Hello everyone, this is going to be a very short diary because the team is knee deep with work on the Sunflower patch today.

Patch is coming along and bugs have been squashed this week, but there are no major new features to talk about this week. The funniest bug found was probably the one where German AI, presumably due to its strong sense of honor, refused to attack units it massively outnumbered (say 40 divisions of medium tanks vs 2 infantry divisions sitting on Copenhagen). We are also looking at integrating the Enhanced Peace Conference AI mod into the patch, because frankly it works well and its creator is a nice guy who gave us permission :)

Oh yeah, also our artist added more neat icons (now 14 in total) for your Armies so it's easier to keep them apart:


Now for something totally different! As you know our games collect stats and metrics and who doesn't love stats?

• 12% of players use Nato counters (this jumped a whole percentage when Black ICE and August Storm mods released)
  
• 12% play multiplayer
  
• 20% play ironman
  
• The most popular major nations are Germany at ~40% of games, Soviet (15%) and USA (12%). France is least popular at 6%.
  
• 35% are played as a minor nation
  
• Mods are super popular! Around half of daily active games use mods of some kind. We are really excited by this, because we spent a lot of time making sure HOI was easy to mod and easy to get mods for in the workshop.

Among mods the most popular ones are cosmetic. Here are the top 3:

• Colored Buttons
  
• More Division Icons
  
• Flavor Names extended

When it comes to daily active players I can't quote exact numbers, but compared to other games and how its historically looked the numbers for HOI4 are strong which looks great for the future :)

I know everybody was hoping for a patch this week (including us!), but we also want to make sure things are as good as they can be when we release, and especially since we are still dealing with a lot of illness among team members we need to push it a little longer. You will know it when I do when the patch is ready :)

See you all next week, in another life where we are all cats (cats playing 1.2 Sunflower)

Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive

Hello everyone, this is going to be a very short diary because the team is knee deep with work on the Sunflower patch today.

Patch is coming along and bugs have been squashed this week, but there are no major new features to talk about this week. The funniest bug found was probably the one where German AI, presumably due to its strong sense of honor, refused to attack units it massively outnumbered (say 40 divisions of medium tanks vs 2 infantry divisions sitting on Copenhagen). We are also looking at integrating the Enhanced Peace Conference AI mod into the patch, because frankly it works well and its creator is a nice guy who gave us permission :)

Oh yeah, also our artist added more neat icons (now 14 in total) for your Armies so it's easier to keep them apart:


Now for something totally different! As you know our games collect stats and metrics and who doesn't love stats?

• 12% of players use Nato counters (this jumped a whole percentage when Black ICE and August Storm mods released)
  
• 12% play multiplayer
  
• 20% play ironman
  
• The most popular major nations are Germany at ~40% of games, Soviet (15%) and USA (12%). France is least popular at 6%.
  
• 35% are played as a minor nation
  
• Mods are super popular! Around half of daily active games use mods of some kind. We are really excited by this, because we spent a lot of time making sure HOI was easy to mod and easy to get mods for in the workshop.

Among mods the most popular ones are cosmetic. Here are the top 3:

• Colored Buttons
  
• More Division Icons
  
• Flavor Names extended

When it comes to daily active players I can't quote exact numbers, but compared to other games and how its historically looked the numbers for HOI4 are strong which looks great for the future :)

I know everybody was hoping for a patch this week (including us!), but we also want to make sure things are as good as they can be when we release, and especially since we are still dealing with a lot of illness among team members we need to push it a little longer. You will know it when I do when the patch is ready :)

See you all next week, in another life where we are all cats (cats playing 1.2 Sunflower)

Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive

Hi everyone! Friday means its time to give you all a fresh update on Sunflower (1.2 patch) progress! Its starting to come together nicely now, so without further ado, here is what's been happening...

GUI improvements
Managing a lot of divisions training in parallel can get hard to get an overview of so now it’s possible to compact the entries. As an added help we now color training that is blocked by lack of equipment making it much easier to manage your queue size.


