Don't forget to tune in to today's World War Wednesday, where Portugal and its new focus tree will be showcased to you all.

We'll be live over on Twitch at 16:00 CET

If you missed last week's stream, it can be found here:

Today's Development Diary by Podcat



Hi everyone! Release of La Résistance is closing in and we are busy fixing, testing and polishing. Today its time to present all the new achievements we are adding, so that the achievement hunters among you can start planning :)

Without further ado, here is all 20 of them (I apologize in advance for all the young whippersnappers who wont get the movie and tv show references ;) ):

One King, Two Crowns

As Bourbon Spain, hold all Spanish and French core states.


We will Rock you

As Spain, own Gibraltar.


Well, I didn't vote for you

Win the Spanish Civil War as the anarchists.

...our chief weapon is surprise

As Spain, have at least 5 spies and stage 5 coups against other nations.

Die, Perfidious Albion!

As Fascist France or Vichy France, occupy all of Great Britain.

Second Time’s the Charm

As France, occupy Moscow while Napoleon VI is your country leader.

Tour de France

Occupy all of mainland France while having at least 20 fully equipped Bicycle regiments.

Go ahead, Macau my day

As Portugal, create a collaboration government in Macau and have it own all Chinese states.

BFFs

As Portugal, join the same faction as Great Britain.

Warszawo, walcz!

Stage the Warsaw uprising and succeed.

Play it, Sam

Have a spy network of at least 50% strength in Casablanca.

Spies Trade

As India, become the spymaster for the Allies.

You Will Never Kill Me Alive

Have one of your spies take a Suicide Pill.

Why Die For Danzig

As Germany, have France turn fascist while at war with Poland.

I SEE EVERYTHING

Get over 90% intel in each category on a major without using code cracking

Shaken, not stirred

Successfully stage a coup in any nation using a spy with the Seducer trait.

Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once

Have a French and British spy work together on the same Operation

Man of a thousand faces, every one the same

Have the same spies be captured twice (so needs to be successfully rescued)

Turing Complete

Fully decrypt all nations in the axis

Don’t die for your country

The challenge from PdxCon 2019 - As Germany in 1939, occupy all of Poland and France without taking more than 475 in casualties. No paradrops allowed!

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See you all next week when we will be doing an AAR writeup of what its like playing as a spymaster of your faction. Also, don't miss out on our stream at 16:00CET today if you want to see LaR in action.

Don't forget to tune in to our Twitch for part 2 of the showcase of Anarchist Spain!

Live at 16:00 CET: https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

Here's last week's action ⏬

Today's Development Diary by Podact



Hi everyone and welcome back to another dev diary for La Résistance. Today its time to cover the art and music part of the expansion plus showcasing some of our new historical operatives. I will also be sharing the rest of the diary schedule until release. Enjoy!

Music
Let's start here so you can listen to some samples while you read!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYVHAQ7ExSs

For La Résistance we got 4 new tracks:
“Imperterrita” - Our Spanish theme song. Really good buildup tune that I think will also fit well to the spanish civil war.
“A Storm Coming” - Kinda classic HOI4 axis-y march tune we use at war and for nations going fascist.
“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” - Our french theme song. A great song for democracies with plenty of drums.
“Cloak and Dagger” - The “spy tune”. We play this when players are doing sneaky stuff. It's a pretty slow tension/thriller tune.



As you can see we try to cover new themes and theaters for each song so the game will not just play differently but also sound different with the new expansion :)

Art
Hi! We are artists on Hearts of Iron team, Irene and Albina and we want to tell you a bit about the production of 2D assets..

Since we are focusing on France, Spain and Portugal in this expansion, we have added portraits of generals, admirals and political leaders from these countries. These portraits were created by a number of different artists including us, Celine and Ahmed. Here is some picked favorites:



Two of them are illustrations of Military Junta and The Anarchist Commune, two committees that represented opponent parties in the Spanish civil war. It was challenging and interesting to work with leader portraits that are a bit unusual!



Our new feature - spies. We have made a lot of portraits of them. Male and female operatives of different nationalities, ages (and attitudes :p). You can see that the operatives share some outfit details, like glasses, suits and so on. In order to create the amount of portraits needed for this expansion we tried a new system of 2D modular portraits. As the system was new we took a bit of a risk but we feel it paid off in the end. Some of the biggest challenges were to create elements in the same camera angle and lighting conditions so they could be switched easily. In the end it turned out to be really fun to play with this character creator!



