Здравствуйте товарищи! - Greetings comrades! And welcome to a new Hearts of Iron 4 Dev Diary! I hope that you are all having a great summer, and that you are prepared for a little reading, because today we’ll be talking about the last country left to show for the upcoming expansion, a country that, in the direst of times, did take No Step Back.
As you all know, the Soviet Union is huge, and we’ve had to form our own Content Design Soviet to properly implement all the cool stuff we wanted to represent. So today I’ll be talking about my main responsibility, which has been the historical and the common branches for what is one of the most interesting countries in HOI.
I’d just like to mention a couple of things before we start: First of all, yes, everything we’ll be talking about today will be coming for free with the Barbarossa update, although some content might vary if you don’t own some of the previous DLCs. Secondly, our beloved Motherland is still WIP so you might see content, values or even art that’s not final and is subject to change before release. You will also see a fair amount of debug decisions that we use in order to test the new systems. And with that said, I suggest you make yourselves comfortable and ready for a long read, and let’s get started!
This country entered World War I as the Russian Empire, but got out of it as Soviet Russia, having lost substantial territory in Eastern Europe as a result of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, where the Bolsheviks in Petrograd ceded control of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland and other areas to the Central Powers. Since the Allies did not recognize the Bolshevik government, no Soviet Russian representation attended the Peace Conference of 1919 at Versailles, where the former Russian territories previously ceded to Germany became independent states.
In December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed. The term soviet means “council”, and they emerged in the 1905 Revolution as groups or assemblies of Russian workers, soldiers and peasants, in opposition to the Tsar. These soviets disappeared after the (failed) revolution of 1905, but re-emerged under socialist leadership during the revolutions of 1917, which overthrew the Tsar. Through the Soviets, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, constituted the political structure of the new regime.
Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Iosif Stalin came to power and soon began to suppress all political opposition inside the Party, starting with Trotsky and his followers, but turning against many of those who supported him in his political struggle shortly after (such as Zinovyev or Bukharin), developing a climate of political paranoia and carrying out the Great Purge, with its massive arrests and extremely harsh repression to citizens, military and even party members.
But that’s enough history for now, let’s take a look at how the Soviet Union looks when you start the game in 1936.
As you can see, a few things have changed: Initial War Support has been significantly reduced, aiming at making it a bit harder to get to War Economy super early on, something that the Soviet Union was not really ready to do in 1936. Stalin has finally got a trait (and as you’ll see, this is not the only trait he’ll be getting). There are far more starting National Spirits than before, we will take a look at them later, but the first two of them you might recognize: Home of the Revolution and Trotskyite Plot?
We also have a starting advisor, Genrikh Yagoda. He is one of three possible Heads of the NKVD, each one with different characteristics, that you will not be able to manually remove/replace until you get rid of the purges (during which, Yagoda might get purged and be replaced by Yezhov, who can in turn get purged and be replaced by Beriya, as happened historically).
The advisor roster has been greatly expanded, these are the advisors available to Stalin in the early stages (unless he goes too wild with the purges).
There is an even longer list of advisors available for the alt-history communists, most of them will be targeted during the purges, but those are for the next dev diary!
There have also been some changes to the Generals roster: You will now start the game with the five first Marshals of the Soviet Union. Kulik has been demoted to General (since he was made marshal only in 1940, after having lost 3 of the previous marshals in the purges), and there is a new cavalry-specialized general, Vitaly Primakov, available at game start, although a potential target in the purges (generic portraits mean WIP portraits!).
Last but not least, we have sent several Soviet generals on leave to a rejuvenation center, as some had portraits from long after the war. But as you can see, they have not yet returned from their trip (traveling up to 30 years back in time might take some... time, after all).
Okay, we are now finally ready to take a proper look at the new Soviet focus tree (well, except for the Alt-history branches, those are for the next week).
Kinda wide and populated, yes? Well, our main goal with this rework was to offer a more flavorful and historically-accurate experience, while presenting the player with an ample variety of options (both historical and not-so-historical-but-still-plausible) to go for in every different area, just as the largest country in the world deserves!
