Nov 13, 2019

Hearts of Iron IV - BjornB

1.8.0 "Fork" is now live and downloadable through Steam. The last four digits of the checksum are 3241 (the new launcher displays a much longer full checksum; the in-game version will still show just the four digits).

Since 1.8.0 does not contain any major game mechanic changes, it should be save game compatible with 1.7.1. But if you for some reason want to remain on 1.7.1 or older,here are instructions for reverting to patches since 1.5.4, or special instructions for 1.5.3 and earlier.

Please make sure that any mods you are using are updated for 1.8.0, or your game might not run properly (seriously). Due to a few complications that we only noticed very recently, mods will not be properly shown in the new launcher the first time you run. But if you launch the game and run to the full menu, exit, and then relaunch, they should show up correctly. See this thread for more information.

If you discover any bugs in patch 1.8.0, please report them in the bug report forum as usual.

################################################################ ######## Patch 1.8.0 "Fork" ######## ################################################################ ################################## # Feature & General ################################## - Added new Launcher - Added "/mute <user name>" and "/unmute <user name>" chat commands ################################## # Balance ################################## - Reduced number of destroyers needed to cover convoy routes from 1 destroyer per 5 convoys to 1 destroyer per 10 convoys - Convoys can no longer detect convoys as that just drags down the average detection when escorted - The amount of convoys in a sub battle is now based on the length of the route, so longer = fewer in a battle - Reduced total possible torpedo reveal chance reduction to 60% from 70% by reducing wolfpack by 5% and commander trait by 5% - Slightly reduced sub reveal chance when firing torpedos to account for convoys no longer contributing to detection averages - Slightly reduced passive sub reveal chance in combat to account for convoys no longer contributing to detection averages - Added 2 sub detection to radar 4 to make t4 subs not so hard to detect when matched up against modern destroyers - Aluminium Company of Canada focus now gets an additional 14 Aluminium - upgraded t4 radar to have sub detection from 10 to 14 - upgraded t3 radar to have sub detection from 5 to 6 - increased IC cost for t3 sub hull from 270 to 320 - increased IC cost for t4 sub hull from 300 to 450 - increased IC cost for cruiser sub hull from 370 to 390 - increased number of convoys covered by each destroyer on escort from 10 to 12 - Lowered t3 and t4 submarine torpedo damage from 23 to 22 and 30 to 28 respectively - slightly increased the speed penalty on depth charges ################################## # Bugfix ################################## - Fixed a civil war revolter not getting correct focus tree - Fixed escaping or sunk convoys from inadvertently affecting damage calculations for the remaining convoys. - Fixed Diminishing Returns now applying to party popularity changes. - Fixed lend-lease sender having its convoy sunk instead of the receiver in naval combats - Prevented subjects from giving units to their overlord as part of a request for expeditionary forces if those units are volunteers or expeditionaries from another country. ################################## # UI & Database ################################## - The open music player button in settings now has proper size - Music Player now has proper spelling in tooltip/settings button - Fixes for Japanese various names (ships, divisions etc). - Fixed full name for Canadian general Percival John Montague. ################################## # Modding ################################## - Added define to allow scaling of ship part of sub detection inside combats - Enabled some console commands that had previously been developer-only but which did not really need to be locked. - add_mines - release (country) - debug (toggle miscellaneous in-game debug utilities) - debug_smooth (toggle within-game-tick frame rendering) - instant_prepare (division preparation) - reload_textures - tag_color (set country color) ################################## # Stability & Performance ################################## - Fixed a crash when removing certain unit leader traits. - Added checks to prevent CTD in cases where AI had sent invalid expeditionary forces - Optimized game rule checks by finding the game rule in the game rule database more efficiently. - Prevented a crash if a script tries to make a non-existing country declare war on another country. - Fixed CTD on invalid set_politics usage by failing to set ruling_party, made it write an error instead. - Fixed pointer truncation in 64bits in ProtectedMemoryAllocate - Fixed crash reporter to correctly indicate if the program is built for a 64-bit architecture. - Fixed a CTD related to expeditionary forces that could lock in saves - Fixed game crashing in weird ways if a mod tries reusing an id

Nov 13, 2019

Dev Diary: Sub Balance + New Launcher

Hearts of Iron IV - Addaway

Today's Development Diary by Podcat

As Wednesday is upon us so is a new dev diary! Next week we will be back with more espionage, but today is about a small surprise patch as well as improved Focus tree navigation.