When it comes to unit models we already showed off both our armored cars and scout planes, so click those links if you wanna see more than the below sample:



For spain we also have a new light tank model as well as a plane model (the nationalists had their own licensed version of the German Bf109)

Historical Operatives

As part of La Resistance, we wanted to highlight some of the most famous agents that were active during the period. There are quite a few of them, but here is a list of personal favorites:

Otto Skorzeny:

Perhaps the most famous German small-unit leader of the war, Skorzeny was involved most famously in the German raid to liberate Mussolini (also available as a historical operation under the right circumstances!). Beyond that, he was involved in a number of other operations.

Jeannie Rousseau:

A French woman who gathered intelligence on the German V-weapon program through work in a French company supplying war material to Germany. Her reports led to the Allies becoming aware of the V-2 development taking place in Peenemünde and the allied air effort to destroy the site. She was later captured, but survived the war.

Dusko Popov:

A triple agent working for MI6, the Abwehr, as well as the Yugoslavian government-in-exile, he fed misinformation about D-Day to his German handlers, who were completely convinced that he was working for them. In between, he apparently chased a lot of tail and his lifestyle served as inspiration for Fleming’s James Bond (not to be confused with James Boned, who is inspired by Daniel).

Josephine Baker:

An American-born Frenchwoman, she would use her considerable fame as an entertainer to gain access to high-ranking diplomats and relayed secret information she overheard at parties to the French intelligence service. She smuggled notes about German troop movements written in invisible ink on her notation or pinned in her underwear.

Nancy Wake:

A native of New Zealand, the Fall of France found her, unfortunately, in France. She quickly began organizing an escape network for shot-down allied pilots before the Gestapo closed in on her and her husband. While she narrowly managed to escape to Spain, her husband was not so lucky. She later returned to France to organize the resistance, taking part in an unsuccessful uprising of the Marquis.

Upcoming diaries

As release approaches the dev diary content is getting pretty locked in so I figured I might as well show you the schedule so you know when topics will pop up (and so you can stop asking me for when we talk about AI and bugfixing… seriously guys it's pretty much always the last 2 diaries ;D). Here goes:

4/2 - Achievements
5/2 - Spymaster AAR
12/2 - AI & Feature changes
19/2 - Full Patchlog, Balance & Bugfixes
25/2 - Release!!!

That's it for today, don’t miss our stream at 16:00CET where yet again the anarchists will take over and continue showing Spain.

STOCKHOLM - 23 January 2020 - The codes have been cracked and your agents are ready to move. The enemy will do their best to uncover your mission, but you’ve been preparing for this day for months. You will expose the collaborators and bring the vengeance of the oppressed to the very doorstep of the occupier. You are La Résistance. And the date of the operation has been set.

Paradox Development Studio is ready to announce that La Résistance, the next expansion to Hearts of Iron IV, will be available for all generals and spymasters on February 25, 2020. Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox’s best-selling strategy wargame about World War II, will now be supplemented by an expansion that highlights the challenge of governing unruly conquests and the power of well-placed spies.

Features of Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance include:

• 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 Campaign: New National Focuses for Republican and Nationalist Spain, including an expanded Spanish Civil War that can spiral into a wider conflict.
  
• Portuguese National Focuses: New unique focus tree for Portugal. Restore Portuguese naval power, strengthen the overseas empire or intervene in the Civil War next door.
  
• Espionage: Use your Intelligence Agency to train spies to specialize in certain types of information warfare and send them on special operations, or develop passive resistance to enemy espionage.
  
• 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.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1158100/Expansion__Hearts_of_Iron_IV_La_Rsistance/

Join Da9L, Bratyn, and Jojo at 16:00 CET today for another preview stream of La Resistance, this week looking at Anarchist Spain!

Tune in: https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

Today's Development Diary by Meka66



Hello everyone and welcome to another dev diary for La Resistance! I should begin by introducing myself: I am Meka, I joined Paradox just a few months ago as a Content Designer. Some of you may be aware of me due to my work on Theocracies and Burgundy over on EUIV, but now I'm here to show what mischief I've been up to in my time on Hearts of Iron.

Man the Guns saw the creation of a lot of new tags, making some countries balkanisable, and almost all of the world decolonisable. Waking the Tiger saw the introduction of formable tags, a mechanic that until now has not been further utilised. However, with La Resistance, a whole slew of new releasable tags will be added to the game along with two new formable nations.



