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HOI4 Dev Diary - Merry Christmas

As is traditional christmas time means 2 things: The dev team all disappear off on holidays and I make some beutifulhorrible holiday art... so, merry Christmas everyone!
doggos_2018.jpg


As I said we now go off on a much needed break, so expect diaries to resume again when we get back after new years :)

I figured I'd also give a little summary of the year from out point of view. This year saw the release of Waking the Tiger back in march which we are proud of and seems to have been received really well. Then during the summer we hit a new record on amount of active monthly users playing HOI (540k!!). Otherwise we have been hard at work on probably our most ambitious expansion yet - Man the Guns, which we announced (very early) at PdxCon. I expect a lot of people wanna ask me for a release date, but it is what it always is: when its ready. I can promise that we'll tell you early next year though.

As is customary I usually drop some cool statistics as well. so 'ere we go:
  • We investigated tutorials a bit and found that the HOI one actually seems to work the best of the ones we have. a whole 89% of people who start it actually complete it, and people who do complete it have a much higher chance to stick around and play the game (I am not much of a tutorial man myself, preferring to get watch lets plays and the like, but this still makes me happy :))
  • We broke all our player records during summer. I dunno if the weather was extra bad this year or not, but people seem to have been spending their vacation charging across Europe in tanks.
  • Constructive Engineering and Training continuous focuses are the most popular by a wide margin
  • The most popular total conversion mod is Road to 56 (12%) followed by Kaiserreich (8%). 3rd spot is held by Millennium Dawn at 5.5%. The most popular non TC mods are Colored Buttons and player led peace conferences.
  • Multiplayer games sit at 11% (daily unique players) and 17% use ironman

Oh yeah, we were pretty excited to hear that HOI4 had been nominated for the 2018 steam awards under Best Alternative History. I'm not gonna beg you to go vote at all. Totally up to you!

I also figured we'd highlight my 2 favorite bugs that have popped up during development. Smoke launchers let submarines lay down smoke to escape... somehow without revealing their position ;D also we had a great one where whenever we iterated on stats for a ship design it would double the stats of those modules, and also double the amount of module slots. @YaBoy_Bobby was the undisputed king of the seas in this abomination:
upload_2018-12-19_14-8-41.png

(its a while ago, so its an older iteration of the UI). I have no idea what -75% reliability mean, but I suspect it just explodes if you try to train with it.

See you all next year and have a merry Christmas and a happy new year - HOI4 Dev Team
 
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Hope this "DLC" wont cost 20$ like paradox your "dlc´s" are so overprised it hurts! plz stop

I've got tens if not hundreds of hours from every Paradox (gameplay) DLC I've purchased - in my experience, whether it's value-for-gameplay, range of content (ie, amount of work required) or comparable DLC in the genre, they're anything but overpriced. Keep in mind that if Paradox doesn't make a reasonable return on investment (costs plus a reasonable profit) there will be no DLC at all (developers aren't like Christmas elves, and need money to live).

Also keep in mind that if you personally wouldn't get as much value, Paradox frequently discount their DLC and games in sales, and drop prices over time (Waking the Tiger is 50% off on Steam at time of typing, for example :)). In other words, if you're super-keen and must have it at launch, that suggests the price probably isn't to much for you, and if the price is too much for you and you're less ken, you can always wait and pick it up later - so you can match the price you pay to the level of keenness you have for something :).
 
Hope this "DLC" wont cost 20$ like paradox your "dlc´s" are so overprised it hurts! plz stop
So an expansion that will completely change the gameplay thanks to fuel, while also having naval warfare reworked is not allowed to cost that much. But games like Call of Duty and Battlefield that get yearly release which is same shit different year can cost from 50-60€ and even 120€ right?
 
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I can wait for a pulished game where oil does really matter.. my last HoI4 game I had as Italy 250 ships and 6.000 planes all fighting at the same time... felt so wrong.. I have bought all other DLCs waiting for this one... in the meantime, I am playing Ck2 or Cities Skylines hehehe
 
Really looking forward to Man the Guns. For me, once we get a legit naval overhaul, it's game on. Happy the finish line is drawing near.
 
Hey Paradox team Merry Christmas!
Suggestion for the next DLC, which would fit well with the new fuel mechanic; Mediterranean focus, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey ships played a huge role in this theater.. oil and control of Suez/Gibraltar was of great importance.
Just an idea happy new year BTW
 
Happy New Year!
 
Hey Paradox team Merry Christmas!
Suggestion for the next DLC, which would fit well with the new fuel mechanic; Mediterranean focus, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey ships played a huge role in this theater.. oil and control of Suez/Gibraltar was of great importance.
Just an idea happy new year BTW
Also Bulgaria in there and a 2nd major rework.
 
Nitpick: on that submarine stat sheet, "Anti-air" should probably be listed oveover Armour so that all weapons are listed together.

Merry new year, happy yuletide, looking forward to next DD, etc
 
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Hope this "DLC" wont cost 20$ like paradox your "dlc´s" are so overprised it hurts! plz stop
20$ is good considering the cost for personnel, resources and etc and could you please use more formal English because you sound like you learned English from American teenagers.