As a minor improvement to support the work on next section naval battle and port strike reports now give a quick summary over damage to survivors as well so you know how much was done in total and naval invasion alerts are more relevant and accurate.

Naval Balance
There has been a bunch of reports about the submarine game not working so well, so this week we fixed bugs and tweaked submarines and convoy raiding. The big bug was that raiders would attack empty routes (supply convoy routes to places with enough local supply, so that they weren't used), this meant that they would be attacking non-existent convoys in a bunch of places rather than real ones making it appear as if it was impossible to catch anything there. General detection was also too low and has been tweaked up. The way sunk convoys affected efficiency of transport also had problems and have been tweaked for much stronger impact now. Starving out islands with a lot of defenders work a lot better now and raiding convoys can be pretty potent!


The AI’s use of fleets and missions have been improved a lot for Sunflower, but it’s still an area that needs more work to be really competitive with players. It’s something we will put effort into in the future.

General balance-wise we have been working on stuff to promote mixed fleets better and discourage light cruiser spam and lowering the impact of evasion in combat, meanwhile torpedoes have also gotten stronger. It’s going to need some more tweaking before the patch is out, but naval balance is now already much better!

Script update
We feel it is a shame that so many of the Soviet loving players chose to avoid the fiery alternate history path that picks Leon Trotsky. It simply has not made sense from a pure gameplay perspective. We’ve added a focus to address the issue that Trotsky is a much weaker choice than Stalin.

After winning the civil war, a Soviet player will be able to pick the focus ‘Permanent Revolution’, which unlocks parts of the same tree that ‘The Great Purge’ does.


Once the focus is completed, Trotsky’s trait will change to ‘Triumphant Revolutionary’. This will remove his Political Power penalty and make it much cheaper to help fuel more righteous worker revolutions across the globe.

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”- Trotsky


The focus trees have long been a source of many weird, funny and frustrating bugs.
The exiled government of Germany would demand Memel from Lithuania, who would then lie down flat and hand over the territory. Countries would welcome their invaders by building infrastructure and factories in the occupied territories. Diplomatic pressure on Turkey would make them a puppet of the exiled Germany. The USA would view a democratic Germany as still being ‘The Fascist Menace’ and jump at the first chance of war with them. Japan would go for war with the USA, despite being pushed back to the islands by the Chinese.

These and many other issues with the National Foci have been addressed in the upcoming patch.

I’ll mention a few of the general changes here:

• As a general rule foci are blocked when a country has capitulated. We’ve added an option in script to unblock it for when the foci still make sense to complete.
  
• Adding buildings via focus should now look for control of the state before building.
  
• Blocked some of the foci leading to war if the nation has the same ideology.

At the moment there are some AI issues left to deal with, but if all goes well I hope we can get the Sunflower patch wrapped up during next week, at least as an open beta for public testing. Thanks for being patient!

Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive

Hi everyone! Friday means its time to give you all a fresh update on Sunflower (1.2 patch) progress! Its starting to come together nicely now, so without further ado, here is what's been happening...

GUI improvements
Managing a lot of divisions training in parallel can get hard to get an overview of so now it’s possible to compact the entries. As an added help we now color training that is blocked by lack of equipment making it much easier to manage your queue size.


As a minor improvement to support the work on next section naval battle and port strike reports now give a quick summary over damage to survivors as well so you know how much was done in total and naval invasion alerts are more relevant and accurate.

Naval Balance
There has been a bunch of reports about the submarine game not working so well, so this week we fixed bugs and tweaked submarines and convoy raiding. The big bug was that raiders would attack empty routes (supply convoy routes to places with enough local supply, so that they weren't used), this meant that they would be attacking non-existent convoys in a bunch of places rather than real ones making it appear as if it was impossible to catch anything there. General detection was also too low and has been tweaked up. The way sunk convoys affected efficiency of transport also had problems and have been tweaked for much stronger impact now. Starving out islands with a lot of defenders work a lot better now and raiding convoys can be pretty potent!


