AT LAST! A reason to make Special Forces! 

Remember that in this update support companies will apply it's bonuses to specific battalion types so for example that support artillery bonus will give that 15% breakthrough bonus to each mountaineer batallion in the division

Now they have land doc, naval, air and now special forces. Logistics should be the next. I always find it funky how trains are grouped when researching. But if there was a new Doctrine tree, which allowed you to progress to lowering fuel consumption, quicker infrastructure construction time or building quicker railways - and railway hubs, a feature that is definitely needed - not to mention they could add something to do with trains there too. It could be paid with by XP depending on its function, so mainly army XP.

Surprised there is no bonus for paratroopers equipment capture ratio to exemplify that infiltration and the strategic transfer of equipment to alternate locations.

Take a shot every time Dave says, “At the end of the day…”

The main problem about the firepower of paratroopers at the moment is, that you cant add artillery on them. Having a more expensive parachuteable PACK artillery gun battalion (like we see in some mods) would be good I think.

7:51 it says Battalion Modifier: Mountaineer. That most likely means ALL mountaineer battalions in that division. It's not for the base artillery battalions in that division. So, if you have say 8 battalions of mountaineers and 3 artillery, the bonus applies to the 8 mountaineers, not the 3 artillery battalions. It's in the description!

Paratrooper update feels insanely interesting, you can drop large groups of soldiers behind enemy lines like to disrupt their frontline supply situation, use light tanks to get more punching power and utilize their supply grace. Then, if you drop a lot of them, you can either stay and use transport planes to drop supplies or I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) you can also just get out if you take an airfield by planning a paradrop from the captured airfield to your territories, you can do that in a instant since paradropping doesn't require planning

With mountaineers I feel it is important to remember that terrain bonii/mali are division specific not battalion specific. Attaching mountaineers with artillery and/or light tanks make for a very effective alpine attack division

I'm guessing the idea of having Paratroopers that can hold out longer behind enemy lines is that you can drop one or two beefy divisions on enemy supply hubs and hold them until your front line reaches them - which they'll achieve more easily because you've denied the enemy their supply for a significant time (also also you get the supply hub for yourself faster? If so, you can continue the push more rapidly too). I like it. Less cheese, more strategic paradrops that cripple an area of enemy defences in support of a big push. Though TBH, one change I want to see is being able to auto-name 'divisions' as regiments for special forces. Historically they very, very rarely fought all together as a single division and would instead separate into battalions to cover more objectives - and due to the scale of HOI4 having regiments as the 'smallest unit' makes sense. If they added a feature that let you split off special forces and reform them like you can with naval fleets that would be incredible - allowing a multi-pronged offensive with special forces that can then form up into a bigger division if you need them to hold part of the line afterwards.

I was wishing they had a branch where you could turn paratroopers into urban combat specialists.

17:05 this is a nod to the US Army using Gliders to insert jeeps, light tanks, and APCs. Part of the 101st Airborne Division History.

Maybe they could make it that you can have infinite amount of special forces, but they take a lot of time and lots of equipment to train and would need lots of equipment to have max strenght, because they're special. Like you can manually deploy them after multiple months have passed.

What people always forget to do with their paratroopers with high air support and a enough transport planes allows you to deliver supply deep in enemy territory so if you get a decent army of paratroopers with air support and supply drops they last for quite a while.

This is the one Ive been waiting for And dont sweat the reading glasses my brother - I finally came to terms with my needing them too

I'd like to see if paratroopers can do significant damage to supply hubs. And with the Light tank paradrop does that include light AT-tanks and spgs. If so it would add a significant amount of piercing and soft attack allowing for thick para div's to take and hold key supply hubs. If so we are about to see a massive shift in the meta and even more para drop rage in multiplayer. As one division can ruin an entire front line. While feedback thinks paratroopers are the least powerful of the lot, I see them as the one with the most game impact as supply hubs will become such an easy target.

Daddy Feedback looking damn good with some glasses! Love your content man, thanks for keeping the playerbase informed and entertained as always!

I think that special forces should have their own manpower based on the manpower of the nation you are playing. Let me explain, in real life only a few select individuals can become special forces in an actual army, so having 5%-10% of your manpower dedicated only to special forces could be an intresting idea

the first thing i thought when the video started was how does this dude have my glasses. i was going to double check older videos to make sure i wasn't going insane, so super happy you mentioned it in the first few seconds

bro get glasses with blue light filter glasses

Best intro ever aha You are an absolute legend mate, love your vids!

