Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Riso]

Your computer.

 

[thesheeep]

Your mom.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Your mom's computer.

 

[Life of the Party]

Spoiler

Hi everyone! On the 6th of June 3 years ago we released a little game called Hearts of Iron IV. Now obviously the 6th is tomorrow, but of course this is sweden’s national day, as well as being earmarked for recovery after the paradox summer party that’s happening tonight. So you get to enjoy my anniversary diary one day early But, before we get into all of that, first let’s talk about yesterday’s releases!

Yesterday we released the 1.7 ‘Hydra’ free update which brought the game to 64-bit as well as improvements to AI, front systems and convoys. See here for full patchlog. Together with this update we also release a Radio pack filled with new music as well as the Axis Armor Pack for your tanking pleasure :p We hope these prove popular because we have lots of ideas for future ones we would like to do if it goes well



Development

Most of the design was written during the summer of 2013 with me chilling out to documentaries and sipping beer in the sun. Back then we were a lot smaller and the whole original design doc is actually smaller than most expansion docs are now :D Actual development ramped up late 2013 and we actually showed off the game to journalists super early in Januari pdxcon 2014 for some initial feedback. At this point there was no ai, and 90% of mechanics did not do anything. My most vivid memory of it is explaining to Angry Joe how you could nuke the world as Hitler ;D That and Justin Bieber crashing a ferrari in the nearby neighborhood in miami…

I had a couple of goals with HOI4: I wanted a game that would be easier to get into for new players. I wanted a more high level experience focusing less on micromanagement of battle and more on the buildup and planning aspects of WW2 (it’s not very sexy, but in my mind WW2 was won by logistical planning and war production, not heroics). I wanted to dial back some of the complexity of HOI3 and bring back some of the lightness & freedom of HOI2 for players - to let them develop and personalize their countries more. I wanted to ramp up country specific flavor and bring back things like tech teams to a degree. I also wanted to make the best platform for modders we had ever done, because I always felt a bit sad that HOI3 never really had the modding community that HOI2 did.

A lot of these choices were based on experiences working on HOI3 and Vicky 2. Hearts of Iron III had focused very hard on the historical aspects, to a degree that it couldn't really handle small deviations and I wanted to make sure HOI4 could handle this as well as providing a historical experience.

Johan dug this up, which is my first pitch for roughly how I wanted to balance the focus on the new game:

Here was the first section guidelines for feature design I put down:

• Accessibility. The game should not scare a new player. New target audience outside fans of previous games is people who enjoy CK2 and EU4, and are interested in WW2, it should not be harder to get into than those games necessarily.
• If a feature doesn't show in an interface its not a feature
• The effort spent on a feature should be proportional to the amount of player interaction it has. No interaction and its not a feature.
• a feature should have a clear reinforcement loop in its feedback. eg: "see problem"->"do action to fix problem"->"see problem solved"
• No AI control cop-outs. There shouldn't be any checkboxes saying "plz automate this". Then we would rather remove the feature.
• Less complexity for complexity’s sake features while delivering the same or more flavor than before.
• less micro, more macro decisions, but avoid very very long decisions such as stockpiling that player will always fail on the first time.
• Prefer planning decisions rather than last-minute decisions. There are many things to keep track of in HOI and sometimes there is a lot of free time and sometimes there is a ton of stuff going on, so if we can make some of those decisions while its calm you get a much smoother workload for the player.

I feel like we mostly lived up to the initial goals in the end and the game launched to very good reviews and sales as well as a ton of new players joining us and the community growing over time.

We had 2 major struggles during development I would say and they together led to us having to delay the release quite a bit.

One was the battleplanner & AI. We went through quite a bunch of iterations on this one. The goal was always a system that assisted the player and would still need the player to go in and adjust things (no playing itself!), but finding the right balance between hand holding and automation was very hard. So were the exact controls. It was tough to find a solution where you could adjust stuff without pausing, and where orders wouldn't override the player too much. On the other hand the system was absolutely crucial for us to give the player the high level experience we wanted and the fantasy of drawing up plans for their units. We also did not think players would accept going back to HOI2 level province counts, which would have been required if it was all manual. It went through several iterations:

1. A nation level planning tool where all armies were part of the same plan, and the player controller synchronization points (say the northern army group would come in at point X when the southern group had reached a certain point). This worked well… until we added an AI. At this point we realized that the plans needed to be able to adjust to changing circumstances a lot better. At this point plans were more like overlays also and did not follow units or change when enemies took provinces.
2. We changed the system to adjust based on fronts and province changing. At this point you drew arrows rather than fronts, which felt great… but didnt work so well during unpaused play either, because you also needed to control the width of the fronts.
3. The final iteration before launch was changing it so that you drew fronts rather than arrows. It felt a bit worse, but gave a lot better control.

