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HOI4 Dev Diary - Man the Guns and PdxCon

Hi everyone! We are now back from PdxCon which was an amazing experience. If any of you were there, thanks a lot for coming! I had a lot of fun and interesting conversations with HOI fans and we had a very cool challenge to as Poland inflict as much casualties as possible on Germany in 1939 in just 30 minutes. The winner (all glory to @Zwireq, AKA Zwirbaum) pulled off 1.8 million using clever tactics and a strong cavalry army! What better way to save Poland than to turn the false myth of the polish cavalry charging German tanks around :)

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The myth itself is something based on reality where polish cavalry performed a successful charge early on in the war vs German infantry at the battle of Krojanty. Something the German propaganda machine tried to falsely portray as the poles being unprepared for meeting modern German armor (there were no tanks there). The myth apparently lived on a long time, notably taught in schools and promoted in soviet propaganda… that said, in Hearts of Iron IV at pdxcon the polish hussars did ride out and win!

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The HOI4 booth where we ran the challenge.

We also announced the next big expansion for HOI: Man the Guns.
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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.

We don't have a release date yet, and most of the above is still subject to change because we are are still early. I really wanted to talk as much as possible about what we are up to at pdxcon though :) Hopefully I will see more of you next year there!

We also announced that HOI4 has hit 1 million sales (wooot), and to celebrate that we have decided to make an anniversary edition that comes with a super cool alt history diorama - Italian soldiers raising the flag over the rubble of Big Ben, Iwo Jima style ;). I felt italy invading London was one of the more hearts of iron things there was when it comes to alt-history :)

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We had the first version for PdxCon in the booth fresh from the maker, and you can see it there in the picture above. The anniversary edition is actually possible to preorder already! Just follow this link.

As have been mentioned elsewhere this doesn't mean we are ready to start up regular diaries yet. You guys are not really fans of filler stuff, so we are going to have to wait a little longer for diaries to start up regularly again. I will let you know as soon as we feel ready to start showing things off proper.
 
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Will the Gameplay Rules be like how it is implemented in CK2?

And on further note I am kinda shocked that there will be literally *zero* bug fixing until the next expansion releases considering how broken the game can be, especially in Asia which was the focus of the last expansion. Devs at Paradox need to plan their roadmap release dates better so this doesn't happen again.
 
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''The myth itself is something based on reality where polish cavalry performed a successful charge early on in the war vs German infantry at the battle of Krojanty. Something the German propaganda machine tried to falsely portray as the poles being unprepared for meeting modern German armor (there were no tanks there). The myth apparently lived on a long time, notably taught in schools and promoted in soviet propaganda… that said, in Hearts of Iron IV at pdxcon the polish hussars did ride out and win!''

The Myth was started when an Italian journalist Indro Montanelli wrote a article about ''Polish bravery charging German tanks with Sabres and Lances'' which is something the Germans would use to promote their Propaganda not Soviets. The Soviets may have taught this Myth after the war in their Schools, but so did the Americans and British to an equal or worst extent, I remember in my elementry school back in the 90's that American school books promoted this Myth as a Fact.
 
''The myth itself is something based on reality where polish cavalry performed a successful charge early on in the war vs German infantry at the battle of Krojanty. Something the German propaganda machine tried to falsely portray as the poles being unprepared for meeting modern German armor (there were no tanks there). The myth apparently lived on a long time, notably taught in schools and promoted in soviet propaganda… that said, in Hearts of Iron IV at pdxcon the polish hussars did ride out and win!''

The Myth was started when an Italian journalist Indro Montanelli wrote a article about ''Polish bravery charging German tanks with Sabres and Lances'' which is something the Germans would use to promote their Propaganda not Soviets. The Soviets may have taught this Myth after the war in their Schools, but so did the Americans and British to an equal or worst extent, I remember in my elementry school back in the 90's that American school books promoted this Myth as a Fact.
I only remember reading about it in books that said it never happened but was used as propaganda. I guess I came late to this.
 
Will the Gameplay Rules be like how it is implemented in CK2?

And on further note I am kinda shocked that there will be literally *zero* bug fixing until the next expansion releases considering how broken the game can be, especially in Asia which was the focus of the last expansion. Devs at Paradox need to plan their roadmap release dates better so this doesn't happen again.
There was a dev comment stating there could/would be one more bugfix patch, in this thread.

We are aware and I would currently expect that we have time scheduled for patch work before 1.6, yes. The China Warlord issue at least is on top of my priority list. I won't promise that it will be fixed, because experience has shown me that such a claim will come and bite me in the behind.
 
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I wouldn't bet on it.
Which comment came first? Archangel85 made his comment just the other day. Considering the number of complaints about podcat's comment near the beginning of this thread, it seems to me that it has gotten through to them.
 
One of the things that sprung to my mind due to the naval rehaul is the instant embarkment of huge armies at ports. The game should take division/army size into account when you send them through sea from port to port, the same way you can't insta-invade by planning a naval invasion.
 
