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HoI 4 Dev Diary - Formable Nations and Achievements

Hello, and welcome back to another dev diary! We are on the home stretch, with only two more issues to go before release! The team is working very hard to squash the last bugs and tweak the almost-possibly-partially-final values.


Today, we will talk about Achievements and Formable Nations.


Formable Nations have already been teased by some ill-advised clicking on stream. We won’t tell you just how you can get the infamous form_hre decision, but rest assured: it is quite a journey. And no, the trigger that was accidentally shown on stream is no longer quite so accurate...


The historical purists can also rest assured that they won’t see the decision pop up if they follow the historical path, and the AI is set to never go down this path.

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The goal of the Formable Nations system is to give players a goal to work towards and enhance the sandbox gameplay. The formable nations have proven quite popular in other titles such as EUIV and the economics-simulator-that-shall-not-be-named. The implementation was fairly simple on the mechanics side: if you are one of the countries that can form a nation and control the required territories, you can activate a decision to form that nation. This gives you a cosmetic tag and cores on the relevant territories.

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We have a few fairly plausible formable nations like the Baltic Federation, Scandinavia, or the United Netherlands, which are pretty easy to do. We also have a number of somewhat less historically accurate formable nations like, say a reborn Roman Empire (which Mussolini may or may not have been aiming for), and finally the really far out ones like the Byzantine Empire.

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We envision these latter ones to be a late-game thing, after you have already achieved dominance over your region, when you want a little extra flavor for that world conquest. We’ve also attempted to ensure that all world regions have at least some possible formables.

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Again, the AI is set to never take these decisions in historical mode, and the territory requirements are such that only the more plausible and easy ones would likely ever be taken by the AI.


Currently, you need to control the territory directly, but future iterations might also allow you to form nations diplomatically.


Your reward is a new name and country color and a new flag. We had a lot of fun coming up with alternative history flags for a lot of these countries. For some, there are some additional goodies like custom namelists.

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(This particular one is also available if you form Austria-Hungary through the Hungarian focus tree)

We’re not going to spoil the full list of countries that you can form - you can find them out yourself in just a few weeks.

And if forming a new nation isn’t enough of a challenge for you, Waking the Tiger also comes with 18 new achievements:

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Awake and Angry: Reconquer all of China and Manchuria and force a Japanese surrender.

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Romance of the Three Kingdoms - as China, puppet and then annex Yunnan and Guangxi Clique.

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Sun Tzu Reborn: As Any Chinese Nation, have fully upgraded/promoted field marshal to Level 10.

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The people have stood up!: With Mao as your leader, win the Chinese Civil War.

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Made in China: As Communist China, have over 100 military factories

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Tojo shot first: As Japan, nuke a core territory of the US before the US develops nuclear weapons.

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Sunrise Invasion: As Japan, conquer Mexico then Europe before 1945.

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The Dragon Swallowed the Sun: As Manchukuo, break free from Japan and annex your former Overlord without being in a faction.

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Hail to the Qing: As Manchukuo, restore the Qing dynasty.

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The good, the bad and the weird: As Manchukuo, have max level infrastructure in every owned state and generate at least 15 units of oil.

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Battlecry: As a warlord, conquer all of China and Japan.

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Panda-monium: As a warlord, be at war with all chinese nations simultaneously.

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Make a man out of you - Have at least 1.000.000 manpower queued up for deployment.

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My ships don't lie: Form Gran Colombia and have 20 capital ships

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I swear I’m not a Byzantophile: As Greece, Form Byzantine Empire.

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Australia-Hungary: Annex all of Hungary as Australia

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Our Other Place in the Sun: As Imperial Germany, conquer a Caribbean island.

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Monarchy is back in fashion: As Germany, bring back the Kaiser and ensure that Italy is controlled by Victor Emmanuel by killing Mussolini.


That is all for today. Next week, we will take a closer look at the nuts and bolts of the game and talk a little about what our AI programmer(s) have been doing in these past weeks. On stream, Daniel and Gabriel continue their run of “historical” Germany, so tune in at 16:00 CET at https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive


Rejected Titles:

Providing a sense of Pride and Accomplishment

Stealing Victoria II game mechanics for fun and profit, mostly profit

Dan Lind’s Disney Song Singalong

Google Search History: Byzantium Tank Division Names

We use only the finest memes for our achievements

Proud to announce the Shakira/Sabaton collaboration project
 
TBH Real Life is full of those kind of things, I mean the whole Napoleon expansion to real life was completely bugged. I mean how could a single country beat up whole of Europe. and it wasn't fixed until Duke of Wellington patch. :p

The Napoleon expansion was issued to fix the Habsburg DLC. The Devs really got their money’s worth out of a couple of backwater nobles in Southeast Germany.

