The long tradition of HoI anniversary surprises, while slightly delayed, has not been forgotten.

Today, we have the pleasure of announcing to you the next milestone in the Hearts of Iron story: By Blood Alone. Over the coming months, we’ll be revealing more on what each of these features consists of, but for now enjoy a snapshot of the future for Hearts of Iron.

In By Blood Alone, you will chart the course of Mussolini’s regime in Italy or subvert Italy’s historical path in one of many new alt-historical paths in the new Italian focus tree, driven by the constant involvement in war from the beginning to the end of the game.

Choose to take on the task of resisting the Italian colonial occupation as Ethiopia in their new, expansive focus tree. Will you go into exile only to return stronger than ever when the greater conflict ignites, or can you beat the ultimate challenge and evict Italian troops from your land before forging a new path for your country in the prosperous Horn of Africa?

Experience the true meaning of ‘building tall’ by balancing your precarious situation as Switzerland, sandwiched between an ever-growing array of totalitarian regimes. Will you succumb to their pressure, or stand as a shining beacon of democratic ideals in the face of greater odds?

Alongside a number of changes to the air warfare system, take advantage of a comprehensive Plane Designer feature, as well as numerous quality of life improvements and new functionality for owners of La Resistance and the intel system. Accompanying the plane designer, we’ll be adding a whopping 67 new 3d plane models including a wide array of new Italian planes as well as going back and adding models to many important planes currently lacking them.

In By Blood Alone, you will be able to make use of a variety of new demands in the overhauled peace conference feature. Demand the demilitarization of states, the dismantling of military industry in defeated foes, civilian factory war reparations, and access to resource rights in addition to the expected array of peace conference actions. Of course, we can’t forget that navies played an important part of post-war negotiations - augment your victory by partitioning the navies of defeated foes, and put these behemoths of the sea to good use as you look towards the next conflict.

Divisional Commanders will now be the bread and butter of your future officer candidates. Grow their skills passively as they perform their duties in command of divisions, reward their actions in combat with country-unique medals, and see their persistent achievements follow them as they are promoted to higher positions over the course of a game.

Encounter up to 20 new unit models and associated SFX, 12 new radio-integrated music tracks, and new diplomatic actions as well as many more quality of life and functional improvements to HoI in By Blood Alone.

As mentioned above, we’ll be delving much deeper into what each of these features will consist of in the coming weeks and months leading up to release. Stay tuned for more information!

Teaser Trailer

Wishlist it here!

Join the discussion here!

Hello there, C0RAX here. Welcome aboard to my dev corner, in this thread I'll be going over the core introduction of the planned changes to naval gameplay.
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• Good ship design is unintuitive.
  
• Combat revolves around exploiting oversights
  
• Ahistorical meta

• Clearer design process
  
• Meta based upon good structure and multiple key values
  
• Making historic choices in naval design and composition work well in game

• Tech Tree
  
• Ship Designer
  
• Hit profiles
  
• Spotting
  
• Fleet composition

The most obvious change is our first port of call today, this is the tech tree. There are a number of changes here that will be explained in further detail further to the aft of the dev corner.



So firstly the naval tech tree has been split into 2, the naval tab contains hulls and tech directly linked to hulls. Let's take a look at what that looks like.




As you can see it's much more concise than before, armor techs have been combined so each level will unlock both heavy and cruiser armours and are not linked to any specific hulls. SH armor still remains part of the super heavy battleship.

Moving on to the new “Naval Support” tab.




Here you will see quite a difference from the old tech tree. Gone are the secondary battery techs as they are now research via the medium gun techs



Additionally the naval shell upgrades are now part of the gun lines acting as an intermediary tech between new modules. But don't worry about having to research more techs, XP reductions are gone but base research times are down.



Dual Purpose Guns

And let's finally address that big elephant in the room… Dual purpose guns now branch off the light gun line. They are a 1939 onward tech, with the UK,USA,Japan & France starting with the Basic dual purpose Battery Researched and historic ships starting equipped with dual purpose Batteries and dual purpose Secondaries. Dual purpose guns lack the piercing of regular guns but make up for it by also providing AA.




