Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Seigneur Locklear]

So, 1.11.5 is out.

• Halved motorised breakthrough and armor

LUL, no wonder I was cutting through everything like knife through butter with motorized/rocket arty Bulgaria. Took Stalingrad in like 3 months or something.

 

[thesheeep]

So, 1.11.5 is out.

• Halved motorised breakthrough and armor

LUL, no wonder I was cutting through everything like knife through butter with motorized/rocket arty Bulgaria. Took Stalingrad in like 3 months or something.

The defenses of Stalingrad are no match for the Mad Max Rocket Bikergangs of Bulgaria.

 

[Angelo85]

Paradox is dipping their toes into a subscription model, at least for DLC:

Enjoy the Complete Hearts of Iron IV Experience Via Subscription
Players Can Now Pay Monthly Fee to Access All Heart of Iron Content
STOCKHOLM — 15 February 2022 - In the six years since the release of Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy wargame has expanded many times to reflect the size and complexity of World War II. More detailed army and naval management, as well as new espionage and resistance systems have been added, not to mention the many new alternate history paths for the major nations of the world in this tumultuous time.

If you own Hearts of Iron IV but have found it hard to keep up with this growth, Paradox Interactive has introduced a subscription model for players unable or unwilling to commit to six years of added content. This is especially helpful for new players who are unsure where to start when buying expansions or country packs.

Available only to Hearts of Iron IV owners through Steam, the expansion subscription gives players access to:

• Five expansion packs: Including the naval themed Man the Guns and the recent Eastern Front focused No Step Back
• Two Country Packs: Adding new national focuses for Central European and Eastern Mediterranean nations.
• Sound Packs: Including period music and historical speeches, as well as two song packs from the Swedish metal band, Sabaton.
• Cosmetic Packs: Special cosmetic skins for Allied and Axis Armor, new ship models and planes of the Eastern Front.
• All upcoming expansions and content

This subscription is available now on Steam for the suggested monthly retail price of $4.99/£3.99/€4.99.

FAQ about the subscription from their Steam page:

Spoiler

Subscription Service FAQ

How do I get the subscription?
You need to own the base game only, then simply purchase game time from the Steam store page. There is also a button on the title screen that will take you there if you are not currently subscribed.

What does the subscription include?
The subscription will give you access to Together for Victory, Death or Dishonor, Waking the Tiger, Man the Guns, La Resistance, Battle for the Bosporus, No Step Back, and cosmetic DLCs. Future releases will be covered in the subscription as well.

Why a subscription?
With a plethora of DLC options to choose from, starting out from scratch can be daunting to new players. This is an affordable way for players to experience the entire HoI4 catalog without having to weigh which items they would prefer to purchase. This does not mean it is the only way to get DLC moving forward. The subscription service is entirely optional, and buying DLCs as you have always done is still, and always will be available.

I already bought a bunch of HoI4 DLC, will this affect me?
Nope! Nothing will change for you. You still own all your DLC and you still have the option to purchase future DLC.

What happens if I stop subscribing?
If you stop subscribing, you will lose access to any content you have not separately purchased.

I won't be playing HoI for a while, how do I cancel my subscription?
Canceling is handled through your Steam account. Visit Account Details, where you can cancel a subscription at any time. Your canceled subscription will remain active until the paid plan expires.

Will my subscription cover future DLC?
Yes! When new DLC and content packs are released, current subscription owners will have immediate access to them upon release.

What if I want to buy a DLC?
That option is still available and always will be. The subscription service is an additional option that some players may find better suited to their situation. It is in addition to, and not instead of, a normal purchase.

Can I get a refund?
If a renewable subscription has not been used during the current billing cycle, you may request a refund within 48 hours of the initial purchase or within 48 hours of any automatic renewal. Content is considered used if any games within the subscription have been played during the current billing cycle or if any benefits or discounts included with the subscription have been used, consumed, modified or transferred. More details can be found in Steams refund policy.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

If you own Hearts of Iron IV but have found it hard to keep up with this growth,

Hah good one. Is that why you still have countries in Europe without focus trees? I can't keep up with all the irrelevant dead people they keep adding as althistory leaders.
Also shouldn't they have made the base product free to play with this announcement? It'd be a smart move, they practically give it away during humble sales.

