Hearts of Iron IV Anniversary Week & Developer Corners!

[Arheo]

Hey would appreciate a reply to my previous comment suggestions, also will you guys be adding some form of "War protifteering" similar to how war bonds work but instead of just that making it so non-communist countries can engage in profiteering such as how oskar schindler did, for countries like germany to use this which may provide additional free military factories by making political concessions to the upper class would be good.

I have your DMs on my todo list, it's been quite a busy day week month year - I will get round to a response!

Re: war profiteering; I think this is generally something that makes more sense for bespoke country content rather than a generic system. It can otherwise get uncomfortably close to topics we do not cover in HoI without the means to adequately and contextually describe them.

 

[Tumon]

I have your DMs on my todo list, it's been quite a busy day week month year - I will get round to a response!

I meant the one I posted on the second page, it was related to the naval rework for east asia and may be relevant for the dev corner updates Yeah slightly added a bit more but worth a reply through the thread or DM's when you're free.

 

[Eligha]

Glad to see that the developers are aware of the issues the game still faces. Extended diplomacy and the rework of alliances would be so great. Current systems leave a lot to desire. Maybe there could be some sort of cohesion factor to factions?

I wish that there was a middle ground between the tight historical playbook and the completely random unhistorical. Lot of times you have to abandon a playthrough and start over just because luck didn't go your way. Or more realistically, leave the game for a while. It's frustrating.

The biggest issue in my book however is how little consideration there is in each country's focus tree to the other countries they interact with. Lot of diplomatic focuses break very often. If said AI countries only deviate a little, get invaded or ESPECIALLY when they get a civil war. Civil wars break the game the most and definitely need a revisit.

That being said, I'm looking forward to what future changes bring to the game.

 

[Nor William]

"South/East Asia is next"

Will Southeast Asia get some love? maybe in next country pack... please give us some hope ;-;

 

[Tumon]

Will you also be making videos for each development corner update on the schedule? Also when you're having ur major meeting for naval rework be sure to read my DM's beforehand about the rework I have some realistic idea's that can be implemented, also appreciate the dev corner update plan sounds great! Any idea when we can also expect the first development diary for China and Japan's east asia update?

 

[Boginga]

any update that touches on naval mechanics is a dream come true

 

[Louco doido]

When you say you're going to update China, you mean all Chinas, right?

Will older tank models be updated eventually?

 

[Magnilil]

I'm more of a Stellaris player (and forum lurker) but I'll try my luck with this giveaway. More complex economic gameplay is probably the aspect I'm more interested about. Varied diplomatic options and detailed "Island hopping" sound fun.

 

[WolfClaw]

It's time to creat a real warlords map, each of them had more ties to WWII than many Latin American countries (doesn't mean they shoudn't have their own focus trees)

 

[Merrivale]

On the battle planner, one thing that always kills me about letting the AI just go is closing encircled pockets. Instead of attacking a pocket from all directions to quickly close it and then move on, the AI tends to shuffle units around the pocket because it has to "cover" the entire front, and I think it views an attack out of the pocket into any one province as possible for ALL the provinces (or at any rate, it is way too conservative about bulking up every province around the pocket).

So even in a "minor" war where I have a huge advantage and thus don't feel the need to micro, I still have to step in whenever pockets develop to close them myself manually (with ease, I might add, this is not remotely a close call on whether an all-out attack on the pocket is warranted).

 

[_IGT_]

That's great

 

[crikky10]

I can't wait for the new updates and also for the 10th anniversary, can't believe it's already been a decade of epic battles in one of the most history-changing periods ever.

 

[zhangjim]

My point of view is that the focus is not that more is better. Especially considering the lessons learned from India in the previous DLC, those hypothetical historical routes should be as conservative as possiblet.

 

[Treviranus]

A key challenge that I have noticed recently is that the more complex the focus trees get - more countries have unique ones and the unique ones get ever more elaborate - the harder it is to create a specific scenario by presetting paths for AI countries before you start a SP game.
On one hand it is sometimes too rigid (I've never seen monarchist Germany go for accepting British naval dominance for example) on the other hand it is sometimes too fluid, meaning that the AI flatly doesn't do what you tell them (I once told France to go Communist before the start of the game and they went monarchist instead). If this issue isn't adressed - and it should be fixable fairly easily - SP games will just become more and more unhinged with every new update, unless you play strictly historical.