In terms of gameplay, there are lots of short focuses in this tree, however you will never be able to complete all the focuses in all branches (unless you play until very, very late in-game). You will have to choose your strategy and pick the focuses and branches that will be key for your success in the campaign.
Let’s start talking about the industrial branch.
During the first years of Soviet rule, the economic and industrial development basically consisted of recovering the formerly rural-agricultural Russian economy from the devastation of the Civil War. From 1921 to 1928, the USSR pursued the New Economic Policy (replacing the policy of War Communism, which had led to the decline of the national economy). During the time of the NEP parts of the means of production (light industry, food industry, etc.) was largely in private hands, while the state controlled the heavy industry, transport, banks and international trade. However, during the Stalinist era, the primary goal was the establishment of an industrial base in the country, and during the late 1920s measures were taken again against the kulaks, initiating the collapse of the NEP. In 1928 the implementation of the First Five Year Plan began, followed by a forced industrialization and collectivization.
As you might guess, the main feature of the Soviet industrial branch is the Five Year Plans: You start with a National Spirit representing the Second Five Year Plan (1933-1937), this plan was characterized by a harsh collectivization and a major advance in industrialization and infrastructure. However, the hectic pace of this industrialization and the lack of qualified personnel often resulted in high accident rates (meaning frequent losses in lives and expensive material) and, overall, low efficiency.
As you complete focuses on the Five Year Plan branch, your National Spirit will evolve, representing the Third Five Year Plan (1938-”1942”, the plan was of course ruined in 1941 after Barbarossa). This plan initially emphasized the need of increasing quality in production and resource extraction. However, with tensions in Europe growing at an alarming rate, the plan soon started to gradually focus on defense and military production.
This is represented in game by the possibility of specializing your Third Five Year Plan, you can focus on increasing the efficiency of your factories in the long term, or you can shift the focus to start boosting armament production as soon as possible. As you might have noticed, the focuses in the centre are all resource-related.
As I’ve mentioned, the Third Five Year Plan was ruined after Barbarossa, so how is that represented in HOI?
Well, all the focuses related to the Third Five Year Plan (the ones inside the red boxes below) will get locked forever once the Soviet Union gets dragged into a war against a major country, meaning that once the Great Patriotic War starts, the Third Five Year Plan goes to hell, forever. You will keep your current national spirit with all its bonuses, but you won’t be able to progress any further in this part of the branch.
But fear not, that’s not the end of the Five Year Plans. If you manage to survive and defeat your enemies, and right after the peace conference against the enemy that ruined your five year plan, Restoration and Development will be automatically completed for you, not only granting temporary bonuses for repairing and rebuilding your (potentially) devastated industry and infrastructure, with a cost in consumer goods, but also unlocking access to the Fourth Five Year Plan and the final focuses in the industrial branch. The Fourth Five Year Plan (1946-1950) was focused around the reconstruction and economic development of the country.
The focuses below the Fourth Five Year Plan are late-game focuses aiming to provide interesting things to do and goals to achieve if you decide to continue playing after the main war (or if you manage to have an independent war against another major while world war 2 is raging elsewhere).
The COMECON was an economic organization, founded in 1949 by countries from the Eastern Bloc, and led by the Soviet Union. Once you complete the focus Found the COMECON (presumably earlier than 1949), a small decision system will be unlocked, aimed at aiding your allies (usually at your expense) in order to boost their military and industry so that they keep the pace in the potential wars to come.
To the right of the Five Year Plan focuses, we have a choice to make: train National Specialists or rely on Foreign Experts. The first will significantly improve the national designers, which are now slightly weaker at game start. The latter will unlock the Gosproyektstroy.
The Gosproyektstroy was a State Design and Construction Bureau set up in 1930 following an agreement with the "Architect of Detroit" (Albert Kahn), by which American architects became consultors for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union in the early 30s. This is one of many cases in which the USSR concluded agreements with foreign companies, mainly American (Ford, General Electric...) and German (Krupp, Borsig...) to carry out industrialization during the years of the first five-year plan.