 

[Stavrophore]

Modern Day mod got updated to NSB and i must say it's pretty good and cool. Not much flavour so far, and the world is kinda static even when not playing historical.
Was playing as Russia, puppeted Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, conquered Poland, Finland and Sweden, baltics are still not mine because muh NATO, and im working toward puppeting Serbia, generally was just minding my own business, when the fucking John Mccain got elected, formed "Freedom League" faction and declared war on me, immediately sending 5 mechanized marine brigades, 4 heavy tank brigades and one SF brigade in a naval invasion of far east siberia.

There's no way i can resist might of the US empire, have no airports there, no naval bunkers. Once they land it's over. Good that they haven't nuked me first. Was a good run though.

 

[Stavrophore]

McCain completely lost it, Vietnam trauma finally got him. US is in a big deficit because of war, while im comfortably running a surplus.
I've also repelled that huge naval landing, but lost all of my pacific fleet beside one carrier lol.
Edit: Fuck he landed again, took vladivostok. Its a shame nuclear annihilation doesnt work in hoi4.

 

[Space Satan]

Hey Everyone! I am back this week to talk to you a bit about some changes we are making to air management and combat. The first thing I want to get out of the way is that this is not a “Man the Guns” style rework of combat and management systems. Our focus on air changes have mostly revolved around quality of life and balance changes to existing systems, while largely maintaining the structures people are familiar with (with a couple of exceptions). So, let's get into it!

Starting off with a QoL change I am very happy about: Simplified Wing Deployment. Anyone who has experience with managing air wings probably has some complaints about how deploying wings works. The live system requires three clicks in the best case (four if you include choosing a base) to deploy a single wing into an empty airbase. In the worst case this requires more clicks and doing some math for creating a large wing that can later be divided evenly. Now, we are adding quick deploy buttons to the air base UI to allow deployment of a wing in a single click. We are also keeping the old deployment menu for more advanced deployment options. Also, in this menu, we have simplified the flow for deploying single and multiple wings at once.

WIP UI design of simplified wing deployment tools. Note the art style here is not indicative of a change in art direction for our UI. In the first image we see the setup that can be done to select fast deploy options from any air base.
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YaBoy_Bobby · May 18, 2022 at 15:00

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One of the most visible changes to air management, and hopefully a big quality of life improvement for most people, is the addition of Air Groups. The first thing I want to say is this is not Army Groups or Fleets. For now, and the foreseeable future, we are not adding Air Marshals or any sort of mechanical impact to using Air Groups. Air Groups are an organizational structure and nothing more. What it will do is enable the grouping and selection of multiple air wings across multiple locations bases for easier management. These groups will be displayed when in the air map mode so that you do not have to hunt down your wings on the map when you want to interact with them.

A very much WIP view of our current air groups

Of the changes we are making, one of the most notable is moving to standardized/fixed wing sizes. This change comes with a loss of flexibility in some situations and makes managing smaller numbers of airplanes a bit more complicated. However, I think that real air combat in HoI4 is measured in thousands of airplanes and not dozens. We are currently looking at 100 sized wings for most aircraft, with size 10 wings for a few specific equipment types(scout plans, CV planes, ect). This allows us to streamline wing deployment and some other management stuff such as not having AI take up weird percentages of air bases. It also makes balance easier and fixes a few exploit cases. This may take some getting used to but I feel it improves the overall experience of managing large numbers of aircraft.

The final change I want to discuss today is an addition to the combat system. We are adding a new mechanic for intercepting planes in regions enroute to their target. In most cases, engaging planes in their target region will still be most effective. But in others, such as when range is a factor, the region being crossed has a bunch of engagement and spotting bonuses, and in a few other cases leaning into combat in an intermediary region can be a good idea.

Beyond these more concrete changes we are doing a balance pass on existing air combat mechanics. A lot of this is still too WIP to discuss, but I would like to highlight one of our objectives which is decoupling agility and speed with more impact given to speed in later air superiority fighter designs, but more on that at a later date.

As always, I wish you all the best and don't hesitate to tell us how these changes make you feel.

Until next time o7

 

[Joggerino]

The interception mechanic sounds fantastic!

 

[Space Satan]

Naval Rebalance | Designer Corner

• Thread starterC0RAX
• Start dateToday at 15:00

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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Goals

• Clearer design process
• Meta based upon good structure and multiple key values
• Making historic choices in naval design and composition work well in game

Rebalance Overview

• Tech Tree
• Ship Designer
• Hit profiles
• Spotting
• Fleet composition

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Tech tree

The most obvious change is our first port of call today, this is the tech tree. There are a number of changes here that will be explained in further detail further to the aft of the dev corner.

