Hi everyone! Sorry about the late diary as we had to scramble for some alternative content due to originally planned authors being cut off by an enemy encirclement and suffering terrible attrition (a.k.a being sick). That means that instead of talking about optimization and AI we will be focusing on balance stuff we have been working on for the 1.3.3 patch which is nearing completion.Infrastructure will now affect the cost of building factories in a state. At the highest level of infrastructure, the cost for each factory is the same as before, with a few minor cost reductions for readability. In less developed states with lower levels of infrastructure building factories is more costly. The bonus to build in high infrastructure states is shown in the construction map mode.The reason for this change is twofold. We wanted to ensure that some states are more valuable than others as they will naturally become centers of industrialization. The other reason is to slow down the growth of industry in the mid to late game, which we felt was too excessive (we have also worked with tech progression here). Finally we felt that the value of infrastructure and infrastructure giving national focuses was too low and this will change this up quite a bit!This is a famous joke in software development that is attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs. There’s a certain truth to this and it applies to more areas than programming. Whenever you start something new, initial progress is usually pretty quick but as as you keep working on it, each incremental improvement becomes harder and harder.In Hearts of Iron IV, production efficiency used to have linear growth. We have changed this so that initial production efficiency growth is relatively fast, but it slows down as the lines become more efficient.In this graph you can see the difference between the old and new implementation. The old implementation steadily grows in efficiency until it reaches the cap. With the new system, initial efficiency growth is faster, but it takes much longer to reach maximum. This is affected by technology, meaning that modifiers to efficiency growth speed, cap and base all affect efficiency growth.The main benefit of this change is that high efficiency and efficiency retention has a lot higher value now and you need to think harder whether to change out a production line or not.Justifying a war used to only account for the cost of the states you selected for the wargoal. This led to a situation where it was too efficient to just claim a single state per war justification in order to keep world tension down. War justifications now accounts for the size of the country you are justifying a war against. This has the effect that justifying a war against a major nation, something that would be seen as a very aggressive move, will therefore result in a larger amount of world tension.Justifying against multiple countries has also become a more costly affair, with political power cost going up per justification and war the country is already involved in. This should help with multiple justifications draining political power from guaranteeing nations and make player think a little before they start drawing up the new proposed borders.When a country is at war the tension limit for them joining a faction is lowered. This allows nations to intervene in early wars through other means than guarantees.Previously you would only get access to a country’s stockpile of equipment when they surrendered. We felt this was too restrictive and a but unrealistic, so there is now a new mechanic where you get access to a percentage of a nation’s equipment when they capitulate. It also gives you a neat breakdown of the most common equipment and detailed count of the restNext week we will be talking about AI, optimization and other things, so see you then!Don't forget to tune in at 16:00CET on www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive today where me and Daniel will be starting a campaign of Kaiserreich in World War Wednesday!