The AI’s use of fleets and missions have been improved a lot for Sunflower, but it’s still an area that needs more work to be really competitive with players. It’s something we will put effort into in the future.

General balance-wise we have been working on stuff to promote mixed fleets better and discourage light cruiser spam and lowering the impact of evasion in combat, meanwhile torpedoes have also gotten stronger. It’s going to need some more tweaking before the patch is out, but naval balance is now already much better!

Script update
We feel it is a shame that so many of the Soviet loving players chose to avoid the fiery alternate history path that picks Leon Trotsky. It simply has not made sense from a pure gameplay perspective. We’ve added a focus to address the issue that Trotsky is a much weaker choice than Stalin.

After winning the civil war, a Soviet player will be able to pick the focus ‘Permanent Revolution’, which unlocks parts of the same tree that ‘The Great Purge’ does.


Once the focus is completed, Trotsky’s trait will change to ‘Triumphant Revolutionary’. This will remove his Political Power penalty and make it much cheaper to help fuel more righteous worker revolutions across the globe.

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”- Trotsky


The focus trees have long been a source of many weird, funny and frustrating bugs.
The exiled government of Germany would demand Memel from Lithuania, who would then lie down flat and hand over the territory. Countries would welcome their invaders by building infrastructure and factories in the occupied territories. Diplomatic pressure on Turkey would make them a puppet of the exiled Germany. The USA would view a democratic Germany as still being ‘The Fascist Menace’ and jump at the first chance of war with them. Japan would go for war with the USA, despite being pushed back to the islands by the Chinese.

These and many other issues with the National Foci have been addressed in the upcoming patch.

I’ll mention a few of the general changes here:

• As a general rule foci are blocked when a country has capitulated. We’ve added an option in script to unblock it for when the foci still make sense to complete.
  
• Adding buildings via focus should now look for control of the state before building.
  
• Blocked some of the foci leading to war if the nation has the same ideology.

At the moment there are some AI issues left to deal with, but if all goes well I hope we can get the Sunflower patch wrapped up during next week, at least as an open beta for public testing. Thanks for being patient!

Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive

Hi everyone and welcome to this weeks diary with an update on Sunflower (1.2) patch. This is a great diary because its mostly written by other team members while I grab the credit of posting it! :D First up is Voffvoffhunden with new nations we are adding in.

New Nations
Have you ever felt that the Soviet Union was a bit of a big, threatening blob, but that there was little you could do about it apart from taking all their territory for yourself?

Things are about to get a whole lot more colorful!

You can for example enjoy a stay in the breadbasket of Eastern Europe, as the territory of the Ukrainian SSR joins the fray as releasable cores! Get yourself a nice little puppet just a grenade’s throw from Moscow, or release it from the Soviet Union, take control and have your own little reconquest against Poland.




Of course, one pesky country doesn’t do much for the breakup of the Soviet Union, so let’s all give it up for our favorite Caucasus trio!

Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are releasable, and offer a whole new regional playground. I hear Tbilisi is lovely this time of the century.




As Poland gets invaded, Georgia might look to set up its own little empire Between the Other Seas, Azerbaijan might want push towards Stalingrad to ensure it controls ALL the Caspian oil, and Armenia, bordered on all sides by larger potential enemies, offers a whole new challenge for those players who like to play small nations and make them big.

Now, we hear you, some people prefer hotter climates to former Soviet states, and some players would rather dismantle the Allies than the Comintern.

For you there’s always Southeast Asia!




Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia can now hang out with Siam, offering new and challenging paths to domination in East Asia, or more states to turn into precious communist puppets.

We’re not stopping with the French-controlled mainland, however, as both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands can get a sock to the jaw as you force them to release Indonesia and Malaysia!



The colonial map will never be the same again.