1.8 ‘Fork’
Fork you say? I thought you said 1.8 was going to be Husky? Due to technical requirements having to do with updating to the new paradox launcher we had to jump a big number other than going to 1.7.2 like we had planned. This means that 1.9 will instead be Husky which is the big update coming together with La Resistance.

To read the full changelog for the patch, click here.

To summarize, the big points here are: Stability, submarine balance and a new launcher

Submarine balance
Later tier 3 and 4 subs were simply too good compared to destroyers designed to hunt them. They have been nerfed a bit and increased in cost and destroyer upgrades improved. Large empires should now also have a bit easier time as we better control the amount of convoys in each battle and have fixed a bug where convoys would actively hurt the sub detection abilities of their escorts making it really tough in big battles.

New launcher
We much like Imperator, EU4 and Stellaris have now also moved to the new launcher.
Since wargamers are a traditional bunch you might be asking why a new launcher is happening. There are several reasons:

Platform independence. We want to be able to exist on multiple platforms eventually and the current one is limited and not really capable of doing it very well.
The old one is really limited in how we can communicate with you. Now we can link to multiple news post for example.
It frees up the dev team (us). We never really had the time to work on the launcher and as the place setting up mods and such there have been a ton of requests for features (such as mod groupings and presets) that we just never have the time to do. With a dedicated team working on a unified launcher across pdx games they will have more time for stuff like this and we can worry about the game itself. I have great hopes for lots of cool improvements in the future and make sure to let them know in comments what kind of features you would like to see.
We got a neat continue button now directly in launcher so you can save time getting back on your previous session ;)

Go here to read details about the launcher changes and what the mean for modders and player.

The tl;dr for players though is that you need to start the game, run it to the main menu and then quit and restart. Without this your mods wont show up. This will clean up old mod configuration and prep everything. Mods will still show out of date until modders have updated the supported version, but we haven't made any changes that will break them so 1.7.1 mods should still be ok, despite them saying they arent - so no panic ;) If you do have issues please post about them in the above linked thread about the launcher rather in here (its still cool to discuss the launcher here though).

The patch itself releases later today (late afternoon). That is all about the patch, lets move on to highlight some neat stuff coming in 1.9 'Husky'...

Focus Tree Navigation
As our focus trees have gotten larger finding things in them or simply exploring them has gotten harder. To solve this we are adding several things to the national focus screen (btw UI here is still a bit WIP and may change)
- Zoom - You can now zoom in and out to the mouse pointer much like on the map. Its a nice way to get around on big trees (*squints at the spanish focus tree*)
- Filters - toggling various filters can let you easily spot where industry is located, or things related to particular national spirits you are trying to get rid of or modify. These are tagged manually on focuses so its something modders will be able to use also.
- Free Search - on top of filters we also have full free search. It goes through tooltips automatically and picks out focuses. This is a more advanced and powerful version of Filters and quite nice for finding specific things fast when you know what you are looking for.
This is me searching for industry related stuff in the Chinese tree. It also shows some of our default filters on the right. Several nations have special filters to help highlight specific mechanics. So China has "Inflation" as a filter, the commonwealth nations have a filter to help spot affecting independence etc. We hope this is going to make getting into new focus trees a lot easier!

Here is an example of zooming out about half way on China:

If I place my mouse pointer somewhere I can still see tooltips and zooming will zoom to the cursor.

See you all next week for another diary!

Oct 30, 2019

Dev Diary: The Intelligence Agency

Hearts of Iron IV - Addaway

Hi everyone! Today we will start going through the Espionage features announced at PDXCON in greater detail. First off is the hub of everything - Your Intelligence Agency.