Starting with releasable tags, Man the Guns allowed most of the world to be decolonised, but Oceania was mostly left unloved with only one nation being added to the continent, leaving the rest of the disparate islands untouched and still under colonial rule. However, I have added 6 new releasable tags and one formable for the region.

The Kingdom of Hawaii was only annexed by the United States 38 years before the start of Hearts of Iron and can be released along with most of the US’s pacific holdings.



Tahiti


Samoa


The Federated States of Micronesia


The Solomon Islands


The Mariana Federation


These disparate islands may struggle to survive on their own, and so a nation who holds enough of the Polynesian Triangle will be able to unite all Pacific peoples into a single state known as Polynesia. This state will be formable by any nation listed above plus New Zealand. Unlike other formable tags, this nation can be created by dominions meaning New Zealand does not necessarily have to leave the Allies in order to form this tag.



But perhaps players wish to live out an alternate history where the Naha Prophecy was fulfilled and Kamehameha united the Pacific several years earlier. With the Polynesian Empire game rule, Hawaii will begin the game having already conquered the entirety of the Polynesian Islands and built up a fair-sized industry.





The ability to form Polynesia is a free feature, as are the releasable tags.

Along with adding these releasable nations, I did also touch up the old fragmentation game options to make the world fully split into different continents. The UK now surrenders its African, Asian, and American islands to its former colonies, Portugal surrenders Timor to Indonesia, and a few other small changes like that.

Also, armies standing around in former colonial territories is now a thing of the past and nations will now only have armies stationed in territories where they have access.



Iberia is a focal point of La Resistance and as such, a few releasable tags have been added to the subcontinent as well.

Catalonia


The Basque Country


Galicia
[img{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/9948323/7594ee915821a5a3d3667bec8c83ed3a28bacee3.png[/img]

Spain can of course be fractured from the start of the game by selecting the appropriate option in the game menu. However, I noticed Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia simply weren’t enough to make Iberia look “shattered” so I took the liberty of adding an “11th of November” game rule, and I will leave it for you all to speculate what that option does.

When it comes to the second formable, one must be opportunistic and take full advantage of the instability in Spain and Portugal. The Moorish people once reigned sovereign over all of Iberia, and owners of La Resistance will be able to restore the long-dead state of Al-Andalus.



Andalusia was once an Islamic Sultanate that ruled from the Iberian peninsula and a beacon of the Islamic world. Through struggles with the Catholic kingdoms in the medieval era, the Andalusians would slowly be pushed out of Iberia, ending with the conquest of the Emirate of Granada in 1520. However, the Moorish people continue to exist to this day in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria, many of whom are descendants from Moorish refugees fleeing the Spanish Reconquista.

Andalusia will be formable by any of the North African countries; Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara, Algeria, or Libya. In order to form this tag, one must occupy a large portion of both Spain and Portugal’s southern states and forming the tag grants cores on the entirety of the Iberian subcontinent.



But that isn’t the end of Andalusia. Similar to Byzantium’s “triumph” decisions, Andalusia will be able to sweep across the Mediterranean and beyond, restoring their old claims and titles.



If a player can enact all decisions relating to the Andalusian conquests of North Africa and the Med, they will be able to press on for Egypt and Arabia and declare themselves the Umayyad Caliphate reborn, granting cores on the Arabian Peninsula.



Upon doing so, Andalusia will unlock their final set of decisions, allowing them to restore the entire former claims and titles of the Umayyad Caliphate, effectively reuinifying the Islamic world.



As we have expanded the scope of Hearts of Iron, some old bits of content started to become outdated and lead to some annoying bugs, which I have dedicated some time to fixing. One key thing I have improved is the way that the British Raj interacts with different game options and Britain doing strange things. From now on, the Raj will be able to freely pursue their focus tree even if Britain forces them into independence, with some focuses bypassing, and others no longer requiring the Raj to be a subject.



That's it for today- make sure you join Da9L, Bratyn and Jojo at 16:00CET on https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive as they have a closer look at Anarchist Spain!

Today's Dev Diary by Podcat



Hi everyone! The team is now back from the holidays and polishing on La Resistance. Today its time for a classic “bag of tricks” diary covering various small changes. The theme is quality of life here.


MEFO Bills
Ever forgotten to renew MEFO bills as Germany? Yeah me neither! But just in case someone does we got you covered. Now you can opt out or back in if you changed your mind, at any point during each cycle.