 

[Lean_XD]

Generals!

Not only is our nine year anniversary happening today, but we've got a lot of content for you all to read through so make sure to continue reading. We've got Developer Corners starting up again, HOI4 Anniversary Giveaways every day and the Multiplayer Mayhem happening in the 2025 Community Cup!

But first, a word from our Commander in Chief @Arheo .


Greetings all,

As the oft-quoted Eisenhower stated, ”In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. In the spirit of this, we thought it would be time to take a look at the long-term roadmap for Hearts of Iron. It has been around three years since our last formal Hearts of Iron Roadmap, and while plans have changed and evolved, this statement of intent has been largely what has guided our development process up until the release of Götterdämmerung.

Our mainline intended innovations, when this was written just after No Step Back, included the following:

• Improvements to Frontline Stability (Progress in NSB, more to come)
• Strategic and Tactical AI improvements
• Battle Planner Improvements

Götterdämmerung included a lot of improvements to the AI including Force Concentration: a feature designed to simulate tactical pushes and armor concentration. This has been an interesting one: when released, we saw a lot of players taken by surprise by the AI using this approach, and a lot more discussion over players being defeated or losing to the new AI behaviour. However, most of the community seems to have adapted fairly quickly to this change. To me this is a positive thing: while having a broad playerbase with varying levels of skill means we need to be gradual about how and if we increase overall difficulty when playing against AI, the existence of community “meta” and learning materials gives most players tools to catch up. In short, there’s no reason not to continue iterating on AI features that may increase average difficulty or required skill levels.

On a related note, we’ve fixed a bunch of issues with frontline stability, but battle planning remains a tool that has a stark divide between how new and veteran players utilize it. We’ve done some quite deep user research into this particular area, but this resulted in few actionable results beyond handling edge cases better and improving frontline integrity.

Long Term Goals and Strategies to guide AI (Progress in NSB)​

Most of this is “under the hood”, but we’ve made a lot of progress adding tooling to interpret and direct how the AI performs long-term planning. This area of the game is notoriously opaque and it’s taken a fair while to get to the point where we have enough analytical insight into the mechanical decision-making process of the AI, but, we’re more or less there now. This has meant improved tooling such as AI strategies, imgui debug tools that modders also have access to, and better integration with existing mechanics that previously existed “on top” of the game without interacting much with the AI. This is of course a goal that has no defined end-point, but compared to where we were three years ago, much has improved.

Improving Peace Conferences​

By Blood Alone saw a contribution-based peace conference system added, with numerous narrative demand options. On reflection the design approach here was not super stable, and while the feature hit most of the key notes (contesting demands, earning defined contribution, rewarding better play), it fell into a similar trap to the old system when it came to AI antagonism. It took longer than it should have done for that behaviour to stabilize with tweaks and changes, but we’re in a better (if not perfect) situation now.

Update Core National Focus Trees with Alt-History paths alongside more Options​

We’ve had a couple of methods of doing this. First are the maintenance updates included in some War Effort patches. These tend to be quite minor, but we’ve added a fair few things to various focus trees over time.

Secondly, revisiting focus trees such as Germany and Hungary represents a greater investment into this. Overall, I’m happy with the dual-pronged approach to this; reworking focus trees comprehensively is a full expansion-cycle affair, and doing it outside of a paid release is not something we will ever be able to do. I feel the majority of the community understand this, and our roll-in approach to DoD, TfV and WtT has been for the most part welcomed.

Great Power Diplomacy​

I’ve spoken at length on this in a few other places. Fundamentally, design ideas for this one always ended up conflicting with focus trees. HoI4 is a war simulation with a superimposed latch-driven state-machine that drives the global narrative. It is unlikely we’ll change that approach. However, the process of working through design ideas for this has given us some avenues for further exploration.

Multiplayer & Social layer Improvements & Support​

The Career Profile and associated features hit the social layer note pretty well. Traditionally, these features are designed to increase player engagement: something which HoI doesn’t really have an issue with. However, the feature has proven to be unexpectedly popular amongst specific groups within the community, both for completionists and as a learning aid. While I don’t think we’ll be making any fundamental additions to this, it won’t be going away and we’ll keep adding content such as new medals and ribbons.

