For King and Country, Paradox announces Together for Victory
First Expansion for Hearts of Iron IV has Commonwealth Focus

STOCKHOLM – 1 November 2016 – When the fires of war erupt and your nation is under siege from the greatest war machine the world has ever seen, it is good to know that you are standing shoulder to shoulder with your brothers and sisters around the world. Together for Victory, the first expansion for Paradox Development Studio’s World War II game Hearts of Iron IV, shines a bright light on the British dominions and colonies that rallied around the flag in England’s darkest hour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCbK6ZmJ0MM

The centerpiece of Together for Victory is a set of new National Focus trees for five subjects of the British crown: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the British Raj in India. Make history with appropriate technology or alternate history paths, as well as new portraits, new leaders and new companies for the Dominions. Together for Victory is the first step in a process that Paradox hopes will tell the story of every nation in the great conflict.

Together for Victory will also include:
New Autonomy system has different levels of dependency and status for subject nations – puppets, Dominions and fully independent states
Continuous National Focus ideas will add new bonuses and improvements to your country as you take it through the crucible of war
Nations can request a Lend-Lease agreement from their allies and friends if they are in dire need of equipment and vehicles

And much more, including updates and changes to the combat system


Hearts of Iron IV: Together for Victory is coming soon to major digital retailers, including the Paradox store.

For King and Country, Paradox announces Together for Victory
First Expansion for Hearts of Iron IV has Commonwealth Focus

STOCKHOLM – 1 November 2016 – When the fires of war erupt and your nation is under siege from the greatest war machine the world has ever seen, it is good to know that you are standing shoulder to shoulder with your brothers and sisters around the world. Together for Victory, the first expansion for Paradox Development Studio’s World War II game Hearts of Iron IV, shines a bright light on the British dominions and colonies that rallied around the flag in England’s darkest hour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCbK6ZmJ0MM

The centerpiece of Together for Victory is a set of new National Focus trees for five subjects of the British crown: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the British Raj in India. Make history with appropriate technology or alternate history paths, as well as new portraits, new leaders and new companies for the Dominions. Together for Victory is the first step in a process that Paradox hopes will tell the story of every nation in the great conflict.

Together for Victory will also include:
New Autonomy system has different levels of dependency and status for subject nations – puppets, Dominions and fully independent states
Continuous National Focus ideas will add new bonuses and improvements to your country as you take it through the crucible of war
Nations can request a Lend-Lease agreement from their allies and friends if they are in dire need of equipment and vehicles

And much more, including updates and changes to the combat system


Hearts of Iron IV: Together for Victory is coming soon to major digital retailers, including the Paradox store.

So, last week we announced the name of the expansion we are working on: Together for Victory. A big focus of the expansion is fleshing out the commonwealth nations and first up last week was Canada. Today we will be showing off Australia!


Australia Focus Tree
Australia ended up with a really big tree actually (although much is mutually exclusive paths where you need to make a choice). We put extra effort into their alt history paths because we figured their location made them well suited for this.[/b]



Australia start with the national spirit Great Depression, which limits their production capacity during the initial years. This is modified through a number of wartime emergency foci that become available as tension rises and war breaks out.

On the political side Australia has a few choices. The main choice one is whether to stay with the commonwealth or break free.

If Australia decides that it is tired of fighting Britain's war, there are a few option. From here Australia can either focus on protection against the Japanese menace lurking next door, by trying to form an alliance with USA.

The fascist path features civil wars and, deceit and a glorious deal with Japan to split to South West Pacific between the two empires.

The communist path focuses on helping communist China by sending equipment or volunteers. Once Australia has proven it is willing to make sacrifices for the revolution Soviet will accept them as a member of the Comintern.

Like Canada we have also been adding extra leaders with unique portraits (magnificent beards make such a difference for admirals).



Technology Sharing
You might have noticed that the Canada tree presented in the previous diary as well as this one made references to mysterious technology sharing focuses. This is a new feature part of Together for Victory which is set up from focus trees or events. It allows nations to share their technological progress with other members of their sharing group (not necessarily limited to factions etc). The way it works is that the more members of your group have unlocked a certain technology the more bonus you will have to research and catch up. Some like the commonwealth basic one has no limitations on affected technology, but things like the Tizard Mission between UK and USA are limited to electronics, radar etc. You’ll have ways to improve your bonuses from sharing, and some nations will get less out of technology sharing than others, but we’ll get to that when we start showing details about how the new autonomy system works (in a future diary).



