Hello!

During this week we'll be releasing one tutorial video a day where glorious DDRJake explains some basic concepts of the game in an easy to understand manner.

The purpose of these videos is to make short and easy to find guides on specific topics. Once the game is released we expect a ton of user made let's plays and tutorials. Since these tend to be quite long, and it might be hard to find the specific thing you have questions about, We made these. I like to call them wiki articles in video format.

We start off with video #1 - Battle Plans! Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRkkqv6B7I8

Want to learn more?
The Hearts of Iron IV wiki

Hello!

During this week we'll be releasing one tutorial video a day where glorious DDRJake explains some basic concepts of the game in an easy to understand manner.

The purpose of these videos is to make short and easy to find guides on specific topics. Once the game is released we expect a ton of user made let's plays and tutorials. Since these tend to be quite long, and it might be hard to find the specific thing you have questions about, We made these. I like to call them wiki articles in video format.

We start off with video #1 - Battle Plans! Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRkkqv6B7I8

Want to learn more?
The Hearts of Iron IV wiki

Hi everyone! Today we will be talking about something pretty important: How to learn how to play Hearts of Iron IV! To help with this we have two important tools: Tutorial & Game Wiki.

Tutorial
Hearts of Iron IV is very much the easiest HOI to get into, but it is still a complex hardcore game, and as such we want people to get the best and smoothest start possible on the way to mastering it.



HOI4 features a somewhat nonlinear tutorial where you will be starting off as Italy and learning about different aspects of the game. Each step will generally also contain links to in-depth info on the Wiki (more about that soon). Italy is a good country to learn with because it puts you in a pretty easy war with ethiopia right away and it's pretty much up to you when and how you get involved with WW2. The tutorial is also not something that ends, so you can keep playing on as Italy with the same savegame if you so chose (recommended for first playthrough).



Wiki
In my opinion a complete and up to date wiki is an important part of playing and learning to master a Paradox grand strategy title so we wanted to make sure there was a wiki available from launch and also that it was integrated in the game. Thats right, we now have an ingame browser so reading info won't take you out of the game experience and its possible to open links directly from the game in it.
The browser can be set up to use your regular external one if you like also, which is pretty nice if you have multiple screens. For people on trains or otherwise disconnected from the internet - the game ships with an offline version of the wiki as well you can decide to use instead.

You can go check out the wiki already here.

We will also be releasing a series of beginner tutorial videos starting next week for people who prefer to learn by observing :)

See you guys next friday when we'll do the last diary before release!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

Hi everyone! Today we will be talking about something pretty important: How to learn how to play Hearts of Iron IV! To help with this we have two important tools: Tutorial & Game Wiki.

Tutorial
Hearts of Iron IV is very much the easiest HOI to get into, but it is still a complex hardcore game, and as such we want people to get the best and smoothest start possible on the way to mastering it.



HOI4 features a somewhat nonlinear tutorial where you will be starting off as Italy and learning about different aspects of the game. Each step will generally also contain links to in-depth info on the Wiki (more about that soon). Italy is a good country to learn with because it puts you in a pretty easy war with ethiopia right away and it's pretty much up to you when and how you get involved with WW2. The tutorial is also not something that ends, so you can keep playing on as Italy with the same savegame if you so chose (recommended for first playthrough).



Wiki
In my opinion a complete and up to date wiki is an important part of playing and learning to master a Paradox grand strategy title so we wanted to make sure there was a wiki available from launch and also that it was integrated in the game. Thats right, we now have an ingame browser so reading info won't take you out of the game experience and its possible to open links directly from the game in it.
The browser can be set up to use your regular external one if you like also, which is pretty nice if you have multiple screens. For people on trains or otherwise disconnected from the internet - the game ships with an offline version of the wiki as well you can decide to use instead.

You can go check out the wiki already here.

We will also be releasing a series of beginner tutorial videos starting next week for people who prefer to learn by observing :)

See you guys next friday when we'll do the last diary before release!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

Hello everyone! We are getting close to release now with preorder started a few days ago.
When we posponed HOI4 release it was mostly a question of getting more time for programmers to fix bugs, which left our scripters and artists a little underused. We figured we would put this to use on adding more flavor and fun for some minor. We have a lot of polish players, so focusing on Poland seemed to be a good idea. We werent sure if we would get this complete on time, and since we wanted to see if this kind of content packs would be well received we figured the best idea was to make it a separate DLC from the base game. Things worked out and it got ready on time, so we decided we should just release it to everyone for free (this isn't just for preorder, you will get it whenever you buy HOI4, forever).
If this is popular we hope this is the first of a series of packs we'll make as DLC in the future.

So, what does it contain?

• Focus tree.
  