Economic Decision Making​

We haven’t made any great strides here. We still have medium to long term plans to expand the industrial economy elements of HoI, while taking care to avoid simulating too many pure economic elements.

Special Projects​

Götterdämmerung represents the culmination of this project. I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, though now that we’ve had some time to monitor the wider effects of special projects, it is about time to revisit balance and take a pass on the huge array of tech that was added in the Götterdämmerung update.

More Difference between sub-ideologies & Government forms, Advisors and Internal Politics Improvements​

We didn’t really get here! This is quite a difficult topic to broach in a strategy game, and other things ended up taking precedence. We’ve had some minor changes to advisors, but nothing to write home about in the grand scheme of things.

More National Focus Trees

Fairly Self-explanatory.


Make Defensive Warfare more fun​

This is still a goal of mine, but we haven’t managed to tackle it yet. I think some of the fundamentals of HoI4 (ie, stuff we simply can’t/won’t change) stand in the way of doing this justice, though it also plays hand-in-hand with changes to doctrine and division design which are definitely in the works.

Adding Mechanics to limit the size of your Standing Army, Particularly post-war etc​

Definitely still planned, though not a major priority on its own - will have some words on this later. I don’t feel like this is something that has been glaringly missing for a game with a narrative of “crescendo to war”, though as we start to experiment around the fringes of that pillar (smaller regionally-focused conflicts and expansions), it will become more necessary.

Have Doctrines more strongly affect Division Designing​

We’ve had some success here with the changes to support companies and equipment streamlining. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is “done”, though. We have short-medium term plans regarding doctrines though, and having them affect division design more strongly is one of the key pillars for this effort.

Immersion and Roleplay Elements, Optional tools for making your mark in a game​

We’ve added a lot of things that touch on this: division medals, plan naming, deeper recruitment design, MIOs and industrial specialization being chief among them, feature-wise. I think these features do what they set out to do: letting you leave your own mark on the battlefield and the campaign narrative. As you may have noticed from recent war effort patches, we’ve also identified that we need to be better with streamlining how players interact with these types of features.

War Effort Updates​

I talked at length in the 2022 roadmap about the introduction of maintenance updates - something we ended up doing, and calling “War Effort” patches. On their own merit, these have been extremely useful for us, and have allowed us to iterate and introduce quite a lot of system updates and quality of life changes such as:

• Persistent equipment designs
• System Rebalances to designer modules and units
• MIO streamlining
• Some quite significant performance improvements
• Over 1000 bugfixes
• Mod support
• Focus tree updates
• Balance standardization of some systems (quite important for game health!)

One of the things we were uncertain of before we started War Effort patches was whether this would reduce the maintenance included in major updates, resulting in effectively just moving things around. With the exception of our approach to country packs (ie; not including maintenance updates at country pack release), it has not directly affected the size and impact of major releases.

The old Roadmap championed these as a method of updating older focus tree content. It’s fair to mention that this ended up not being a major focus of war effort updates. It became quickly apparent that developing focus trees is the majority of the work our Content Designers do; that’s not realistically something we can do in iterative updates.

So while there is success here, there’s also room for improvement. We will keep producing War Effort updates, but I want to try and find some form of structure to them, and a way of steering them in a way that more quickly addresses high impact community issues. Particularly, I would like to find a way to increase the visibility of our approach to handling community issues, though I will caution that this will require some time to achieve.

Next Steps​

Aaand that’s our retrospective.

That ended up quite a lot longer than I’d expected, but that’s ok - the future plans are at least a little more concise! I want to give you an updated roadmap for our next few years, though with the usual caveats. As you can see above, these plans are not super specific, they aren’t promises, and they don’t always work out. Nonetheless, the act of planning is extremely important, and communicating those plans perhaps even more so.

So what does the future look like for HoI4?

It will come as little surprise that South/East Asia is next, with content primarily focused on Japan and China, and mechanics to support this narrative, as well as reinvigorating the Pacific war. I don’t want to go into too many specifics here (tune in next time for more!), but the war in and around Asia as well as the Pacific has been left behind by our recent developments directed at the European elements of the conflict. To give some broad strokes here, we’re looking at developing the narratives that faction membership will give you, improving and streamlining elements of naval control, with a particular focus on the types of naval warfare that carried the Pacific conflict, and adding much greater strategic narrative (and a less opaque simulation) to the flow of naval conflict. This is not an exclusive list, and it’ll probably leave you guessing - but you won’t have to wait long.

