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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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How will the naval intelligence that's needed to know whether to burn precious fuel by sending your fleet out to do battle, work? Is this part of the reworked spotting?
 
myzael said:
Zbigniew Załuski was one of (if not the only one) communist party members that stood against that propaganda in his "The Polish Seven Deadly Sins" from '62. The debate lasted well into the seventies.

I haven't managed to find sources on it being taught in school.

And the prevalence of the myth in the west is just a matter of PRL not disproving them after it's inception and West Germany re-using nazi propaganda material.
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- so... does that mean that France was completely indifferent to "cheese eating surrender monkeys" myth that still is perfectly alive and well in 21 century? Was France part of the soviet bloc?

Bearjuden said:
This Guardian link says they themselves reported the myth two years prior to the article (2009), which not only shows that the reporter thinks it enough to report it without checking, but that everyone who read the article and not the correction will think it true as well. It's definitely still out there.
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- graduan article can hardly be counted as source to anything but graduan journalists competence.
 
podcat said:
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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I now see that sadly I was in the minority who liked them then... :(
 
I made a post about this some months ago. Was going to quote it, but didn't find it because the search engine is currently broken.

Anyhow, I hope this DLC finally fixes the "splitting fleets" screen into sorting by class (including variants) instead of alphabetically.

Look at this mess:

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Enjoy splitting out your obsolete ships each and every time you play a country with a large navy.

And while we're at it, HoI4 is missing the "reorganise" functionality from previous PDX games entirely:

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It should be here:

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Why the ability to directly reorganise ships between two fleets is missing, seems baffling to me. I use it in older PDX games all the time, and I'm sure others do as well. It's basic functionality, and HoI4 has no excuse to be inferior in this regard to its predecessors and other PDX games that came out over a decade prior.

EDIT: Actually originally meant to have the re-organise button as two arrows next to the merge button like in HoI3, then forgot about that before editing the picture. Can't be bothered re-editing now. Either way, it should be in the game.
 
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I'm super excited about this expansion, and very glad it's going to be on the naval game, but...

podcat said:
... we have already done big changes to both land and air in previous expansions and updates...
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Death or Dishonour was not a big update to air. It didn't add the ability to destroy old planes, filter airplane types and variants, assign airwings to armies, fix strategic bomber whack-a-mole, add a "do not upgrade" option to airwings etc.

It was a light polishing of the air GUI more than anything, with some extra control over your air units by being able to select airwings like divisions.

Sure, Waking the Tiger added some things, but a "do not upgrade" option really should have been in DoD.

I'm very excited nonetheless.

P.S. Germany should start with Carrier I unlocked and Graf Zeppelin in the production queue :)
 
I hope for the USA and the United Kingdom focuses will be remade better than at Germany as despite very interesting focuses of Alternative Germany, Historical focuses seem more favorable, and me forces to long impossibility for the Communistic Alternative of Germany a little (but do not think that I'm for the Communists, just wanted to play, and for example look at the coming of World Communism led by Germany and the Trotsky Soviet Union or the epic war between the Soviet Bolsheviks and the Orthodox German Marxists's).

It was interesting to see if there would be an opportunity in this addendum to free some states from the United States or the United Kingdom. How at the Soviet Union and whether development of these countries in respect of historicity is planned in the next updates or DLC and can additions of trees of focuses?
 
I have two question. First being will the UK have a monarchist path? and the second being, can currency make a comeback in HoI4 since the war didn't just effect the participants, it also effected the nations of the world through the economies, since the worlds biggest economies were involved in the war. Other nations such as Sweden made tons of money trading with both sides. This i feel like isn't represented well in the game. Therefore i strongly believe that currency should be re implemented in the Hearts of Iron series.
 
Alex_brunius said:
No it doesn't. In HoI4 you reorganize ships between fleets by drag & drop of ships between their boxes instead.
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I didn't actually know that.

Just now fiddled around with it a bit and while I can see it even being faster in some cases (splitting between doomstacks if you don't care about ship tech/variant level), I still think the old pre-HoI4 method provides a lot more information at first glance and is quicker and clearer to use if you want to e.g. split certain obsolete ships from the fleet.

But why not have both methods?
 
Congratulations Hoi team !!! 1 million sales is amazing for a 'niche' game
The other stats were remarkable too. The half of player base play monthly and the average player stats.

Congrats Zwireq , that's a lot of German kills. :eek:

Looking forward to navy changes and fuel equally enthusiastically. :)
 
I'm more excited about renovating old fleets than anything else.
 
Fulmen said:
I didn't actually know that.

Just now fiddled around with it a bit and while I can see it even being faster in some cases (splitting between doomstacks if you don't care about ship tech/variant level), I still think the old pre-HoI4 method provides a lot more information at first glance and is quicker and clearer to use if you want to e.g. split certain obsolete ships from the fleet.

But why not have both methods?
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I think the easiest solution is to add all the needed info to tooltips and windows already used in current drag & drop way to speed it up.

Basically a hybrid between them.
 
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