That Russian accent though.

Japan, what are you doing…? I am dissapointed.

Hi everyone! At this point we have covered almost all big features of Hearts of Iron IV, so today I thought I would highlight some of the smaller changes we have done and give a little update on where we are in the project. Right now our Release Candidate has been approved which means that no matter what we have something of good quality to release, and the release date 6th of June is safely locked in! At the moment we are working on further balancing and bug fixing for a release day patch.

Straits and Canals
The straits system in HOI4 is our most flexible and moddable yet. Each strait can have different rules to better match historical rules rather than trying to fit it all under a general blanket. Each strait has a list of provinces that needs to be controlled to decide the rules and they can have 4 states in relation to you:
Friendly – you and allies control all provinces.
Contested – Control of provinces is mixed between you and someone you are at war with generally blocking you both.
Enemy – Controlled by enemy, generally blocking you completely although some may let submarines through.
Neutral – You are neither friend or foe. Usually means you can go through unless it’s something like the Panama Canal, or the Turkish Straits where only trade is allowed.
For each of these a strait can specify what happens with military transports, fleets, trade and submarines.

Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – Development Diary 56 – Bits & Pieces” →

Playing as Poland.

Good morning!

This weeks topic is brought to you by the embedded Quality Assurance on Hearts of Iron IV, and how we work. My name is Distantaziq and I’m one of the two embedded QA on HoI4. My partner is currently in flux, but at time of writing and until HoI4 is released it is Da9L who holds the position, or maybe you know him more prominently as the person who put the ”Y” in ”Yermany”.

Quality assuring a game is much like quality assuring any other piece of software, except in an arguably more creative setting. If you’re thinking of getting into the business “to get to play games the entire day” you’re more or less signing up for “a fun safari trip” while you’re really enlisting to the corps.

The Quality Assurance department in Paradox Development Studios is divided in two parts; Embedded Testers, that are a part of the project’s development team, and Central QA that are more fluid as they jump between the titles. Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – Development Diary 55 – HoI4 Quality Assurance” →

Greetings everyone!

This weeks DD is about something I know many of you have been hoping and waiting for a long time; AI!

“The field of ridiculously high expectations and abysmally low standards.” – Wiz

Being the only one crazy enough to want to take on the AI in HoI4 as Wiz went on to other projects, I was thrown in to it over a year ago now, and while it has been the hardest job I have ever had, it has also been the most fun and rewarding one.

So, lets jump in, shall we?

Right off the bat there were a couple of MASSIVE challenges in making the HoI4 AI;
1: Maintaining plausible historical behavior in a relatively dynamic and sandbox oriented game
2: Making the execution of player drawn battle plans solid enough that it would feel beneficial to use it.

Rest assured that significant amounts of sweat, blood and tears have been shed to tackle these issues.

For the first challenge, a couple of things sets the AI of Heart of Iron apart from the other PDS titles. First of all the chronologically compact and recent nature means people have different expectations on the HoI AI to act more or less according to history. While HoI4 is more of a sandbox experience than at the very least its latest predecessor, the set up is still historical and there were often reasons for countries to take certain actions at the times that they did. The challenge here was to have an AI capable of handling new situations dynamically in a way that makes at least some sense, regardless of if they are historical or not.

Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – Development Diary 54 – AI” →

In this episode, Hungary under mighty Daniel invades Germany (after Romania of course). You’ll see how well that will go.