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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As you can see it's much more concise than before, armor techs have been combined so each level will unlock both heavy and cruiser armours and are not linked to any specific hulls. SH armor still remains part of the super heavy battleship.

Moving on to the new “Naval Support” tab.

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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Here you will see quite a difference from the old tech tree. Gone are the secondary battery techs as they are now research via the medium gun techs

Additionally the naval shell upgrades are now part of the gun lines acting as an intermediary tech between new modules. But don't worry about having to research more techs, XP reductions are gone but base research times are down.

Dual Purpose Guns

And let's finally address that big elephant in the room… Dual purpose guns now branch off the light gun line. They are a 1939 onward tech, with the UK,USA,Japan & France starting with the Basic dual purpose Battery Researched and historic ships starting equipped with dual purpose Batteries and dual purpose Secondaries. Dual purpose guns lack the piercing of regular guns but make up for it by also providing AA.

The current values for the dual purpose batteries are not final and are currently aligned with their non AA equivalents.

Finally we have the 1944 Advanced medium dual purpose battery which packs a punch both to ships and planes, which should you reach it could wreak havoc for enemy aircraft and destroyers alike.

Hit profiles & damage ("well the front fell off")

Quick primer on hit profile in case you don't know what they are. A Hit profile is the calculation used to determine how easy it is to hit a ship. This hit profile is then divided by the accuracy of the weapon type a ship is firing (10 * (Hitprofile/weaponaccuracy)^2).

Any other effects that affect hit chances such as weather/time of day are applied to the final value. Currently the live game calculation for a hit profile is the ( (visibility * 100) / speed) .

So a ship with a high hit profile will be easier to hit than one with a small hit profile.

A change to the hit profile calculation is aimed to reduce the impact of speed on hit chance and should flatten the effect of speed for much slower ships. The current but not final working formula is:

( (visibility * 100) / ( (speed/2) + 15) )

In addition to this there have been some other changes for hit chance

• New hit chance modifiers that affect hit chance in the same way that weather affects hit chance. The new modifiers replace existing stat modifiers for modules/tech.
• Radar and fire control increase light and heavy guns hit chance
• homing torpedoes now increase torpedo hit chance
• Base critical chance is reduced

Spotting

• Spotting is now min capped at 0.01% progress per hour, so you will always spot a task force after 10,000 hours (417 days)
• Random chance to instantly spot (encounter) equal to your hourly progress, so if you have a 4% hourly progress you also have a 4% chance to “encounter” a task force.
• Sub and surface detections for a task force are now listed in the task force information tooltip.

Fleet Composition

First joining an ongoing battle was very painful and making strike forces much less useful this should be much less of an issue with much lower and shorter lived penalties for positioning.

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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Now these are the normal changes to modules and ships, but that's not all we have some new modifiers that are replacing or adding to existing modules too.

Fire control/Radar

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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Torpedoes
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Armor

In addition to the new modifiers below for armor a review of armor values and piercing is planned, but I don’t have a completed set of changes for that yet so you will have to wait for future announcements on how that looks.

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C0RAX · Jun 1, 2022 at 15:00

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[Infinitron]

Explore a variety of alternate histories in By Blood Alone, a new expansion for Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive's grand strategy wargame. New focus trees for Italy, Ethiopia and Switzerland open a number of possible paths. You'll also be able to design your own warplanes as you conquer the skies.

 

[HeroMarine]

New version of Kaiserreich, the best mod for this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kaiserreich/comments/veoj3z/kaiserreich_beta_021_a_world_aflame/

28 pages of changes.

 

[Sinilevä]

New version of Kaiserreich, the best mod for this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kaiserreich/comments/veoj3z/kaiserreich_beta_021_a_world_aflame/

28 pages of changes.

I doubt it can help this game. The core is way too rotten.

 

[Fedora Master]

So what's going on with this ga-

 

[thesecret1]

So what's going on with this ga-

View attachment 25901

View attachment 25902

What am I looking at?

 

[HeroMarine]

Most likely the mod developed by 100 trannies about Hitler winning WW2.

https://the-new-order-last-days-of-europe.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Order:_Last_Days_of_Europe_Wiki

The New Order: Last Days of Europe is a Hearts of Iron IV mod, that is set in an alternate timeline where Nazi Germany utterly wins World War II, but quickly loses the peace. The New Order is a narrative-driven mod that focuses on the fallout of an Axis victory and its effects on the world, leading to a three-way Cold War in the 1960s. The mod is known for being incredibly ambitious and features many new mechanics and large amounts of events, paths and characters.