In HOI, you can bring back the project, represented by a construction designer that will provide no research bonus (you’re relying on foreigners, after all) but that can, however, be improved by bringing foreign experts, boosting your production in the long term. Each country will grant different bonuses, Germany will give a bonus to efficiency growth, the USA will grant an efficiency cap bonus and Japan will boost your starting efficiency, for example. All of them will also grant a License Production Cost bonus (atm it’s shown as that amazing “None: +0.75” in the pic below :D).
The Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in the 1700s, became the highest scientific institution in the Soviet Union after the revolution. National academies appeared throughout the 20th century in the Union republics, and regional branches were created as part of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
The first focus (The USSR Academy of Sciences) will grant you a research slot and a small bonus (1%) to research speed.The second focus will allow you to build more academies of sciences in the Soviet republics, both in integrated (not-released) republics and in puppeted republics, for an extra 1% research speed each and, if built on a puppeted republic, then it will also boost your puppet’s research, now that’s a win-win if I’ve ever seen one.
Moving on to the Airforce branch.
During the 1930s, the Soviet government funded missions to break numerous world aviation records. Aviation achievements and records became demonstrations of the USSR's technological progress and Soviet media continuously exalted record-breaking pilots.
However, Soviet aviation was far from being in as good a shape as the Soviet media seemed to indicate. It was, in fact, plagued by mismanagement, inefficiency and technologically-deficient equipment, leading to a staggeringly high accident rate (in early 1941, prior to the war, apparently 2-3 planes on average were lost daily due to accidents, which led to the famous “flying coffin” incident, which sealed Pavel Rychagov’s fate during the Great Purge). The Great Purge definitely took its toll on the Soviet Air Force too, newly promoted officers lacked flying and command experience, while older commanders, having witnessed the fate of so many officers during the purges, lacked initiative and efficiency out of fear of being labeled as enemies of the people.
In HOI, this terrible situation is represented via the National Spirit Soviet Airforce, which has fairly harsh and frightening penalties to anything related to getting your feet off the ground.
Throughout the Airforce branch, you will be able to fix most of these penalties and get some bonuses too. You will not be able to remove all of those penalties though, since you will eventually have to choose between production or pilot training: the left part of the branch aims at improving aircraft production (more plains, better plains), while the right is focused on getting skilled aviators from among flying clubs, and training men and women alike to become competent army pilots, culminating with the three all-female aviation regiments formed by Marina Raskova (they come with aces and everything!).
And it’s time to talk about the Soviet Navy!
The Soviet Navy was divided between four operational zones: The Baltic Fleet, the Black Sea Fleet, the Arctic Fleet and the Far East Fleet, with vast distances separating them. By 1941 the Red Fleet possessed few large modern warships, its expansion had focused instead on submarines and light ships, aiming at protecting the country’s coasts and borders from enemy attacks, the naval defense strategy. After the purges (in which many of the advocates of the defense strategy perished), Stalin pushed to turn the maritime strategy into a resolutely offensive one, but the construction of large military vessels was hindered by the war. Anyways, when Operation Barbarossa commenced, German bombers focused on airfields instead of targeting naval bases. The Third Reich didn’t need to destroy the Soviet navy, as long as their navy managed to blockade Soviet ships in their ports with mines.
In the left part of the tree, you will be able to reinforce the naval bases of any of the four fleets.
You can then Expand Shipbuilding Plants to get a significant amount of dockyards, based on the naval bases you previously reinforced.
To the right, the PC of the USSR Navy will grant you The Red Fleet national spirit.
This national spirit will be further improved in the focuses below, based on your choice between surface or submarine warfare. Most of them will provide some navy experience, tech research bonus and production cost reduction for the appropriate type of ship.
Long Range Raiders will also unlock Cruiser Submarines tech and add a couple of K-Class submarines to your production line.