• 2D art for tanks & planes, complete with flavor names.
  
• 2D art for ministers, generals and country leaders.
  
• 3D art for infantry and some more well known tanks and planes
  
• Some achievements & events.

Polish Focuses
We had two rules when we designed these, first that the Polish focus tree could not be worse than the neutral one and secondly we felt it could not depend on other people's focus trees.

We made sure that all the benefits you get from neutral tree are still there, but made sure that they carried a lot more Polish flavour. In the end we were able to do some really cool things with Poland. The industrialization efforts of Poland are mainly based a short term national investment called the Four Year Plan. Parts of this plan included heavy investment in infrastructure, activation of the Old Polish Industrial Region and developing the Central Industrial Region. We have taken inspiration from the plan and implemented its different parts as branches of the Polish focus tree.

We also focused on the fact that Poland was way ahead of other countries when it came to the decryption of the German Enigma machine. To reflect this, Poland gets special focuses that give them them bonuses in computing and decryption.

When it came to diplomacy we wanted to add additional options for a Polish player who is surrounded by threats. Although we cannot stop Germany and the USSR from trying to carve up Poland (those focuses are elsewhere), we did feel we could have Poland seek accommodation with either power. If you play your cards right this could also lead to an alliance with them (which blocks the “carve up” focuses for that side).

That isn't the most interesting path, however, as digging around in history we stumbled across a rather ambitious Polish plan, called the Between the Seas Concept. This was a proposed alliance of countries between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (one suggestion including Italy, no less). The idea ultimately failed due to a whole number of reasons which are too many to mention.

Still, it’s an intriguing idea, and one we felt we could something really cool with. If Poland chooses to go for the Between the Seas Concept they can set up an entire faction of their own. Although the Balkans are rocky ground for Poland, the Baltic States was an option. Especially if Poland could make up with Lithuania after the rather unfortunate disagreement over the status of Wilno (or Vilnius, depending on which side you were on). So Poland has the option to carve out its own little mini-faction in the center of Europe. From there it is up to a skillful Polish player to grow their alliance and stand strong against both East and West.




Equipment and names
For the Polish DLC we wanted Poland to feel like a fully fleshed out country. This included the names of equipment, which is a challenge for a country that wasn't too active in the research department after 1939. We therefore had to resolve to our least favorite tool when it comes to historical research: making things up.

If we look at ships, the Polish Navy during World War II was just a few destroyers and submarines. However, it gave us something to work with, and so for the names of more advanced classes we tried to followed the same naming convention as the ones we did have information for. That leaves only a slightly small gap, namely every other ship class. Time to get creative!

For light cruisers we went for Polish cities. As an added bonuses the naming order is by population size in the 1930s, a fun little detail for Polish fans. When it came to Heavy Cruisers we chose rivers in Poland, those mighty arteries binding the country together. The first class is named after the Polish Victory against the USSR in 1920 at the Battle of the Niemen (or course Poland would want to name a ship class after that). The follow up classes then get names after other rivers in Poland.

That's it for the easy ones, it’s time to dig a little deeper. We needed two names for Battlecruisers, and ultimately settled on territories that Poland felt were rightfully hers. For the mighty Battleships we went big and named them after Polish Royal dynasties. We saved the biggest man of Polish interwar politics for the biggest ship, the first Polish Super Heavy Battleship Class is the Pilsudski class. We needed two, though, so we also went for another famous Polish Marshall, Poniatowski (the man I am sure unbiased Polish historians agree would have won the Battle of Borodino, if only Napoleon would have released the Imperial Guard to support his flank attack). This left just the carriers and for ´those we went for Polish Kings, starting with the savior of Vienna, Jan Sobieski.





Next week we will be talking about tutorials, wiki and stuff like that. On wednesday we got another episode of World War Wednesday where Daniel & SteelVolt take the helm of communist France, and also more modding stream so make sure to tune in!

Also, remember to preorder so I can beg Fredrik for a real office T-34!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

Hello everyone! We are getting close to release now with preorder started a few days ago.
When we posponed HOI4 release it was mostly a question of getting more time for programmers to fix bugs, which left our scripters and artists a little underused. We figured we would put this to use on adding more flavor and fun for some minor. We have a lot of polish players, so focusing on Poland seemed to be a good idea. We werent sure if we would get this complete on time, and since we wanted to see if this kind of content packs would be well received we figured the best idea was to make it a separate DLC from the base game. Things worked out and it got ready on time, so we decided we should just release it to everyone for free (this isn't just for preorder, you will get it whenever you buy HOI4, forever).
If this is popular we hope this is the first of a series of packs we'll make as DLC in the future.

So, what does it contain?

• Focus tree.
  