The current values for the dual purpose batteries are not final and are currently aligned with their non AA equivalents.



Finally we have the 1944 Advanced medium dual purpose battery which packs a punch both to ships and planes, which should you reach it could wreak havoc for enemy aircraft and destroyers alike.



Hit profiles & damage ("well the front fell off")

Quick primer on hit profile in case you don't know what they are. A Hit profile is the calculation used to determine how easy it is to hit a ship. This hit profile is then divided by the accuracy of the weapon type a ship is firing (10 * (Hitprofile/weaponaccuracy)^2).

Any other effects that affect hit chances such as weather/time of day are applied to the final value. Currently the live game calculation for a hit profile is the ( (visibility * 100) / speed) .

So a ship with a high hit profile will be easier to hit than one with a small hit profile.

A change to the hit profile calculation is aimed to reduce the impact of speed on hit chance and should flatten the effect of speed for much slower ships. The current but not final working formula is:

( (visibility * 100) / ( (speed/2) + 15) )

In addition to this there have been some other changes for hit chance

New hit chance modifiers that affect hit chance in the same way that weather affects hit chance. The new modifiers replace existing stat modifiers for modules/tech.

• Radar and fire control increase light and heavy guns hit chance
  
• homing torpedoes now increase torpedo hit chance
  
• Base critical chance is reduced

Spotting

• Spotting is now min capped at 0.01% progress per hour, so you will always spot a task force after 10,000 hours (417 days)
  
• Random chance to instantly spot (encounter) equal to your hourly progress, so if you have a 4% hourly progress you also have a 4% chance to “encounter” a task force.
  
• Sub and surface detections for a task force are now listed in the task force information tooltip.

Fleet Composition

First joining an ongoing battle was very painful and making strike forces much less useful this should be much less of an issue with much lower and shorter lived penalties for positioning.



Additionally SUPREMACY_PER_SHIP_BASE has been reduced from 100>75 so that IC and manpower have a greater impact on naval supremacy.


The ship designer has some of the most major changes to existing ships and modules. Let's go through them by groupings..

Firstly I want to say that you can no longer have both medium cruiser and light cruiser guns on the same design, fitting both will invalidate the design. This will eliminate one of the largest exploits in current ship design and should prevent ships being unintentionally protected by screening.

Now we will get into some gritty details of the current value changes for the rebalance.

(RED=changed values, BLUE=New values and BLACK=unchanged)

Changes to speed,reliability and Production cost.







Changes to speed for hulls




On speed it should be much harder to get 40kt ships now - faster ships hover around ~35kt with slower ships being in the 30kt range. Some older ships and submarines remain well below 30kt and will need upgrading if you want their speed to match modern ships.

Submarine Visibility



Now these are the normal changes to modules and ships, but that's not all we have some new modifiers that are replacing or adding to existing modules too.

Fire control/Radar





Torpedoes



Armor

In addition to the new modifiers below for armor a review of armor values and piercing is planned, but I don’t have a completed set of changes for that yet so you will have to wait for future announcements on how that looks.




As always If you have any questions feel free to ask here.

Hey Everyone! I am back this week to talk to you a bit about some changes we are making to air management and combat. The first thing I want to get out of the way is that this is not a “Man the Guns” style rework of combat and management systems. Our focus on air changes have mostly revolved around quality of life and balance changes to existing systems, while largely maintaining the structures people are familiar with (with a couple of exceptions). So, let's get into it!

Starting off with a QoL change I am very happy about: Simplified Wing Deployment. Anyone who has experience with managing air wings probably has some complaints about how deploying wings works. The live system requires three clicks in the best case (four if you include choosing a base) to deploy a single wing into an empty airbase. In the worst case this requires more clicks and doing some math for creating a large wing that can later be divided evenly. Now, we are adding quick deploy buttons to the air base UI to allow deployment of a wing in a single click. We are also keeping the old deployment menu for more advanced deployment options. Also, in this menu, we have simplified the flow for deploying single and multiple wings at once.