The other tricky system was focus trees. We wanted a system to guide new players to what to do, and also use this system to steer the AI. it was also supposed to act partially like a tutorial for the first 2 years. We ended up with a system called “national goals” that kinda acted a bit like the current decisions, but with some more map interaction. The big problem was that it could only really show stuff one step ahead and it was really hard to get an idea for where you could take a nation. As a beginner it also wasn't exactly clear how anchlussing Austria would lead to wargoals on Poland in the end. We ripped this out and replaced it with what you now know as Focus Trees, and some ideas were later brought back with Decisions in Waking the Tiger.

The last 3 years

I suspect anyone reading this knows how Paradox works. We keep support our games over long time both with free updates and paid DLC where we try to strive for a 50/50 balance. This gives us the unique opportunity to rework and improve systems after release, and to adjust and grow the game based on feedback. Some of this feedback also comes from telemetry data which is invaluable because the HOI community is pretty much split right down the middle between historical gamers and ahistorical games, and of course also with a hardcore group of competitive MP players. So we gotto make sure we get the right picture and not just who is loudest

Let’s go through all the expansions up to now!

Together for Victory

TFV was our first expansion and we were still putting in a lot of work on bug fixing and balancing at this point so a lot of the free dev work went into that. The biggest feature it gave us was the new subject systems with autonomy levels, something we have been building on ever since. It fleshed out all the british subjects with focus trees, but didn’t go super deep into alt-history quite yet even though we were playing with it.

Death or Dishonor

For death and dishonor we focused on european minors, primarily on the axis side. This is when I think we really started to steer the game towards alt-history. We decided this DLC would be our test and we did pretty out-there stuff like reforming Austria-Hungary. Turns out people really liked these kind of focus trees and we decided from now on to focus on 50% history paths and 50% alt-history going forward. DoD also saw us do our first big revamp of a core mechanic as we changed up air warfare quite a bit.

Waking the Tiger

For Waking the Tiger we wanted to go big (perhaps too big :D). We wanted to flesh out armies and commanders so introduced more traits and the chain of command. We made new focus trees for most of asia and really focused on the China vs Japan conflict. It felt like a bit of a gamble at the time, because it’s simply less known here in the west than the rest of WW2.

Here we also started to revamp old core focus trees and doubled down on alt-history with paths for the Kaiser coming back to power in Germany (you guys loved this one!)

Man the Guns

For MTG the time had come for tackling naval warfare. We wanted this to be the first HOI game with actually decent sub warfare (a tough nut to crack!) as well as other engagements. It was a very ambitious project. Probably the toughest I have done, but I am proud and happy of what we accomplished. In hindsight we should have probably added a naval tutorial though. The original HOI4 never had one, so we didn’t really factor in making a fully new one, but naval warfare has now become just as important as the other two branches of war. On the nation side we revamped USA and UK and did a bit of an experiment with both Mexico and the Netherlands. Mexico because it didn’t really join, and Netherlands because it was defeated early, and was also quite small. I think the way we dealt with both worked out very well actually and shows that if a focus tree is good enough even a smaller power can be equally fun to play.

????

We are now starting development on the next expansion, which is still secret...

I asked on twitter if people had any questions on development, and (not) to my surprise most of it was asking about what is coming next (it’s still secret guys!). Here are a couple:

Q: What was the best tank (thank you mister @grekulf >_<)

It depends a bit on how you define the question. Technical capabilities? Do we factor in cost? Ease of production? I think the Panther is a really cool machine, but if you look at things from a strategic point of viewI think it's easy to say that the Soviet T-34 was the best tank. Technologically solid with sloped armor, mass producible and cost effective, and with a flexible chassi. Do feel free to argue with me in the comments though ;P

Q: Why are you facilitating HOI4 so much towards fast-paced alt-history competitive MP when the vast majority of your players play historical SP, like in previous HOI editions?