• 2D art for tanks & planes, complete with flavor names.
  
• 2D art for ministers, generals and country leaders.
  
• 3D art for infantry and some more well known tanks and planes
  
• Some achievements & events.

Polish Focuses
We had two rules when we designed these, first that the Polish focus tree could not be worse than the neutral one and secondly we felt it could not depend on other people's focus trees.

We made sure that all the benefits you get from neutral tree are still there, but made sure that they carried a lot more Polish flavour. In the end we were able to do some really cool things with Poland. The industrialization efforts of Poland are mainly based a short term national investment called the Four Year Plan. Parts of this plan included heavy investment in infrastructure, activation of the Old Polish Industrial Region and developing the Central Industrial Region. We have taken inspiration from the plan and implemented its different parts as branches of the Polish focus tree.

We also focused on the fact that Poland was way ahead of other countries when it came to the decryption of the German Enigma machine. To reflect this, Poland gets special focuses that give them them bonuses in computing and decryption.

When it came to diplomacy we wanted to add additional options for a Polish player who is surrounded by threats. Although we cannot stop Germany and the USSR from trying to carve up Poland (those focuses are elsewhere), we did feel we could have Poland seek accommodation with either power. If you play your cards right this could also lead to an alliance with them (which blocks the “carve up” focuses for that side).

That isn't the most interesting path, however, as digging around in history we stumbled across a rather ambitious Polish plan, called the Between the Seas Concept. This was a proposed alliance of countries between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (one suggestion including Italy, no less). The idea ultimately failed due to a whole number of reasons which are too many to mention.

Still, it’s an intriguing idea, and one we felt we could something really cool with. If Poland chooses to go for the Between the Seas Concept they can set up an entire faction of their own. Although the Balkans are rocky ground for Poland, the Baltic States was an option. Especially if Poland could make up with Lithuania after the rather unfortunate disagreement over the status of Wilno (or Vilnius, depending on which side you were on). So Poland has the option to carve out its own little mini-faction in the center of Europe. From there it is up to a skillful Polish player to grow their alliance and stand strong against both East and West.




Equipment and names
For the Polish DLC we wanted Poland to feel like a fully fleshed out country. This included the names of equipment, which is a challenge for a country that wasn't too active in the research department after 1939. We therefore had to resolve to our least favorite tool when it comes to historical research: making things up.

If we look at ships, the Polish Navy during World War II was just a few destroyers and submarines. However, it gave us something to work with, and so for the names of more advanced classes we tried to followed the same naming convention as the ones we did have information for. That leaves only a slightly small gap, namely every other ship class. Time to get creative!

For light cruisers we went for Polish cities. As an added bonuses the naming order is by population size in the 1930s, a fun little detail for Polish fans. When it came to Heavy Cruisers we chose rivers in Poland, those mighty arteries binding the country together. The first class is named after the Polish Victory against the USSR in 1920 at the Battle of the Niemen (or course Poland would want to name a ship class after that). The follow up classes then get names after other rivers in Poland.

That's it for the easy ones, it’s time to dig a little deeper. We needed two names for Battlecruisers, and ultimately settled on territories that Poland felt were rightfully hers. For the mighty Battleships we went big and named them after Polish Royal dynasties. We saved the biggest man of Polish interwar politics for the biggest ship, the first Polish Super Heavy Battleship Class is the Pilsudski class. We needed two, though, so we also went for another famous Polish Marshall, Poniatowski (the man I am sure unbiased Polish historians agree would have won the Battle of Borodino, if only Napoleon would have released the Imperial Guard to support his flank attack). This left just the carriers and for ´those we went for Polish Kings, starting with the savior of Vienna, Jan Sobieski.





Next week we will be talking about tutorials, wiki and stuff like that. On wednesday we got another episode of World War Wednesday where Daniel & SteelVolt take the helm of communist France, and also more modding stream so make sure to tune in!

Also, remember to preorder so I can beg Fredrik for a real office T-34!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEN5SEb5ASA

You can find the Information and FAQ thread here!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEN5SEb5ASA

You can find the Information and FAQ thread here!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360

Hi everyone! At this point we have covered almost all big features of Hearts of Iron IV, so today I thought I would highlight some of the smaller changes we have done and give a little update on where we are in the project. Right now our Release Candidate has been approved which means that no matter what we have something of good quality to release, and the release date 6th of June is safely locked in! At the moment we are working on further balancing and bug fixing for a release day patch.

