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Developer Corner | Military Industrial Orgs.

Greetings all!

Today marks the first occasion since the release of By Blood Alone where we take a deeper look into what is coming next. As you may recall from the BBA development cycle, we had an early set of 'Development Corner' diaries, which serve as an opportunity for us to reveal a narrow look at a specific mechanic or design without revealing too much about the wider context of future releases. Today's offering, as well as the next couple of diaries, will be in much the same spirit - you'll just have to wait a little bit longer to get the full picture. Scandalous and polarising, I know.

/Arheo

Hello there, it's me, C0rax. Now you can get all excited because it's time for some Dev Corners in which we will show you some WIP looks into the new features we have been working on. So without further ado this week we will be looking at…


Military Industrial Organisations (MIO's)

This is all very much a work in progress (WIP), you are going to see WIP mock ups, and some details are still being finalized as well

Feature Intent and Goals

Intent:
Create a sense of a living organisation the player can interact with rather than a static bonus as with current design companies.

Why is this important you ask? Well previously we had to provide static modifiers and sometimes change them via scripted decisions or focus rewards. By creating a more organic system to upgrade your design companies you the player can now decide what these upgrades are and tailor them to fit your playstyle. Additionally we can now reward the player for using a design company as opposed to simply having you save up a resource and click a button, rewarding you for putting effort into them.

Goals:​

  • Allow the player to define their designer direction.
  • Integrate design companies into production
  • Provide a framework for national specialisms that can be used on the world stage


Military industrial Organisations (MIO’s)​

So first here is a rough structure of an MIO

contains​

  • Name
  • Icon
  • Size (Level)
  • funds (XP)
  • Task Capacity
  • Departments

departments​

  • 0-1 Design team
    • 3 departments
      • Max 13 traits each
  • 0-1 Industrial manufacturer
    • 3 departments
      • Max 13 traits each

Each departments contains​

  • Name
  • Category’s
  • Trait tree
  • Trait icons

Task Capacity​

  • Size determines how many tasks a MIO can handle
    • Researching
    • Producing
    • Designing

Defaults:​

  • 2 task Capacity
    • + scripted increases
    • + trait increases

This structure allows us to represent MIO’s in a way that expresses the specialisms of the various organisations that designed and produced war materials during the period. You can now represent a company like Bofors AB who designed and produced anti tank, anti air and naval guns seamlessly and expand each of those specialisms as you see fit. Investing in the right MIO is critical to upgrading those specialist departments in order to gain the bonuses you need for specific stats.

Task Capacity:​

An MIO of course can’t work on a number of infinite simultaneous projects. For this we have task capacity that limits how many things your MIO’s can work on balancing. This is an important thing to balance, since producing too much equipment with an MIO will lock you out from using it for research or designing equipment. For ship production this is actually important for producing ships in parallel so you might want to invest in the manufacturing department for task capacity so you can really ramp up your naval production.


Levelling & upgrades​


Research cost and Production cost is used to calculate MIO funds that it gains when it is used.
An amount of MIO Funds is required to increase your size and pick a new trait.


image2.png

image (17).png


Skill Trees
  • Split roughly along the same lines as current design companies​
  • Possibility for country unique trees​
  • possibility for content prerequisites (National focus or decision locking etc...)​
image (16).png

image (19).png

image (20).png

Departments and Tasks​

Industrial manufacturers (IM's)​

  • Assigned to production lines (Task)
  • Skill trees provide production specific bonuses

Design teams (DT's)​

  • Applied to research (Task)
  • Applied to equipment both via equipment designers and normal variants
  • Skill trees provide Stat bonuses
  • Can be applied retroactively to equipment at cost
  • A move away from pay mana get reward


So that's a lot of high-level structural talk so you understand the core concepts of the MIO Feature and so I'll now show some of the WIP flows of actually using these structures and systems.

Researching​

image8.png


image (18) (1).png


image10.png


Equipment variants​

image13.png

image (13) (2).png

image1.png

image (14).png


Production​


image (15) (1).png


Well that wraps things up for this week, I Hope you enjoyed it and as always please leave questions and comments below and I will do my best to answer them. Join me in two weeks for another dev corner showing another feature coming to you in the near future.
 