I expect some people here are new to how we work with DLC at paradox, so going to go over it again. Whenever we release an expansion there is also going to be a free patch coming out for players along with it with fixes and changes, and this is no matter if you buy the expansion or not. For Together for Victory this will be 1.3 Torch. I'll be holding off on printing bug fix lists until just before release, but I figured I'd let you know that we have made some good progress on solving the issue with small vs big air wings (and similar issues in naval combat) as well as done some rebalancing there last week.

See you again next week where we’ll be talking a look at South Africa :)

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

So, last week we announced the name of the expansion we are working on: Together for Victory. A big focus of the expansion is fleshing out the commonwealth nations and first up last week was Canada. Today we will be showing off Australia!


Australia Focus Tree
Australia ended up with a really big tree actually (although much is mutually exclusive paths where you need to make a choice). We put extra effort into their alt history paths because we figured their location made them well suited for this.[/b]



Australia start with the national spirit Great Depression, which limits their production capacity during the initial years. This is modified through a number of wartime emergency foci that become available as tension rises and war breaks out.

On the political side Australia has a few choices. The main choice one is whether to stay with the commonwealth or break free.

If Australia decides that it is tired of fighting Britain's war, there are a few option. From here Australia can either focus on protection against the Japanese menace lurking next door, by trying to form an alliance with USA.

The fascist path features civil wars and, deceit and a glorious deal with Japan to split to South West Pacific between the two empires.

The communist path focuses on helping communist China by sending equipment or volunteers. Once Australia has proven it is willing to make sacrifices for the revolution Soviet will accept them as a member of the Comintern.

Like Canada we have also been adding extra leaders with unique portraits (magnificent beards make such a difference for admirals).



Technology Sharing
You might have noticed that the Canada tree presented in the previous diary as well as this one made references to mysterious technology sharing focuses. This is a new feature part of Together for Victory which is set up from focus trees or events. It allows nations to share their technological progress with other members of their sharing group (not necessarily limited to factions etc). The way it works is that the more members of your group have unlocked a certain technology the more bonus you will have to research and catch up. Some like the commonwealth basic one has no limitations on affected technology, but things like the Tizard Mission between UK and USA are limited to electronics, radar etc. You’ll have ways to improve your bonuses from sharing, and some nations will get less out of technology sharing than others, but we’ll get to that when we start showing details about how the new autonomy system works (in a future diary).



I expect some people here are new to how we work with DLC at paradox, so going to go over it again. Whenever we release an expansion there is also going to be a free patch coming out for players along with it with fixes and changes, and this is no matter if you buy the expansion or not. For Together for Victory this will be 1.3 Torch. I'll be holding off on printing bug fix lists until just before release, but I figured I'd let you know that we have made some good progress on solving the issue with small vs big air wings (and similar issues in naval combat) as well as done some rebalancing there last week.

See you again next week where we’ll be talking a look at South Africa :)

Read the original post

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

Hello everyone and welcome to another Europa Universalis IV development diary. This time we’ll go into the main flavor of the 1.19 patch, which we call Denmark.

Well, why do we call it Denmark? Well.. First of all, we’ve added lots and lots of Dynamic Historical Event to Denmark, bringing them up to par with other european majors. Skåne also starts with the Skånemarket, a large bonus to the fish produced in the province. We have also added a few new provinces in Jylland, while also increasing the development of Denmark as a whole.


And as you can see here, the Danes get a nice new unit in 1.19 as well..



Norway also got an improvement, getting their map revised to include a fair amount of new provinces, and a wasteland in the center of the mountain range, to make the country more easily defended against the vile swedes. We also gave them a huge chunk of new Dynamic Historical Events, making playing them a fair bit more interesting.



We also improved the political mapmode, as so many had requested, so we now show the terrain map where there has been no colonisation yet, so you’ll have some more informative eye-candy while playing



One other thing to mention today is the fact that we added a fair bit more instructions to the AI for your nation if you crash or are forced to stop playing for a while in a campaign. The following options now exists for your convenience.

