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Sunday, July 29, 2018

Hearts of Iron IV Online Division Designer

Okay, I posed... now where's my treat?? by Lisa Zins from flickr (CC-BY)

There's division designer in the game, but it takes 10 minutes of console commands to ask basic questions such as "would this division be better with Superior Firepower or Mobile Warfare".

I've seen a few spreadsheet style division designers online, but they're not really able to answer such questions easily, and I don't have much confidence in their calculations.

So I wrote a command line tool to run such calculations based on game files. And then since I was halfway to something useful for other players, I added React.js frontend, then support for two most popular mods (Kaiserreich and Millennium Dawn).

Here it is.

It's first public release, so bugs are definitely possible, and UI could definitely use more polish.

Calculation engine got amount of decent testing to make sure it matches game data (disregarding Paradox rounding), but I could have missed something, especially if it's something only mods use.

It has extra features which are not exposed in the UI right now, like selecting any combinations of techs not just year + doctrine, and forcing old equipment, and I'd like to expose that somehow perhaps. I'd also like to make calculations more transparent with some extra tooltips explaining how those values got derived.

It doesn't even try to run in old browsers like IE11.

Best place for bug reports and feature requests is its github page, but I'm on all social media, so you can contact me whichever way you'd like to. Pull Requests welcome of course.

Over the years I wrote a huge number of various command line analysis scripts and modding tools for CK2, EU4, and HoI4. This is the first one that's available online, but I guess I could setup frontends for more of them. If you have any requests, send them over.

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