Straits and Canals
The straits system in HOI4 is our most flexible and moddable yet. Each strait can have different rules to better match historical rules rather than trying to fit it all under a general blanket. Each strait has a list of provinces that needs to be controlled to decide the rules and they can have 4 states in relation to you:
Friendly - you and allies control all provinces.
Contested - Control of provinces is mixed between you and someone you are at war with generally blocking you both.
Enemy - Controlled by enemy, generally blocking you completely although some may let submarines through.
Neutral - You are neither friend or foe. Usually means you can go through unless it's something like the Panama Canal, or the Turkish Straits where only trade is allowed.
For each of these a strait can specify what happens with military transports, fleets, trade and submarines.


Manpower, Anti Air and Naval battles
To better be able to model historical use of manpower and for balance reasons Fleets and Air wings now require quite a bit of manpower tied up in shore/ground crews. This means we can get a much more interesting tradeoff for nations like USA and Britain. If you run out of manpower now you won't be able to form air wings or deploy ships.
We have also done changes to how static anti-air works. It now gives a clear damage reduction to bombing in its state and will also shoot down bombers so it's a much more worthwhile investment. In fact if you combine lots of anti air and the Dispersed Industry track in industry research you can remove the majority of bombing damage letting you fight outnumbered in the air easier.
Oh we also added extra details you can toggle on for naval battle reports if you want to dig into all the details of a combat, looks like this:


Graphics Settings
In an attempt to help out people with less endowed computers we have added a ton of settings to graphics where you can lower texture resolutions and turn off visual features. You can for example turn off all 3D models leaving you with just counters.


Airplanes and art
Japanese and US carrier planes now have awesome unique art where they differed from base model. We also fixed a few odd choices. For example the He 111 no longer has to fill the shoes of strategic bomber for Germany and gets moved to tactical instead. In its early game place we now instead have the Dornier Do 19.


We will now be entering the home stretch push for HOI4 before release, so expect more videos and streams in the coming weeks. In fact we have a special longer World War Wednesday Tuesday planned next week at 17:00 CEST. If you aren't completely busy purging evil xeno fungi across the galaxy in Stellaris you can help as well: Pull your friends away from whatever they are doing and tell them about WW2 and HOI4! At this point our aim is, to quote Churchill: Victory at all costs!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

Hi everyone! At this point we have covered almost all big features of Hearts of Iron IV, so today I thought I would highlight some of the smaller changes we have done and give a little update on where we are in the project. Right now our Release Candidate has been approved which means that no matter what we have something of good quality to release, and the release date 6th of June is safely locked in! At the moment we are working on further balancing and bug fixing for a release day patch.

Straits and Canals
The straits system in HOI4 is our most flexible and moddable yet. Each strait can have different rules to better match historical rules rather than trying to fit it all under a general blanket. Each strait has a list of provinces that needs to be controlled to decide the rules and they can have 4 states in relation to you:
Friendly - you and allies control all provinces.
Contested - Control of provinces is mixed between you and someone you are at war with generally blocking you both.
Enemy - Controlled by enemy, generally blocking you completely although some may let submarines through.
Neutral - You are neither friend or foe. Usually means you can go through unless it's something like the Panama Canal, or the Turkish Straits where only trade is allowed.
For each of these a strait can specify what happens with military transports, fleets, trade and submarines.


Manpower, Anti Air and Naval battles
To better be able to model historical use of manpower and for balance reasons Fleets and Air wings now require quite a bit of manpower tied up in shore/ground crews. This means we can get a much more interesting tradeoff for nations like USA and Britain. If you run out of manpower now you won't be able to form air wings or deploy ships.
We have also done changes to how static anti-air works. It now gives a clear damage reduction to bombing in its state and will also shoot down bombers so it's a much more worthwhile investment. In fact if you combine lots of anti air and the Dispersed Industry track in industry research you can remove the majority of bombing damage letting you fight outnumbered in the air easier.
Oh we also added extra details you can toggle on for naval battle reports if you want to dig into all the details of a combat, looks like this:


Graphics Settings
In an attempt to help out people with less endowed computers we have added a ton of settings to graphics where you can lower texture resolutions and turn off visual features. You can for example turn off all 3D models leaving you with just counters.


Airplanes and art
Japanese and US carrier planes now have awesome unique art where they differed from base model. We also fixed a few odd choices. For example the He 111 no longer has to fill the shoes of strategic bomber for Germany and gets moved to tactical instead. In its early game place we now instead have the Dornier Do 19.


We will now be entering the home stretch push for HOI4 before release, so expect more videos and streams in the coming weeks. In fact we have a special longer World War Wednesday Tuesday planned next week at 17:00 CEST. If you aren't completely busy purging evil xeno fungi across the galaxy in Stellaris you can help as well: Pull your friends away from whatever they are doing and tell them about WW2 and HOI4! At this point our aim is, to quote Churchill: Victory at all costs!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive