Generals!

It’s time once again to talk, even if I consider myself a man of action. In this dev diary we’ll go over these new Thunder at Our Gates Features: Ship Captains, and our Division Designer rework, which includes Regimental Support Companies.

Ship Captains are, at their core, a naval implementation of Division Commanders. Individual ships get captains, who can gain experience from being onboard the ships, and it’s also possible to assign medals to said captains, giving additional bonuses.

We’ve also updated the design of the ship details window and made a more detailed history log. It will show things like what combats it has participated in, sunk ships, assists, and some other stuff.

Also, when you have updates in the history log, a small notification appears next to the ship icon. Similarly if you have the opportunity to grant the ship a medal.

Medals apply as normal, and now have specific naval effects when they’re applied to a captain. This is a new modifier applied to the same medals, so it’s also quite easily moddable.

Additionally, a new set of traits are added to distinguish the kinds of ship captains that are available. Destroyer captains will unsurprisingly become better admirals for destroyer fleets, etc.

The entire thing is quite straightforward business, really! Just another way to build the admiral of your dreams.

The Division designer will be available to everyone and has gotten a make-over. It is bigger, bolder, and hopefully better. Best to dive right in on this one:

First off, it’s physically bigger. More or less as big as we can make it and still fit on a 720p screen. We’ve used this opportunity to fit a few extra things. An additional row concerning main stats, including a combat width indicator directly in the division grid. Through truncating the terrain stats, we’re able to give the 3d model viewer a bit more real-estate, too. The usual stats remain in their place for a detailed breakdown. Resource and production cost have gotten a bit of a highlighted placement, too.

But what else is new?

We’ve added a nifty set of hotkeys (shift-clicking and others), to let you instantly fill regiments with battalions of the same type, to reduce unnecessary clicking. I hope you’re as excited about this as I am.

Apart from that, things are still fairly standard. Keen eyes might have noticed the move of division support to the right hand side. It’ll feel odd at first, but it’ll become second-nature to most of you quickly, I reckon. Of course, there’s a new row of interesting stuff at the bottom.

Also as part of this update, we’re adding regimental support companies for everyone. There’s a lot of focus on division design and building in this update, and this felt to us a reasonable addition to add to that focus. Regimental support works quite similarly to divisional support, in that they allow you to put additional stats to a division without overloading combat width.

In the previous dev corner, we experimented with scaling support companies stats based on the amount of battalions in a regiment. We now go for a more binary approach, and if you do not have enough line battalions in a regiment, you will not be able to attach a regimental support company.

In addition, we’ve added a fair amount of new support companies, specifically to bolster the regimental bit. We hope that this will let you have a bit more freeform experimentation when building divisions, and lead to some new interesting templates being built. An additional limit on regimental support is that not all companies are available to all types of line battalions; e.g. infantry pieces cannot be attached to motorised or armored companies, etc.

As a final addition to this, the support weapons research tree is getting a small adjustment in line with this change, to focus solely on certain regimental support equipment. Before it was a bit more of an obvious and free upgrade, assuming you had the slot over. Now it becomes a bit more intertwined with the industrial capacity of the nation you play as.

That’s all for this one! We hope you’ll enjoy these changes, and that it leads to some new interesting considerations when building divisions!

Generals!

Batya here with another patch.

The focus is around Czechoslovakia’s content that was recently released with Peace For Our Time. Besides that there have been a few crashes that were fixed and included in this patch. I also want to extend a special thanks to the wonderful team behind Peace for our Time and all the balance changes, bug fixes, and other additions that they made since release!

This is currently the last planned patch focused around the release of PfoT, but any additional issues will of course be picked up in future patches. We hope that you will enjoy these changes and as always let us know what you think and if you find any other issues do let us know!

As a final note, the team added a little secret and wanted to provide a little hint so here is my (maybe not so) cryptic hint: A.E.I.B.U.

Happy hunting and see you on the Sudeten front!

Patch Notes

• When Czechoslovakia uses the Austria-Hungary reformation decision, they now get a unique cosmetic tag called Great Moravia.
  
• Changed the flag for the Bohemian Kingdom so it still includes Slovakia.
  
• 'Integrate Hungary' is now 'Integrate Former Austrian Lands', and can grant the integration idea to more puppets than just Hungary.
  
• Certain Czech characters now go into exile to some countries sometime after the 'Fate of Czechoslovakia' baring conditions are met.
  
• Slightly tweaked the balance of a few advisors.
  
• The option to demand land in return for joining their faction that Hungary and Poland get when invited now has a tooltip about what happens if CZE accepts the counteroffer event.
  