 

[thesheeep]

TNO is definitely recommended.
Surprisingly good writing, and the nations that they have developed to actual playability are really fun to play.

The UI is an eye-destroying cruelty, though, and I don't think the vanilla UI mod has been kept updated (but not sure).

My biggest gripe with it were the bugs.
Not sure if I posted about that already, but in my Speer game, I finally managed to win the civil war... and nothing happened.
No screen, no event, nothing.
Probably bugged out, which was a real shame, as winning that war as Speer is damn difficult (you have the worst factories, troops, tech, can't actually break through due to lack of tanks, etc.).

I must say, I do wonder if the train & supply lines patch changed anything about the balance in TNO...

 

[gerey]

Most likely the mod developed by 100 trannies about Hitler winning WW2.

Strange fetish for troons to have, but okay.

 

[HeroMarine]

TNO is definitely recommended.

Don't listen to this lunatic.

Most likely the mod developed by 100 trannies about Hitler winning WW2.

Strange fetish for troons to have, but okay.

The mod is incredibly gay.

 

[gerey]

So what's a good HoI4 that has fun post-WW2 content for Germany?

Road to 56?

 

[HeroMarine]

So what's a good HoI4 that has fun post-WW2 content for Germany?

Road to 56?

I played that one once a long time ago and thought it was ok. Currently I only play Kaiserreich.

 

[thesheeep]

Most likely the mod developed by 100 trannies about Hitler winning WW2.

https://the-new-order-last-days-of-europe.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Order:_Last_Days_of_Europe_Wiki

I'm kinda curious:
What don't you like about it?

And I mean actual things, not some "hurr durr its gaayyy" kiddy talk.

Besides the UI, cause that one's obvious... nobody sane likes TNOs UI.

 

[Space Satan]

 

[razvedchiki]

how can i keep the stockpiles from upgrading to next versions?

 

[Space Satan]

Developer Diary | Plane Designer​

• Thread starterArchangel85
• Start dateYesterday at 15:00

Hello, and welcome back to another Dev Diary for the upcoming By Blood Alone DLC and accompanying Patch 1.12! The team has returned from the summer vacation, and we are now back fixing bugs and tweaking the balancing of the new features and focus trees.

Today, we are taking a look at the Plane Designer. As always, any number value that you are going to see in this DD is subject to change.

The Plane Designer became a subject of discussion, both inside the team and in the community, almost as soon as we announced that No Step Back would feature a Tank Designer. We felt that it would mesh well with the rework of the Italian focus tree, not least because the Italian aviation industry was very well developed and produced some of the best combat airplanes of the war - hampered mostly, as Italy so often was, by lacking production capacity.

We also felt that a Plane Designer would help plug some gaps in the lineup of available aircraft. Over the years, many players have commented on the fact that many nations modified their fighters to also be able to carry bombs, or their tactical bombers to also carry torpedoes. One of the big goals of the Plane Designer was to allow for these types of multi-role aircraft.

At the same time, we didn’t want to make these multi-role planes too powerful. Instead, a plane design optimized for a single mission should still be more effective than a multi-role plane. Where multi-role planes offer flexibility, optimized designs offer top performance, if you can afford them.

The basics of the Plane Designer are probably not a surprise for anyone who is familiar with the Ship or Tank Designers. The base is called an airframe, which roughly corresponds to the hulls and the chassis of the ship and tank designers. The Airframes have a number of module slots, where you can put the modules that give the final design its actual stats. There are three different size classes of airframes: Small, Medium, and Large. Small planes also come in a carrier-capable variant of the airframe.

The types of module slots in the Plane Designer are slightly different from the Tank Designer. There are effectively only three types of slots: Engines, Weapons, and Special modules.

Engine modules are perhaps the most straightforward of them. Unlike tanks, where this slot dictates what type of engine the tank uses and a separate stat determines what its speed is, engine modules in the plane designer determine the number and power of the engines mounted on the aircraft. These engine modules produce a new stat called Thrust, while all other modules have another new stat called Weight. These two stats are effectively the limiting factor of what and how many modules you can put on the plane. A design is only legal if Weight does not exceed Thrust (some people might point out that the only planes with a Thrust/Weight ratio of 1 or better in reality are modern, high-performance fighter jets, but these people will be summarily ignored).

Any excess Thrust is converted into extra speed, which is intended to provide a reason not to fill every module slot.