Similarly, Expand the Morskaya Aviatsiya will grant you bonuses for carriers and navy aircraft, while also adding a carrier to your production line.
And we’ve made it to the last actual common branch, the Military branch!
There are three branches here really, one for Military Industry, one for Defense, and one for the Army. Let’s start with the Military Industry, to the left.
Here you will find multiple research and production bonuses, some military factories and some tank templates.
Development of Tankograd will make it cheaper for you to edit tank templates, while also building military factories in heavily industrialized states in the Urals and to the East.
Last but not least, let’s talk about Merge Tank and Materiel Plants. Did you notice that there were similar focuses in the Air and Navy branches?
Well, during my research for Soviet designers, I was amazed by the sheer complexity of just keeping track of a single designer candidate during HOI’s timeline, since many plants were repeatedly renamed (or re-designated), merged or split into different bureaus (which were also frequently renamed, merged and split themselves). Sometimes plants or entire bureaus were merged into even bigger agencies, and other times a plant would just be merged into a nearby, bigger plant to focus on the R&D aspects of it, for example. Last but not least, we have the evacuation of entire plants from West to East carried out by the Soviets shortly before Barbarossa and of course during the war, which often resulted in more merging, renaming, and repurposing of plants. So, in the face of all this industry reassignment frenzy and plant renaming festival I thought: why not just embrace this chaos and make something out of it for HOI?
These focuses will unlock decisions to merge different plants into your active designers, providing them with many different small bonuses. All these plants are real, although not all of them were actually merged into a bureau or into another plant.
Worth noting that there are also a few new Naval and Tank designers available for the Soviet Union.
In the Defense Branch you can choose between building a defensive line in the border with Poland (Stalin Line) or in the border with Germany, assuming you have somehow gained control over Eastern Poland (Molotov Line). You can also fortify Moscow and the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the border with Japan and their minions. Impregnable Forts is meant to represent the fearsome coastal batteries around Leningrad and in the Crimea, that caused so much trouble to the Germans during the invasion.
Further down the tree, we have Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, which will grant you your 5th research slot, The Road of life and the Soviet Atomic Bomb Project.
The Road of Life were the transport routes across Lake Ladoga (water routes during the period in which the lake is navigable and ice routes in winter) to Leningrad during the Second World War. They were the only Soviet surface routes into the city while it was besieged by the Germans (if you want to know more about the Road of Life, I can recommend watching a fantastic episode centered about the siege of Leningrad, as part of the documentary “Soviet Storm - WW2 in the East”. I find the whole documentary very interesting and enjoyable, by the way). In-game, this focus represents the desperate yet brave and daring supply methods used by the Soviets in the direst of times. It will become available as soon as one of the key Soviet cities is threatened by enemy troops, and it will provide some bonuses to winter attrition and supply.
The Soviet Atomic Bomb Project was the military project, part of the Soviet atomic program for nuclear research and development, aimed at developing nuclear weapons during the war. It was greatly stimulated by the activities and achievements of scientific institutions and military industry of foreign powers such as the German Reich and the United States of America. Initial efforts were hampered by the German invasion and remained largely reliant on the intelligence knowledge gained from the Soviet spy rings working in the USA's Manhattan Project. The focus requires having built at least 7 Academies of Sciences, and it will provide an array of bonuses and tools to infiltrate enemy atomic programs and develop your very own nuclear bombs, including an extra operative slot and a new historical operative.
Now let’s talk about the army branch.
The Army Branch is one of the most important ones in the tree, and it has a lot of content related to it, so let’s focus on the key aspects of it, starting with the initial National Spirits.
The Military was highly politicized, making it dangerously inefficient, even though political discussions (and indoctrination) among the troops also had its benefits for the Party. Politicized Military can be improved further down the branch.
As you can see below, The Red Army has a lot of red modifiers, how fitting, right? Well, no worries, most of the focuses in this branch will deal with those red modifiers, gradually putting your unreliable army in very good shape.