The Agency

The Agency is something you need to construct on game start if you plan to involve yourself in the shadow war that will be running now. We recommend at least an investment in defence eventually to help protect yourself even if you do not plan to dedicate resources to offensive operations. Notice that I said ‘construct’? The Agency will take up several of your factories for a while to be created. Civilian factories is the closest we have to a money budget so we felt this was the most appropriate cost to use. When you decide to make the agency you are free to name it (a historical name will be suggested) and you can also pick from a mix of historical logos as well as generic made up ones (surprise - a lot of agencies did not advertise themselves to heavily).

In the Agency you can recruit Operatives (more about them and what they can do in a future diary), work on cryptology (also a topic of a future diary) and upgrade the different branches of the agency as well as update training or develop new gadgets to help your Operatives.

Branch Upgrades

Just like the creation of an agency it will cost you some industry time to develop its capabilities. The time is always the same, but the cost itself can vary with how powerful the option is.

Lets have some examples of the many options:

Naval Department - This is one of the basic branches that improves your intelligence gathering in that field. It will ensure that you get the most out of any naval intel you get.
Passive Defense - This boosts your agencies counterintelligence rating which together with Operatives help you defend against enemy Operatives.
Invisible Ink - Improved ways of sneaking intel back through letters or other ways through writing. It means your Operatives will be generating more intel when active somewhere.
Suicide Pills - Captured Operatives will now have a final way out limiting leaks of intel to the enemy
Diplomatic Training - Operatives learn to operate among high society and politics and would no longer dream of ordering their Martinis stirred. This one helps with missions such as diplomatic pressure and control of foreign trade (yup.. future diary)
Cryptology Department - this sets up a department of math wizards and crossword puzzlers. Why shall be covered in a future diary ;)

The Spy Master

If you have enough upgrades and are in a faction you can become the faction’s Spy Master.

This is the logical path for people who want to lean heavily into espionage to get the most of it. There can only be one spy master per faction and the main advantage of being a spy master is that it will let you run a lot more Operatives (depending on the size of your faction). We felt it was mostly historical that only the really big nations truly invested in this, but the most important reason was balance. A lot of spy systems in games fall down on the fact that people can spam you with agents so you either end up super annoyed or the system needs to be toned down to where it’s no longer impactful and fun. In a historical HOI game given this rule, we have then set us up with 3 potentially powerful agencies: Allies, Axis and Comintern.

See you all next week when we take a look at further espionage topics :)

Oct 23, 2019

Dev Diary: Back from PDXCON!

Hearts of Iron IV - Addaway

Read today's Dev Diary by Podcat

Hi everyone! We are now back from PdxCon (most of us) and landing in our new offices, so brace for a ton of pictures! Oh and we announced the new expansion! If you haven't see the trailer <3 start there:

PdxCon 2019
PdxCon this year was imo one of the best ones so far. It was held in the Funkhaus Berlin. This place was super cool, and was basically the center of all radio and recording for DDR from the 50s until the german reunification.

We had announcements (among them CK3 and La Résistance!), LAN parties, presentations and Q&A sessions with fans as well as a scramble-for-africa multiplayer game on sunday. Most of all though it was super fun to chat with fans and modding groups (several ones were there!)

WW2.. in hot pink!

A very humble picture of Bratyn on a throne ;D

HOI boardgame preview

Animals in the audience?

In our booth we ran a challenge which we plan to be an achivement for LaR, just like we did with 30min of Hel last year. It was called "Don't Die for your Country" and was to capitulate France and Poland as Germany with as few of your own casualties as possible (and no using paratroopers). The final score was 475 casualties :O

Voigt was the winner, and you can read about how he did it here.

We had a ton of fun and basically just crashed when we got home ;D it felt a lot like coming home from a music festival :)

La Résistance

So 'ere we go... Our next expansion is now announced: La Résistance!