Actually, the majority do not play historically. Its fairly split along the middle and for several nations the alt-history paths are more popular than the historical. I think the great thing about HOI4’s design is that it can accommodate both playstyles, while say HOI3 only handled historical games.

As for MP, we do spend more effort on it than the player counts would warrant. There is a small percent of players that play at this level, but balance issues etc that they find are important both for single and multiplayer. Of course we can not always change things right away as the AI will need to also cope with the changes.

Q: Do you think officers should be represented like in HoI3? I know the game has buff/debuffs 'ideas' but I think it would better represent the realities for countries lacking in enough officers to effectively lead divisions. Even Germany struggled with org towards the end of WWII

Officers helped define nations a bit in HOI3. For those things we mostly have it covered with unique national spirits etc though. However, I do think they could exist in some form in HOI4 one day but it would definitely be another way. I was never really happy with how leadership worked in HOI3 and the tradeoffs you had to make were mostly no-brainers.

Q: Would it be possible that the historical events can be also listened through radio news in hoi4?

We have discussed the idea in the past actually. Its a cool idea. I feel like you might need to have alt-history ones as well to make sure it fits in as things change?

Q: When will you update the Soviet and France focus trees?

We’ve had a pretty steady pace to make sure we update the original trees over time. I think its a pretty safe bet to assume at least one gets updated in each major expansion. It has a lot to do with what other countries fit in with it and what the theme is rather than their importance at this point though.

Q: has there been thoughts about reserves and mobilization like there was in HOI3?

I am pretty happy with manpower laws for modelling this, so no current plans.

Q: I'd like a retrospective about Fuel and Command structure. Ppl rly wished for it b4 release, but got told would be better with Oil in production abstraction. Marketing-Lie, because no time for MtG Fuel System, or really convinced by it back then?
Not angry, just curious.

Definitely convinced to try them out. Both add a lot to the complexity of the game, but I think that its ok to move the boundaries a bit after the game has been out for a while and people have gotten comfortable. The way we solved the issues of fuel compared to HOI3, where it was kinda a solvable problem (so you just stockpile once and don't worry anymore), is worked around by having a limited stockpile you had to invest in to build up, and since its the only resource that behaves this way it does not totally change the need for constant resource access.

Q: What has been your favourite feature or expansion to work on?

Tough one. The last expansion always feel the best, so Man the Guns I guess with Death or Dishonor second ;D I am weird when it comes to features and usually have the most fun when I work on AI behind the scenes. If I gotto name one thing though it was probably Decisions from Waking the Tiger. I really felt like we lifted the concept up one more step compared to how we had done it in previous games. They are really cool and flexible now for doing all sorts of gameplay and reinforcement of focus trees.

Q: Will we ever see corps as an army unit in the game? Even just as a UI thing to keep army groups tidier?

You can collapse army groups if things get too much, but who knows, maybe? I don’t see us doing it for UI, but more for being able to place corp level assets on map or the like.

Q: when sweden unique focus tree .....

I’m not sure ya’ll are ready for how overpowered it would be >

Q: What was the most difficult technical issue to overcome during HoI 4's development?

Definitely AI and battleplans. With performance as a second thing. The combination of realtime and such high complexity, and also being expected to be competitive 1-1 vs a player is a tough nut to crack. With most of the other Paradox games we balance vs the player by having AI gang up on them, but in HOI4 that's not really a thing because of the historical situation so we really need to focus on having the ai fight ok in a more fair situation. We probably spend about a month on tweaking AI balance on each expansion.

Q: Would you consider making next designers (air, tank) and what are your thoughts on naval designer, does it fitfull yours awaitings?

I think it ended up pretty cool! Some stuff ended up a little too complex compared to the initial intent though. I think doing it for Air makes a lot of sense as the plane type classifications we use feel a bit weird for modelling certain nations. Potentially for tanks also, although I think that it would need to be a bit simpler here.

Q: What do you think about the changing direction of Hoi. Originally it was a ww2 game but more and more it seems to focus on interwar diplomacy and politics (e.g the Mexican tree)

I went over some of this in the above 3 year development section. Basically I think its a natural progression if you want to support alt history and have nations who didn't join the war do so. HOi4 has always had two halves. Preparing and maneuvering for war and actually fighting the war.