They really need to fix this alt-history garbage.
 
Pretty sure that the only reason the Napoleon expansion worked the way it did was the bugs introduced after the Revolutionary War patch for the USA. Made France go haywire for some reason.
 
Nations like: Ottoman Empire or Greater Arabia would be cool! Especially if Turkey gets its own National focus tree in which u can invite the Last Sultan to come back and take its throne and events like ''Fate of Hatay!" etc would be sick.
 
Pretty sure that the only reason the Napoleon expansion worked the way it did was the bugs introduced after the Revolutionary War patch for the USA. Made France go haywire for some reason.
Honestly, while the Revolutionary War patch broke France, it wouldn't have been a problem if the dev didn't nerf monarchies into the ground in the Napoleon patch. I mean, I get it, monarchy was overpowered and they wanted people to use other government types, but the nerf was too much. Countries like the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary practically became unplayable.
 
Speaking of achievements, it is weird that they didn't put in achievements for major countries defeating their main opponent during the war. There are some - like the USSR has one for defeating Germany, France has one for surviving the war, and so on. But there are obvious omissions, like Japan defeating the USA, or the USA defeating anyone at all.
 
Sees formable nations: Oh, noice, I do hope that i can for-
Sees Gran Colombia owning every province¨: *Gasp* I' dont care if its worth more than 5 human souls, im buying this DLC and remaking that screenshot from scratch, this is the best day ev-
Sees "My Ships Don't Lie" Achievement: I- I think I'm in love. GUess who's getting that achievement ASAP, it's also a good mem-
Sees the rejected "Shakira/Sabaton collab" title: NUTS

In all seriousness, I'm so happy my country (and Ecuador/Venezuela too I guess) is getting its own fromable nation and achievement, next step is giving us a Focus Tree. Good job Paradox-san
 
Speaking of achievements, it is weird that they didn't put in achievements for major countries defeating their main opponent during the war. There are some - like the USSR has one for defeating Germany, France has one for surviving the war, and so on. But there are obvious omissions, like Japan defeating the USA, or the USA defeating anyone at all.

That's because playing as the USA in this game is, and always has been, "easy mode" or pushing the "I win" button.
 
That's because playing as the USA in this game is, and always has been, "easy mode" or pushing the "I win" button.

Having an achievement for something is no reflection on how easy or hard it is. We've got achievements like "Join a faction" as well as stuff like "Conquer Africa and London as South Africa"
 
In all seriousness, I'm so happy my country (and Ecuador/Venezuela too I guess) is getting its own fromable nation and achievement, next step is giving us a Focus Tree. Good job Paradox-san

No offense, but I think if we are going to think about what's good for the game, we have to think beyond "The country I'm from needs love". Game design shouldn't be about satisfying patriotism.

Just because somebody is a patriotic Nepali or Yemeni, doesn't mean there is a need for those nations to get focus trees and decisions (not at this stage of the game anyway).

And just for the record, I think it was a bit of a waste of time for my home country to get a focus tree so early in the game, and it didn't fill me with any kind of patriotic joy when it did get one.
 
You need achievements as goals in a WW2 strategy game? Isn't like winning the war a typical goal in those games? :D
Yeah. Once. Not over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.... again
 
Why is there no achievement for Estland forming the nordics. You can call it "Can i get into nordic now?" or something like that. I´m not sure if anyone had this idea already but it would be great.
 
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Maby also add dynamic city names: names of cities change when owner changes. For example when the Netherlands own Berlin, there should come an event about changing it to Berlijn (the dutch name) or keeping the german name.
 
Maby also add dynamic city names: names of cities change when owner changes. For example when the Netherlands own Berlin, there should come an event about changing it to Berlijn (the dutch name) or keeping the german name.

This!! And also make the city names, the names from their original language pls! Example: in the game the city is called Munich, while in German/the original language it is München. It would make things a lot nicer flavour wise.