• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Status
Not open for further replies.

HoI4 Dev Diary - A Post-Colonial World: Map Changes and New Tags

Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another dev diary for the 1.6 “Ironclad” update and the Man the Guns DLC! As this diary goes live I'll be on vacation in Norway (where among other things I visited the Gneisenau's "Caesar" turret located at Austrått Fort in Ørland, close to Trondheim, Norway), so my replies in the thread below may be a bit slower than usual :). As a little bonus, some pictures and info on the gun emplacement are in the spoiler below.

20180709_142529.jpg

The Gneisenau 283mm (11-inch) cannons in their turret. After being bombed in Kiel harbor (where she had just finished repairs for previous damage), the ship was so heavily damaged (including the destruction of the forward "A" turret), and Hitler was so disillusioned in the performance of his surface fleet, that it was decided to have the ship scrapped altogether. The turrets were to be used as coastal gun emplacements, and the "Caesar" or "C" turret was moved here to defend the harbor of Trondheim. Extra armor was added, especially to the top (an extra 200 metric tons of steel). Total weight of the turret was 1,000 metric tons (compared to the 800 metric tons it would've weighed when placed on Gneisenau). Located on an elevation of about 50-60 meters, the range was 42,6km, reaching all the way out to the Atlantic, and also to the Trondheim harbor. Considering it was placed on solid ground, accuracy was also markedly improved over ship-based artillery.

20180709_151941.jpg

Some of the Gneisenau's engines were also relocated here, in the complex inside the mountain. These provided all the power to the turret and the facility. It could rotate 360 degrees (but no further, or the electrical cables would snap - on a ship, due to the superstructure, this was never a problem anyway) in 50 seconds. Alternatively, if power failed, the entire five-story turret (every level rotated as one along with the visible part of the turret) could be hand-cranked and rotated by 4 soldiers. The engines (one shown here) are the original ones, and still operate to this day.

20180709_155959.jpg

The guns could fire 9 rounds each minute (so a full salvo of 3 each 20 seconds). The 315kg (for high explosive) and 330kg (for armor piercing) shells were launched at 890-900m/s (by means of a 76kg cartridge and additional 41kg powder bag), with a gun elevation of -8 to +40 degrees. They only fired a handful of test rounds in the 1940s and early 1950s, after which population density became high enough that they could no longer test-fire the guns because doing so blew out all windows in a 3km radius. It never once fired its guns in anger at an enemy. This was the "C" turret, located at the rear of the Gneisenau. The "B" or "Bruno" turret was used as a similar emplacement near Bergen, Norway, while the barrels of the destroyed "A" or "Anton" turret received new housings and were used in fortifications in Rozenburg, near Hoek van Holland in the Netherlands, to defend Rotterdam port.


20180709_142558.jpg

The range finder. It was originally located at the command post at Lerberen, 2-2,5km away from the emplacement. The turret therefore had 2 periscope binoculars so they could double-check whether they were actually firing at enemy or friendly ships (in case the rangefinder had been overrun by enemy forces and they were feeding 'bad' info to the fort).

20180709_142949.jpg

South-facing picture of the fjord the gun emplacement overlooks (the fjords leading to the Atlantic are to the right, Trondheim harbor is far off in the distance to the left). The facility was manned by 125 soldiers, including the original turret commander and some other personnel from the Gneisenau. In addition, it sported an anti-tank wall, bunker, and 20 smaller-caliber cannon emplacements around the periphery for duty as anti-tank guns or for firing flares (one stationary Skoda 4,7cm anti-tank cannon still remains, now). After the war's end, the whole fort was taken over by the Norwegians, until the late '60s when the threat of the USSR became less, and they decided to get rid of it. It was turned into a museum in the early '90s.

P1020565.JPG

Glorious Real-Life ErrorDog approvingly observing shell fire raining down upon his enemies.

Last week we had a look at the new, reworked focus tree for the United Kingdom, including a whole new path for decolonization. Naturally, this elicited a flurry of questions that (because of this week’s dev diary) I could not answer at the time...

I notice one focus talks about a Three-Nation solution in India, does this mean we'll be seeing a tag for Burma or Sri Lanka? Will there be other new tags involved in the decolonisation tree beyond those which are already present?

Also, will Burma finally have its own tag? It was historically separated from the British Raj one year after the game begin.

@Bratyn the focus the three nation solution does mean a tag for bangledesh/east Pakistan, Burma or something else altogether?

Since there is a decolonisation path does that mean that there are more releasable nations in the colonies, like for example Malta or Ghana? Also, is the third nation in the Raj going to be Burma?

Are y'all going to make the African releasables...well...more like real African releasables?

Does the three state solution release Pakistan, India and Burma? Or India, Pakistan Bangladesh. Or India, Pakistan and a Sikh state?

-WHY ISN'T KAZAKHSTAN RELEASABLE YET???