Once you Strengthen the Mobilization Plan for some manpower and mobilization speed, you will be faced with a decision to make: Restore Cossack Units or opt for Cohesion First.
After the Russian Civil War, Cossack troops were disbanded, since many of them sided with the white movement. However, in 1936, the restrictions on conscription of Cossacks for the Red Army were lifted and some cavalry divisions received the status of Cossack Divisions. The wearing of the previously prohibited Cossack uniform was also restored (although it would only last for a few years), and in this uniform walked the Cossack units in their first military parade as part of the Red Army in 1937, and later on at the Victory Parade on June 24, 1945.
In-game, Restore Cossack Units will grant you small bonuses to cavalry, a new general and a few divisions, including a new Cossack cavalry template. To be fair, this template is inspired by the composition of cavalry divisions (not necessarily Cossacks) later on, around 1941, but I really wanted to offer the player an interesting cavalry template from which to work on.
Cohesion First will instead boost your division organization, in exchange for some extra training time.
The old Rehabilitated Military and Military Reorganization have suffered some changes. Rehabilitated military will be available once you get rid of Stalin’s Paranoia and the purges (more of this later), and will help you recover some valuable organization. Military Reorganization has now become an actual reorganization, during which you will have to deal with some nasty penalties that will be applied when you start the focus. However, once the focus is completed, not only will you get rid of said penalties, but your national spirit The Red Army will also get useful bonuses to modifying division templates.
Similarly, Desperate Measures and Lessons of War have also suffered significant changes. Desperate Measures can only be taken while at war against a major power, and will grant a temporary boost to fielding divisions, as well as a set of decisions to help you contain the enemy invasion.
Lessons of War can only be taken once the national spirit granted by Desperate Measures is gone, representing how, even though the Soviet Union suffered numerous and devastating defeats and military failures during the first years of the war, those fatalities were acknowledged and the military slowly learned their lessons from them. This focus is probably the turning point in which the Red Army leaves behind the terrible state in which it was at the start of the game, to begin the path towards becoming a formidable military force. The focus will not only add key bonuses to The Red Army national spirit, but it will also unlock the famous Order 227 (“No Step Back”), which will, in turn, unlock decisions to prepare and carry out important Military Offensives.
In your struggle against the enemies of the people, you will also be able to raise Penal Battalions in the form of divisions entirely composed of convicts. Penal battalions might not be as well-equipped as regular infantry, but they are definitely easier to replenish and overall can perform very good as cheap meatshields, as long as you don’t care too much about your manpower (something that is probably not the biggest issue in the Soviet Union).
Partisan activity in occupied Soviet territory (especially Ukraine and Belarus) was impressively high and played a role perhaps not very decisive but definitely important to the overall war effort. Organization of the Partisans will give you a set of tools to increase partisan activity, disrupt enemy supply and hinder enemy offensives, including a related historical operative and an extra operative slot for him. It will also come with a couple of partisan Generals that can prove to be very useful.
Once you have carried out the military reorganization and learned your lessons of war, you may choose what to do with your Political Commissars: Keep Commissars Organization means that political commissars will continue playing the role of “second commander” within the military units. You can instead Swap to Political Advisors, and try to increase efficiency by subordinating political officers to commanding officers, allowing for more freedom in the military command chain while the new role of political advisor focuses more on morale-related functions.
The Glory of the Red Army will make it easier for you to unlock those last doctrines remaining and field more special forces divisions. It will also unlock a Soviet-specific improved version of the Blitz Tactic, as well as a new General: I read a lot about General Rybalko in various different sources during my research, and I feel that he deserves a place in the Soviet Generals roster.
Now, let’s skip the political branch for a moment and jump to the Internal Affairs branch, a common branch for the communist paths.
Unfortunately, we've reached steams maximum word count for a Dev Diary; So you'll have to read the rest over on our forums right here: https://pdxint.at/3CalDVz
Take a seat at the table, General. It’s time to fight.
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Greetings all, and welcome to today’s dev diary on the huge supply system update coming with the barbarossa update. Before we begin, I’ll leave a heads up that this will be the last dev diary before we break for summer, so don’t expect anything new until some time in August at the earliest.