One thing to note here is that jet engines (and rocket engines, for that matter) are part of these engine slots, which means that they are available for all types of planes. This, by necessity, means that Jet Fighters and other jet-powered airplanes are no longer their own unit type - they are now simply fighters with jet engines. Jet fighters will therefore reinforce regular fighter wings, and also that you can now effectively make jet carrier planes, jet CAS, jet heavy fighters etc.with the plane designer.
Or Rocket Naval Bombers, one supposes, if you really hate your pilots on a personal level.

Weapon modules are also fairly self-explanatory. But beyond providing offensive stats like Air Attack, weapon modules fulfill two other major functions. The first is that the weapons define what type of plane a design ends up being. For this the designer has a Primary Weapon Slot. The module in this slot defines the role of the final design, i.e. Fighter, CAS, Naval Bomber etc.

This is relevant because the weapon modules also unlock what missions a design has available. That means that the strict separation of mission by type of aircraft will be gone. You can now create fighters that can provide ground support, or Strategic Bombers that can do naval strikes, depending on the modules you put on the plane. There are, of course, some restrictions - strat bombers can never mount the modules necessary to unlock air superiority missions, for example.

We still wanted to give you an easy way to classify your designs on a high level and it also makes it a lot easier to tell the AI what a design actually is and how it should be used. Without accounting for doctrines, there are no stat differences between, say, a fighter that has a set of 4 Heavy MGs in the Primary Weapon Slot and bombs in a secondary weapon slot, and a CAS that has the bombs in the primary weapon slot and the MGs in the secondary slot - but one goes into Fighter Airwings and the other goes into CAS Airwings.
CAS planes have a large variety of weapons available to them to attack ground targets.

There is a full list of weapons, the missions they unlock, and what they classify a plane as if mounted in the primary weapon slot, below (stats omitted because balancing is still ongoing):

Module	Missions Unlocked	Type
2x Light MG	Air Superiority, Intercept	Fighter, Heavy Fighter
4x Light MG	Air Superiority, Intercept	Fighter, Heavy Fighter
2x Heavy MG	Air Superiority, Intercept	Fighter, Heavy Fighter
4x Heavy MG	Air Superiority, Intercept	Fighter, Heavy Fighter
Cannon I	Air Superiority, Intercept	Fighter, Heavy Fighter
2x Cannon I	Air Superiority, Intercept	Fighter, Heavy Fighter
Cannon II	Air Superiority, Intercept	Fighter, Heavy Fighter
2x Cannon II	Air Superiority, Intercept	Fighter, Heavy Fighter
Rocket Rails	Close Air Support, Logistics Strike	CAS
Bomb Locks	Close Air Support, Naval Strike, Port Strike	CAS
Small Bomb Bay	Close Air Support, Logistics Strike, Port Strike	CAS
Tank Buster I	Close Air Support, Logistics Strike	CAS
Tank Buster II	Close Air Support, Logistics Strike	CAS
Torpedo Mounting	Naval Strike, Port Strike	Naval Bomber/Maritime Patrol Plane
Guided Anti-Ship Missile	Naval Strike, Port Strike	Naval Bomber/Maritime Patrol Plane
Fixed Explosive Charge	Kamikaze Strikes	Suicide Craft
Medium Bomb Bay	Close Air Support, Logistics Strike, Strategic Bombing	Tactical Bomber
Large Bomb Bay	Strategic Bombing, Port Strike	Strategic Bomber

While some of these weapons are unlocked in the (reworked) Air Tech Tree, some of them are also found outside of it, in a similar manner as the tank weapons are found in various trees. I will note that the total number of techs in the Air tech tree has actually decreased.
A view of the Air Tech tree. It has a total of 28 techs, compared to the old tree’s 38 techs.

One notable aspect is that a lot of these modules provide different stats only for specific missions. For true multi-role planes to make sense, we wanted to make sure that building a design with a mixed set of missions didn’t make the plane useless in some of them. Hanging bombs off a plane should make it less agile and slower, but a fighter that was able to do CAS missions shouldn’t be useless in air superiority missions. Thus, the weight and agility penalties only apply to the fighter if it is actually on a CAS mission, not if it is on an air superiority mission.