I can now answer all these questions with a single resounding “YES!” (and in the case of the last one; a “sorry it took a while but it’s now finally in” ;) ).

As the design for the UK focus tree rework began to take shape, it was clear we needed decolonization of some sort, and all the tags and map changes that come with it. Now, we could have simply done the British Empire with the current in-game borders and be done with it, but I wanted to do things thoroughly and so chipped in a sizeable amount of my “personal development time” to create new provinces, new states, adjust existing ones, add new tags, and to not only do so for the British Empire, but also for the French, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, and Italian colonial empires, and even for the Soviet Union.

Due to the sheer number of modern-day countries (and especially microstates) this process is by no means complete, and I may well continue to use some of my personal time to develop things further. However, as most of this is, in the end, done in my own time, I will not be making any promises…

Before we delve into the meat of things, I do want to give ample credit where credit is due. This would not have been possible without the help of our Community for making the flags that I needed for these tags (as I could not bother artists with it). A big thank-you to everyone who chipped in! I would like to single out one of our Betas in particular (you know who you are!), as he alone did close to 95% of all 236 new flags. Another shout-out to the Modern Day 4 mod team for allowing me to use their namelists and saving me a heckuva lot of research time!

Now, let’s begin.

Asia (Central, India, and Papua New Guinea)

As some may have noticed, flags and even tag files for Kazakhstan have been present in the game folders for a while now. The reason this tag never made it in before was because of certain border changes that were required, but we never had time for before. These have now been made.

Extensive work has been done to properly represent the tangled mess that are the borders of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and also the northern border the latter two of these countries have with Kazakhstan. Further minor changes were made to the “Orenburg”-”Magnitogorsk” borders with Kazakhstan in the northeast. This now allows us to have…

dev diary central asia borders before.PNG

Central Asia before.

dev diary central asia borders after.PNG

Central Asia after. Second picture with released nations to make the borders more visible.


Next up, we’ve had Pakistan for a while, but no possibility for further splitting up the Indian subcontinent. After ample adjustments to the “East Bengal” state, it’s now possible to release Bangladesh as well.

dev diary bangladesh borders before.PNG

East Bengal before.

dev diary bangladesh borders after.PNG

East Bengal after.

Total list of new tags:
  • Kazakhstan
  • Uzbekistan
  • Tajikistan
  • Kyrgyzstan
  • Turkmenistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Sri Lanka
  • Burma
  • Papua New Guinea
dev diary central asia released tags.png

All Central Asian tags released.

dev diary released tags india.png

All new tags in India.


Middle East

Though some attention has been given to this region before (with Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan being releasable), there was more work left to be done. Here, map changes were limited to splitting up the “Abu Dhabi” state by adding the “Qatar” state.

Total list of new tags:
  • Kuwait
  • Qatar
  • United Arab Emirates
  • Cyprus

dev diary middle east borders.PNG

All old and new Middle Eastern tags released.

Americas (Caribbean)

This region did not see any map changes. However, I added a total of 9 tags to the region:
  • Belize
  • Jamaica
  • Bahamas
  • Puerto Rico
  • Guadeloupe
  • Trinidad & Tobago (for convenience also including the British windward & leeward islands)
  • Guyana
  • Suriname
  • Curacao

dev diary released tags americas.png

All new American tags released.

Africa

Oh boy… Where to start. Clockwise? Let’s do this!

First, to make Sudanese-Egyptian borders possible, I split the “Western Desert” state in two, with the Sudanese part called “North Darfur”.

Next, the “Rhodesia” state in southern Africa was huge, encompassing three countries. It was split up into three parts, making it possible to separate Malawi and Zambia from Zimbabwe. In addition, cores were redistributed so that Kenya no longer controls all of Uganda and Tanganyika (which are now represented by their own tags).

In addition, Belgian Congo was not without its flaws either, and so new one-province states were split off from “Stanleyville” state to make Rwanda and Burundi possible.

dev diary southeast africa borders before.PNG

South-east Africa before.

dev diary southeast africa borders after.PNG

South-east Africa after. Both pictures with released tags so the changes are actually visible.

If “Rhodesia” was bad, basically all of French Africa was enough to give me a headache… In possibly the most sweeping map changes, the borders of the “Gabon”, “Equatorial Africa”, and even the impassible “Southern Sahara” states were heavily redrawn, provinces were moved between the states, and the states themselves were heavily balkanized. This resulted in the addition of 4 all-new states: “Middle Congo”, “Cameroon”, “Chad”, and the “B.E.T.” (Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti region). In addition, “Cameroon” state’s border was adjusted slightly at the expense of “Nigeria”.

dev diary central africa borders before.PNG

Central Africa before.

dev diary central africa borders after.PNG

Central Africa after.