Since we last talked about supply, a few things have changed. We found that the way truck need could take off and spike was hard to deal with and that watching out so you didn't overload individual supply hubs was a bit too intensive. We also felt that the way the mapmode worked made it very difficult to project how well supply was flowing.
The iteration we have now aims at addressing these shortcomings. It's now possible for divisions to supply from multiple hubs. Trucks are now less of a strict necessity, rather something you can assign to hubs to make sure they can project supplies further away. Finally, the mapmode has changed to better show the spread of supply as well as current status for divisions.
Supply flow
From each hub connected back to the capital, potential supply is projected outwards - adding up when overlapping. This is represented by the brighter colors below. For each province in distance that supply needs to travel from a hub, there is a reduction in the amount as some is lost. The amount depends on various factors like terrain, crossing rivers etc. The dark purple areas below are reduced to local supply only, and the highlighted red-orange areas indicate locations where there are units suffering from significant supply issues.
In the picture above, the Ukraine/Caucasus front is mainly struggling because it is overextending before the captured rails have been converted, so a lot of the rail network there is not operating. When a railway is taken over there is a longer cooldown when it gets converted for use by you (representing a combination of repaired damage, gauge-alteration, and general maintenance), and without connected hubs supply won’t flow.
How much you can output from each hub depends on the level of railways leading back to the supply capital, and the total max there depends on your industrial base (so Luxemburg can not feed as many as soviet union, for example).
Here, the clock indicates rails that are not yet converted, and the hub icons with red crosses indicate that they do not connect back to your network.
Motorization
To increase the range of a hub (perhaps to help supply the front above better) you can choose to improve the motorization level. The horse icon on the right indicates no motorized supply from the node, but you can opt to toggle it to a higher state of motorization. Be careful, as this will cost you trucks which are taken from the stockpile.
It is also possible to set the motorization level on an army, in which case it will automatically toggle on motorization for hubs that it uses without requiring further interaction from the player.
There are also some other options on a hub. The star icon lets you move your supply capital to a new location, provided that you have sufficient surrender progress. This lets you get around issues where your capital ends up cut off or surrounded, but also comes with a period of bad supply as the new location is prepared.
The blue flag next to it lets you control allied access to the node. This can be a great way to flag to an AI that you do not want them on your front, or to stop them from joining a tight landing situation.
The rail icon lets you quickly switch to construction mode and extend rails from there while the green plus will automatically queue up construction for rails to combat any bottlenecks your node may suffer from back towards the capital. The chevron icon lets you prioritize train allocation if you are running low.
Floating Harbors
As part of No Step Back, we’re introducing a new dimension to naval invasions. Floating, or ‘Mulberry’ harbors can now be constructed once the appropriate research has been completed.
These weighty and expensive pieces of infrastructure (don’t look too close at the numbers above hehe) aren’t intended for every-day landings, but are instead intended to represent the equipment used in large-scale operations such as the Battle of Normandy.
Naval invasions utilizing a floating harbor will be represented by harbor apparatus placed parallel province targeted by the invasion, and will immediately create a stocked supply hub at their location:
Used carefully, one or more mulberry harbors can keep a sizable invading force supplied without requiring the immediate capture of an important enemy harbor. Of course, harbors should remain amongst the first targets of any successful invasion, and the supply hubs created by a floating harbor will be temporary; lasting a matter of weeks or months, depending on the strength of enemy air superiority and other factors.
Of course, there is yet more to cover regarding supply, and we'll have another diary on this subject in the future, but I hope you like what you've seen so far and we’ll be seeing you again after summer!
Oh, and one last thing - one of the new loading screens for NSB is this awesome polish cavalry, so we figured we should share it as a summer wallpaper for you (fear not, there will be a soviet one eventually!)
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For my first HoI dev diary, I’m here to show you the second part of the Officer Corps, a new way of personalising your military that will be included as part of No Step Back and the Barbarossa update.