Its main theme is Espionage and Resistance and the main country focuses are France, both sides of the Spanish Civil War as well as Portugal. We will be starting off by going through espionage in the coming weeks in details

For more info check out the announce post and there will probably be uploads of videos from PDXCon and my talks popping up on youtube in the near future.
also here is a fresh unused screenshot to wet your appetites...

New Office
We have a new office, and it is INSANELY COOL. Me and Daniel have been cruising around and checking it out this morning. Here are some highlights:

Meeting rooms with battleplans and maps!

armed artists...

Mugshot-wall for employees :)

WILD ANIMALS

Toilets with inspirational quotes o_O

Aliens

A space wall where you can literally sit and stare into space...

Casual meeting areas :)

Extra big meeting rooms

The Bar :)

And finally our awesome lobby

Thats it for today. See you again next week when we will start digging into the new LaR features!

Oct 19, 2019

Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance Announced

Hearts of Iron IV - BjornB

BERLIN - 19 October 2019 - The quickest way to kill an enemy is to do it from within. Learn its secrets. Sabotage its industry. break its codes. Strike at vulnerable points behind the front lines. Send agents to build a network of informants and a secret army that will rise against the occupiers. Resistance is never futile.

Paradox Development Studios is happy to announce Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance, an expansion to the best-selling grand strategy wargame. La Résistance introduces a new espionage system to the game, and also increases the range of interactions and options with resistance movements in occupied territory.

Features of Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance includes:

New Focus Trees for France: New National Focuses for Free France and the Vichy Regime, as well as an option for conservatives to restore the old French Monarchy.
More In-Depth Spanish Civil War: New National Focuses for Republican and Nationalist Spain, as well as an expanded Spanish Civil War that can spiral into a wider conflict..
Portuguese Focuses: Navigate the pressure of the World War, or involve yourself in the Spanish Conflict with the new Focus Tree for Portugal (updated point)
Espionage: Use you Intelligence Agency to train spies to specialize in certain types of information warfare and develop passive resistance to enemy espionage, then send them on special operations.
Support Resistance: Use your agents to assist allied resistance movements, giving them what they need to damage the enemy.
Collaboration Governments: Use your agents to prepare the ground for collaborators to fill the void once you’ve conquered your target.
Code Cracking: Decrypt enemy communications to gain short term battlefield advantages.
Recon units: Scout planes can provide useful information on nearby areas while armored cars help in detecting and suppressing resistance activities

As usual, La Résistance will be accompanied by a significant free update to Hearts of Iron IV, available to all players. This update will include a reworking of the resistance system, interface improvements to battleplans and air operations, and many other quality of life improvements.

Oct 16, 2019

Dev Diary: PDXCON and Office Move!

Hearts of Iron IV - Addaway

Today's Dev Diary by Podcat

Hi everyone! Today will be a short dev diary because we are preparing for PdxCon and also moving office at the same time. Its not chaotic at all :D

PdxCon this year is in Berlin, and there is going to be lots of cool reveals, beers and pretzels! We will be announcing our expansion (the trailer is <3 guys) and talk about most of the details in it. Here are some of the HOI highlights:

The big Announcement Show starting at 10am CEST over at twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive
I do a talk on HOI, HOI community, expansion and the future
We have a both with a new challenge (so make sure you have done 30 minutes of Hel) because the winners record this year on the new one will be a new achivement :)
@Bratyn and @Archangel85 are holding a talk about content design and focus trees
We have a competitive HOI4 MP stream with streamers and devs on Sunday the 20th at 5pm CEST - {LINK REMOVED}(twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive)
Most importantly you get to hang out with us and look at cool paradox stuff. The other games have a lot of cool things to announce also.. :)

A lot of this will be streamed as well if you cant make it to Berlin :)

Probably last day I get to say hi to the old office sign!

We are also moving offices. The company is always growing and me being an old hand feel like we move about every year ;D but I guess it has been a few years now since the last move ;) This means we will have proper space to work (its super cramped at the moment), and more importantly.. more space to play boardgames ;)

This is currently what most peoples desks look like:

Next week I will do a diary to talk a bit about PdxCon and summarize all the new announcements and stuff for those that couldn't be there and after that we will dig into the details of the announced features. We wont have a stream next week because the studio wont be ready, but we plan to start those up soon so we can show you guys what we have been working on. Look forward to it!

