mission cp cost has been reduced by 75% - truce period after kicking a country from faction increased to 60 days from 30 - Hungary's Support Urbanization focus now grants one civilian factory in addition to the three building slots. Institute for Industrial Techniques now requires one of the prerequisites, not