Construction queue
We have changed the default behaviour for the construction queue. Now when adding say a new factory construction it will be placed just below the last non-repair entry (rather than at the bottom). This removes a lot of extra work with having to reprioritize things and still allows you to put specific repair jobs at the top of the queue with no issues. There are also new shortcuts in those rare situations where you might prefer sending to end of queue directly.




Exercise auto stop
Exercise now has 2 setting states so that you can either keep the old behaviour (keep training past max level and get XP) or hold shift when activating it and it will automatically stop when hitting the max level. This also works for ships and planes and its a nice relief not to have to babysit exercises when you aren’t after XP.



Decision Notifiers
Since we added decisions in Waking the Tiger the amount has been growing and we have been using them in more and more cool and creative ways. This has meant that the number of choices have gone up and some stuff has needed to change to make sure notifications are actually helpful for you. Firstly we have made notification numbers more visible and clear for both decisions and the espionage agency. Secondly its now possible to right click the decisions button to reset the available count. This means that after that only new ones will show up in the count. They can of course be switched on/off individually like before but if you are like me this saves a ton of clicking, and now it will impact what the notifiers show unlike before where it was only tied to separate alerts.



Allied Naval Invasion Alerts
Invasion alerts can be critically important for you to notice if an enemy is about to make a successful landing somewhere and you need to react. Previously it was difficult to help out nearby allies as alert were only for your own controlled shores. Now we have 2 new alerts mirroring the old ones for allies so you can bail out Mussolini when he's in a pinch ;)




Civil War Surprises
During a normal war you have time to set up your plans and get units into place fast, but in civil wars this is not so. With the spanish civil war in focus this expansion we wanted to make sure we made this less stressful for players, so now if any civil war happens the AI will wait a short while to activate its plans giving a human player time to organize or pause if they want. Its not a long break but its enough where it feels a lot more comfortable to play against now.


Zoomable & Searchable Focus Trees
We already went into this in detail back here. But since then we have improved the UI to make filtering better and set it up for old trees as well to make finding things easier. This below is for Mexico and lets you highlight stuff related to rebellions and church authority as special filters on top of the regular filters:




Thats its for this week! Today we are also starting up streaming again. Me and Daniel (mah leaks) are going to show off as much as we can of the Espionage system at 16:00CET. See you then!

https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

Live today at 16:00 CET: Podcat and Da9L show off the new espionage system in all its glory!

Tune in here: https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

Today's Development Diary by ManoDeZombi

Olá everyone and welcome to another dev diary for La Resistance! Let me begin by introducing myself: My name is Manuel, I’m from Spain and I joined Paradox as a Content Designer for HOI a couple of months ago (just on time to attend PDXCON, yeah!).

I’ve been working on the implementation of Portugal for La Resistance. The original design of the focus tree was made by Portuguese professor Pedro Santos. He came with what I consider to be a really interesting idea, where the political branch of the tree has multiple possible interactions with the Spanish Civil War.

While I worked on Portuguese Events and Decisions, the whole tree was implemented by our producer, Vachon (big kudos to her!). We tweaked the design of the Focus Tree a little bit, specifically the communist branch, which we felt was a bit dull compared to others, and the SCW-related branches to make them properly interact with Spain. Now I’m the one who will polish the tree and will attempt to get rid of all those lovely bugs our great Betas are reporting. Talking about Betas, our freelance artist @Indyclone77 is the one to blame for all the wonderful Portuguese event pictures and new icons you are about to see in the focus tree and national spirits, he has done an amazing job not only in making all that cool art, but also in providing crucial feedback during the development, so big kudos to him as well!

Before going on, please note that balancing is still a work in progress, so there may be changes in what you are about to see.

So I’d like to start talking about the National Spirits Portugal will start with in 1936:

• Unreliable Army: Representing the poor state of the Portuguese army during the period of the First Republic, which historically led to a major reorganization in 1937, it provides some penalties to Division Organization, Recruitable Population Factor, War Support and Division Attack, so you want to get rid of this before entering any conflict (probably not the best idea to join the Spanish Civil War only to see how your disgusting Spanish enemies defeat your unprepared troops and occupy your precious mainland in a blink...).
  
  
• Unstable Republic: During its 16 years, the First Portuguese Republic saw the inauguration of nine presidents and 44 cabinet reorganizations. Even during the Ditadura Militar there were several failed coup attempts. In 1933, after Salazar’s creation of the Estado Novo and the new Constitution approved in a referendum, Portugal’s stability slowly increased (maybe the censorship system and the different police forces that repressed all kinds of dissidents also helped a little bit with that). So another no-good spirit applying penalties to your Daily Political Power Gain, Stability and Construction Speed. You will be able to remove it through the different political branches, and you will probably want to do it ASAP.