In the longer term, we have some other areas that we’re keen to take a pass on:

Military Doctrines and Division Design​

These systems are quite old and don’t offer much ability to shape your gameplay. I would like to link these better, in order to have doctrines shape both how you compose and how you use your military.

Manufacturing and Industrial/Economic Gameplay

Watch this space.


Breaking the Snowball!​

HoI’s “crescendo to war” that I mentioned earlier is extremely important to the main narrative of the war. However, as time goes on we have released more content focusing on the smaller players in this conflict. There are elements of the game that don’t mesh particularly well here, and I want to take a look at the way wars and war escalation are structured to make this more engaging and less disruptive when minor conflicts erupt.

Improving the Diplomatic Landscape​

“But you said you couldn’t do this!”, I hear you cry. And mostly you would be right. However, with the introduction of late game technologies in Götterdämmerung, there is even more reason to continue playing after the end of the war. I would like to keep developing how the world “falls out” after the conflict, producing more realistic geopolitical results as well as the potential for new and more systems-driven “what if” conflicts after the end of the war. Of course, any such changes would be multiplied in effect if they could also touch upon the pre-war landscape too…

Alt-History​

Well, that’s a broad category. This is one we’ve been looking at in quite a lot of detail. We see an increasingly stark divide within different groups of the community on how we (or even if we should) approach alt-history. For those that enjoy it, don’t worry, we’re not going to stop making alt-history content, however, I have asked the team to look, in the long-term, into ways of producing more structured, plausible alt-history content with clearer historically-adjacent narrative hooks. In addition, we have started to evaluate if it’s possible to create more deterministic global alt-history situations and produce some “semi-alt-history” ways of playing HoI - something that I think would capture the fun parts of the non-historical content we provide while also retaining the benefits of the determinism that the historical scenario imparts.

I have one, final note on the practical elements of what we release. We intend to continue releasing what we’ve previously termed “Country packs” and “Unit packs”, but we need to both be clearer about what is or isn’t included, and adjust the scope. We’re devoting some more resources to our Country pack development moving forwards, and we’ll be including mechanics and systemic changes in those the same way as expansions - albeit still focusing on “minor players” in the war.

Alright, I started writing this three hours ago and apparently I’m still going, so here I will force myself to stop. I’m here to answer questions.

/Arheo

View attachment 1308896
Of course, these dates may be subject to change so keep that in mind!



Hearts of Iron IV's 9th Anniversary!​

As apart of HOI IV's Ninth anniversary, we've decided to do another giveaway with a different prize each day including some fan favourites and some keys for the new Song pack for those of you who missed out on some of those banger tunes. To participate and enter for a chance to win some of these codes, make sure to reply here on each day you want to take part in the giveaway.

Because of time zones, we've decided that each giveaway "day" will start at 14:00 CEST, so for example, if you want to take part in the Bonus Songs Pack giveaway on Tuesday, then you need to reply between 14:00 CEST on Tuesday and 13:59 CEST on Wednesday. If you reply on Wednesday 14:00 CEST, then you're taking part in the Wednesday giveaway, etc.

You can reply as many times as you want, on as many days as you want, but if we're looking through replies and have to choose between two replies, we will probably choose the reply that has some substance (vs "Just replying to take part") so be creative, engage, comment on the announcement or on others' replies.
(Giveaway T&C attached below)

Today: HOI IV Starter Edition So you can play with more friends x30
Tomorrow: Bonus Songs Pack To listen to, even when you're paused x30
Wednesday: No Step Back To bring Communism to the world x30
Thursday: By Blood Alone Take your fight to the skies x30
Friday: Arms Against Tyranny To bring the fight to the Nordics x30

Hearts of Iron IV Anniversary Sale!​

To add even more fun to our anniversary celebration, the Hearts of Iron Sale (up to 70% off) is now live over on paradox.com!

Community Cup 2025​

We are back for yet another round of the Community Cup, hosted by Dankus. This year, the Teams are participating for a chance to win 5000 Euros! With Casters such as Dankus themselves, Mo and one of our own Community Ambassadors Fraser, the finals will be played June 7th at 17:00 CEST.

Make sure to catch all of the action over on Dankus's Channel, or the HOI Youtube Channel!