In the last dev diary we explained how we want to allow you to specialise your military branches with the leadership and advisors. Today we bring to you some new features that allow you to customise how your military operates, and act as a further use for the new sources of branch experience that were hinted at last week.
You may have been wondering what all those shiny boxes with emblems were for. I'm here to tell you they are the new Officer Corps Spirits.
Spirits are a new way to specialise your military, generals and even help your division designs. Each branch has multiple categories for its spirits that affect different aspects of the way they operate. Here I have shown you the spirits of the army which provide bonuses to designing divisions or operating armies. Of course this category has analogs for both the air and navy branches. Now we have the more direct combat effect level spirits that let you improve specific parts of your units to best match your strategy. These also let you conduct some historical moves that previously were quite hard such as using your capital ships as surface raiders without screens. And for those keen eyed readers, yes the division spirits provide tactics weight increases if you also have them selected as your preferred tactic which we will get to shortly. Finally we have the final category for the army and navy branches, the academy spirits. Previously generating commanders was a purely random chance. Now with the academy spirits you can tailor this toward specific personality traits along with helping you generals progress in a particular direction. For the above image you can also see the new engineer officer personality trait that provides bonuses to xp generation for the engineer trait. This works in tandem with the advisor promotion mentioned last week, and adds another dimension towards tailoring your officer corps from the very beginning. With the new spirits some are limited by either your political ideology or doctrines and so you will have to take this into account when deciding the strategy of your officers corps. The final part of this week's dev diary brings us to preferred tactics. This new feature provides you with a tool to influence the likelihood of a specific tactic being used in combat allowing you to increase the chance of getting that favorable matchup in battle or possibly the perfect counter.
This simulates a doctrinal emphasis on doing battle in a specific way; but can also provide a tool that can be used to counter a strongly themed force. The new window will help show you all the tactics you have unlocked from doctrines and see what effect they have on the battle. If you combine this preferred tactic with your division spirit bonus you will double the effectiveness of the tactic preference so unifying your strategic direction will help you get the most out of the officer corps.
Well that's all for this week comrades, see you at the front. C0RAX
For my first HoI dev diary, I’m here to introduce the Officer Corps: a collection of new features that will be included as part of No Step Back and the Barbarossa update.
For quite a while, we’ve wanted to allow for more direct specialization of military branches, as well as tying together various disparate systems such as the high command, generals, military-focused national spirits, and doctrines. To achieve step one of this process, we’re giving the Officer Corps and associated mechanics a unique national interface:
(WIP, as usual)
Here, the empty advisor portraits at the top of the window are where you can now find your High Command and Military Theorist, and the advisor portraits below this are related to each branch Chief - they have been moved out of the political sub-window accordingly.
As well as UI location, there are further changes coming to all military advisors. Where previously, the theorist was the only advisor type that granted daily experience gain, all high command and branch chief will now generate experience appropriate to the branch they represent.
The Advisor rank (e.g. Expert) indicates both the magnitude of their modifier bonus, and the daily experience you will receive.
We’re also experimenting with a split political/command power costs to gate the experience ramp-up somewhat, along with some other minor changes to command power.
Behind the scenes, we’ve made a host of changes to the advisor, spirits, and commander systems. Where previously, if we wanted to create a national spirit related to having a certain character in your government, it would be entirely unrelated to having an advisor with the same name, masquerading as the same person - likewise for commanders and advisors masquerading as the same person. This has changed. These are (for the most part) now controlled by ‘characters’. This has pretty sweeping connotations for our internal content designers, as well as modders, but importantly also allows us to bring the following new system to the No Step Back release:
Advisor Promotion
The introduction of a more connected Officer Corps felt like the perfect time to bring more of a connection to the Generals and Field Marshals that oversee your active forces, and the various military offices that advise your government.
In No Step Back, Generals, Admirals or Field Marshals can be assigned an advisory desk duty in addition to their status as a field commander. This will effectively add the character as a new advisor to your roster.