Now let’s look at the Portugese Focus Tree and talk about the different paths a player can choose from:


See an enlarged version of this image on the forums

As you can see, the general structure varies a little bit from the standards of other trees, where you have clear separate branches for industry, military forces and politics.

Let’s start with the colonial branch, shall we?

Through the first focuses, Portugal will receive big bonuses to non-core manpower that will prove really useful in the early stages, since Portugal’s initial manpower is really low. The player can then choose between integrating the African colonies (which will also provide some extra manpower), or allowing them to form their own governments and puppeting them (something that will be appreciated by other democracies in the world).

There is also a sub-branch that joins the industrial one, developing industry and infrastructure in the African colonies.



Regarding Industry, by continuing the public works initiated by Salazar’s regime around the early 30s, Portugal will gain access to the first focus that will provide her first extra research slot (take into consideration that Portugal starts with only two research slots, so it seems just fair for her to get an early focus to fix that). The player can also choose between a fast development of the civilian industry receiving more factories or, with a slower approach, invest in future development getting some nice bonuses to industry research and construction speed.

Portugal can also improve infrastructure and resource extraction industries on the mainland and, of course, there is a focus representing the construction of dams, something Iberian dictators liked very much to do.

And then we have the military industry sub-branch, where the player can get (much needed) military factories and some useful bonuses to production and research for aircraft, vehicles and artillery. Make sure you don’t miss the extra research slot “hidden” between all these industrial focuses!



The first focus on the Naval Branch will unlock decisions to buy ships from either The United Kingdom or Italy. If they accept to build your ships (make sure you have good relations with them before activating the decision!), you will then be presented with three different options to choose from.





The central and left sub-branches focus on Convoy protection and submarine warfare, providing a number of research bonuses for destroyers and submarine warfare, as well as adding a couple of dockyards to boost your naval production. These sub-branches then merge, eventually leading to a focus that unlocks Portugal’s third and last research slot (for a total of five).

The right side of the naval branch is focused on the production of the big ships, as well as fortifying the vulnerable Portuguese possessions in the Atlantic Ocean and Asia.



The Army Branch, although fairly small (don’t worry, you will find more military focuses under the Political Branch), will help Portugal to get its army in shape for the conflicts to come. The first focus removes that nasty Unreliable Army National Spirit and leads to some research and production bonuses in the next focuses. Finally, you will have to choose between building heavy fortifications in Lisbon, or creating a light fortification line along the coast.



Now, let’s take a general look at the whole Political Branch before getting deeper into each of the sub-branches:





In the right, we have the “cautious” approach to the Spanish Civil War. Here you won’t be able to join the SCW until you have swapped to a communist government. It’s a much slower approach, but after the war, you can pick different focuses to interact with foreign countries, including one that will grant you a war goal against Spain, in case their ideology is no longer desirable for you.



If you go with Strict Neutrality you won’t be able to interact in the SCW, but you will gain some nice boosts to your industry, production and Democracy support via the British, as well as some recurrent decisions to purchase equipment from them.







In case you go with Estado Novo, you will have to choose between Strict Neutrality (mentioned above), Support the Nationalists and the Monarchist branch.

Support the Nationalists, as its Republican counterpart, will allow you to support Nationalist Spain and send volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. You can join the SCW against the Republic in further focuses, and also intervene in Spain after the civil war if the Spanish government does not match your ideology.

National Syndicalism will pave the way to become Fascist, leading to some interesting focuses: You can either join the Axis, or claim that Portugal will be the nation that finally unites the entire world under the same rule, ideology and faith (this will provide a powerful National Spirit, but it will also annoy some people around the globe).

Refuse the Naval Blockade unlocks a decision for countries at war with the United Kingdom, by which they will use some of your convoys to carry supplies where they cannot reach, increasing their War Support and, of course, diverting the production of one of their factories to meet your needs.





In the case of a Carlist Uprising happening during the Spanish Civil War, you can support your Monarchist friends in Spain and join the war against all those disgusting Communists, Socialists, Anarchists and Fascists (a lot of people to deal with in the Iberian Peninsula).



And that’s all from me, I hope you enjoyed the dev diary and make sure to stay tuned for the next one. Anyways, we wish you all a merry Christmas and very happy New Year. See you all in 2020!