WIP UI design of simplified wing deployment tools. Note the art style here is not indicative of a change in art direction for our UI. In the first image we see the setup that can be done to select fast deploy options from any air base.



In the second Image we see the newer version of quick deploy within the advanced deployment menu. You now have a set of filters to only show planes of a specific type, and you can now set the reinforce preference on all of the wings you are about to deploy, or individual ones.


One of the most visible changes to air management, and hopefully a big quality of life improvement for most people, is the addition of Air Groups. The first thing I want to say is this is not Army Groups or Fleets. For now, and the foreseeable future, we are not adding Air Marshals or any sort of mechanical impact to using Air Groups. Air Groups are an organizational structure and nothing more. What it will do is enable the grouping and selection of multiple air wings across multiple locations bases for easier management. These groups will be displayed when in the air map mode so that you do not have to hunt down your wings on the map when you want to interact with them.

A very much WIP view of our current air groups


Of the changes we are making, one of the most notable is moving to standardized/fixed wing sizes. This change comes with a loss of flexibility in some situations and makes managing smaller numbers of airplanes a bit more complicated. However, I think that real air combat in HoI4 is measured in thousands of airplanes and not dozens. We are currently looking at 100 sized wings for most aircraft, with size 10 wings for a few specific equipment types(scout plans, CV planes, ect). This allows us to streamline wing deployment and some other management stuff such as not having AI take up weird percentages of air bases. It also makes balance easier and fixes a few exploit cases. This may take some getting used to but I feel it improves the overall experience of managing large numbers of aircraft.

The final change I want to discuss today is an addition to the combat system. We are adding a new mechanic for intercepting planes in regions enroute to their target. In most cases, engaging planes in their target region will still be most effective. But in others, such as when range is a factor, the region being crossed has a bunch of engagement and spotting bonuses, and in a few other cases leaning into combat in an intermediary region can be a good idea.

Beyond these more concrete changes we are doing a balance pass on existing air combat mechanics. A lot of this is still too WIP to discuss, but I would like to highlight one of our objectives which is decoupling agility and speed with more impact given to speed in later air superiority fighter designs, but more on that at a later date.

As always, I wish you all the best and don't hesitate to tell us how these changes make you feel. Until next time o7

Checksum: 8e75


Balance:
- Adjusted the ship refitting cost calculation. The base cost is now a percentage of the hull cost, and the cost for any module changes are added on top of that. The same is true for tanks.
- Removed path connecting advanced light tank chassis to modern tank chassis research

Stability & Performance:
- Fixed rare OOS happening when players joined an MP game after playing a different game

Modding:
- Hot-reloading AI strategy plans will not crash the game.

Database:
- Changed the starting British Motorized Division template to use motorized - sorry, motorised - recon
- Added some bypass conditions to Czech focuses
- Unlocked fuel tank module for French cruiser submarines

Bugfix:
- Only display the ship refitting speed and cost modifiers when MtG is active.
- Added Bypass to "Demmand Lithuanian Annexation" if Poland already controls all Lithuanian states except for Memel
- Fixed units being unable to convert a move order to a retreat order when attacked
- Fixed CTD that could happen during railway gun positioning.


For the full patch details & discussion

Hi folks,

It’s been a while since our last update on future plans for HoI, but we’re about ready to show you some of the work we’ve been doing. Before we begin, I’d like to indicate that there’ll be some differences in how we do this. As I’ve previously stated, we want to begin discussion around features and implementation details a little earlier in the process than usual. This means a couple of things.

Firstly, while we’ll be showing off some individual features, we’re not yet ready to give an overview of the entire scope of our next release yet. This will, of course, be coming in the near (ish) future.

Secondly, you’ll be getting an early look at what we’ve been working on, and this comes with all the caveats you might expect: lots of WIP design, interface, and gameplay.