The type of advisor available to you is dependent on the skill level and traits of the commander you’re ‘promoting’ (not everyone likes desk duty ;) ), as you can see in the highly WIP interface below:
Here, Herr Hell can be converted to an Entrenchment specialist as he possesses the Engineer trait, and has skill level 5. Currently, both Military High Command and branch Chief roles are available.
Experience
Experience generation in general has been weighted and balanced in order to achieve a more gradual switch from peacetime generation (a strong cadre of advisors, and unit training), through to wartime. Experience generation from combat and battles has been reduced fairly significantly to account for this, as well as capped (separately from other sources). Overall, experience generation will be consistently higher than in previous versions - this was done both to mitigate the introduction of the tank designer (and thereby increased costs), and to account for the other new ways in which you are now able to spend experience, which we shall cover below.
The eagle-eyed amongst you noticed in a previous diary that the doctrine branches had been removed from the technology window - they can now be accessed from the officer corps interface, and will function somewhat differently to before. Doctrines will be unlocked directly by spending branch experience, which can still be affected by instanced cost modifiers often found in focus trees and events.
(There have been no major structural changes to doctrine layouts)
There are, in addition to the above, several new and exciting things that branch experience will be used for in NSB, some of which are handily teased in the first screenshot of this diary. Alas, we will be covering what those are and how they might affect your gameplay in a future DD.
Another Wednesday means time for another update! Today its time for a "bag of tricks" diary which means its an assortment of smaller features and improvements. Todays selection has several things you guys have asked for for a long time so I hope you will like it!
Decommissioned templates
Its now possible to mark templates as old. Much like with equipment they will no longer show in the list.
Divisions can still use them but get a little warning, and you cant switch to one until it is recommissioned.
It is also possible to reorganize the list of templates using drag and drop, so you can make sure you keep your horsie boys on top where they belong.
Army List Controls
We have also added various controls to the army list. Its now possible to sort and much easier to select
Colorized infra bonuses
Infrastructure help you build more effectively. To make it easier to parse where the best states are we went ahead and colorized the bonus indicator
Lend Lease QoL
To make it possible to more easily send ALL of your stockpile of something we have now added a button to the lend lease interface to set it to the content of your stockpile. A lot nicer than typing out a number you have to look up ːsteamhappyː
War join spam
This one has been on my top 5 annoying things since back in 2014 :D When your war causes a lot of nations to get pulled in you get a ton of separate messages. This can be super annoying because just as you fire off your attack you need to deal with popups. No longer. Check out the comparison when declaring on Poland as Germany. in New vs Old:
For five years, wargamers around the world have been challenged to outbuild and outfight history’s most terrible war machines in Hearts of Iron IV, a grand strategy wargame from Paradox Development Studio. Millions of tanks and planes have been built as players fought through an infinite variety of alternate histories set against the backdrop of humanity’s greatest struggle.
In honor of the fifth anniversary of Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox has announced a new bundle that will give players even more style as they prove that they are the master of modern total war.
The Hearts of Iron IV Anniversary Bundle Includes:
A newly available Immersion Bundle collects the game’s cosmetic touches that add further visual and audio detail to the game, including:
Radio Pack: 35 songs spread across all three factions, as well reproduced music from earlier games in the Hearts of Iron series.
Axis Armor Pack: Over 60 armored vehicle models for the German, Japanese and Italian armies, including the StuG III, Japanese experimental heavy tanks and the L-6 light tank.
Allied Armor Pack: Over 50 armored vehicle models for the American, Soviet, British, and French armies, including the M7 Priest, the French Renault tank and a host of new tank destroyers.
Allied Speeches Pack: Over 70 minutes of speeches from some of the most inspiring moments from the Allied campaign, including MacArthur’s celebrated “I shall return” and Churchill’s pledge to “fight on the beaches”.
Paradox has also updated the Mobilization Bundle to include all of the available Hearts of Iron IV expansions.
These Hearts of Iron IV compilations are all available at the Paradox and Steam stores.