The next set deals with the extremely low-effort “French West Africa” state. 6 (!) new states were introduced: “Guinea”, “Ivory Coast”, “Upper Volta”, “Niger”, “Togo”, and “Dahomey”. The state itself was renamed to “Mali”, and lost an additional province to the impassible “Mauretania” state. The border with “Mauretania” was then ‘flattened’, and “Tombouctou” state was split off from the “Mauretania” state (and their borders redrawn) to enable proper Malian borders.

dev diary west africa borders before.PNG

West Africa before.

dev diary west africa borders after.PNG

West Africa after.

Finally, the remaining minor changes include splitting the single “Gambia” state’s province into two, as well as splitting off the Sidi Ifni enclave from “Rio de Oro”, turning it into its own state.

In addition, (1 point) victory points have been added throughout the continent so that every releasable African nation now has at least one VP. (EDIT: Since the writing of this Dev Diary I have added 1-point VPs to all other releasable tags as well, so that each tag has at least one VP.)

Mauretania, as it is fully impassible in the game, unfortunately did not make it in as a tag.

Total list of new tags:
  • Morocco
  • Algeria
  • Tunisia
  • Sudan
  • Eritrea
  • Djibouti
  • Somalia
  • Uganda
  • Rwanda
  • Burundi
  • Tanzania
  • Malawi
  • Zambia
  • Republic of Congo
  • Gabon
  • Equatorial Guinea
  • Cameroon
  • Central African Republic
  • Chad
  • Nigeria
  • Niger
  • Dahomey
  • Togo
  • Upper Volta
  • Ghana
  • Côte d'Ivoire
  • Mali
  • Sierra Leone
  • Guinea
  • Guinea-Bissau
  • Senegal
  • The Gambia

dev diary all african tags released.png

"Family Portrait" of all African tags.

Europe

“Bessarabia”’s borders were the victim here, as to make modern-day borders possible it had to be split up into two. A new state “Southern Bessarabia” was added, with cores of both the Ukraine and Moldova.

dev diary bessarabia borders before.PNG

Bessarabia before.

dev diary bessarabia borders after.PNG

Bessarabia after.

Next, Poland. Yes, again. Some of you may remember that I adjusted the states and provinces in Eastern Germany to allow for the Oder-Neisse line for the 1.5.2 update. I now decided to do the same for Poland’s northern and western borders. A new state, “Königsberg” was split off from “Ostpreussen”, along a roughly east-west border. Virtually all Polish states in the East had provinces redrawn and moved between states, now enabling true modern-day borders for Poland in all directions.

Furthermore, I split up “Wilno” state, renaming it to “East Wilno” and adding a new state “West Wilno”, the division between which follows modern-day Lithuanian borders. In addition, there’s a little secret for those players who lead Lithuania to victory against whoever controls “West Wilno”, and wrest control of the state from them…

dev diary polish lithuanian borders before.PNG

Poland before.

dev diary polish lithuanian borders after.PNG

Poland after.

And finally, after the dev diary showcasing the Oder-neisse line border changes there were some requests from the community to adjust the “Vojvodina” state borders so that there wouldn’t be an ugly ‘jab’ of the “Serbia” state protruding into Austria-Hungary’s borders. At the time, I quickly hacked this in by making the “Vojvodina” state gobble up the provinces in question from the “Serbia” state, but this then upset people because it made historical occupation zones impossible to recreate. I now put in some time to fix that, as well. A new state was split off from “Vojvodina” called “West Banat”, representing the territory that previously was a part of the “Serbia” state. In addition, province 11580 was moved from “Vojvodina” to “Croatia”. This now makes it possible to have both historical occupation zones and ‘clean’ Austria-Hungarian borders. :)

dev diary vojvodina borders before.PNG

Vojvodina before.

dev diary vojvodina borders after.PNG

Vojvodina after.

Total list of new tags:
  • Malta
  • Moldova
  • Scotland
  • Wales
dev diary europe released tags.png

Showcasing new releasable tags and new Polish borders.

The final tally of all additions world-wide is thus (so far):
  • 8 new provinces
  • 22 new states
  • 59 new releasable tags
  • A lot of province and state border changes
dev diary all tags released.png

Drool-worthy picture of a balkanized world (ironically not the balkans (yet) :( ).

All this will be included in the free 1.6 “Ironclad" update. In addition, because of the sheer number of new tags added, we are looking at possible ways to prevent people who go down the Empire path to manually release tags and get the ‘best of both worlds’, with an unstoppable zerg rush of small nations who use their generic trees to build up industry. To this end, decolonizing via the British decolonization tree currently only keeps 20% of all decolonized nations - the other 80% will leave the faction when they become independent. Naturally, this number is subject to change - we want decolonization to be attractive, but not the automatic go-to way to play the game as UK. In addition, I saw multiple people wondering if we'll be representing semi-autonomous regions as puppets rather than integrated colony territories. This is something that hasn't been decided yet.

