Paradox Development Studios has posted their latest developer diary for Hearts of Iron IV, and this write-up looks at conscription and training of our units, and they want us to feel as if we’re ”growing and nurturing” our armies.
This should help put ”more focus into pre-war production,” which hasn’t always been that endearing. Manpower has ”big changes” in Hearts of Iron IV, and they explain how training works.
”Rather than controlling only how much it ticks up per month your conscription laws now control what percentage of the population you can recruit from the full population count.” Also, scraping the bottom of the barrel for men in the army will have an impact on industrial efficiency, and the quality of conscripts will drop so they take longer to train.
The dev team also talk about the new Army Planner. ”Here you can manage your division that you want to eventually deploy as well as all of your division templates they are built from. You may queue up as much as you want here and as you produce equipment each division will start to fill up.”
”A division that has gotten some equipment will start training its soldiers but training level is limited by how much equipment you have. 10k men having to share a single Panzer II tank is going to have a tough time learning anything.”
As long as a division has 10% of its equipment and manpower they can be deployed, but obviously that could have disastrous results. Experience for troops is split into Green Soldiers, Trained, Regular, Seasoned and Veterans. Putting your divisions through drills off-map maxes out at ‘Trained’.
On-map training raises the cap. ”You can train units on the map when deployed as well and this basically simulates large-scale exercises and war games. Soldiers trained on the map can reach up to Regular status,” continued the diary.
”For Seasoned and Veterans you need to see actual combat. To get these more well trained troops you will now start looking at some trade-offs. Training on the map costs equipment for every day of training as rifles, tanks and other stuff breaks down, so if you are trying to build up a stockpile of arms for an offensive you might need to hold back on training to keep your storage filled.”
When at war our divisions will be picking up experience much faster, but at the cost of lives.
Check out the latest Hearts of Iron IV Dev Diary 13 - Conscription & Training for more.