HEARTS OF IRON 4 REVIEW SERIES
A railway line is effectively a series of two-province connections, and the lowest one in the chain determines the level of the railroad connection between two supply hubs. While they are technically province buildings like forts, they are in reality closer to a building that connects two provinces. Railways function a little differently from other buildings. You can save the character as a variable to refer to them later, such as spamming debug messages in the console! You can check if a character is a certain type of character:
You can change the traits of advisors without having to make a whole new advisor: You can set and check character flags for nefarious purposes: So let’s talk about some more things you can do with it! The old script with create_country_leader and other such effects should still be working, but obviously you don’t get any of the advantages of the unified character system.
This is a clear departure from the practice in the live version of the game, where you would create a new country leader in that effect. As you can see in the first screenshot, you can use visible triggers for unit leaders to ensure they are not shown if you don’t want them to be.Ĭharacters that can potentially become country leaders are made into country leaders using the promote_character effect, like so: Once defined, characters are recruited in the country history file in order to be added to the game. A broken portrait only needs to be fixed in one place instead of five etc. Hat means there is a lot less confusion and duplication of effort necessary when putting a character into a new role, since stuff like portraits, name etc. Or we could also add the role later on, via focus, event, decision. It also means that if we wanted to allow Zhukov to become a country leader, we could simply add a country leader role for him in the character file, like this: This also means that if a character is removed from play - say, through a purge - they are automatically removed from all roles that they could have, which makes such systems a lot easier to do script-side. This also means that character names can now be localised and you can refer to a character by ID instead of by name (this helps a lot with character names that have non-english characters in them - turns out this broke some triggers and effects). On the character level itself, things like name and gender are handled. Due to technical concerns, Operatives remain their own thing. This should dramatically reduce the amount of potential zombie generals shambling around, which I am sure the non-zombie population will greatly appreciate.Ĭharacters are defined in the common/character folder, and their definitions look like this:Įvery character is defined as a container for different roles they can fulfill, like General (corps_commander), Advisor, country leader etc. We have overhauled that side of the game from the ground up with the introduction of characters. Cases where a country leader could also be a general had to be handled manually, leading to lots of exciting bugs when the country leader was removed but the general was forgotten about and other such cases. It only knows about country leaders, military leaders, political and military advisors, and operatives. In the current live version, the game has no real concept of a person as a distinct thing. Probably the biggest change is in how we handle people on the backend (or ponies, for that matter - we do not discriminate).