That’s it for now! There’s always more map changes to be made, but I’m quite happy with where we’ve come so far. This also marks the last dev diary of July, as the rest of the team is following (or, like myself, has already followed) Dan’s lead and heading off on vacations (a true leader leads from the front, after all! ;) ). This results in a two-week Dev Diary hiatus. You can expect the regular Dev Diary schedule to resume on the first of August, when we’ll talk about a little something we’ve stolen from a certain other PDS game, and which we think will have incredible potential for HoI4... Have a great summer vacation, everyone! :)

Rejected Titles:

Putting that Sausage Factory in Tanzania Tanganyika on the map

dev diary small sausage factory.PNG

Colonialism... Not even once...

Implementation of these map changes was accompanied by regular exasperated cursing in despair

We now have the ability to put country_name_here on the map

We now have the ability to wipe country_name_here off the map

Rated R for bordergore

The Bratyn giveth and the Bratyn taketh away

Trinidad and Tobago World Conquest when?

"Screw this war, I'm off to do my own thing in the Bahamas!" is now an actual thing you can do

I don't envy whoever has to update the "Anti-Colonialist Crusade"... Oh wait, that's probably me :(

"Hello, and welcome to the 59th episode of 'Beta Presents: Fun with Flags'!"

A beautiful tapestry of Ruina Imperii

If I stop responding it's because the team finally got sick of me breaking their savegames

New resource to replace oil: potassium
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
The HoI4 states in the USA are legitimately the states of the USA. Do you mean further breaking down the states, like the USA STATES MOD does? Because otherwise it would make no sense. (Which I couldn't care less about happening, either way)
As you may have noticed throughout this thread, the US is the only country where states correspond to internal boundaries (with a couple of minor exceptions, probably for gameplay reasons, in New England and Virginia). The trouble is, everyone who complains about this "problem" seems to think that only their own country is "wrong". However, as the US is the outlier, I submit that it is the country that needs to be fixed, because honestly why would any victorious enemy want to respect pre-existing administrative boundaries when dividing up their spoils?
 
As you may have noticed throughout this thread, the US is the only country where states correspond to internal boundaries (with a couple of minor exceptions, probably for gameplay reasons, in New England and Virginia). The trouble is, everyone who complains about this "problem" seems to think that only their own country is "wrong". However, as the US is the outlier, I submit that it is the country that needs to be fixed, because honestly why would any victorious enemy want to respect pre-existing administrative boundaries when dividing up their spoils?

Because it is more efficient and usually wiser to take control using the existing administrative and physical infrastructure it and levers of power if they still function, even if most of the workforce is taken out of service and replaced. Then roll out reforms.
 
Still left unimpressed. I love most of your games, Paradox. But its just impossible to play Hearts of Iron IV, with current naval system. Brakes immersion for me so much, I just cant bother playing. Transport ships shouldn't be most effective naval unit. No point in building submarines. No way to have meaningful strategic control over the oceans. As such, no way to play in this time period as Empire of Japan, USA, British Empire. Even USSR and Germany, is less interesting, as both Germany and Soviet Russia, where bitterly contesting naval access in the Atlantic, Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea. None of that in the game, making it, meh... Hopefully this will change one day, game has a potential. Cheers!

If it is of any comfort @Mastah Jedi, we are actively working on a rework of the naval system, we'll do our best to improve it :)

More control over where your ships go - including naval transports - is something we are hoping to add in MtGs (I know our QA have been hounding Dan about it). Apparently invasions use the same pathfinding algorithm as land movement and that one does not take naval superiority into account because of reasons.
 
Germany and Soviet Russia, where bitterly contesting naval access in the Atlantic, Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea.

I find it confusing that you are saying that you are unimpressed with naval warfare on a Dev Diary for an update focused on naval warfare, when we literally haven't seen any of the naval features that are supposed to massively overhaul naval warfare. I have to ask if you had any idea what this DLC is about when posting. Though this did remind me of something I think is important.

I hope that we can see some better reason to fight for control over the seas. The play style I use for naval combat is concentrate all my ships and never use them until I absolutely need them for a naval invasion, then putting them all in a single sea zone on convoy escort. For example, playing as Germany I never do a battle of the Atlantic, I merely wait to concentrate everything on the English channel.
 
Thank you for your hard work on constantly and consistently improving the game, but now a question, with the changes in Poland will we still have historically accurate Austro-Hungarian Galicia borders? Once again thank you for your hard work as always.
 
I love all the new changes. Especially Kaliningrad and the new African nations. But still, I still haven't seen the Montenegrin state fixed. It looks ok if you take it as Italy but if you release Montenegro it looks wired. I understand that the state is like that for practical reasons, but I would love it fixed. Keep up the great work!!!
 