I feel like paratroopers should have the ability to lock down where they drop to make them worthwhile. Irl they were meant to capture and hold strategic points until the army arrived so maybe something where the supply grace lasts 30days and maybe a strong buff to defense for half that time would make bigger paratrooper divisions worth it and would give them a chance to survive until the main forces reach them, to balance it you could make it to where that grace is significantly reduced and the defense buff is lost if they attack and capture areas such as -10days supply per tile or something along those lines

The glasses suit you, brother. 👍

Damn bro with glasses you look way hotter and smarter, like a business man or smth and not a hobo playing HoI4 in a garage.

Combat insertion on the paratroopers is to represent the deployment of paratroopers ala D-Day where they were dropped near to the beaches and caused havoc behind enemy lines before coalescing into proper field formations. Whereas the other tree seems like it would incentivise using smaller paratrooper divisions to wreck absolute havoc on an enemies industry, sort of like the insertion of spies into Europe by the allies to assist resistance operations - you're sending these guys on suicide missions but that could more represent the resources spent on sabotage missions better than the espionage agency.

My God those glasses suit you so well

I always loved using special forces (I guess it was more of a roleplay thing for me than it was effective). Seeing that now they can be even more useful feels good

what would have been really cool for Paratroppers is a modifier that only applies when they're behind enemy lines, but not to the dropped unit itself. Instead, the paratrooper unit has a sort of "aura" around itself in which it gives attack and recon bonuses to the units on the nearby frontline.

I've got over 2k hrs in game and I dont understand how people think special forces are useless. There's no reason not to have mountaineers, there are always lots of hills/mountain tiles that tend to be critical to get past and their higher org allows them to last in fights much longer and grind down normal troops. Marines especially are important for getting through rivers which are pretty much everywhere, seizing ports, islands, and straights. Having at least 6 divisions of them is a must for me. Paras are more situational, but I've found them to be very good for offensives where there are big supply deadzones where your troops are just a tile or two from the enemy supply hubs(Stalingrad!), where your supply is low and the enemy is fully supplied and well dug in. Dropping like 10 small divisions around the critical supply hub and then taking it gives just the opportunity needed to push through the deadzone while the enemy has to take troops off the Frontline to deal with the paras. Its also really good to assign them to a general with commando trait and use the para glider ability that way they suffer very little org damage when they land so they can immediately fight and take several tiles and hold them before the enemy can respond.

Well for me, i use para troopers to land on rails to prevent supply to certain areas. So the extra defensive bonuses would make it possible to do that on d day and actually last long enough to get them off a defended beach... maybe

You forget snow last longer in the north

You are wearing glasses! I refuse to get over it

Super looking forward to this now. Hope its not too hard to unlock at least two special forces branches. I wonder how the officer corps and high command bonuses to doctrine cost will apply - so if you have an air doctrine -10% bonus does this now also apply to paras ? Cheers MMM

bro them glasses look good dont worry about it.

Wait that could be useful for finland which snows quite alot longer and other Nordic countries

They didnt show every single doctrine node. They only showed the different options but not the standard ones. There could be some hidden gem.

If they can make paratroopers where you can drop 5 or so divisions of them deep in enemy territory and capture a supply hub making them able to hold out without a significant effort from the enemy to eliminate the pocket then they will be very good and fun. It would tie into intelligence learning enemy supply routes and sending a paratrooper force to cut off a strategic hub and pushing with your line.

imagine that: paradropping some tank supported paras onto a mountain tile behind enemy lines with signal, engineers and hospital. also maybe air suppl them. they will do every 30 days loads of damage to the state and will be incredibly difficult to kill.

I like the glasses. It makes you look distinguished.

looking good

I don't know if this is possible with the way the game is setup, but if it is the way that to me both keeps special forces relatively balanced, has verisimilitude and isn't (as) arbitrary is to have special forces battalion bonuses not count (so for example, marines would have normal naval invasion penalty, mountaineers wouldn't get mountain bonuses and paratroopers can't paradrop) until the division is level 2 at least. Even better would be that the division gets half the bonus at level 2 and full bonus at level 3 (not sure how that works for paratroopers, maybe they can paradrop at 2 but have less org when they drop). So if you want to be mountaineer Romania you can, but you have to fully train mountaineers and then further exercise them once they are deployed. This would also stop people from taking a division and just changing it to marines for naval invasions, since currently even a zero experience marine is suffering less of an attack penalty on naval invasion than a regular division. If the above isn't possible it could also work to just give special forces battalions a flat penalty to experience gain, I'd assume that could be added with the current division system.

I thought myself & my mates to be big-brained people when we added Amphibious Engineers and Sappers to our mod "Second Sengoku". Paradox apparently thinks the same.