Q: Did you ever consider going abit more in depth into the populations of the game? I feel like manpower and population are just a number when it should affect much more.

If you mean different cultures, no. It's a conscious choice. WW2 is pretty recent and can be a touchy subject without calling out specific population groups. If we are talking about other stuff then yeah probably eventually

Q: Who in the team has got the most hours on the game, and how many is that?

Probably Daniel? He has something like 10,000h while I am just under 6000h.

Q: What was the most difficult game mechanic or system to rework since launch?

Naval warfare. It was in the least iterated state and the amount of balance and iteration was very heavy.

Q: Will you have a globe in Hoi5? Or is paradox really dedicated to that cylinder life?

The only game I could see benefit from a globe would be a cold war game honestly (for accurate missile distances). Globes have a lot of downsides, like not being able to see half the world etc. Maybe something like Imperator’s simulated half-globe camera though, I quite like that one after getting used to it.

What's next expansion about? :D

It’s a secret still!

Today we will also have an anniversary stream special with me and Daniel at 15:00 Stockholm time. I have managed to dig up an old pre-release version of the game for us, and we will be looking at that as well as talk about the last 3 years of development. Don’t miss it!

See you all next week!

 

[Space Satan]

Espionage top UI leak

 

[HeroMarine]

Nice, I hope I can send Soviet spy Olga Benario to Hitler like Getúlio did.

Spoiler

 

[Space Satan]

Germany is much more adapt now in amassing huge forces. For example, before, I managed to utterly crush GER even with half-assed forces before but now they can amass quite effective force, and combined Axis divisions number in 800-1000, and pushing that will not be a trivial task

 

[CaffeineConquistador]

Ah, shit there’s a fourth HOI? I’m just staring to get 3 down. Fuuuck.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Ah, shit there’s a fourth HOI? I’m just staring to get 3 down. Fuuuck.

And here I am still in Darkest Hour

Then again my computer is kinda weak

Is there any good performance-increasing mod? I wanted to play Old World Blues

 

[LizardWizard]

OWB is the only reason to ever install HOI4

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I would say Kaiserreich is an even better reason, the new version of Millenium Dawn is extremely promising (currently too buggy), and the big elephant in the room that might ouster everything else is the looming shape of The New Order.

 

[LizardWizard]

Kaiserreich is just alt history vanilla. And HOI4 is fucking trash

 

[CaffeineConquistador]

Ah, shit there’s a fourth HOI? I’m just staring to get 3 down. Fuuuck.

And here I am still in Darkest Hour

Then again my computer is kinda weak

Is there any good performance-increasing mod? I wanted to play Old World Blues

Sorry, I really don’t know, bud; I don’t have the game. Now, if you’re talking HOI3, there’s a few things you can do, but if DH is already taxing your rig, I wouldn’t even bother trying.

 

[Raghar]

Ah, shit there’s a fourth HOI? I’m just staring to get 3 down. Fuuuck.

And here I am still in Darkest Hour

Then again my computer is kinda weak

Is there any good performance-increasing mod? I wanted to play Old World Blues

Learn how to assemble PC, open you PC add proper MB and CPU, and possibly RAM and possibly heatsink. HoI4 isn't that demanding, I have occasionally even 4 speed.

Last time I looked into OWB it was buggy and unfinished. I guess it would take them as much to finish them as to you to get faster CPU and MB.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Ah, shit there’s a fourth HOI? I’m just staring to get 3 down. Fuuuck.

And here I am still in Darkest Hour

Then again my computer is kinda weak

Is there any good performance-increasing mod? I wanted to play Old World Blues

Sorry, I really don’t know, bud; I don’t have the game. Now, if you’re talking HOI3, there’s a few things you can do, but if DH is already taxing your rig, I wouldn’t even bother trying.

ASAIK most of the late game lags are from the AI spitting out masses of low quality units and then not doing shit with them. This could be fixed in recent patches, not sure. There's a mod or two on Steam that supposedly fixes this problem, but I haven't tried it. Only got past the late 1940s once or twice in my games before going into cerebral coma.

 

[Orobis]

And here I am still in Darkest Hour

It's ok you're not missing anything, Darkest Hour is still best HOI.