I love all the new changes. Especially Kaliningrad and the new African nations. But still, I still haven't seen the Montenegrin state fixed. It looks ok if you take it as Italy but if you release Montenegro it looks wired. I understand that the state is like that for practical reasons, but I would love it fixed. Keep up the great work!!!
I will have to stop you right there and tell you that it is Königsberg not Kaliningrad.
 
Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another dev diary for the 1.6 “Ironclad” update and the Man the Guns DLC! As this diary goes live I'll be on vacation in Norway (where among other things I visited the Gneisenau's "Caesar" turret located at Austrått Fort in Ørland, close to Trondheim, Norway), so my replies in the thread below may be a bit slower than usual :). As a little bonus, some pictures and info on the gun emplacement are in the spoiler below.

View attachment 387689
The Gneisenau 283mm (11-inch) cannons in their turret. After being bombed in Kiel harbor (where she had just finished repairs for previous damage), the ship was so heavily damaged (including the destruction of the forward "A" turret), and Hitler was so disillusioned in the performance of his surface fleet, that it was decided to have the ship scrapped altogether. The turrets were to be used as coastal gun emplacements, and the "Caesar" or "C" turret was moved here to defend the harbor of Trondheim. Extra armor was added, especially to the top (an extra 200 metric tons of steel). Total weight of the turret was 1,000 metric tons (compared to the 800 metric tons it would've weighed when placed on Gneisenau). Located on an elevation of about 50-60 meters, the range was 42,6km, reaching all the way out to the Atlantic, and also to the Trondheim harbor. Considering it was placed on solid ground, accuracy was also markedly improved over ship-based artillery.

View attachment 387690
Some of the Gneisenau's engines were also relocated here, in the complex inside the mountain. These provided all the power to the turret and the facility. It could rotate 360 degrees (but no further, or the electrical cables would snap - on a ship, due to the superstructure, this was never a problem anyway) in 50 seconds. Alternatively, if power failed, the entire five-story turret (every level rotated as one along with the visible part of the turret) could be hand-cranked and rotated by 4 soldiers. The engines (one shown here) are the original ones, and still operate to this day.

View attachment 387691
The guns could fire 9 rounds each minute (so a full salvo of 3 each 20 seconds). The 315kg (for high explosive) and 330kg (for armor piercing) shells were launched at 890-900m/s (by means of a 76kg cartridge and additional 41kg powder bag), with a gun elevation of -8 to +40 degrees. They only fired a handful of test rounds in the 1940s and early 1950s, after which population density became high enough that they could no longer test-fire the guns because doing so blew out all windows in a 3km radius. It never once fired its guns in anger at an enemy. This was the "C" turret, located at the rear of the Gneisenau. The "B" or "Bruno" turret was used as a similar emplacement near Bergen, Norway, while the barrels of the destroyed "A" or "Anton" turret received new housings and were used in fortifications in Rozenburg, near Hoek van Holland in the Netherlands, to defend Rotterdam port.


View attachment 387688
The range finder. It was originally located at the command post at Lerberen, 2-2,5km away from the emplacement. The turret therefore had 2 periscope binoculars so they could double-check whether they were actually firing at enemy or friendly ships (in case the rangefinder had been overrun by enemy forces and they were feeding 'bad' info to the fort).

View attachment 387687
South-facing picture of the fjord the gun emplacement overlooks (the fjords leading to the Atlantic are to the right, Trondheim harbor is far off in the distance to the left). The facility was manned by 125 soldiers, including the original turret commander and some other personnel from the Gneisenau. In addition, it sported an anti-tank wall, bunker, and 20 smaller-caliber cannon emplacements around the periphery for duty as anti-tank guns or for firing flares (one stationary Skoda 4,7cm anti-tank cannon still remains, now). After the war's end, the whole fort was taken over by the Norwegians, until the late '60s when the threat of the USSR became less, and they decided to get rid of it. It was turned into a museum in the early '90s.

View attachment 387686
Glorious Real-Life ErrorDog approvingly observing shell fire raining down upon his enemies.

Last week we had a look at the new, reworked focus tree for the United Kingdom, including a whole new path for decolonization. Naturally, this elicited a flurry of questions that (because of this week’s dev diary) I could not answer at the time...















I can now answer all these questions with a single resounding “YES!” (and in the case of the last one; a “sorry it took a while but it’s now finally in” ;) ).

As the design for the UK focus tree rework began to take shape, it was clear we needed decolonization of some sort, and all the tags and map changes that come with it. Now, we could have simply done the British Empire with the current in-game borders and be done with it, but I wanted to do things thoroughly and so chipped in a sizeable amount of my “personal development time” to create new provinces, new states, adjust existing ones, add new tags, and to not only do so for the British Empire, but also for the French, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, and Italian colonial empires, and even for the Soviet Union.