One of the things that sprung to my mind due to the naval rehaul is the instant embarkment of huge armies at ports. The game should take division/army size into account when you send them through sea from port to port, the same way you can't insta-invade by planning a naval invasion.

425k troops were mustered for D-Day + throw in lot of airplanes and naval crews in support of the invasion itself. They didn't even freaking use an existing port and instead created four port on the spot.

Eventually those 4 artifact port, known as project mulberry, manage to land 2.5 million troops. Nevermind the tonnage for other thing like food, ammo, and fuel, etc....

Now you complain about a medium size instant-invade? OK...
 
425k troops were mustered for D-Day + throw in lot of airplanes and naval crews in support of the invasion itself. They didn't even freaking use an existing port and instead created four port on the spot.

Eventually those 4 artifact port, known as project mulberry, manage to land 2.5 million troops. Nevermind the tonnage for other thing like food, ammo, and fuel, etc....

Now you complain about a medium size instant-invade? OK...


Although factually correct, you are reading history backwards. To get to that stage took a lot of experience and trial and error. Planning for D-Day started in 1942, if that 's a specific operational claim. Meanwhile, look at the British intervention in Norway where they packed their transports with what they most needed at the bottom. Again, it is something that you should get better and better at with experience.

K
 
I am aware that there were early experiments with invading and that is somewhat reflected in an abstract way in tech for expanding your invasion fleet size.
 
First, I am not complaning, just merely reflecting on one aspect of the game. Now, I was just stating that embarking thousands of fighting men and their respective equipment into ships takes a bit longer than the time it takes in game.
 
Does anyone think this DLC will enable you to reroute convoys? It would be nice to when playing as the Soviets to not have to send trading convoys through the Baltic Sea when at war with the Axis and instead just send shipping through the White Sea to the UK or something. On a similar note, it would be great if we could chose when playing as Germany to have convoys route around the British Isles through the North Sea to Brazil or Portugal instead of them navigating by default through the Channel.
 
Any reworking of Naval Affairs needs to be outcome-focussed. We have plenty of examples of WW2 naval combat to have a fair idea of how this should look and what the potential outcomes should be. We also know that the inability to re-route convoys is just stupid, and the sea/land/air interface is ridiculous.

I hope that PDX do look at this with a results-led rather than a process-led method. There are so many broken aspects to the naval game that it would be tiresome to recall them all, never mind list them all. And we are how many years since release?

I will get back to playing this game once they complete this effort and see.

K
 
First, I am not complaning, just merely reflecting on one aspect of the game. Now, I was just stating that embarking thousands of fighting men and their respective equipment into ships takes a bit longer than the time it takes in game.


Ha, well, something that would make life interesting is the limits imposed by moons and tides on the timings of invasions and the enormous influence of the weather. But these would limit player agency and present players with difficult choices, something I am told will reduce sales and make the game too difficult.

K
 
Any reworking of Naval Affairs needs to be outcome-focussed. We have plenty of examples of WW2 naval combat to have a fair idea of how this should look and what the potential outcomes should be. We also know that the inability to re-route convoys is just stupid, and the sea/land/air interface is ridiculous.

I hope that PDX do look at this with a results-led rather than a process-led method. There are so many broken aspects to the naval game that it would be tiresome to recall them all, never mind list them all. And we are how many years since release?

I will get back to playing this game once they complete this effort and see.

K

This!
Totally agree in every point.
Thx for this post! Couldn't have said it better.
 
So... the planned features list looks quite impressive, and very much looking forward to it. If it gets too ambitious and some of the things don't make the cut, OK, but please don't move them completely to distant future... I'm not sure whether mentioned changes to naval combat refer to more meaningful overall naval system (not just massive battles of superstacks early in war), or actual combat mechanics... Or not even sure how should that more meaningful overall naval system behave (but it isn't mu job to, so... :-D )
 
a really simple fix they could do would be drastically reduce the number of divisions that are allowed to invade at any one time; this can be done by tweaking some numbers in the 3 transport techs

the current numbers are 10/40/100... the default/minimum is 10 divisions, when during overlord (which would be the 1944 tech, 100 divisions) fewer than 10 divisions landed, and it was a herculean effort to provide support and logistics for even those

@podcat
 
This!
Totally agree in every point.
Thx for this post! Couldn't have said it better.
What I'm worried about though, is... the system where best strategy is to create one doomstack is clearly not very nice or historical.
However given how rest of the combat (air/land) goes, I'm wondering how would better system look like... fleet size historically wasn't really presenting any issues that would make sense to translate to stacking maluses(even the existing CV cap is not historical), so that approach would be nonsense. I guess what could be meaningful to do, is to make battles last far shorter (concept of ammo would help there). It would also be desirable to change the system so that it makes less sense to concentrate fleets in one spot, but the difficulty here is, how to make that happen without micromanaging becoming hell and at the same time, not getting a system where things feel out of player's control.