• Some of the Balance of Power Decisions reappearance times have been rebalanced slightly.
  
• Overhauled late-game industry and Peace For Our Time branch ideas to use idea swaps to reduce the amount of ideas displayed.
  
• Added conscription/training & militia bonuses for the army spirit to some focuses.
  
• Added two new division name lists: Rangers & State Defense Guard.
  
• Germany can no longer start ‘Fate of Czechoslovakia’ if CZE still owns the Sudetenland, they will get a wargoal instead.
  
• Added a slight color change to Czechoslovakia when it starts its monarchist or fascist branches.
  
• Two Polish MIOs (Naval and Tank) can be gained by Czechoslovakia depending on completing a focus or having a core related state.
  
• Added tooltips to a few focuses when they don't have any targets (faction members/puppets) yet to make clear what they do.
  
• Added some extra visual and focus effect flavor in the fascist branch.
  
• The Ready for Anything decision to remove the BoP now has slightly more forgiving requirements.
  
• Czechoslovakia no longer uses the Balkan Union cosmetic tag, using a new Pan-European one instead
  
• Completing the Czechoslovakian focus 'Lessons of War' now removes the BoP modifier 'Threatening Neighbors'.

• Fixed a crash that can occur when a rocket silo's 'Surface-to-Air' mission is set to a naval region.
  
• Fixed a crash that can occur on Mac during peace conferences.
  
• Radola Gajda now has a Militarist trait.
  
• Removed two army leader cost reductions as together with unremoved ones they could accumulate to -125% army leader cost and make promoting division leaders cost 0 CP.
  
• Unifying with Poland now grants their unit leaders.
  
• Buffed the monarchist integration idea from -1 daily autonomy for Hungary to -2.
  
• Added a new cosmetic tag for Czechoslovakia's (integrated communist) puppets so they don't stay blue while CZE isn't.
  
• Fixed Galicia's default capital being in the Sudetenland.
  
• Fixed two Slovak navy chiefs having the same idea token.
  
• Fixed communist path overlapping with democratic paths if a democratic path was chosen with the gamerule to show normally auto-hidden branches enabled.
  
• Fixed multiple scope mistakes in the new special project.
  
• Czechoslovakia no longer loses cores on Slovakian and Ruthenian states with the historical event chain.
  
• If Czechoslovakia is puppeted by a non-aligned nation, Hlinka is now automatically replaced by Emil Hacha as leader for the non-aligned party.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Industrial Concern Apollo would become available unintentionally through an upgrade focus linked to the concern.
  
• Fixed an issue where Skoda's industry company required an extra focus after being upgraded.
  
• Swapped around two victory point names that were misplaced on the map. (The tiles have 0 VP points so the name is only visible in bottom left when selecting the province).
  
• Integrated some community feedback on localization for naming and usage of the correct characters.
  
• Fixed typo in Hácha's name.
  
• Fixed an issue which cancelled the focus 'Fortify the Crossroads' if Slovakia exists.
  
• Multiple cosmetic tags achieved after doing the autonomist path no longer disappear when reannexing Slovakia through the autonomy system.
  
• Fixed Peru having access to a Czech Industrial Concern.
  
• Fixed broken Visibility conditions with some Czech MIOs for Germany and Poland.

• Slovakia is now more likely to fight on the Eastern Front when they are a German puppet.
  
• Increased the chance that Germany does its new raid on Czechoslovakia.
  
• Hungary is now more encouraged to take part in Operation Barbarossa.
  
• Germany's historical plan will cancel if the Czechs annex Austria.
  
• Kommisariat Böhmen-Mahren is now more likely to assist Germany. Either support in the war, defending territory, or lend-lease.
  
• Fixed broken allowed statements in a Polish naval and tank MIO making them show on every country when PFOT is disabled.
  
• Added a lot more detail to a bunch of AI event considerations.
  
• Germany was given an even stronger nudge to do the Berlin-Moscow Axis when faced with a strong Czech faction under certain circumstances.

• New advisor portrait for navy chief František Placák.
  
• New advisor portrait for air chief Jaroslav Kejla.
  
• New idea art for Leveraged Sokol.
  
• New focus icons for: Compromise with the Veteran Agrarians, Powerhouse of Europe, Leverage Sokol, Forgive Trading Debts, Deepen Ties with Trademen, Bolster Domestic Construction & Trinec Ironworks.
  
• New flags for CEF (Central European Federation) formable.
  
• Removed all uses of USSR GFX CCP focus icons, replaced the one on Industrial Relocation with a new icon.
  
• Certain Focus icons in the Czech tree will be switched for different ones depending on ideology.