• Ignore Decisions -Yes/No
  
• Embrace Institutions - Yes/No
  
• Develop Provinces - Yes/No
  
• Disband Units - Yes/No
  
• Change Fleet Missions - Yes/No
  
• Send Missionaries - Yes/No
  
• Convert Culture - Yes/No
  
• Add/Remove Cultures - Yes/No

Stay tuned.. Next week we’ll talk more about forts, peace options and tradegoods, amongst other things.

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

Welcome to the second diary covering stuff in the upcoming (unannounced) expansion and patch, if you missed the previous check <here>. I do have it on pretty good authority that there is gonna be some enlightenment on that today during the World War Wednesday stream (15:00 CEST) ;), so make sure to tune in then!

One of the things we are focusing on in this expansion is to flesh out the commonwealth nations with focus trees, art, flavor and special mechanics. First up is Canada because it was the first of the commonwealth nations to send troops to Britain.
Like many commonwealth nations it suffered from the Great Depression and came through the war a modernized, more independent and stronger nation despite the hardships of the war.

The Canadian focus tree deals with some major issues of the time. Firstly how to get out of the economic depression and get ready for the war, but also problems with conscription, particularly around french-canadians (a major reason was because existing officers were mostly english speaking). Canada had a fairly small population, but mobilized heavily during the war, both militarily (40% of men in conscriptable ages joined the military and a sizable amount of women too) and industrially (a large part of allied production was thanks to Canada). To model that one of the trade offs you will need to do in the focus tree is one between manpower and fielding a larger army or to fully mobilize your industry.

So, without further ado here is the focus tree:
larger

You will notice a few things. First up: it's BIG! Secondly, we have made sure to support all ideologies without restricting internal development and such too much by ideology (you can mobilize industry no matter what etc). This is something we feel strongly for and will keep doing in the future as some of the major trees can be a bit inflexible. It's not readily apparent but there are a couple of new features hidden in choices in this tree as well that we will be talking about in future diaries, but to not give away too much this early: we are expanding on the puppet/subject and master relationships into a new system with levels that can be affected, and there will also be neat new things with technology (I probably said too much already now though.. More in the future!).
Each of the nations we add comes with more Generals/Admirals, portraits, custom equipment icons and 3d models where appropriate. We really want to make sure that nations we add feel fleshed out and give you new ways of playing (focus trees are great for this!)



To make playing the allies cooler we are also adding a new feature with the expansion: Request Lend-Lease. This allows you to make broad stroke requests such as requesting infantry equipment or heavy tanks to your allies, they can then exactly how to fulfill that (or if they can’t at all). Like we usually do we team new features with free stuff in the patch so you can now also modify a receiving lend-lease if you no longer need parts of it (or even the whole thing). This functionality will be for any kind of Lend-lease too so no matter how it's set up you can avoid canceling the whole thing when you just want to change parts.




Next week we will be covering more new stuff, but until then don't forget to tune in for the expansion announcement and multiplayer stream at 15:00 CEST today. We will be trying a new format with spokespersons for each major faction being able to talk on the stream with headsets so things should be more involved than normal!

Read the original post

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

Welcome to the second diary covering stuff in the upcoming (unannounced) expansion and patch, if you missed the previous check <here>. I do have it on pretty good authority that there is gonna be some enlightenment on that today during the World War Wednesday stream (15:00 CEST) ;), so make sure to tune in then!

One of the things we are focusing on in this expansion is to flesh out the commonwealth nations with focus trees, art, flavor and special mechanics. First up is Canada because it was the first of the commonwealth nations to send troops to Britain.
Like many commonwealth nations it suffered from the Great Depression and came through the war a modernized, more independent and stronger nation despite the hardships of the war.

The Canadian focus tree deals with some major issues of the time. Firstly how to get out of the economic depression and get ready for the war, but also problems with conscription, particularly around french-canadians (a major reason was because existing officers were mostly english speaking). Canada had a fairly small population, but mobilized heavily during the war, both militarily (40% of men in conscriptable ages joined the military and a sizable amount of women too) and industrially (a large part of allied production was thanks to Canada). To model that one of the trade offs you will need to do in the focus tree is one between manpower and fielding a larger army or to fully mobilize your industry.