Oct 9, 2019

Dev Diary: Armored Cars

Hearts of Iron IV - Addaway

Today's Dev Diary by Podcat

Hi everyone and welcome to another dev diary. The team is working hard towards PdxCon that is coming up next week and we are looking forward to pretzels, beer, and of course meeting you guys!

Today we will be talking about Armored Cars! I have often been asked why HOI4 doesn't have them, and today you get to find out why now is the time time :)

Resistance Suppression
Part of the reason we are finally adding armored cars is that they go hand in hand with resistance suppression. Since its inception, the armored car has been a useful tool against lightly armed and armored opponents. As explained previously, Garrisons will work as a shield against resistance activity. If adequate, the garrison will absorb the vast amount of resistance attacks that would otherwise sabotage industry or resource extraction. Armored vehicles will be especially suited to this role as hardness will give damage reduction to attacks made by the resistance.

In addition to being more resilient and preserving manpower, armored cars will come with a higher suppression stat and a better ratio of suppression to deployed manpower. Armored cars will generally not be as protective as light tanks, but will have a great amount of manpower protection for their cost.

All of these things combine to make armored cars a good option for resistance suppression when manpower is more of a concern than some extra production cost. Horses will still have an edge when it comes to suppression vs production cost, however.

Hardness to prevent losses
High suppression value
Cheap production cost compared to other armored vehicles
Higher cost still than just horseboys

Main battalion Combat Role

Fighting on the frontlines as the main battle force is not a typical role for an armored car. In HoI4 it will be no different. In most situations, the armored car will be outclassed or simply not appropriate for the terrain. However, in a few cases, armored cars should work fairly well as main battle units.

In WW2 armored cars saw a good deal of combat in the deserts of Northern Africa and the Middle East. Their decreased supply needs, ability to move quickly in desert environments, and excellent capability in fighting poorly equipped enemies made them perform rather well in those theaters.

In HoI4, armored cars will work similarly. They will provide increased protection and breakthrough over say motorized or infantry while coming cheaper than light tanks. They will also be the fastest land unit in the game in the right terrain. These factors should make them dangerous opponents in secondary and tertiary theaters of combat.

Combat and Intel
We have split the recon support company into several now so that it can be tailored to the division type you have, and the speed it needs to move at because now the speed on the recon company will be limiting the whole division. Meaning that if you scout your trucks with cavalry they will need to move at cavalry speed.

We have:

Cavalry Recon Detachment - regular horsey boys you are used to. Cheap, but not that fast.
Motorized Recon Company - Motorized, so jeeps and light vehicles. Fast but weak
Light Armored Recon Company - Armored cars
Armored Recon Company - Light tanks
Armored cars is a good sweet spot of capability, speed and armor while light tanks help keep your hardness and armor up in tougher divisions.

Recon companies give you an edge when picking tactics in combat, and that remains the same. We have on the other hand been rebalancing tactics to make recon more worthwhile. Tactics are now rerolled twice as often and we have lowered the frequency of certain phases like close combat quite a bit (unless fighting in urban terrain).

Recon companies now also do one more thing, they let you generate more intel in combat. More intel you say? What is this? As part of this update we will be redoing how intel works, but we will be going into that in detail in the future. For now all I can say is that there will be several ways to acquire intel (where fighting is one) and that relative intel will be replacing the straight up combat bonus from having crypto techs.

Armored cars looks really cool, so here are some renders for the new models for you to enjoy:

Ingame tech wise armored cars depend on motorized, so to use the recon companies you need both that and to have unlocked the recon support companies.

Armored cars will be coming with the DLC while basic intel changes and the other recon companies are available for all with the ‘Husky’ update. Next week is PdxCon and we are also moving offices, so I’ve set my alarm clock on “Maximum chaos!” but I think we should be able to give you a bit of an update diary anyways :) Seeya then!