 

[thesheeep]

I really wish there was some game that combined HoI4's approach to combat (with the battle lines and an almost complete lack of direct influence) with not being entirely focused on warfare.
Whenever I tried HoI4, I was intrigued by the combat, but pushed away by absolutely everything being about warfare. Trade, economy, politics, society... none of that really plays any significant role.

I get it, it's a WW2 game. I just wish someone took parts of it and put it in a game with a not-exclusively-about-warfare focus.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well the new version of Millenium Dawn is trying something like that, and based on the demo so will The New Order.

 

[Ventidius]

So, I haven't played this game in a while and have noticed that they have released a bunch of DLC in the meantime. Is any of it "essential"?

 

[Zeriel]

As usual, the added national focuses are decent to good, but everything else pretty much sucks. Man the Guns is another failed abortion of a UI that makes the game worse presented as a starring feature.

 

[HeroMarine]

Try again next year.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

I really wish there was some game that combined HoI4's approach to combat (with the battle lines and an almost complete lack of direct influence) with not being entirely focused on warfare.
Whenever I tried HoI4, I was intrigued by the combat, but pushed away by absolutely everything being about warfare. Trade, economy, politics, society... none of that really plays any significant role.

I get it, it's a WW2 game. I just wish someone took parts of it and put it in a game with a not-exclusively-about-warfare focus.

Don't forget demographics.

I want that game so bad. Maybe one day I will just become the change I want in the world.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

I really wish there was some game that combined HoI4's approach to combat (with the battle lines and an almost complete lack of direct influence) with not being entirely focused on warfare.
Whenever I tried HoI4, I was intrigued by the combat, but pushed away by absolutely everything being about warfare. Trade, economy, politics, society... none of that really plays any significant role.

I get it, it's a WW2 game. I just wish someone took parts of it and put it in a game with a not-exclusively-about-warfare focus.

Many of us wargamers have been waiting years for a game like that. Most modern wargames take a meta approach and the higher you get with control options, the more unfocused and generalized the options and data. I'd prefer a game where it was the other way around. In a global conflict scale game, I'd rather focus more on fronts, policies, and the best use of army forces, not spending time trying to decide whether my battleships have 8 inch or 10 inch guns or what kind of small arms the infantry has. The minutiae of HOI style games goes way too far with that 'war designer' approach, instead of actually making you feel like a commander in chief or at least a high general war planner. Paradox's wargames may give you the power to wage war, but your time spent doing it makes you feel more like a file clerk than a heroic leader or brilliant strategist.

Ageod began using decision cards for its previous titles, which do offer some more options when it comes to directing the conflicts. The Decisive Campaigns series also does this well with their WWII games. The closet thing HOI has is the event popups, but they're usually very scripted and offer limited choices when changing anything. I'd prefer a more cause-and-effect approach to events (example such as instituting a draft - you get more recruits, but loyalty and production rates suffer from pulling men away from homes/factories).

 

[AwesomeButton]

The minutiae of HOI style games goes way too far with that 'war designer' approach, instead of actually making you feel like a commander in chief or at least a high general war planner.

Paradox's wargames may give you the power to wage war, but your time spent doing it makes you feel more like a file clerk than a heroic leader or brilliant strategist.

Hah, sorry to burst your bubble, but that's how it seems to have been In Churchill's memories, he devotes a huge amount of space commenting precisely on what types of ships, airplanes, etc. they were considering between, going into a lot of technical details, which they were discussing in various commitee meetings, where he and other politicians would sit down with engineering experts. I'll need some time to dig up exact quotes, but it was surprising to me how true to life HoI 4 was in that regard. How much all your choices matter inside the game is another subject.

In Hitler or Stalin's case it wasn't much different, I think they both had to make use of expert advice, and I know they both liked to meddle in all areas of conducting the war including where they had no qualifications to.

 

[Space Satan]

What annoyed me the most is that should you lose some capital ships, then it is extremely hard to perform a comeback. Battleships and carriers are slow to build. Ships are being constructed for years. Which is why most navies were damn old at that time. And common fear of losing your navy in a decisive battle means capital ships are sitting on their bases and some expendable shit are fighting other expendable shit.
Even if japs would win Midway that won't matter much, because japs were bogged with megalomanic projects and could not cope with US naval prodcution