So, without further ado here is the focus tree:
larger

You will notice a few things. First up: it's BIG! Secondly, we have made sure to support all ideologies without restricting internal development and such too much by ideology (you can mobilize industry no matter what etc). This is something we feel strongly for and will keep doing in the future as some of the major trees can be a bit inflexible. It's not readily apparent but there are a couple of new features hidden in choices in this tree as well that we will be talking about in future diaries, but to not give away too much this early: we are expanding on the puppet/subject and master relationships into a new system with levels that can be affected, and there will also be neat new things with technology (I probably said too much already now though.. More in the future!).
Each of the nations we add comes with more Generals/Admirals, portraits, custom equipment icons and 3d models where appropriate. We really want to make sure that nations we add feel fleshed out and give you new ways of playing (focus trees are great for this!)



To make playing the allies cooler we are also adding a new feature with the expansion: Request Lend-Lease. This allows you to make broad stroke requests such as requesting infantry equipment or heavy tanks to your allies, they can then exactly how to fulfill that (or if they can’t at all). Like we usually do we team new features with free stuff in the patch so you can now also modify a receiving lend-lease if you no longer need parts of it (or even the whole thing). This functionality will be for any kind of Lend-lease too so no matter how it's set up you can avoid canceling the whole thing when you just want to change parts.




Next week we will be covering more new stuff, but until then don't forget to tune in for the expansion announcement and multiplayer stream at 15:00 CEST today. We will be trying a new format with spokespersons for each major faction being able to talk on the stream with headsets so things should be more involved than normal!

Read the original post

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

Hi everyone! Today I will start talking about features coming in the future expansion (still not announced yet, so its name shall remain under fog of war). First up are things related to battle plans and managing unit orders

Paid Feature: Blitz Command
The Offensive Lines in battle plans are designed to expand as a front expands and you take territory. This works fine if what you want to do is push along a broad front, but not as well when you are trying to have several orders in the same area active at once or doing encirclements or more detailed things. As long as such are a couple of provinces microing some armored divisions to do it is no big hurdle, but for bigger stuff that becomes a lot of work. So, to improve on this we are adding another tool to the battle plan toolbox for you to use: Blitz Command. A blitz command works differently in that when you activate it it remembers the area you tell it to take and will do that without readjusting its width or caring about other things getting in its way. Perfect for drawing pincer movements and encirclements!



We have also worked on the AI’s ability to identify encirclements and choke points, so even though it's easier to plan an encirclement now actually successfully pulling them off will be more difficult.


Free Feature: Configurable Garrison Order
The Garrison order has gotten some love and you can now configure what you want it to guard and care about. So if you only care about ports and coastlines you can select only ports and coastlines for the order. It will also help you a bit and count up how many divisions are at least needed so that it can place one on each spot according to your order.


Thats it for this week but we are doing a Q&A stream today during World War Wednesday at 15:00CEST so tune in if you have questions (about anything really) and I'll do my best to answer :)

Read the original post

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

Hi everyone! Today I will start talking about features coming in the future expansion (still not announced yet, so its name shall remain under fog of war). First up are things related to battle plans and managing unit orders

Paid Feature: Blitz Command
The Offensive Lines in battle plans are designed to expand as a front expands and you take territory. This works fine if what you want to do is push along a broad front, but not as well when you are trying to have several orders in the same area active at once or doing encirclements or more detailed things. As long as such are a couple of provinces microing some armored divisions to do it is no big hurdle, but for bigger stuff that becomes a lot of work. So, to improve on this we are adding another tool to the battle plan toolbox for you to use: Blitz Command. A blitz command works differently in that when you activate it it remembers the area you tell it to take and will do that without readjusting its width or caring about other things getting in its way. Perfect for drawing pincer movements and encirclements!



We have also worked on the AI’s ability to identify encirclements and choke points, so even though it's easier to plan an encirclement now actually successfully pulling them off will be more difficult.


Free Feature: Configurable Garrison Order
The Garrison order has gotten some love and you can now configure what you want it to guard and care about. So if you only care about ports and coastlines you can select only ports and coastlines for the order. It will also help you a bit and count up how many divisions are at least needed so that it can place one on each spot according to your order.


Thats it for this week but we are doing a Q&A stream today during World War Wednesday at 15:00CEST so tune in if you have questions (about anything really) and I'll do my best to answer :)

Read the original post

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

Hi everyone, today I thought we should do something different and take a look at how some concepts have changed over the Hearts of Iron game series. We'll be looking at supply, upgrades and reinforcement and such first.

