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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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Torma25 said:
2019? Come on that means more than a year without any patches or updates. Previous DLCs were released less than nine months apart and now we have to wait almost an entire year. I'm sad.
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How 2019 release would be more than a year? 1.5 was released in March, and the last patch (1.5.3) was released in April.
 
Torma25 said:
2019? Come on that means more than a year without any patches or updates. Previous DLCs were released less than nine months apart and now we have to wait almost an entire year. I'm sad.
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I'm pretty sure it's a very rough estimate from the person writing the article.
 
Kadanz said:
I'm pretty sure it's a very rough estimate from the person writing the article.
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Even so, it is probably close to when the DLC will be done. Looking for it in a few months would be a mistake.
 
That´s easy. PDox will chance the full research tree for all Marines, build in some new Game Mechanics for Seabattles and so on. They will fix all overseen Bugs and not fully functioning Build-Ins too as good they can.

That need Time. For that the Year 2019 is good compromise, esp. they don´t say any correct release date. So they can take themself time to make the DLC and the Groundversion of the Game as good as perfect.
 
Khevenhuller said:
Even if they were not called Corps they was generally an intervening step, whether it be the Poles in 1939 with their 'Operational Groups', or 'Western Desert Force' pre-8th Army, but most armies fielded some form of corps structure. I mean, if you could have a Corps which held 'Corps Troops' that would be fun (the heavy artillery, an infantry tank brigade, signal intercept units and so on). I rarely do the meatgrinder of the eastern Front, but if it would eliminate all this shuffling people get agonised about that cannot be bad.

But it has to be balanced against micromanagement. Not sure if command appointments should not be automated unless the player deliberately intervenes, as opposed to now where there is no leader unless the player intervenes. That in itself could be linked to the political sphere and make it a bit more of a cost to interfere in your own General staff's way of doing things? Inveterate 'interferers' like Hitler and Churchill could be very good at putting people's backs up whereas if your boss was Roosevelt or Mussolini then you could possibly be more relaxed...

Anyhow, having something similar for naval affairs would be nice (1st Cruiser Squadron reports to Home Fleet and so on...) and in the air too (11 Group reports to Fighter Command...) But Command Heirarchies can collapse under their own weight unless they are automated to a certain extent. Maybe an expended role for who you choose as your branch Chief of Staff would be a useful mechanic here?

K
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This has my vote ( for what that is worth ).
 
2019 is ok with me. Gives me time for a few leisurely playthroughs with some of the big mods, Kaiserreich etc.

Edit: The lack of dev diary's is wearing on me though.
 
u.u Una tragedia papa, 2019 look so long. Its true that they need much time to solve naval warfare. And the best is give them time, also fuel un land units needs a big effort.
Due the time i hope they could make some upgrades in politics and trade, some people was wondering some new mechanics (i wish to see variables prices, o a deep offerdemand/demand but a price in IC of resourses lower when you are not selling production to make some kind of competition, is a example of something that should not break the game with minor changes). I hope they ensure that kind of things.
 
ZechsMerquise73 said:
What's that? Nazi weather control machines, you say?
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give him a medal plz, jajajaja.
He was talking about frozzen ports that couldnt be usage so then you loss convoy. But i was thinkin that is not so easy, becose island would need a local depot something they dont wanna have ( there a good points to have it or to not have it) to dont be out of supply in winter. Also you could make a naval invation in the artic in winter...
Is a cool stuff but i dont know if it will work as we want with out very very deep changes in logistics (that i suppose the developers want but no for ironcland)
 
Khevenhuller said:
Even if they were not called Corps they was generally an intervening step, whether it be the Poles in 1939 with their 'Operational Groups', or 'Western Desert Force' pre-8th Army, but most armies fielded some form of corps structure. I mean, if you could have a Corps which held 'Corps Troops' that would be fun (the heavy artillery, an infantry tank brigade, signal intercept units and so on). I rarely do the meatgrinder of the eastern Front, but if it would eliminate all this shuffling people get agonised about that cannot be bad.

But it has to be balanced against micromanagement. Not sure if command appointments should not be automated unless the player deliberately intervenes, as opposed to now where there is no leader unless the player intervenes. That in itself could be linked to the political sphere and make it a bit more of a cost to interfere in your own General staff's way of doing things? Inveterate 'interferers' like Hitler and Churchill could be very good at putting people's backs up whereas if your boss was Roosevelt or Mussolini then you could possibly be more relaxed...

Anyhow, having something similar for naval affairs would be nice (1st Cruiser Squadron reports to Home Fleet and so on...) and in the air too (11 Group reports to Fighter Command...) But Command Heirarchies can collapse under their own weight unless they are automated to a certain extent. Maybe an expended role for who you choose as your branch Chief of Staff would be a useful mechanic here?

K
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Though I agree to a certain extent with your sentiments that the current OOB system could stand to be fleshed out some more, I would also add that any attempt to do so should be considered extremely carefully. Generally speaking, I like HOI 4 better than HOI 3, mainly because of the micromanagement nightmare that HOI 3 tended to turn into in fairly short order. Any attempt at expanding the current OOB system should making avoiding over-complexity a major priority.
 
By the way, you mentioned weather, i would like to see a little add in maps. A weather/temp map becose when you are playing is complex to se animation or picking provinices. Also a button to see terrain clear (with no overlay of countries, etc). Actually see this is no clear.
 
kaguravitro said:
By the way, you mentioned weather, i would like to see a little add in maps. A weather/temp map becose when you are playing is complex to se animation or picking provinices. Also a button to see terrain clear (with no overlay of countries, etc). Actually see this is no clear.
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also, weather effects are pretty heavy so they hurt performnce. Most of the time I have no idea what weather is like, becuse I have to keep my cursor over the province to get any information. I really do hope they add a weather mapmode.
 
REALLY !?

I was strongly advocating for FUEL since HoI 1. It would have solved many problems and help naturally balancing the game. It was an obvious choice and it took you... I don't know... 14 years !?

Incredible.
 
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