Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Raghar]

Lessons Learned
When we released Together for Victory, the feedback we got for the focus trees was somewhat mixed. On the one hand, a lot of people liked them because of their size and the ability to take a country down entirely new story lines. On the other hand, a lot of people felt that that the new trees wasn't adding much to the way they played. That was somewhat disappointing for us, because we had spent so much time on the hundreds of events and focuses that went into TfV, and we were wondering why exactly that was.

We started digging into telemetry data on what countries people actually played after TFV, and things got a lot clearer: About 40% of players play Germany, with other major nations following behind at quite a distance. The expansion gave the commonwealth minors a healthy bump, but still - the only content we really added for 40% of our players only happened extremely rarely in singleplayer games. Only when historical focuses were switched off, and the AI decided to go down the fascist path, did the German player get to see any new content (news events aside). And even then, the content was usually little more than an alliance request.

Well, considering players can have even less info about what happens around than people in Nazi germany. It's not even newspapers writting about ComChi conquering Japan.

So that was the first big lesson: new content needs to tie back to major countries, particularly Germany. Thankfully, we had already decided that our next DLC should focus more on the Axis, so we wouldn’t have to try too hard to come up with reasons why Germany should be involved.

And as a conclusion, they decided to give even less reasons to play smaller countries.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I'd say impassable provinces make sense in more than just AI sense. HoI3 had by far the best Winter War/Continuation War experience in Pdox games because impassable terrain greatly reduced Soviet ability to just deploy overwhelming force, whereas in HoI4 it all hinges on using the entrenchment bonuses from Grand Battle Plan.

In fact, I hope that they have a hell of a lot more impassable terrain than just Sahara, like HoI3 had. This is one of the features from HoI3 that I think Pdox needs to put into much greater use in other games.

Lessons Learned
When we released Together for Victory, the feedback we got for the focus trees was somewhat mixed. On the one hand, a lot of people liked them because of their size and the ability to take a country down entirely new story lines. On the other hand, a lot of people felt that that the new trees wasn't adding much to the way they played. That was somewhat disappointing for us, because we had spent so much time on the hundreds of events and focuses that went into TfV, and we were wondering why exactly that was.

We started digging into telemetry data on what countries people actually played after TFV, and things got a lot clearer: About 40% of players play Germany, with other major nations following behind at quite a distance. The expansion gave the commonwealth minors a healthy bump, but still - the only content we really added for 40% of our players only happened extremely rarely in singleplayer games. Only when historical focuses were switched off, and the AI decided to go down the fascist path, did the German player get to see any new content (news events aside). And even then, the content was usually little more than an alliance request.

Well, considering players can have even less info about what happens around than people in Nazi germany. It's not even newspapers writting about ComChi conquering Japan.

So that was the first big lesson: new content needs to tie back to major countries, particularly Germany. Thankfully, we had already decided that our next DLC should focus more on the Axis, so we wouldn’t have to try too hard to come up with reasons why Germany should be involved.

And as a conclusion, they decided to give even less reasons to play smaller countries.

Yea, a real pity. They actually should have realized that the whole problem in TFV focus trees was that none of them were particularly worthwhile or capable of major diversions (though I suppose this would be something more important for potential WW1/Cold War timeline extensions). A basic example is that the usual fascist or communist branch claims are CLAIMS, not CORES. What most of those minors need desperately if they're going to try and go apeshit is a stronger manpower base. 'Straya and South Africa for example should get straight-up cores instead of claims through their respective focus tree branches purely from a gameplay perspective.

It also ties in with the more distinct problem that there are literally only four factions that have any reason to be there (and Chinese United Front is really there for gameplay reasons so China doesn't jump immediately to another faction) and any extra factions the trees create are entirely counter-productive because they're going to be no one but you and any puppets you obtain. It's not so much that the ability to create factions is wrong, but there's just no room or purpose for it in the game's timeframe and focus.

Factions might make a lot more sense if they had a sort of tiered faction system, some faction mutability (ie, Kwa taking charge of the Allies from UK as time goes by), and a League of Nations/United Nations mechanic (but that's really something more suited for a timeline extension, but one that would be essential for such).