Due to the sheer number of modern-day countries (and especially microstates) this process is by no means complete, and I may well continue to use some of my personal time to develop things further. However, as most of this is, in the end, done in my own time, I will not be making any promises…

Before we delve into the meat of things, I do want to give ample credit where credit is due. This would not have been possible without the help of our Community for making the flags that I needed for these tags (as I could not bother artists with it). A big thank-you to everyone who chipped in! I would like to single out one of our Betas in particular (you know who you are!), as he alone did close to 95% of all 236 new flags. Another shout-out to the Modern Day 4 mod team for allowing me to use their namelists and saving me a heckuva lot of research time!

Now, let’s begin.

Asia (Central, India, and Papua New Guinea)

As some may have noticed, flags and even tag files for Kazakhstan have been present in the game folders for a while now. The reason this tag never made it in before was because of certain border changes that were required, but we never had time for before. These have now been made.

Extensive work has been done to properly represent the tangled mess that are the borders of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and also the northern border the latter two of these countries have with Kazakhstan. Further minor changes were made to the “Orenburg”-”Magnitogorsk” borders with Kazakhstan in the northeast. This now allows us to have…

View attachment 386494
Central Asia before.

View attachment 386496
Central Asia after. Second picture with released nations to make the borders more visible.


Next up, we’ve had Pakistan for a while, but no possibility for further splitting up the Indian subcontinent. After ample adjustments to the “East Bengal” state, it’s now possible to release Bangladesh as well.

View attachment 386490
East Bengal before.

View attachment 386492
East Bengal after.

Total list of new tags:
  • Kazakhstan
  • Uzbekistan
  • Tajikistan
  • Kyrgyzstan
  • Turkmenistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Sri Lanka
  • Burma
  • Papua New Guinea
View attachment 386505
All Central Asian tags released.

View attachment 386503
All new tags in India.


Middle East

Though some attention has been given to this region before (with Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan being releasable), there was more work left to be done. Here, map changes were limited to splitting up the “Abu Dhabi” state by adding the “Qatar” state.

Total list of new tags:
  • Kuwait
  • Qatar
  • United Arab Emirates
  • Cyprus

View attachment 386497
All old and new Middle Eastern tags released.

Americas (Caribbean)

This region did not see any map changes. However, I added a total of 9 tags to the region:
  • Belize
  • Jamaica
  • Bahamas
  • Puerto Rico
  • Guadeloupe
  • Trinidad & Tobago (for convenience also including the British windward & leeward islands)
  • Guyana
  • Suriname
  • Curacao

View attachment 386500
All new American tags released.

Africa

Oh boy… Where to start. Clockwise? Let’s do this!

First, to make Sudanese-Egyptian borders possible, I split the “Western Desert” state in two, with the Sudanese part called “North Darfur”.

Next, the “Rhodesia” state in southern Africa was huge, encompassing three countries. It was split up into three parts, making it possible to separate Malawi and Zambia from Zimbabwe. In addition, cores were redistributed so that Kenya no longer controls all of Uganda and Tanganyika (which are now represented by their own tags).

In addition, Belgian Congo was not without its flaws either, and so new one-province states were split off from “Stanleyville” state to make Rwanda and Burundi possible.

View attachment 386509
South-east Africa before.

View attachment 386504
South-east Africa after. Both pictures with released tags so the changes are actually visible.

If “Rhodesia” was bad, basically all of French Africa was enough to give me a headache… In possibly the most sweeping map changes, the borders of the “Gabon”, “Equatorial Africa”, and even the impassible “Southern Sahara” states were heavily redrawn, provinces were moved between the states, and the states themselves were heavily balkanized. This resulted in the addition of 4 all-new states: “Middle Congo”, “Cameroon”, “Chad”, and the “B.E.T.” (Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti region). In addition, “Cameroon” state’s border was adjusted slightly at the expense of “Nigeria”.

View attachment 386499
Central Africa before.

View attachment 386495
Central Africa after.

The next set deals with the extremely low-effort “French West Africa” state. 6 (!) new states were introduced: “Guinea”, “Ivory Coast”, “Upper Volta”, “Niger”, “Togo”, and “Dahomey”. The state itself was renamed to “Mali”, and lost an additional province to the impassible “Mauretania” state. The border with “Mauretania” was then ‘flattened’, and “Tombouctou” state was split off from the “Mauretania” state (and their borders redrawn) to enable proper Malian borders.

View attachment 386510
West Africa before.

View attachment 386507
West Africa after.

Finally, the remaining minor changes include splitting the single “Gambia” state’s province into two, as well as splitting off the Sidi Ifni enclave from “Rio de Oro”, turning it into its own state.

In addition, (1 point) victory points have been added throughout the continent so that every releasable African nation now has at least one VP. (EDIT: Since the writing of this Dev Diary I have added 1-point VPs to all other releasable tags as well, so that each tag has at least one VP.)

Mauretania, as it is fully impassible in the game, unfortunately did not make it in as a tag.

Total list of new tags:
  • Morocco
  • Algeria
  • Tunisia
  • Sudan
  • Eritrea
  • Djibouti
  • Somalia
  • Uganda
  • Rwanda
  • Burundi
  • Tanzania
  • Malawi
  • Zambia
  • Republic of Congo
  • Gabon
  • Equatorial Guinea
  • Cameroon
  • Central African Republic
  • Chad
  • Nigeria
  • Niger
  • Dahomey
  • Togo
  • Upper Volta
  • Ghana
  • Côte d'Ivoire
  • Mali
  • Sierra Leone
  • Guinea
  • Guinea-Bissau
  • Senegal
  • The Gambia

View attachment 386489
"Family Portrait" of all African tags.

Europe

“Bessarabia”’s borders were the victim here, as to make modern-day borders possible it had to be split up into two. A new state “Southern Bessarabia” was added, with cores of both the Ukraine and Moldova.

View attachment 386491
Bessarabia before.

View attachment 386506
Bessarabia after.

Next, Poland. Yes, again. Some of you may remember that I adjusted the states and provinces in Eastern Germany to allow for the Oder-Neisse line for the 1.5.2 update. I now decided to do the same for Poland’s northern and western borders. A new state, “Königsberg” was split off from “Ostpreussen”, along a roughly east-west border. Virtually all Polish states in the East had provinces redrawn and moved between states, now enabling true modern-day borders for Poland in all directions.

Furthermore, I split up “Wilno” state, renaming it to “East Wilno” and adding a new state “West Wilno”, the division between which follows modern-day Lithuanian borders. In addition, there’s a little secret for those players who lead Lithuania to victory against whoever controls “West Wilno”, and wrest control of the state from them…

View attachment 386502
Poland before.

View attachment 386498
Poland after.

And finally, after the dev diary showcasing the Oder-neisse line border changes there were some requests from the community to adjust the “Vojvodina” state borders so that there wouldn’t be an ugly ‘jab’ of the “Serbia” state protruding into Austria-Hungary’s borders. At the time, I quickly hacked this in by making the “Vojvodina” state gobble up the provinces in question from the “Serbia” state, but this then upset people because it made historical occupation zones impossible to recreate. I now put in some time to fix that, as well. A new state was split off from “Vojvodina” called “West Banat”, representing the territory that previously was a part of the “Serbia” state. In addition, province 11580 was moved from “Vojvodina” to “Croatia”. This now makes it possible to have both historical occupation zones and ‘clean’ Austria-Hungarian borders. :)

View attachment 386508
Vojvodina before.

View attachment 386512
Vojvodina after.

Total list of new tags:
  • Malta
  • Moldova
  • Scotland
  • Wales
View attachment 386511
Showcasing new releasable tags and new Polish borders.

The final tally of all additions world-wide is thus (so far):
  • 8 new provinces
  • 22 new states
  • 59 new releasable tags
  • A lot of province and state border changes
View attachment 386493
Drool-worthy picture of a balkanized world (ironically not the balkans (yet) :( ).

All this will be included in the free 1.6 “Ironclad" update. In addition, because of the sheer number of new tags added, we are looking at possible ways to prevent people who go down the Empire path to manually release tags and get the ‘best of both worlds’, with an unstoppable zerg rush of small nations who use their generic trees to build up industry. To this end, decolonizing via the British decolonization tree currently only keeps 20% of all decolonized nations - the other 80% will leave the faction when they become independent. Naturally, this number is subject to change - we want decolonization to be attractive, but not the automatic go-to way to play the game as UK. In addition, I saw multiple people wondering if we'll be representing semi-autonomous regions as puppets rather than integrated colony territories. This is something that hasn't been decided yet.

That’s it for now! There’s always more map changes to be made, but I’m quite happy with where we’ve come so far. This also marks the last dev diary of July, as the rest of the team is following (or, like myself, has already followed) Dan’s lead and heading off on vacations (a true leader leads from the front, after all! ;) ). This results in a two-week Dev Diary hiatus. You can expect the regular Dev Diary schedule to resume on the first of August, when we’ll talk about a little something we’ve stolen from a certain other PDS game, and which we think will have incredible potential for HoI4... Have a great summer vacation, everyone! :)

Rejected Titles:

Putting that Sausage Factory in Tanzania Tanganyika on the map

View attachment 386619

Colonialism... Not even once...

Implementation of these map changes was accompanied by regular exasperated cursing in despair

We now have the ability to put country_name_here on the map

We now have the ability to wipe country_name_here off the map

Rated R for bordergore

The Bratyn giveth and the Bratyn taketh away

Trinidad and Tobago World Conquest when?

"Screw this war, I'm off to do my own thing in the Bahamas!" is now an actual thing you can do

I don't envy whoever has to update the "Anti-Colonialist Crusade"... Oh wait, that's probably me :(

"Hello, and welcome to the 59th episode of 'Beta Presents: Fun with Flags'!"