(About Giveaway)

I don't think I am able to put all of my feelings, opinions, and expressions without writing a book about this game, but I will try.
The first video game I have ever played was GTA San Andreas. I liked it so much that I as a four year old managed to convince my parents to buy me a PC, although it was not the first game I installed on my PC, in a few days I got my hands on a copy. To this day, it is my favorite game. I have spent thousands of hours in it. Most of it on a community mod called SAMP. Through my life I have changed my tastes about video games, I probably have an odd thousand hours in Minecraft. But the only game that I have played more than GTA San Andreas is HoI4.
I have... acquired Hearts of Iron IV in 2019 I was on summer break, and I wanted a new game to play, something tied to ships, and the MTG trailer popped up on YouTube. I downloaded the game, but I had a problem. My PC at the time had a 32-bit Windows 7, so I had to find an older version, the one that only included Togather for Victory and a few songs. I had no idea how to play the game. The first country I played was Germany. I didn't even know how focus tree's worked, I didn't even know that It had political branches, so I tried to force history by justifying and declaring on Austria and Czechoslovakia. Later I watched someone playing infantry only, where I Saw 7/2 template and how to use focuses, since then I became better but I was still terrible, aided by my still very broken InGlIsH meaning I couldn't reach out to the community. Few things I remember from that time were the horrible air deployment system, using cheats when doing Barbarosa and boost ideology and coup options in diplomacy tab. Later on I upgraded my PC and "acquired" the latest version, which was one with La Resistance, and soon BfB. By then I had stopped using cheats and was playing with different nations. I enjoyed playing in the sandbox of nations, making my own stories, about how Germany became leader of the new Europe, or how Japan helped collapse Allied powers. How Small Yugoslavia kickstarted Second Red Revolution. How France ruled the waves. How Turkey did nothing for the whole game. How Italy accomplished Roman ambitions (old tree), How the Ottoman Empire did nothing for the whole game. How Hungary became the powerhouse of aircraft production. How UK managed to cause a stalemate in France... Again. How Germany challenged Royal Navy again, then lost again, then invaded them with paratroopers. And thousands of smaller stories about divisions, ships and squadrons forgotten by courtesy of a language barrier, Storries that I told myself and wanted to document but never found enough resources to make it come true. Endless games I had, dozens of them were probably identical. And countless discussions I had on this forum and even more on Reddit, All in the sake to try and improve the game, or to try and bring attention on things to change in what is to hopefully come.
I can write about all things that annoy me, that is how I spend most of my time on this forum, but for every minute I have spent writing a short critique of the game, I know I have spent more than 30 times that in the game.

 

[Reni Malaj]

Calling it East/South Asia would be a better way to put it.

 

[Mitsuo Katagiri]

I will pay for 2 copies + my soul if you add Konoe Fumimaro to Japan in the new expansion.

 

[FLUX2226]

At that point we're getting down to modular production, and that's a level of detail I'm not keen on supporting from a strategic perspective.

That makes me a bit sad. I wasn't necessarily in favor of modular construction, but it was the most elegant way I could think of to fix the "build bare-bones equipment and then convert to variants with modules to save resources" exploit. Especially for capital ships it's easy to execute and the savings are massive.

But maybe you'll come up with another solution

 

[PoultryLaser]

It may be a long shot, but I would really like to see Reorganized Nationalist China receive a focus tree with this upcoming DLC. The dynamic between them, Chiang Kai-shek's government, and the communists is really fascinating. It went through a few different iterations and leaders with a range of views on its relationship with Japan. Real weird mix of revolutionaries pursuing specific goals outside of Chiang's reach, genuine collaborationists & lickspittles, and opportunistic bandits. Plus, they actually had an enormous military of their own. There's also the argument that they should exist on the map in 1936 in the form of the East Hebei Autonomous Government, which is currently just represented as Japanese occupied territory.

I highly recommend Rana Mitter's book, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, for anyone interested in the topic.

 

[Chubbeh_Panda]

Appreciate you're still updating the game but I wish there was an option to disable some of the recent mechanics to the game. The special projects and air raid stuff is absolute garbage. The ability to play without tank designer and plane designers too, without disabling the dlc completely. I've barely played since graveyard of empires as the achievements are nigh impossible. Does every achievement have to be a world conquest?