Lastly, for the time being we’ll be producing these ‘design corner’ style diaries every two weeks, rather than weekly. This is likely to change as we get closer to being complete.

Before I hand over, I’ll give you a quick run down of the directive for the feature we’re looking at today: Peace Conferences. Our primary objectives are to:

• Create a system that appropriately rewards participation.
  
• Allow for conflict and conflict resolution within the scope of the conference.
  
• Create a limited ‘economy’ within conferences, where you may have to sacrifice your overall aims in order to secure immediate concerns.
  
• Produce more ‘realistic’ outcomes where the AI is concerned

And with that, I’ll hand over to @Yaboi_bobby to dive into the deeper details!


Hey everyone, over the past months we have been working to overhaul the peace conference system. It is no secret that in HoI4 the peace conference system has a number of issues with how it functions. Combining that with the fact that it is a surprisingly hard interface to learn how to use, it is rightly one of our most disliked and complained about features. We have taken a large step away from how the system currently works and I am excited to show what the future holds for peace conferences.

The first major departure we made from the old system was shifting from absolute claiming of territory to contestable claiming of territory. In the old PC system once somebody claimed a state, that was it. That claim would be locked in and no one would be able to interact with it further. Now, players may contest other players' interactions in the conference. This doesn't come without cost. Contesting claimed territory will come with a point tax, and every time a contest happens the price of interacting with that state climbs further. This effectively creates a bidding war between all parties invested in a given state. This change should have some interesting outcomes, allow mid and low level participants to have more agency, and give players the tools needed to go after the states that are most important to them for things like achievements and forming new tags.

Here Brazil prepares to bid upon Chao Boreal which has already been claimed by Argentina


Contestable bids help solve some problems, but without further changes many still persist. One of the most obvious issues was how the old system handled turn order. The old system would order countries by participation, and then go in order based upon the number of points held by participants. Where it gets weird is the fact that the order of the list would get updated after each nation’s turn. This meant that often the top two participants could have enough points when a turn ended that they would simply exchange turns between them and end up completely controlling the conference. This was in some ways a good method to allow two big faction leaders to have majority control after the end of a historical WW2, but is bad in virtually every other case.

We did a lot of thinking about turn order and how to structure the turn in general. Slowly we came to the conclusion that any system with a visible turn order, no matter how it was structured, would put people at disadvantage or advantage depending on turn order. This led to the creation of what we have been calling the “Blind Bid” system.

The main concept of the “Blind Bid” system is that everyone acts simultaneously. The way this functions is that, each turn, every conference participant uses their points to make bids. When every player has finished making their bids, all of the bids are evaluated at once. Bids have a fixed cost much like the current claims do, but now with more modifiers. In any instance where two participants made a bid on the same state, that state is marked as contested and the players involved have the majority of their points spent on the bid refunded. Each time a state is contested, it increases in cost for all subsequent rounds. This effect stacks on a state each turn in which a contested bid happens. The other side of this is uncontested bids. Each turn a bid goes uncontested, it increases in cost for everyone else except for the person who made the bid. This acts to, over the course of several turns, lock in bids as they become too expensive to realistically contest.

Brazil and Argentina attempting to resolve a contested bid on Chaco Boreal


At this point you may be thinking “Yeah OK, but I get points each turn, how does the conference end?” This leads us to the final major change: limited points. This is pretty self explanatory. Each participant will get a fixed amount of points over the course of the conference based upon war participation score. The way we do this is by distributing a percentage of those points every turn until all points are distributed. Most of the work here comes down to rebalancing war participation and finding what we consider a good point ceiling for a conference. Limited points will mean, in some cases, that loser nations survive more intact than they did previously, but this should not be a common case. In general, we think this creates a fun and somewhat tense conference experience.