Modifiers only apply to certain missions. Here, the bombs the Stuka carries make it less agile, but the dive brakes give it better air defense

Finally, we have the so-called “Special” module slots. These are effectively a catch-all term of various different items, a list of which you can find below:

Armor Plate: Increased Air Defense, reduced range
Self-Sealing Fuel Tanks: increased Air Defense, costs Rubber
Drop Tanks: increased range (small airframes only)
Extra Fuel Tanks: increased range, reduced air defense
Dive Brakes: increased air defense, increased naval strike hit chance
Radio Navigation I: reduced night penalty, increased strat attack
Radio Navigation II: reduced night penalty, increased strat attack
Air/Ground Radar: reduced night penalty, increased strat attack, increased naval detection
Air/Ground Radar II: reduced night penalty, increased strat attack, increased naval detection
Air/Air Radar: reduced night penalty when on intercept mission
Air/Air Radar II: reduced night penalty when on intercept mission
Floatplane: increased naval spotting (small airframes only)
Flying Boat: increased naval spotting (medium+large airframes)
LMG Defensive Turret: increased Air attack, reduced agility
2x LMG Defensive Turret: increased Air attack, reduced agility
HMG Defense Turret: increased Air attack, reduced agility
2x HMG Defense Turret: increased Air attack, reduced agility
Cannon Defense Turret: increased Air attack, reduced agility
2x Cannon Defense Turret: increased Air attack, reduced agility
Recon Camera: unlocks recon mission (LaR only)
Demining Coil: unlocks demining mission (MtG only)
Bomb sights I: increased strat attack
Bomb Sights II: increased strat attack
Non-Strategic Materials: reduced Aluminum cost, reduced air defense

Special Modules are primarily intended to help optimize planes for various missions or give them different niches.

The eagle-eyed amongst you have already spotted that planes now have a surface and sub detection stat. Up until now, planes that were active in a sea zone always provided a flat bonus to the spotting speed of any navies active in the seazone. This will now change, with planes having dedicated spotting stats that determine how well they do with helping the navies spot. There are modules, like the Air-Ground Radar and the Flying Boat hull, which give bonuses to naval spotting.

Vanilla planes have those stats already baked in, with some being better than others - carrier planes are better than their land-based counterparts, naval bombers are better than fighters etc.

To further support this, we are adding two more things: Maritime Patrol Planes as a dedicated unit type and a special Naval Patrol mission for planes with the right modules.

Maritime Patrol Planes are built on the Large Airframe, giving them exceptional range. They are able to mount the whole array of naval bomber weapons, but naval strike is really not intended to be their primary role. Maritime Patrol Planes are meant to help with spotting raiders in the deep ocean, where smaller planes with shorter ranges struggle to provide much mission efficiency.
You can run naval patrol missions with many different types of planes.

Finally, let’s talk a bit about art! While we already have a large amount of historical art for various plane types, we also wanted to give you more options to visually distinguish your designs, even if it is just to find the plane design more easily in the production menu. For the tank designer, we split up the existing art and recombined it into various combinations to quickly generate a large number of assets. We realized early on that this wouldn’t work for the plane designer. So instead, we decided to fill in some gaps in the existing art as well as add some art for a number of prototypes that flew but were historically passed over for mass-production.
Here is a partial list of new plane icons coming in BBA. Which one’s your favorite?

We also decided that we wanted to add more 3d art. Much like the tank designer, you can select these assets when you design the plane. We are adding about 80 new 3d models for planes to the DLC, but more on that in the future!
Here is just a teaser of some of the new assets coming in the DLC:

That is about it for this week. We hope that you will enjoy playing with the Plane Designer as much as we enjoyed making it. To end this DevDiary on a personal note: The Plane Designer will be my final contribution to Hearts of Iron 4. After close to 6 years on the project, all the way from the early days on Together for Victory, the time has come for me to leave the company and move on to greener pastures. It has certainly been an eventful and productive couple of years, and there are many things that I am very proud of (and a few that I regret - like adding Austria-Hungary as a joke and then finding out that people love monarchism). Working on the Hearts of Iron series has always been a dream for me, since the day I launched Hearts of Iron 1, almost 20 years ago now. Few people can say that they had an impact on a piece of entertainment that has had a similar impact on themselves. But the thing I am most proud of is the team we have built. Hearts of Iron is in very good hands, and there are years of content still to be released. I’m looking forward to it - but, once again, as a player.

Weird designs that QA came up with:
This single plane outguns an entire tank platoon, unfortunately it can’t ever turn:

And then we restricted the number of bomb bays you can have on a plane:

6 engines, 8 cannons, 4 cannons in turrets, and a production cost 50% higher than a strategic bomber. Needless to say, this combo is no longer possible:

When you look at the Spitfire Mark I’s armament and wonder: but what if…more guns?

 

[gerey]

What don't you like about it?

Dunno if I dislike it or not, but Himmler is basically Doctor Doom. I think the troons developing this trainwreck have been watching far too much MCU.