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Reserved for Developer Replies


adski42 said:
This looks epic! Does this mean you can have multiple manufacturers/design companies picked at the same time? I.e. Supermarine and Avro?
C0RAX replied:
yes since you attach the MIO when you research or design equipment so there is no country level selected design company, it purely on a variant or production line basis. so if you want to have Supermarine making and designing fighters and Avro designing and producing bombers simultaneously you can
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Saevynn said:
Will how many production lines we can have at once be tied to our manufacturers' levels, traits and/or numbers?
C0RAX replied:
By default each MIO coms with 2 task capacity but this can be upgraded via unlocking traits in some departments and it can also be increased in some external content such as national focus's and decisions. in general it is much more common to increase task capacity for naval MIO's.
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JitterDoll said:
I can't say that I completely understood the skill tree just by looking at this WIP, but I can make a judgment on other points, it's pretty awesome! I think companies have become much more corporate, intuitive, and natural.

On the other hand, what bothers me is how the Turkish Keçi Ticaret is represented in this system. Because I like that.

I hope this new element is a free update, and I'd like to give a shout-out to developers. Thanks!
C0RAX replied:
Industrial Concern design companies remain unchanged in this new system since they represent a different type of company than those that interact with equipment normally. So MIO's replace the 4 equipment focused categories
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GianpietroU90 said:
Hello @C0RAX, thanks for the exciting news. Maybe it is too early to ask, but there is a Soviet focus that allow the player to merge industrial complexes, will this one be impacted by this new update/DLC? It's just that I can't really understand how the two can coexist. But maybe I just need to wait and see :)
C0RAX replied:
We are aware of this and the many other custom ways the script interacts with current design companies. we have a plan to integrate them, more on that in the future once we have completed all of that work.
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Mashiro Kurata said:
Do MIO all start at level 1 like spies? Or can start with a different level like a general/admiral?
C0RAX replied:
Currently at game start all are size 1 but there is nothing preventing MIO's starting at a given level through script
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This looks like it has a lot of potential. the most important thing that needs to come out of this is the degree of modibility.
 
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This looks epic! Does this mean you can have multiple manufacturers/design companies picked at the same time? I.e. Supermarine and Avro?
yes since you attach the MIO when you research or design equipment so there is no country level selected design company, it purely on a variant or production line basis. so if you want to have Supermarine making and designing fighters and Avro designing and producing bombers simultaneously you can
 
  • 16
  • 9Like
  • 8Love
Reactions:
Will how many production lines we can have at once be tied to our manufacturers' levels, traits and/or numbers?
By default each MIO coms with 2 task capacity but this can be upgraded via unlocking traits in some departments and it can also be increased in some external content such as national focus's and decisions. in general it is much more common to increase task capacity for naval MIO's.
 
  • 9
  • 7Like
Reactions:
It's looking good, I feel like there's potential here to avoid too much additional micro which is always a good thing when adding new content. Hopefully in practice this doesn't add another mandatory item on the players' to do list in terms of overwhelming the player.
 
  • 8Like
Reactions:
I can't say that I completely understood the skill tree just by looking at this WIP, but I can make a judgment on other points, it's pretty awesome! I think companies have become much more corporate, intuitive, and natural.

On the other hand, what bothers me is how the Turkish Keçi Ticaret is represented in this system. Because I like that.

I hope this new element is a free update, and I'd like to give a shout-out to developers. Thanks!
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
  • 3
  • 1Haha
Reactions:
I can't say that I completely understood the skill tree just by looking at this WIP, but I can make a judgment on other points, it's pretty awesome! I think companies have become much more corporate, intuitive, and natural.

On the other hand, what bothers me is how the Turkish Keçi Ticaret is represented in this system. Because I like that.

I hope this new element is a free update, and I'd like to give a shout-out to developers. Thanks!
Industrial Concern design companies remain unchanged in this new system since they represent a different type of company than those that interact with equipment normally. So MIO's replace the 4 equipment focused categories
 
  • 11
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Hello @C0RAX, thanks for the exciting news. Maybe it is too early to ask, but there is a Soviet focus that allow the player to merge industrial complexes, will this one be impacted by this new update/DLC? It's just that I can't really understand how the two can coexist. But maybe I just need to wait and see :)
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Hello @C0RAX, thanks for the exciting news. Maybe it is too early to ask, but there is a Soviet focus that allow the player to merge industrial complexes, will this one be impacted by this new update/DLC? It's just that I can't really understand how the two can coexist. But maybe I just need to wait and see :)
We are aware of this and the many other custom ways the script interacts with current design companies. we have a plan to integrate them, more on that in the future once we have completed all of that work.
 
  • 15
  • 4Like
Reactions: