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HOI4 Dev Diary - Formables and Releasables

Hello everyone and welcome to another dev diary for La Resistance! I should begin by introducing myself: I am Meka, I joined Paradox just a few months ago as a Content Designer. Some of you may be aware of me due to my work on Theocracies and Burgundy over on EUIV, but now I'm here to show what mischief I've been up to in my time on Hearts of Iron.

Man the Guns saw the creation of a lot of new tags, making some countries balkanisable, and almost all of the world decolonisable. Waking the Tiger saw the introduction of formable tags, a mechanic that until now has not been further utilised. However, with the Husky patch, a whole slew of new releasable tags will be added to the game along with two new formable nations; one as part of the free patch, and one for owners of La Resistance.
Polynesia 001.png

Starting with releasable tags, Man the Guns allowed most of the world to be decolonised, but Oceania was mostly left unloved with only one nation being added to the continent, leaving the rest of the disparate islands untouched and still under colonial rule. However, I have added 6 new releasable tags and one formable for the region.

The Kingdom of Hawaii was only annexed by the United States 38 years before the start of Hearts of Iron and can be released along with most of the US’s pacific holdings.
Polynesia 002.png


Tahiti
Polynesia 003.png


Samoa
Polynesia 004.png


The Federated States of Micronesia
Polynesia 005.png


The Solomon Islands
Polynesia 006.png


The Mariana Federation
Polynesia 007.png


These disparate islands may struggle to survive on their own, and so a nation who holds enough of the Polynesian Triangle will be able to unite all Pacific peoples into a single state known as Polynesia. This state will be formable by any nation listed above plus New Zealand. Unlike other formable tags, this nation can be created by dominions meaning New Zealand does not necessarily have to leave the Allies in order to form this tag.
Polynesia 008.png


But perhaps players wish to live out an alternate history where the Naha Prophecy was fulfilled and Kamehameha united the Pacific several years earlier. With the Polynesian Empire game rule, Hawaii will begin the game having already conquered the entirety of the Polynesian Islands and built up a fair-sized industry.
Polynesia 009.png

Polynesia 010.png


The ability to form Polynesia is a free feature, as are the releasable tags.


Along with adding these releasable nations, I did also touch up the old fragmentation game options to make the world fully split into different continents. The UK now surrenders its African, Asian, and American islands to its former colonies, Portugal surrenders Timor to Indonesia, and a few other small changes like that.


Also, armies standing around in former colonial territories is now a thing of the past and nations will now only have armies stationed in territories where they have access.
Armies.png


Iberia is a focal point of La Resistance and as such, a few releasable tags have been added to the subcontinent as well.


Catalonia
Catalonia.png


The Basque Country
Basque.png


Galicia
Galicia.png


Spain can of course be fractured from the start of the game by selecting the appropriate option in the game menu. However, I noticed Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia simply weren’t enough to make Iberia look “shattered” so I took the liberty of adding an “11th of November” game rule, and I will leave it for you all to speculate what that option does.
Spanish Fragmentation.png


When it comes to the second formable, one must be opportunistic and take full advantage of the instability in Spain and Portugal. The Moorish people once reigned sovereign over all of Iberia, and owners of La Resistance will be able to restore the long-dead state of Al-Andalus.
Andalusia Conditions.png


Andalusia was once an Islamic Sultanate that ruled from the Iberian peninsula and a beacon of the Islamic world. Through struggles with the Catholic kingdoms in the medieval era, the Andalusians would slowly be pushed out of Iberia, ending with the conquest of the Emirate of Granada in 1520. However, the Moorish people continue to exist to this day in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria, many of whom are descendants from Moorish refugees fleeing the Spanish Reconquista.

Andalusia will be formable by any of the North African countries; Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara, Algeria, or Libya. In order to form this tag, one must occupy a large portion of both Spain and Portugal’s southern states and forming the tag grants cores on the entirety of the Iberian subcontinent.
Andalusia 1.png


But that isn’t the end of Andalusia. Similar to Byzantium’s “triumph” decisions, Andalusia will be able to sweep across the Mediterranean and beyond, restoring their old claims and titles.
Andalusia Decision 2.png


If a player can enact all decisions relating to the Andalusian conquests of North Africa and the Med, they will be able to press on for Egypt and Arabia and declare themselves the Umayyad Caliphate reborn, granting cores on the Arabian Peninsula.
Andalusia Decision 3.png


Upon doing so, Andalusia will unlock their final set of decisions, allowing them to restore the entire former claims and titles of the Umayyad Caliphate, effectively reuinifying the Islamic world.
Andalusia Decision 4.png

Andalusia 3.png


As we have expanded the scope of Hearts of Iron, some old bits of content started to become outdated and lead to some annoying bugs, which I have dedicated some time to fixing. One key thing I have improved is the way that the British Raj interacts with different game options and Britain doing strange things. From now on, the Raj will be able to freely pursue their focus tree even if Britain forces them into independence, with some focuses bypassing, and others no longer requiring the Raj to be a subject.
Raj Fix.png


Join Da9L, Bratyn and Jojo at 16:00CET on twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive as they have a closer look at Anarchist Spain!
 
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You know what? If I didn't know any better, I'd think the Devs for HOI4 took a look at CK2's random world settings and said, "We'll work towards that, but first let's make everything balkanizable." While I'm not personally invested in restoring the Umayyad Caliphate, I can see the creation of lots of tags as useful for normal HOI playthroughs.

If I want to go all WWI on defeated powers, I can do that now. And I'm thinking that in the future, there might be offshoots of this technology for use in other features.
 
give some unique party names for Spanish splinters but almost every micro island nobody would play has at least one. Don't you think that there is something wrong with it?
The majority of these Oceanic countries gained independence as republics so finding information on their political parties was relatively simple. The Spanish splinter nations do have unique leader names for each of their parties, although yes unique party names could be implemented at some point as well.
 
@mekka66 Welcome to the hoi4 forum! I hope you are not too discouraged by the reception this dev diary has received; your additions are alright!
I honestly do not care for the pacific releasables or enjoy the meme content one iota, but you clearly cared about this area and worked to improve it.

I would celebrate the addition and use it, even, if the game was in a better state. But it is currently not looking good, so this kind of announcement looks a bit tone deaf. Again, I do not fault you at all for that, this reflects mostly on whoever decided to go ahead with a diary on this topic at this point in time, when a casual look at the forum would show that there are some pressing matters like the braindead AI or the lacking and bugged focus trees. Pressing enough, sadly, that an earnest announcement of a dev adding a bit of flavour to the game will be "respectfully disagreed" with intensely.

I appreciate all the clamor for "he developed it in his free time", which is perfectly fair. Consider, however, that the negative reaction to this dev diary is not aimed at mekka66's work, but rather at the apparent disconnect: the forum regulars call for better mechanics, bug fixing and the addition of significant WWII content and events... and PDX releases a diary about formable tags for Samoa and a decision to restore the Umayyad Caliphate (nearly 1000 years late and with questionable borders).
 
As Spaniard these are probably the ugliest iberian flags renditions i've ever seen, these flags make me want to burn portugal a throw the ashes to space
P.S. Besides i don't know why u keep using estelada to represent independent catalonia or catalonia statehood, that is flag of independence movement itself even the designer didn't want to make it the flag of the country, 'national' flag of catalonia is senyera flag without ugly cuban copycat star

Following my vexillology rant, some years ago some friends and me were working on flags for an Iberia tag we created for a victoria 2 mod we made (well i helped with some flags), using iberian simbols that make historic sense yes, but also trying to make the flags look visually appealing. I know, i know: we were no big bucks paid, fancy career art designers, but i think what we made with mighty paint in some free afternoons is decent or at least not ''horrendous banners of hell that makes your mother cry and deny she even gave birth to you if she founds you drew em'' bad. With this i don't want to flex or anything, just give inspiration to the real flags i'm sure are yet to be revealed instead of this out of season april fools joke.

Well so here they're, we took inspiration from other vic mods and flags of the internet but i think the commie one in particular is quite original:
Commie:
IBR_communist.png

Fasc:
IBR_fascist2.png

Republic:
IBR_republic.png

Monarchy:
IBR_monarchy.png

Monarchy2:
IBR_vanilla.png


So yeah and for anarchy iberia just put the CNT FAI flag like someone already said in this post, sorry if too much hyperbole, but come on those flags are tearing me apart
 

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Angry mob mentality at work here. But does none of you give any thought to what this will accomplish? Do you want this new member of the HoI team to apply for another game department to get away from this community? The next employee will most likely not want to work for the HoI team and pick another game for sure. I hope you remember that when you write a complaint about HoI team lacking people working on stuff.