Hearts of Iron 1
I didn't remember how it was here, and actually had to go buy myself a copy of the game online because I couldn't find any discs :D

HOI1 has a pretty simple supply "system", a percentage of your total Industrial Capacity (IC) is diverted to supply production via a slider and goes into your supply stockpile. Units consume supply and if they run out they start losing organization etc. For a unit to be able to draw supply it needs to be able to trace a path to a friendly port or its capital. There was also a combat modifier penalizing you from fighting far away from your capital.

Reinforcing had to be done manually (although you could do it for whole armies) by clicking on their strength to bring it back up.

Upgrading divisions was a bit tricky compared to later games. You had to take them off map into the Force Pool, perform the upgrade by partially rebuilding it and then redeploy the unit on the map.

These systems gave great control, but forced you to do a ton of micromanagement and keep track of a lot of things at the same time.


Hearts of Iron II
Supply works a lot like HOI1, but introduces concepts like Supply Efficiency and Transport Capacity (TC). TC is a global value that gets automatically set as 150% of IC (could change by modifiers). Each division adds up to your total need of transport capacity depending on their supply consumption and if you go over it you start getting penalties. What directly effect a division is called Supply Efficiency which is an average of TC, local infrastructure and any bonuses from local HQ.

Supply for divisions was now changed to be less micro intensive. You could prioritize armies and also give them special Offensive Supply when in a pinch. Doing so gave these units improved supply efficiency for a month at huge cost, but was good for your elites and critical offensives.


Upgrading and reinforcement is now also less micro and done by diverting a percentage of your IC to it with a slider. You also had the option of producing attachments (like military police or anti air) to your divisions which could be deployed later.

This basic system made for a lot less micro management, while only giving up some control (there is only really 2 prio levels since a division is prioritized or not), managing attachments was some micro, but it was a step in the right direction and gave great control. One of the major downsides of the system was that there was no real way of controlling Transport Capacity, so if you expand into in asia your front in europe will get same penalty when going over a global TC, but as an abstraction it worked pretty well.


Hearts of Iron III
For HOI3 we wanted to expand on the supply system and make it more realistic. Supply and fuel are transported around the world in a province-by-province (and through naval transports) flow network.


This system meant that there was a realistic delay built in when stuff changed and bottlenecks appeared and it's probably our most realistic system to date. The downside of this was that it was extremely hard to understand and follow (and also was very very bug prone). A problem a week ago could be causing your current frontline issues and because it was all a flow system with incremental changes being able to interpret how it was going wasn't exactly clear. What actions to poke the network with to improve things also was never really readily apparent for people without a lot of experience. We even added an "arcade mode" supply option that bypassed all the complexities and put it back to HOI1 level basically.

Like HOI2 reinforcement and upgrades were now handled by diverting IC and upgrades.


There is no way of prioritizing different armies or geographical areas, but you can tell units not to receive upgrades or reinforcement and in that way control where stuff is sent.

HOI3 also expanded on divisions and basically made everything an attachment. This meant that you could reorganize brigades on the map by shuffling stuff around and do things similar to attachments in HOI2. The downside was that this was very micro intensive when you wanted to reorganize army templates as there was no way of doing it across more than one at a time.


Hearts of Iron IV
For HOI4 we changed the supply flow system to be instant and based around bottlenecks instead. The goal being that it should be easily apparent what is causing your frontline problems. We also moved to larger areas to get a better manage the complexity for calculations and display to player.

When it comes to upgrades and reinforcement we made drastic changes in HOI4. They are now effectively the same things as you produce equipment rather than an abstract supply value to fill your divisions. We also added abilities to prioritize where supply went between theaters for better control, and even flagging division templates as elites, regular or reserves to manage their priority within theaters.

Looking at the system I think gameplay went up on all accounts here. I think the system feels more realistic and immersive when looking at how you need to build exact equipment, but with fuel costs calculated into production of equipment rather than when using them (like on ships). There are some suspension of disbelief issues here we want to work on in the future.

When it comes to managing upgrades of divisions compared to HOI3 we also made a big leap. It's now easy to do incremental changes to lots of divisions at once, either through editing their master division template, or changing a couple of selected divisions at once. Also upgraded equipment now slowly trickle into the divisions, upgrading them bit by bit in the field rather than all at once like in previous games.


Team wise we are working on the expansion right now and should be able to start doing dev diaries on it soon, but let me know how this one felt, is it interesting to take a trip down memory lane?

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