Developer Diary | Small Features #1

This week we are going to talk about some of the small features coming with Arms Against Tyranny, these are small things that add or change the game to increase the QoL or add to the game.

So this week we have 3 main groupings;

• Division Structure

• Economy

• Presets

Division Structure

First up we have division structure changes. The way you make a division has been fairly static for quite some time. With this update there are some new changes that increase the challenge and compromises you will have to make when designing your divisions.

First up we have some changes to the categories for each brigade that you choose when you pick the first battalion for each vertical column. Previously we had both artillery, AA and AT in the same category as maneuver units like infantry and tanks. This is no longer the case; artillery, AA, and AT are now in their own category meaning you need to choose how many support brigades you have and how many maneuver brigades you have. This extends to mobile battalion and armored battalion categories.

Previously there was never any real scarcity when it came to a division's battalion slots, you could generally always have whatever number of battalions you wanted in generally any mixture. Now your brigade also starts with the bottom slot locked making a 5x4 grid.this is the default state of divisions and you can unlock this 5th slot by unlocking doctrines giving you a 5x5 grid. When this is combined with the category changes you will need to think about how much combat support battalions you can bring vs vs how many maneuver battalions you you need if you want to make that large division with lots of tank and infantry you will be significantly restricting just how much Artillery, AA and AT you bring to boost your unit.

Economy

Now we are onto something many of you have seen in the focus tree dev diaries is the new modifier “Consumer Goods Factories Factor” . This new modifier exists because the Consumer goods calculation and its associated modifiers have changed.

Previously the calculation of consumer goods was calculated by adding all the consumer goods modifiers to get a percentage; it then worked out the number of factories that percentage represented against your total factory count. So if you had 5 civs and 5 mils for 10 total factories and your consumer goods modifiers total was 10% you had to pay 1 civ for consumer goods. You were then “taxed” that number of civilian factories.

This had a nasty problem in that it was very easy to first reach 0% consumer goods which was a considerable balance consideration due to it allowing faster snowballing of the economy. This easiness of reaching 0% consumer goods was then a problem because once you reached 0% other parts of the game where the reward was a further reduction of consumer goods were rendered useless since you cannot go below 0% consumer goods.

This is now done a little differently, firstly there are now 2 steps to the calculation of the percentage. First we have the base value(expected consumer goods), this works the same as the old percentage calculation; it's a simple percent value that is added up together. This generally is only set by laws so it acts as a base value that everything else modifies. We then have the consumer goods factor (the new modifier) which multiplies this value and if there