All this negativety over a non-issue. You have to get out of your way to access this content in the game and that's obviously also why he did it as his work to figure out how to do things like this.
 
For neutral Hawaii, I have the royal standard as the national flag. The historical Union Jack design is available to a Democratic Hawaii. Hawaii as an independent nation is largely seen as either a republic or a restored monarchy, and since Non-Aligned is a bit finnicky to flip into, I made it their default starting ideology with a significantly high support for Democracy. While the monarchy did use the Union Flag as well, I wanted to make all Polynesian countries have four distinct flags for each of their ideologies.

I can see the logic in this but I have to say, I'm not convinced. Will "Democratic" Hawaii be a Constitutional Monarchy or a Republic? I'd argue it should be the former by default. A newly independent Hawaiian Kingdom would surely appeal to the British who would likely offer support contingent on Constitutional Monarchy. This raises another point - free Hawaii needs its own Focus Tree with branches to assert native identity or integrate colonials and also a branch that allows Hawii to assert dominance over Polynesia as a whole.

I realise that functionally a democratic Constitutional Monarchy and a democratic Republic are barely different at all but it's quite important flavour-wise. Currently there are some weird cases, like "Republican Italy" still having Victor Emmanual as a national spirit, indicating it's still a monarchy in reality.
 
In the german version of the game, India has a bug where it's name completly disappears when changing ideology or when becoming independent. Did you already know about that and can you please fix this too?
 
Biggest problem is performance, all these essentially unused Tags take up a huge chunk of the games resources. (Can be tested by anyone by removing all the irrelevant tags) They essentially negate the work they did in the last updates
Sorry, but this is factually wrong. Countries only create lag when they own a core. Mind you, this lag they create is very impactful, but it does not lag if it doesnt have a core or an owned state. If u want to see research about this go to the Coop discord.
 
I would be delighted at the opportunity to add more formables in the future :)

Haha, Well what do I have to do to implore you and ask that these suggestions are pushed from the future to the near-future - namely before the release of Le Resistance? How many sheep do i sacrfice? How many Spanish civil wars do i have to lose for these to be added pre-launch? MY BODY IS READY!
 
Angry mob mentality at work here. But does none of you give any thought to what this will accomplish? Do you want this new member of the HoI team to apply for another game department to get away from this community? The next employee will most likely not want to work for the HoI team and pick another game for sure. I hope you remember that when you write a complaint about HoI team lacking people working on stuff.

All this negativety over a non-issue. You have to get out of your way to access this content in the game and that's obviously also why he did it as his work to figure out how to do things like this.

I hope that what this will accomplish is a serious internal discussion on where the game is heading and how to prioritize further development. If the road ahead is one of more fantasy content where simple bugs are ignored and historical content is flawed at best, maybe it’s time to be honest towards the players and tell everyone that.
 
I remind you guys, that players are still waiting for WW2 borders in the WW2 game... Instead, another generic and empty content. Becouse, let's be clear, these new countries do not offer anything interesting or unique for players, it's another generic, no-flavour content. It's a shame that the game about WW2 is moving towards fantasy and lack of immersion. I hope there will be a lot of historical missions as well as spies in the new DLC, instead of being generic...
 
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If a player can enact all decisions relating to the Andalusian conquests of North Africa and the Med, they will be able to press on for Egypt and Arabia and declare themselves the Umayyad Caliphate reborn, granting cores on the Arabian Peninsula.

Propose for a flag and name change (perhaps color too?) when declaring the restoration of The Caliphate.
 
I hope we get to see more american states releasable. Canadian provinces and the russian far east too.

I Think if you annex most the big players in the world (all of europe, russia, and america) there should be a special formable 'world order' tag. That way I can make my beautiful global commune and not have to call it mexico.
 
Was kinda hoping they'd get around to making Iwo-jima less obscenely large...
 
why so many EU4/CK2 era alternate histories, and so little content for realistic WW2 era alternate histories?
 
I still think that more resources are needed to fix bugs quicker.

there are bugs 10+ months old, that are reported repeatedly in the bug forum, just to be systemacally ignored till some reddit post explodes or some first reply in a DD gets the attention of Podcat.

Bugs lasting 1 year has been a thing since the releas of WtT, hope it can change.