A beautiful tapestry of Ruina Imperii

If I stop responding it's because the team finally got sick of me breaking their savegames

New resource to replace oil: potassium


Wheres the dominion of Newfoundland love i know we were a dependency but canada should not have cores on us :p they did only get us with 51% of the vote and you guys gave us such love in Victoria 2 :D "these men are hardiest and most skillfull boatmen in rough seas that exist.” Winston Churchill writing about Newfoundland
 
When will you guys think abaut remake the Focus Tree of Russia? It's not only the biggest country in the world but also, looking to them in this time period, Russia had quite some interesting possibility's for Alternative History. Well, the most notable aspects would be Trotsky or the Russian Fascist Party who wanted to reform the Old Tzardom into a systeam similiar to Italy were the Monarchy was basacly a simbol without real power. Or even the proper White Emigrés around the world who could not only open the door to a Second Russian Civil War but also to a Monarchist Restoration without Fascist Interference or the creation of a Aristocratic Republic simiar to the short-lived Russian Provisional Governament who suceded the Tsardom and preceded the Bolchevikes (headed by Kerensky basacly all the time of his existence, 1917). Not only Russia could give a interesting alternative history but also country's like Italy or France who at the moment are quite boring (basacly France) who have many interesting historical aspects that Paradox could take, like teh Action Françlaise, the French Popular Party, the rising radical left or the democratic right. Eventually Italy culd be quite more interesting since the country faced division between the ones loyal to the King and the ones loyal to the Il Duce and the Partisans who were communists, democrats and monarchists.

Anyway, keep going with the good work.
 
You guys should add a state for Mauritania that's passable. Like the coastal area.
It's just really weird how only Mauritania is the only nation in North/West Africa that can't be released.

Also could you guys add Burgenland as a State?
And add a decision to retake Burgenland from Austria as Hungary in the Death or Dishonor DLC?
 
I wonder if we will ever have a function that allows us to actually create our own nations after war instead of having a set country that claims each province. For example, if I were to defeat the Soviet Union instead of releasing the historical central Asian countries I could unite them all under one banner.
 
Will you take one more look at China? Zhang Lan's China kind of is stuck in between the People's Republic and the Democratic Republic. Would be wonderful if one could reform it into a Democracy under Zhang Lan, when theres no other chinese player left:)
 
Mister @Bratyn

Quick question... Is Pakistan's border going to be fixed to actually look like the actual India-Pakistan Border? As it stands it seems like Pakistan has full control over Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir, when in reality they only had partial control.
 
I wonder if we will ever have a function that allows us to actually create our own nations after war instead of having a set country that claims each province. For example, if I were to defeat the Soviet Union instead of releasing the historical central Asian countries I could unite them all under one banner.

Kind of like what Revolutionary Republics can do in EU IV?
 
not just maps changes, and focus threes, which was my initial impression

I don't understand how you would get that impression. The page for Man the Guns says "Man the Guns is a new naval themed expansion that brings you closer to the swelling waves as you train and command large battle fleets or smaller flotillas better designed for your coastal shoals."

The first dev diary also said

Man the Guns will focus on naval warfare primarily but also redoing UK and USA and giving them more fun options. There will also be other new focuses but those are secret for now. We will also be adding fuel to the game which a lot of people were very excited to hear about at pdxcon :)

The UK and US revamps we plan to handle the same way we did Germany and Japan, e.g the changed trees and historical path in the 1.6 'Ironclad' update and the new alt-history paths (despite my perhaps not so subtle hints people have figured out that there is going to be the possibility of a 2nd american civil war among other cool things).

As for the themes we decided to go with naval for several reasons. One, that it fits very well with USA (and they were on the top of our list of nations we felt needed more fun gameplay). Secondly we have already done big changes to both land and air in previous expansions and updates so it was time for the 3rd type of warfare to get its time in the spotlights. Its also currently in my opinion the weakest part of HOI and something we really want to make shine.

We are currently very early in development so things may change, but here are some things mentioned we are aiming to do (in expansion or free update or mixed):
- Ship design and the ability to refit older ships and keep things up to date
- Naval Terrain: different seas will behave differently and suit different ships and fleet compositions
- Revamped naval combat
- Fleets split up into task forces for better control
- New naval spotting system
- Ability to control naval routes and block areas you dont want units to travel through
- Fuel, obviously going to be a massive balance job for us and a big gameplay change for you :)
- Gameplay rules, particularly to help multiplayer groups out when it comes to manage their games
- of course other stuff as well. to be revealed in the future.

It absolutely perplexes me that you somehow had the initial impression of "just map changes, and focus trees". I feel like you haven't even been paying attention to anything about this DLC and just took to complaining that the naval system is currently horrendous when they are going to be focusing months on improving said naval system.
 
But... Yugoslav breakup?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.