 

[Space Satan]

We can, at last, now convert all the trash from Poland, Finland, France, Romania or China into something useful

Spoiler

Hi everyone and welcome to today's dev diary. I’m home with a nasty cold, but lets power through and check out some more stuff coming in Death or Dishonor and the Oak update. Today’s main topic is Equipment Conversion, or how to choose the StuG Life.

Using older chassis to mount more powerful guns etc was very common in WW2 era Germany, in fact its most produced armored fighting vehicle the StuG III was essentially a PzIII with its turret removed to make room for a more powerful gun. We've always let you build these self-propelled variants in HOI4, but its not been possible to convert existing vehicles before. Now if you get Death or Dishonor it will be! This is a great way of getting rid of older stuff you might not want to deploy and keeping it relevant for longer.

If you look at the top production line there you can see that the conversion tickbox is enabled, and that the line is using suspiciously little resources and running at high speed. This is what it looks like with the box unticked:

You can only enable this if you have spare equipment that is possible to convert from sitting around in your stockpile. When converting you pay the difference in resources only rather than the full amount and production speed is much higher.

Note that it lists in what order and what will be converted (although here all I had for the diary was PzIIIs).

So what exactly can you convert?

• Any base model (PzIV) or upgraded variant marked obsolete (say PzIV B) to a newer one (PzIV C). This goes for planes too.
• Any base model or variant (up to one tech level back) to a self propelled. So you can convert a Medium Tank 1 to a Medium Tank Destroyer 1 or Medium Tank Destroyer 2 (the second one would then cost more resources).
• The above also works for licensed or captured equipment (although you can't convert a captured T-34 to a PzIV C, they need to actually be upgraded versions of the same thing).

There are also some new techs that help improve conversions to be even more efficient. 2 of them in the machine tools tree and Dispersed Industry also gives a base bump.

For modders its fairly easy to mess around with this, check out the spoiler for scripting examples:



We have also been updating the war overview interface to make it nicer and more informative.
its now possible to see total losses, fielded manpower, industry and also to be able to sort by each column.

Another thing is that we now showcase capitulation a bit clearer (see Free France) and its now also possible to get out of capitulation. Previously this only happened at the end of the war which led to some weird cases where a France who had reclaimed all their territory still wouldn't be able to stop their side from giving up if the other majors had fallen. Now the capitulated state is reset if you reclaim your original capital and get back 90% of their surrender level.

This weekend is PdxCon and next Wednesday we will be taking a look at new air stuff! Also do tune in to the World War Wednesday stream at https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive with maybe only Daniel at 16:00CET (unless he manages to snag another sidekick than me). It will be full "hot code!" mode and start a new campaign as Hungary to show off stuff from last week's diary

 

[Riso]

One of those paid features, by chance?

 

[Space Satan]

Air UI is being reworked

Spoiler

Hi everyone, time for this weeks Death or Dishonor and Oak Update dev diary. Today will be all about the improvements to the air warfare coming in the update. Some of you who were at PDXCON this weekend might have had a sneakpeek, but here are the details Speaking of PDXCON, I had a lot of fun meeting fans (but yikes my feet after 3 days), and look forward to next years!

Issues with the old system
When we started looking at the air warfare part of the game we felt that there was two main flaws: Transparency and Control. The system only really showed you information over very long time with graphs so it was very hard to understand what was going on and what you could do to improve things. Control wise it was a lot of work to select, organize and move wings around, not to mention having to open lots of airbase windows everywhere.

So what did we do? Check out this screenshot, it shows most stuff we have at once:

First of all we decided to go with something we knew would work well, making airwings behave more like divisions. They are now on the map and you can move them between bases and assign missions in a similar way to divisions and it’s easy to give orders to many things at once. Secondly we made a new air combat interface that should be a lot more helpful and informative. Keep reading to check out all the details...

Air Wing Interface

The air wing interface has been overhauled. The air base window is now gone. Instead, when clicking on an air base, the air wings will be listed on the left, like army divisions would if you selected ground units. We also added the ability to drag a selection box over several air bases to be able to give orders to all of them at the same time.

The list of air wings shows relevant information about the air wing, such as its strength, type and missions it’s currently flying.

Relocating wings to a new airbase is easily done by just selecting them and right-clicking on a new airbase. We’ve added arrows to show that an air wing is relocating and its progress.

Assign Air missions
Above the list of air wings is the mission panel. To give an air wing a mission in the new system, click on the missions icons in the panel, and right click on the target air region on the map.

