Idle’s Weather Effects

Updated 19th February 2020 (version 0.9.0) see change notes

Feedback welcome!

If you generally play at speed 1, 2 or 3 (like me) this mod will deliver a tangible improvement to your game. You’ll time your attacks differently, and feel the effects of conditions on your troops, planes and ships better.

If you always play at speed 4 or 5, weather effects will only be momentary, your game will lag and you’ll be tempted to write a book called Mein Kampf.

Weather in HOI4 impacts the land, naval and air theatres, but in vanilla the effects look feeble and unconcerning.

This mod aims to do 2 things:

1. Improve the density of 3D weather effects so they look more threatening and immersive.
2. Improve the distribution of weather effects, so they better align with the areas in which the weather is actually occurring.

Rain, snow, blizzards, thunderstorms and sandstorms are generated on the map in spheres. In vanilla, there may only be 1 or 2 spheres in a strategic region, meaning that parts of a region will be left bare when in reality there’s a torrential thunderstorm going on.

Another problem is the radius of the spheres is huge, so you can see rain in areas that are actually dry, because the effect is overspilled from a neighbouring region.

This mod makes spheres signifacantly smaller, so they can be fit better inside each strategic region and you won’t see the overspill that used to happen in vanilla. It also drastically increases the number of spheres (typically 5-20x more) so that the whole region is covered. Each region is altered by hand for the best result.

This mod doesn’t change any actual game mechanics. The game’s weather synthesis is left unaltered, the effects of that weather on your soldiers, sailors and airmen are exactly the same now as before.

The mod doesn’t alter the 2D ground visuals, so mud and lying snow will appear exactly as before.

There are other mods out there that alter the actual impact of weather – this isn’t that mod.

I call it synthesis because weather isn’t simulated to the depth it was in HOI3. This was intentional so the devs could better control conditions in each theatre.

HOI4 weather is divided into strategic regions – the regions that define air zones and naval zones when you hit F2 / F3.

Each strategic region is given a table of temperatures and probabilities that a certain type of weather will occur, for example a blizzard will be quite likely in the Alpine region during winter. HOI4 does record the amount of rainfall and depth of snow, and with snow melt the ground will become sodden and turn to dreaded mud. All these things are outside the scope of the mod however.

This mod is very, very small. It doesn’t interact with much.

• Ironman is fine but Not compatible with achievements. This is very unfortunate but apparently changing the weather graphics (but not the actual gameplay impact) still makes it incompatible.
• Not compatible with Kaiserreich or Total War. KR changes the strategic regions where weather spawns – for example Austria has its own region now. Total War is similar. You will still see weather but it won’t necessarily be correct.

This mod is currently BETA (Version 0.9.0)

• HOI4 performance optimisation leaves a lot to be desired. Eventually I will release a ‘lite’ version that runs better on laptops / crappy GPUs
• 3D Weather not yet added to: North America, South America (adding more regions every week)
• No 3D weather in some naval regions (most contested regions are covered but deep oceans not so much)
  – Note these only affect the 3d weather – your actual game is unaffected
• Additional polish needed for individual effects.

This is my first mod, and the features aren’t documented so please be kind 🙂

Please don’t repackage this mod without permission.

Originally posted by Rich Person:

This is awesome! Can I tip you?

You can help Idle and Make a Donation[streamlabs.com]. Cheers!