Looking to the future, there is a lot more we want to do, to allow enterprising players to redraw the world map through victory, or give themselves new challenges.

Even with the new countries released, the Soviet Union is still an enormous block that we will be looking to add even more cores to. There are the Soviet republics of Central Asia, of course, which will be a huge chunk of territory. These will be followed by some more Soviet republics that never became independent, but which a forceful peace treaty might find use for to guarantee global stability/overlordship.

There’s also some more work to be done in Asia, such as the division of India, and Papua New Guinea, which Australia currently clamps on to with fists of steel.

Then there’s Western North Africa, where the control of France and Spain is a little too secure. That brings us on to the subject of the rest of Africa, which has just an immense number of post-colonial states whose independence is tightly tied to the era.

From there, we’ll see where future updates take us!

Theoretical states are always interesting, and who knows, I’ve heard a rumor that Texas really wants to secede from the Union...

AI Update from SteelVolt
This week I started out making sure that the AI is capable of canceling deployment lines when it badly needs the equipment in the field. Following up on that I am currently working on improving the AIs template upgrade and selection capabilities as well as fixing a bug or two in that system that popped up during development.

Oh, and there was that funny bug: AI could give away states to countries not at war with the original owner, leading to it being immediately given back...to the original owner!

See you all next week!

Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive

Hi everyone and welcome to this weeks diary with an update on Sunflower (1.2) patch. This is a great diary because its mostly written by other team members while I grab the credit of posting it! :D First up is Voffvoffhunden with new nations we are adding in.

New Nations
Have you ever felt that the Soviet Union was a bit of a big, threatening blob, but that there was little you could do about it apart from taking all their territory for yourself?

Things are about to get a whole lot more colorful!

You can for example enjoy a stay in the breadbasket of Eastern Europe, as the territory of the Ukrainian SSR joins the fray as releasable cores! Get yourself a nice little puppet just a grenade’s throw from Moscow, or release it from the Soviet Union, take control and have your own little reconquest against Poland.




Of course, one pesky country doesn’t do much for the breakup of the Soviet Union, so let’s all give it up for our favorite Caucasus trio!

Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are releasable, and offer a whole new regional playground. I hear Tbilisi is lovely this time of the century.




As Poland gets invaded, Georgia might look to set up its own little empire Between the Other Seas, Azerbaijan might want push towards Stalingrad to ensure it controls ALL the Caspian oil, and Armenia, bordered on all sides by larger potential enemies, offers a whole new challenge for those players who like to play small nations and make them big.

Now, we hear you, some people prefer hotter climates to former Soviet states, and some players would rather dismantle the Allies than the Comintern.

For you there’s always Southeast Asia!




Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia can now hang out with Siam, offering new and challenging paths to domination in East Asia, or more states to turn into precious communist puppets.

We’re not stopping with the French-controlled mainland, however, as both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands can get a sock to the jaw as you force them to release Indonesia and Malaysia!



The colonial map will never be the same again.

Looking to the future, there is a lot more we want to do, to allow enterprising players to redraw the world map through victory, or give themselves new challenges.

Even with the new countries released, the Soviet Union is still an enormous block that we will be looking to add even more cores to. There are the Soviet republics of Central Asia, of course, which will be a huge chunk of territory. These will be followed by some more Soviet republics that never became independent, but which a forceful peace treaty might find use for to guarantee global stability/overlordship.

There’s also some more work to be done in Asia, such as the division of India, and Papua New Guinea, which Australia currently clamps on to with fists of steel.

Then there’s Western North Africa, where the control of France and Spain is a little too secure. That brings us on to the subject of the rest of Africa, which has just an immense number of post-colonial states whose independence is tightly tied to the era.

From there, we’ll see where future updates take us!

Theoretical states are always interesting, and who knows, I’ve heard a rumor that Texas really wants to secede from the Union...