As before, wings will only fly missions that are suitable to them. This means that it’s possible to select both air superiority and bombing missions with a mix of air wings. The fighter wings will perform air superiority missions and the bomber wings will, unsurprisingly, provide bombing. This change should make it a lot easier to manage orders for several air wings at the same time and reduce the need to micromanage the air units.

Another thing you might have spotted in the first screenshot is that we now have special combat icons in air mapmode. These show by base color how it's going (sorry Germany) but also which side is getting air support, so a green plane with a + means they are getting help from the boys in the air.

Air Combat Window
As you may have noticed, selecting air wings does not automatically bring up the air region window. This is because we have changed this window into becoming the new air combat window.

The new combat window provides information on air combats in the past day, or from the last sortie. The top of the window shows the familiar information from the old air region window, but the bottom shows the new air combat overview.

The overview is divided into air superiority missions, where fighters battle against enemy fighters, at the top and in the bottom half we show you bombing missions and intercepts. This information can be filtered by mission type, and toggled between our missions and enemy missions.

In the top part you might recognize two new icons. Those are for Air Detection. It's such an important value that we felt it best to move from tooltips and show that instead of radar (which is just one of the factors affecting detection). We’ve been rebalancing a bunch of that stuff too, but don't look too closely on numbers as its in progress.

You may also notice that we’ve added some other useful information. A very important stat is the disruption. This refers to air missions that have been forced to divert back to base, for example due to taking damage from intercepting fighters.

Radar
You might have spotted a little green circle in the first screenie also. We've added more visible radar overlays that you can bring up either through a toggle or by hovering over one

Oh yeah, for those who want to see all the new on-map air counter icons here you go:

As is normal in game development you only end up having enough time to do half of the things you planned from the start, so see this as the first step on air improvements as well. More things are sure to follow in the future, but we are pretty happy with this progress

Next week we’ll be taking a look at Yugoslavia. See you then!

 

[Space Satan]

Death or Dishonor Release Date - June 14th

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Suppose I should wrap up my Kaiserreich campagns quick then.

On a separate note, Kaiserreich in the current version is perfectly playable. Most of the stuff that shows it's in alpha is the lack of text for a number of focuses descriptions (ie, all of Mongolia's), missing portraits and save game flag icons, not yet implemented focus branches for Austria and Ottoman Empire, and the mysterious WIP mechanic next to Stability and Popularity.

But it's probably the best Kaiserreich to date, in large part because HoI4 is much better suited for the mod's needs. It's also very surprisingly stable, I've had it crash only once (when saving) and I'm not sure if it was because of the mod or just HoI4 in general.

 

[Anthedon]

A shame mods can't fix the AI. There was a dev stream of 1.4 recently and the AI is still completely useless apparently. It still abandons fronts, still doesn't conquer empty territory and still builds useless divisions. (see here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...stream-im-concerned-about-the-1-4-ai.1020632/)

 

[KoolNoodles]

Is this good yet? As in, is the AI passable? Both enemy nations and how armies work(plans and whatnot). I scrolled quickly and saw many mentions of it still being shit.

Edit: Ok, I read right above me. Sweet Jesus.

 

[sser]

Is this good yet? As in, is the AI passable? Both enemy nations and how armies work(plans and whatnot). I scrolled quickly and saw many mentions of it still being shit.

Edit: Ok, I read right above me. Sweet Jesus.

Game seems permanently fucked in this regard.

 

[not an artichoke]

Not conquering empty territory is usually to avoid overextension. The other criticisms are fair, although AI mods easily fix the division composition problem. The biggest issues I see are the AI shuffling units around aimlessly (particularly an issue on large fronts) and moving units/invading overseas unnecessarily.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The unit compositions are probably the way they are just so players can derp about with theirs more, I guess. Anyone can get someone to calculate the mathematically most optimal combinations, after all, but if one inputs those as the AI defaults you end up making them the only genuinely viable ones. The compositions aren't a real AI problem anyway, just a matter of templates.

I think the shuffling is based around the plan front system sometimes acting in strange ways (usually when a front changes dramatically because of, say, a lake) or what appears to be the AI being extremely picky about the supply limits but also commanding multiple units at once to relocate because of that. When you have a front without supply issues, it does that considerably less. Haven't seen the AI actually abandon a front though, and there's one thing the AI actually finally knows how to do properly for the first time in the series history: Actually defend the British Isles in the event of invasion. Japan's AI still sucks at defending against invasions tho. Given that recently I've only been playing Kaiserreich, I suppose a big factor in this MIGHT be that the Union of Britain only has a single island to focus on so it's much less neurotic.