Beyond the big three changes listed so far we have a number of smaller tweaks, adjustments, and rebalance to overall cost of interactions and participation. However, that topic is not worth going into at this point as it is still very much WiP. So with that I will conclude the first overview of the peace conference rework. We look forward to your feedback, hot takes, and hopefully excitement. Until next time o7

Join the discussion!

The frontlines are expanding! Our community is making an operational push onto a new platform! That's right, D(iscord)-Day is upon us!

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- Added a bypass to the Free French "Form the National Committee" Focus to avoid blocking the player if they don't have 90 Legitimacy
- Fixed a problem in British Alternate Strategy Plans when historical focuses are off without a specific strategy plan being selected
- Fixed issue where Estonia and Latvia would not follow the historical focuses
- Added missing leader tooltip in Soviet focus The Glory of the Red Army. Pavel Rybalko will become a general after completing the focus, and now everyone knows it.
- Turkey no longer gets a wargoal on themselves when refusing Balkan Federation demands
- Niche Role will now be correctly set correctly when AI designs ships. This also applies to players using "auto design".
- Japanese puppets should now get the corrects name
- Fixed achievement "Better than Szent Istvan" being impossible to earn due to a an issue with the new character system
- Naval battles will no longer count towards combat duration for career profile

As you’ll be aware, it has been a while since our last dev diary, and I’m super thrilled to finally release what we’ve been working on since No Step Back.

We take great pride in our attention to gameplay telemetry that we receive from keen HOI4 players from across the globe, and our data wizards regularly furnish us with relevant information with which to steer development of features. After NSB, we were informed of a clear and scientific trend in the data:



That’s right folks, it turns out that 99.5%* of you exclusively play monarchies. It was quite clear to us that we had a mandate to finally concede to public demand, and add the long-awaited Habsburg branch to the Generic focus tree!

*These results were verified by independent election officials.
Now, regardless of which nation you hold dear, you too can find and install a local member of the Habsburg dynasty, taking part in the restoration of everyone’s favourite neighbourhood hegemony.



After discovering a stray member of the Habsburg dynasty, steer your nation to glory by choosing an appropriate spouse or accidentally inheriting some countries you weren’t aware existed.

No Habsburg tree would be complete without an edifying array of royal marriage candidates, so we’ve included plenty of historically accurate examples:



Once you have secured the bloodline, you can, naturally, expand your sights to join your relatives in other countries in vying for the ultimate prize:



As you might expect, every nation can now join and restore the Holy Roman Empire regardless of where they start.

In addition to the usual focus tree content, we’ll be expanding our ambitions somewhat! We’ll be including three new realistic continuous focuses to the Habsburg branch:




Ultimately we feel that this adds a great deal to the generic focus tree experience, importantly providing a thoughtful, plausible and historically inspired approach that you can enjoy with nations as far afield as you like.

A.E.I.O.U, folks!

UI:
- Fixed some DX11 and OpenGL UI elements being 1 pixel off by making them incorrectly positioned the same way DX9 does

Modding:
- The game will no longer show an empty "Modify Government" alert when using hidden ideas

Stability & Performance:
- Fixed CTD due to AI not being notified when a leader is removed from a country

Bugfix:
- Fixed adding or removing divisions to a general under a marshal not updating the marshal's abilities' effects
- Fixed capping of the reliability value to 100% in the Tech Details view
- Fixed a bug where character traits would sometimes duplicate on level up.
- Fixed Radio II XP cost for the tank designer being higher than intended
- Isoroku Yamamoto will no longer have an extra 'I' in his name
- Fixed a rare issue where the Japanese coal liquification focus could fail to add a refinery
- Fixes to French career profile translation
- Fixed typo in the communist party of Yugoslavia

- Added an option in the settings menu to disable cloud storage backup of your career profile statistics.
- Players that own most major DLCs should no longer see promotions for the DLC Subscription in the main menu.
- Fixed potential cloud storage issues for the career profile which could result in your statistics not being backed up.
- Fixed a potential desync issue with statistics collection in multiplayer
- Fixed the "Civil wars" stat collection for "Battle for the Bosporus" DLC.