I'm loving that Paradox is taking notes from the mods people are commonly using regarding special forces, and specifically the new support companies that come from the special forces trees.

Maybe I don't understand the game well enough. I only have used paratroopers a couple times and they tend to die a lot. What I have gotten used to doing is using them more like marines, where I try to paradrop near a port and capture it. I'd like to see them want to control air ports, and then turn an airport into a small hub with transport planes. Not sure if that would be balanced, but I think it would make sense. Transport planes can supply without a hub, but they should be able to supply much less. If they have a place to land, then they should provide more supply. My 2 cents. Overall though the changes look cool.

The main problem i have with paratroopers is the lack of range of transport planes. It would be nice to use them to cut off bottlenecks or to take small islands.

the para tree needs something that increases air supply so that it can be a viable but expensive strategy, I.E. you drop paras behind enemy lines to cut supply to your enemy's frontline troops(either by encircling them or taking their supply hubs), and your transport wings can supply those paras (at great expense) forcing the enemy to break divisions off the frontline to go kill the paras, rather than them just being able to wait out the paras supply grace and obliterate them with a single division. to balance it, airsupply should result in equipment wasteage of like 75%, so its a big gamble to attempt (I.E. while you're airsupplying paras behind enemy lines, your own frontline will be undersupplied) so in effect, you're sacrificing your own supply, to completely take away the enemy's supply until they can bring up reinforcements to kill your paratroopers and retake the supply hubs.

glasses looking good on you!

As far as I can understand the terrain buffs are for support companies not whole army, though maybe you can put them in any division and give this buff to the whole army

Your glasses look fabulous. I wear almost the same.

The contribution Thing Sounds Like 10 Bataillons are Just counted as 7.5 Bataillons so you can field more Special forces than your cap

Is everything okay? your voice sounds DEEP

Feedback: Mountaineers are only good for defence. Dankus Memecus: Hold my Drink

I was just working on a mod to fix special forces, looks like paradox did it for me

Glasses looking good

Meaby as Finland having a snow rangers could be useful.

More Feedback glasses videos

i kinda wish they would make transport plane supply actually be enough to keep paratroopers in supply enough to keep fighting like in bastogne and the 101st thatd be sick

Right on, marines and mountaineers could turn the tide before if deployed correctly but it was always easier to just overwhelm enemies with stat-maxed regular divisions. This should make it more interesting.

We need something we can airdrop in similar to a floating port for naval invasions that dramatically increases the supply time. Something where you use transport planes in a similar fashion as convoys in order to continuously supply your "beachhead" behind enemy lines.

4:00 You can still train all three SF units as long as you research them. But the balance part is not all three will get the same amount of bonuses, especially if you are a Minor country. Major countries will have the benefit of at least having more advanced doctrines. For instance, the USA has access to all three SF doctrines since they historically have Rangers, Marine Commandos, and Airborne units. But they will likely focus more on Marines and Airbornes since the US military is designed to fight two wars beyond their oceans as an expeditionary force. They only had one dedicated Mountaineer Division in WW2 and it was the 101st Airborne Division that took the Eagle's Nest. Conversely, Germany will gain all three SF doctrines but focus more on Mountaineers and Airborne since their fight is mostly on Continental Europe.

I wonder if special force cap being a ratio of core pop and total industrial capacity would be better (maybe with inclusion of research speed or smth) It'd be great to have a slightly higher cap, as atm for most nations it's just another low priority thing to research and dump army xp into

Paratroopers are really slept on for their capability to snipe supply hubs and take temporary state control to press the funny scorched earth button. reducing enemy supply to 0 for a week absolutely ruins their capability to hold and at best you can even turn it into a surround with the paratroopers already doing the hard part of cutting the enemy off.

I hope that we're able to unlock two Navy, Air and Land doctrines via focuses or something. Maybe a decision, where it's required to have a certain amount of XP in stock and having progressed maybe halfway down a doctrine tree. I also hope Paradox alters the way equipment is lost - like... Instead of equipment breaking as it's used, the rate of breakage is reduced by 40-60% or so, and AMMUNITION is added to the game. Small, Medium and Heavy, the bare minimum. Thus we'd rely more on that than having a million rifles waiting to be THROWN AT THE ENEMY, which is how it feels like right now. Then we just need to fill the divisions with the core equipment, and less of it will be needed to fill needs as Ammo will take that up instead. But if they want to go more advanced, they might split up the ammo types even more to fit battalions, tanks, artillery pieces, ships and so on. Dozens of ammo types at worst, but it would make sense. Uniforms. For the troops. Small Arms. Guns you have in your hand. Artillery. Anti-Tank, and Anti-Air ammo for each type respectively. Used by artillery types and tanks, mostly. Anti-Air will also be used by ships. Aircraft Ammo. Straightforward, any plane with guns. Light, Medium and Heavy bombs. For CAS, Medium and Heavy Bombers respectively. Light, Medium and Heavy Ship Shells. For light, medium and heavy batteries. That's a lot of ammo types. But that's kind of excessive detail, but would be fun to have, though it adds more to the complexity.