Speaking of the "hot code" thing, I think it might have something to do with unit AI not executing plans following certain map changes inbetween the original creation of the plan and current situation. Seen that happen quite a bit with my own units when blitzing and events collide. That or its just some new bollocks for 1.4 situations.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

 

[Varvarg]

not to mention how bad the germs are at defending france. If you rely on germany, you better send 15 divisions to the ports, because hitler will just derp around with Eva in his bunker.

Those damn british naval invasions. Should tone them down a bit in frequency, and instead make the A.I invest more divions into more decisive landings.

 

[Average Manatee]

Tried a game to see if AI improved, and holy fuck how is it still so shit? The AI will still rabidly attack into horrible battles, not even utilizing all available troops in the province and surrounding provinces. Have 3 provinces available to launch an attack from with 10 divisions each? Just start a bunch of attacks with 2 divisions at a time vs. the enemy's 6, when you could overrun it all by attacking with 16. Your divisions are at 15% equipment strength? Who gives a shit if they have 4 soft attack and the enemy has 400, anything that is fully ORGed is apparently a valid offensive unit. You could literally improve the game 100% with a single line of code that disables attacking with any division that has less than 90% strength and by forcing the AI to include all available units in the province and nearby provinces with the initial attack (up to the battle width). This is incredibly simple stuff that anyone writing an AI should not be able to fuck up. Until this happens you'll be able to win any war on any difficulty by literally doing nothing while the AI suffers millions of casualties per year.

Funny enough, when you want want to attack the smartest way to do it is not to use the artificial "intelligence", but just to drag-select your entire army and right click on a province. This way your units intelligently choose the path that has the shortest travel time, meaning they tend to stick to high infra/good terrain and stack up to overwhelm the enemy. Then you get amazing encirclements everywhere from all the AI divisions in poor areas that never react and you clean up a third of their army. All the great minds at work trying to make an AI to handle war and its beaten by the HoI equivalent of 1a-2a-3a.

Also the new Air UI is still a clusterfuck and annoying as hell. Germany is attacking Britain with 1000 fighters and 1000 bombers? Put your 1500 fighters on air superiority/interception over London. Wait, the next day they decided the bomb in the airzone of whogivesafuck that is 10 Miles north, so you need to reorder your planes there. Wait, now they switched to bombing the channel and you need to send your shit there so your fleet doesn't evaporate. Can't just split up your fighters in groups of 300 because they'll be obliterated due to being outmatched in numbers, so you need to go back every week to watch this shit even while trying to fight in the Med/Africa/Asia. Funny how HoI4 streamlined the ground combat to the point of absurdity yet literally nothing about the Air is automatable or works in a way that doesn't make you tear your hair out.

Kaiserreich is pretty cool though. Had a game as nationalist France and had to fight a CoF that had a puppet Germany.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Kaiserreich's new version is p sweet, included updates for Austria like the two previously missing paths alternative to Greater Austrian Empire, reforming the Dual Monarchy or creating United States of Greater Austria.

 

[Anthedon]

I'm currently playing Kaiserreich as the glorious CSA AUS. The AI seems to have gotten a wee bit better since launch, I haven't witnessed any total fuckups so far. Interface and graphics are still hilariously bad, but mods will not fix that I fear.

Going to crush the remaining hippies on the west coast next and then maybe export some proper southern manners to other parts of the world.

Just look at the focus tree, it's three screens big and that's just for one of the USA factions. Makes vanilla look reallly bad.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Biggest benefit to things is that Kaiserreich's scenario is, errrr... More balanced than real history. This results in a greater level of action all over the globe and a lot of wildcard countries.

EDIT: It should also be noted that more countries have unique huge branching focus trees than have a generic focus tree at this point.

 

[Raghar]

https://youtu.be/nXbyreQ__7I?t=1903

Is this mod, or have they fucked up really hard in unmoded HOI4 as well?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It's Road to '56, which is sort of like the Magna Mundi without all the irredeemably stupid shit of Magna Mundi mods for EU3, though in this case it's more closer to a compilation mod like a more closer to vanilla BlackICE (though BlackICE in HoI4 is more troubled by regular feature bloat, rather than just being filled with retardation like Magna Mundi's bloat).

Pretty fun mod, definately my go-to if I want to play standard WW2 scenarios.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Biggest benefit to things is that Kaiserreich's scenario is, errrr... More balanced than real history. This results in a greater level of action all over the globe and a lot of wildcard countries.

Is that really a good thing?

Don't get me wrong here, I would love this game to be a sandbox where anything goes, but even in vanilla I usually find myself playing with historical focus on. Otherwise you build up into 1939 as Axis only for AI Hitler to trigger war with 500 countries and you just wasted 3 hours of your life with nothing to show for it.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Biggest benefit to things is that Kaiserreich's scenario is, errrr... More balanced than real history. This results in a greater level of action all over the globe and a lot of wildcard countries.

Is that really a good thing?

Don't get me wrong here, I would love this game to be a sandbox where anything goes, but even in vanilla I usually find myself playing with historical focus on. Otherwise you build up into 1939 as Axis only for AI Hitler to trigger war with 500 countries and you just wasted 3 hours of your life with nothing to show for it.

Well I think that's the reason the Kaiserreich scenario is more fun. The world there isn't as focused around a single country (Germany) as in regular WW2 scenarios, and between two factions. In vanilla you sort of have to leave historical focus on because otherwise things just sort of fall apart in terms of cohesion since everything is too interlinked with the standard WW2 so you can only really afford for the player's deviation from the focus paths.

In Kaiserreich, the big thing is that the entire globe has been by and large designed around local crises and Mexican standoffs, while factions can only be joined via decision and event (or by being released as a puppet). This not only leads to a larger number of small wars, but there is also a much much larger number of top-dog countries rather than just Germany and USA overshadowing everyone else with possible exception of Soviet Union. The Mexican standoff approach plays by far the best for HoI4, since so many important wars (civil wars and Weltkrieg 2 itself) have multiple sides fighting in them and then have consequences for the larger scale (most obvious being question of who wins the Second American Civil War and Spanish Civil War). Wars and alliances are more local, and that's a very good thing overall, with the general framework of the Weltkrieg 2 remaining intact to tie things together when local goes global.

Another benefit that the HoI4 version has I'd say is that the focus trees make it much more manageable for the game to herd the cats of its complex scenario and for the player to keep track of what's going on this time, and the HoI4 manpower system and other differences to HoI2 make it easier to make a more nuanced presentation of (almost) each country's strengths and weaknesses. And as usual, a result of this balance is that the number of interesting countries to play in Kaiserreich is bigger than ever (this is because original Kaiserreich already boasted enormous increase in this category).

Also a thing I think is noteworthy is that Germany and USA start off getting a mountain of shit dropped on top of them, which makes things rather more interesting (USA campaign with current version is probably my favourite Kaiserreich experience ever, considering how desperate the fight at the start of the civil war was), particularly since one of my dislikes in original Kaiserreich was that Germany's position was too well off which usually made them beat Commune of France with relative ease. By contrast in HoI4 version, I have *never* seen AI Germany beat France on its own, which is the way it should be because *I* am the one who is supposed to stop these insane commies from conquering the world.

 

[Anthedon]

Finished my AUS run from above by retaking the West Coast and liberating Canada. The biggest issues still is the AI using shitty division templates. My infantry was so superior to the Canadians that I didn't lose a single engagement.

I'll check in again in another six months. But at this point I won't get my hopes up that Paradox can fix this game (mods can't touch the AI IIRC).

 

[Space Satan]

Try ExpertAI+. You'll soon go to PRX forums whining about AI using OP templates and how it is nearlly impossible to win. Was priceless to see people facing classic Space Marine template against them and cannot do shit about it.

 

[Average Manatee]

Try ExpertAI+. You'll soon go to PRX forums whining about AI using OP templates and how it is nearlly impossible to win. Was priceless to see people facing classic Space Marine template against them and cannot do shit about it.

Doesn't matter much if the AI is still so braindead that you can get Germany to suicide its entire population on the Maginot line. You can get the AI to use proper divisions on a general basis but its still completely unable to realize that attacking across rivers into forts or bad terrain is a bad idea without specialized divisions.