AI Update from SteelVolt
This week I started out making sure that the AI is capable of canceling deployment lines when it badly needs the equipment in the field. Following up on that I am currently working on improving the AIs template upgrade and selection capabilities as well as fixing a bug or two in that system that popped up during development.

Oh, and there was that funny bug: AI could give away states to countries not at war with the original owner, leading to it being immediately given back...to the original owner!

See you all next week!

Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive

Hi everyone! It's been a very empty office this week between gamescom and sickness (I'm starting to wonder if the CK2 team is testing their new plague expansion stuff on us!) but we've still managed to get some stuff done on the Sunflower(1.2) patch.

Port Strikes
As many of you have noted port strikes are very hard to defend against and feel unbalanced. You can now only perform port strikes if enemy air superiority isn't above a certain level (30% is what we are testing atm), basically it means there needs to be no defenders or you need to have air superiority for the mission to perform at all. We are also adding stacking penalty in the same way land combats work, to simulate that there just isn't enough room for 1000 bombers to strike the same small fleet. We have also been looking at some other naval issues, but more about that in the future.

AI
The main focuses this week for AI has been making sure ai upgrades its templates better and naval missions.

The naval mission AI should now use the ships at its disposal much better and prioritize defending invasions. The issues with Ai creating long invasion plans it could not cover and never managing to invade japanese home island shouldn't happen anymore now for example. It also had a tendency to be overly protective of areas with convoy raiding leading to very nonoptimal fleets being organized for hunting.

When it comes to division templates SteelVolt managed to squash some bugs related to switching them out and we now have a scriptable progression system for the AI to use. It was for example not able to realise that it could progress its light armor templates to medium armor templates before. I imagine this will be very welcome among modders as well to be able to custom tweak nations. For those who dare to look at code, here is an example:

light_armor_default = { target_width = 19.9 width_weight = 0.1 column_swap_factor = 0.1 stat_weights = { <snip> } target_template = { weight = 0.9 support = { engineer = 1 recon = 1 artillery = 1 } regiments = { light_armor = 4 motorized = 5 infantry = 1 } } allowed_types = { <snip> } replace_at_match = 0.9 replace_with = medium_armor_default }

The important bit here being
[COLOR=#ffff00]replace_at_match = 0.9
replace_with = medium_armor_default[/color]

This is an example from the light armor template, which will change to the medium armor template once it has a match of 90%.

Do note that the "entry point" of a template must follow the naming convention given (for example 'light_armor_default'), but after that it should work with any name at all, meaning those templates would not be picked by AI in any other way than through the scripted progression.

If you don't spend all day looking at code, the above basically translates into more interesting AI opponents ;)

Other AI improvements we have been working on this week is improving its avoidance of small encirclements and making sure it can handle building of nuclear reactors for late game, so beware nukes flying :). Next week for ai we plan to focus on many minor issues to improve AI performance, like making sure it doesn't tie up too much equipment in training when it needs it in the field to help with casualties.

The plan for the patch is to be able to release it (as a open beta first) in 2-3 weeks barring any outbreaks of plague. Next Friday we'll have some more updates for you as well as talk about some new additions that will be in the patch:


Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Europa Universalis IV Wiki
Europa Universalis IV Development Diary Archive

Hi everyone! It's been a very empty office this week between gamescom and sickness (I'm starting to wonder if the CK2 team is testing their new plague expansion stuff on us!) but we've still managed to get some stuff done on the Sunflower(1.2) patch.

Port Strikes
As many of you have noted port strikes are very hard to defend against and feel unbalanced. You can now only perform port strikes if enemy air superiority isn't above a certain level (30% is what we are testing atm), basically it means there needs to be no defenders or you need to have air superiority for the mission to perform at all. We are also adding stacking penalty in the same way land combats work, to simulate that there just isn't enough room for 1000 bombers to strike the same small fleet. We have also been looking at some other naval issues, but more about that in the future.

AI
The main focuses this week for AI has been making sure ai upgrades its templates better and naval missions.