I'd love to be able to move Paratroops by bunny hopping them from airbase to airbase...

I like the idea that the marine can exfiltrate from any shoreline, paratroopers should also be able to exfiltrate behind the enemy line, otherwise you are still gonna make one battalion paratrooper because they are gonna die anyway. They can't fight either, your 24 width paratrooper can't beat 9/1 or 7/2, there's no reason to make big paratrooper division. If paratrooper can get cross enemy division that would be nice, while doing so it will sustain the attack on the enemy (lose org and strength like regular battle), as a nerf paratrooper takes a few days or so to capture a tile, so it can be practically moving in enemy region without capturing it. This way the paratrooper is more like a special combat unit instead of a one time use partisan unit.

You sir are the real special force.

my thoughts are..... you look good with the glasses they suit you !!!

I am pogging like mad over rangers, just from a flavor standpoint.

Those marine commandos will be meta changing in their current state imo.

Special forces expanding via normal army size is realistic though.

This stuff looks fun! I think paratroopers should be of limited utility in the game. Historically, they were very much an experimental approach to warfare, and it could be argued many of these airborne experiments were either failures (market garden), close calls (Crete) or had mixed results (Burma). Large scale operations were very complex and expensive to pull off, and their track record overall established them as a complimentary or secondary element when compared to other specialized forces like engineers, marines and mountain troops. Essentially, paras should be very expensive and of limited utility. Their full potential should only be accessible to major powers with sufficient industrial/research capacity in game.

I used to love doing big unbreakable 30 width paratroopers with light tanks as Japan for the china war and the islands fight. For the most part the Chinese couldn't pierce and with air supply the china war was much easier so I could just use my paratroopers and drop like 6 of them behind the lines to cut up the Chinese forces and then destroy them with my infantry. I stopped doing this when they broke paratroopers and I couldn't get airdrops to work anymore, haven't used them in well over a year because they never work.

The Marine "pull out" function is clearly the most important thing in these doctrines.

Sounds like you are using Paratroopers a bit wrong. If dedicated to combat use, you wanna drop them behind the enemy frontline so they can pinch the enemy divisions, helping with encirclement.

Oh you with your titles. Feel like I saw this one coming.

Over 2,000 hours in hoi4... never done a paradrop

I want a new type of special forces that can do everything just not as effective as the ones that are made specifically for that task

The main point of paras is that you should connect your land troops with paras really quickly! You land paratroops, they reduce enemy org and you attact those reduced troops with your normal troops or marines! You drop para to supply depot and cut enemy supply line and whyle enemy is suffering supply issues, you hammer them down with your regular troops! Paratroops alone = a lot of starwing men…

hey im fairly new to these dev diaries, how long does it normally take for things shown in dev diaries to end up as an actual feature, like will i be looking at waiting a year before this gets added, or two, or what?

I can't wait for my Paratroopers to be useful

nice glases my brother

Arty, AA and AT battalions should be airdroppable in para divisions.

Hmmm i wonder if you can paradrop and then takeover an airport and get them home again

Maybe instead of a cap based on the percentage of total army there should be cap based on manpower. So special forces are usually full time volunteers working at military. E.g. special forces can constitute at max 1% of recruitable population, but not more than 50% of total manpower? It just would make sense if a mountainous countries like Bhutan,Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Switzerland, Lebanon, Nepal, Tibet etc. could have 100% mountaineers armies. It could also depend on special forces type, because paratroopers are more special than marines and marines are more special than mountaineers. E.g. according to Wikipedia Russia has 1.154 million fielded troops with 3.708 million total manpower, so taking into consideration that Russia has 143 million people in HOI4 terms, Russia has limited conscription. But VDV (Russian Airborne Forces ) have 45,000 man. And while conscripts are often little more than meat shield, VDV is the most important component of the Army (technically they are their own branch, but in HOI4 terms they are part of the Army) and Russians would rather disband most of their land forces than touch VDV. So no VDV consists 1% of available Russian manpower, but I could easily imagine situation where it would be multiple times more if Russia became bankrupt. So maybe: - mountaineers: up to 1% of recruitable population, no more than 50% total manpower - marines: up to 0.5% of recruitable population, no more than 25% total manpower - paratroopers: up to 0.25% of recruitable population, no more than 15% total manpower Don't look to much into this numbers, I want to just convey an idea, not propose a concrete numbers. I just think that country that is on volunteers only should be able to field army consisted only from special forces (special forces in term of HOI4, not what NATO calls special forces). Other idea could be to introduce different manpower pools e.g.: - professionals - conscripts - militia/paramilitary (Home Guard, Volksturm etc.) And special forces could use only use professionals, but professionals should have on awerage higher organization than conscripts. While militia units should have penalties for using them outside core territory, but it maybe would encourage players and AI to spam troops defending home territory, so no more capping by para-dropping on victory points with 1 battalion trash-troopers or totally undefended coast line. Home Guard in the UK reached 1.7 million serviceman, that is like 100-350 divisions just guarding coast, victory points, and infrastructure in the UK. Yeah, they should have like 50% of normal battalion organization, and even less, maybe 25%, when using outside core territory. But at least there would be some use to for militia and old guns.

Road to 56 kinda way with another tree, but hey, if it works, then works!

Welcome to 480p life Dave! Actually mine is more like 144p, oof

So if I understand correctly you can still use all three in your divisions (mountaineers, paratroopers, marines), but from those upgrade trees, you can normally only choose one, right?

I wonder how it would work with mods that add more kind of special forces

Nice glasses!

Feedback looks and sounds like he aged 10 years in the span of a few months.

Just has a thought regarding the mountaineer branch, choosing between CW and art stats. Paradox seriously needs to boost the artillery stats. Why? A CW reduction of -0.2 means essentially every 15 mountaineers you get an extra artillery. Why is this OP? If you're building a chonky 42/44 w mountaineer, you add 15 mountaineers and 4 art usually to get to 42, right? Add another artillery to that. One extra artillery regiment is far more soft attack and breakthrough than a 15% increase. You're increasing stats by 125% instead of 115%. That's huge. Unless I read this wrong, and the 15% applies to all divisions not just mountaineer division artillery battalions, this will trump the 15% 9/10 times, only time the 15% SA and BT will be better is if you're so poor you can't even afford to add on one more art battalion to your elite divisions that comprise a small portion of your army. Food for thought.

i kinda understand why they didn't buff paratroopers as much as other two branches. Air xp is most abundant in early game for axis and as Germany you can have broken paratroopers as early as 1938. Most of the games would be over in 1940.

The only time I see here is a whole heap of new rules for MP games will be written up to ban them or remove all effectiveness of special forces

Wait, you can paradrop tanks?!

More bonuses to field hospitals? Yes, please. Another thing Paradox could look at is M.A.S.H. units, like a specialized division with terrible combat stats but provides an area of effect casualty trickleback modifier. But to make them really useful, there needs to be a "trailing line" order, where the unit follows the line units but stays off the front itself. Hell, you know the US Navy has a fleet of specialized medical frigates. Throw that in too. Build it like a standard ship, and it tries to stay out of combat but provides casualty trickleback to shore states bordering its current sea zone. Bonus: Give it a special order, call it Civilian Aid, where instead of catering to combat casualties it focuses on the civilian population of shore states, granting small bonuses to compliance if the country is allied to you or resistance and collaboration if it is against you, a tiny tick of your ruling ideology on the target country (Maybe capitalist dogs aren't so bad. Papa Stalin never give us hospital!), and a bonus to recruitable population since more people will want to join and fight for the guys who go out of their way to avoid civilian casualties and heal civilians caught in a war. Technically helicopters didn't exist during WWII, but maybe add that to the Modern tier of the tech tree to unlock helicopters for CAS, recon, and added transport options, to replace scout plane catapults, and to extend the range of hospital frigates further inland based on the range of the helicopters assigned to them.

1 SOF division should take on 2-3 reguler infantry divisions with the same combatwith if they are those integrated divisions ... if they are more a sabotage unite they should be able to seake around and NOT concer teritory but do damage to infrastucture and are very week against evry unite ... so you have to build rear secour unites

I understand that using field hospitals is not optimal for a game, especially when the only nation I play is Nationalist China, HOWEVER they make me feel better inside that not every person in my army is going home in a wooden box

The bonuses look high, but you have to spend XP to unlock them, then spend more XP on templates and you're still limited by Special Forces Cap. XP is needed for Doctrines and designing Equipment, so I don't think the Special Forces are really worthwhile.

But where are the dedicated shock troopers??? The Sturmtruppen?

You look aswome with those glasses.

5:10 MOUNTED recon not mountaineer