The naval mission AI should now use the ships at its disposal much better and prioritize defending invasions. The issues with Ai creating long invasion plans it could not cover and never managing to invade japanese home island shouldn't happen anymore now for example. It also had a tendency to be overly protective of areas with convoy raiding leading to very nonoptimal fleets being organized for hunting.

When it comes to division templates SteelVolt managed to squash some bugs related to switching them out and we now have a scriptable progression system for the AI to use. It was for example not able to realise that it could progress its light armor templates to medium armor templates before. I imagine this will be very welcome among modders as well to be able to custom tweak nations. For those who dare to look at code, here is an example:

light_armor_default = { target_width = 19.9 width_weight = 0.1 column_swap_factor = 0.1 stat_weights = { <snip> } target_template = { weight = 0.9 support = { engineer = 1 recon = 1 artillery = 1 } regiments = { light_armor = 4 motorized = 5 infantry = 1 } } allowed_types = { <snip> } replace_at_match = 0.9 replace_with = medium_armor_default }

The important bit here being
[COLOR=#ffff00]replace_at_match = 0.9
replace_with = medium_armor_default[/color]

This is an example from the light armor template, which will change to the medium armor template once it has a match of 90%.

Do note that the "entry point" of a template must follow the naming convention given (for example 'light_armor_default'), but after that it should work with any name at all, meaning those templates would not be picked by AI in any other way than through the scripted progression.

If you don't spend all day looking at code, the above basically translates into more interesting AI opponents ;)

Other AI improvements we have been working on this week is improving its avoidance of small encirclements and making sure it can handle building of nuclear reactors for late game, so beware nukes flying :). Next week for ai we plan to focus on many minor issues to improve AI performance, like making sure it doesn't tie up too much equipment in training when it needs it in the field to help with casualties.

The plan for the patch is to be able to release it (as a open beta first) in 2-3 weeks barring any outbreaks of plague. Next Friday we'll have some more updates for you as well as talk about some new additions that will be in the patch:


Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Europa Universalis IV Wiki
Europa Universalis IV Development Diary Archive

Hi everyone!
The game has now been out for a bit under a month and we have released the first big patch yesterday. This year has been hard work, but also incredibly fun to finally get to release the game we have worked on for so long be successful. As you probably know us swedes like vacations and it's now time for us to get some rest for a month and return full of energy to work on the game again.

This means that you will likely not see as much presence on the forum during this time as you are used to, so I figured I'd give a heads up.

After vacation we will be working on 1.2 patch or 1.1.1 if a hotfix is needed. AI and balance will be priority but we also have some nice ideas for increasing difficulty and replayability and such for players who have already mastered the game. More info on that in august.

Enjoy your summers and many thanks from the team for supporting us!

p.s fun statistics about HOI4: about 30% of games played are using minor nations. This is really great to hear because one of my goals when designing HOI4 was to make minors fun and playable.


(ARMORIOS playing Germany, although his invasion ended in flames for him it looked neat :) )

Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive

Hi everyone!
The game has now been out for a bit under a month and we have released the first big patch yesterday. This year has been hard work, but also incredibly fun to finally get to release the game we have worked on for so long be successful. As you probably know us swedes like vacations and it's now time for us to get some rest for a month and return full of energy to work on the game again.

This means that you will likely not see as much presence on the forum during this time as you are used to, so I figured I'd give a heads up.

After vacation we will be working on 1.2 patch or 1.1.1 if a hotfix is needed. AI and balance will be priority but we also have some nice ideas for increasing difficulty and replayability and such for players who have already mastered the game. More info on that in august.

Enjoy your summers and many thanks from the team for supporting us!

p.s fun statistics about HOI4: about 30% of games played are using minor nations. This is really great to hear because one of my goals when designing HOI4 was to make minors fun and playable.


(ARMORIOS playing Germany, although his invasion ended in flames for him it looked neat :) )

Read the original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive