Looking forward to the summer release! I know everyone who enjoyed HoI 3 would love to try this game and conquer the whole world, even with Bhutan/Tannu Tuva, the most hard-to-play countries. It is a cool challenge.
Category: Hearts of Iron IV
Hearts of Iron IV – 48th Development Diary – 11th of March 2016
Hi everybody, the topic for today is Naval Invasions.
The main design goal for naval invasions has been to make invasions something that requires a lot of preparation to make it possible to pull off, combat “gamey” tactics of sneaking troops in when others are not looking and make it clear how you go about defending yourself, something that requires both navy, air and land.
Let’s start with what is required to do a naval invasion:
- You need to position troops at a starting naval base and draw up an invasion plan for where you want them to go.
- Before the invasion can be launched you need to prepare the invasion. This is first a matter of needing a certain amount of convoys available (which the invasion plan will grab) and a time. Both these depends on just how big this invasion is. Small invasions can be planned and executed quickly but large amount of divisions will require plenty of preparation time.
- For each strategic area you pass through with the invasion plan you must have sufficient Naval Supremacy. You get that by having sufficient amount of ships on patrol and by controlling the skies (air superiority). If you do not control these things you won’t be able to invade (no sending your whole army to suicide). This makes it pretty clear now to defend as well. For example as UK – as long as your fleet is strong and stationed around the island and your air force is up and about you can feel safe from naval invasions.
Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – 48th Development Diary – 11th of March 2016”
Hearts of Iron IV – "World War Wednesday" Part 11 – The Final Showdown
Now with nukes and a peace treaty. The peace system at the end looks amazing.
Paradox said this on their Facebook page:
Next week we’ll be back with a slower paced single-player session, and we’ll kick off a new World War in a couple of weeks with more players.
Hearts of Iron IV – 47th Development Diary – 4th of March 2016
China is always a rather difficult beast for Hearts of Iron games, still we have put on our thinking cap and seen what we can do to at least make things better. So as the game opens we have the Chinas at peace but hostile to each other. (Seb: China is fun to play. And fun to invade too! Also the borders are different from the HoI3 ones. Pretty hard to get a proper historical picture of that time since even Wikipedia throws you an Unified China map. Yay.)
http://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/149305/1_hoi4_25.jpg
The Kuomintang government will get the option to launch an offensive against the communist insurgents, which will eventually end up in the possibility of a border war between Mao and Chiang. There will be no actual fighting, but units in border states will start to suffer attrition.
http://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/149306/2_hoi4_17.jpg
Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – 47th Development Diary – 4th of March 2016”
Hearts of Iron IV – "World War Wednesday" Part 10 – The nuke strat
More like the Nuke Salt (so much salt)!
Spoiler: no nukes yet. 🙁
Japan does a new invasion and the devs look at it only once (the whole Twitch chat was begging for them to show the Japanese progress at the end, but no), Britain unleashes some more naval invasions and Germany continues the war in the Raj with supply problems. Podcat still brags about his perfect defense in Europe. Johan also curses more, you will see why.
However, Germany does not have enough oil. Iran took Baku and they do not trade xD
Hearts of Iron IV – 46th Development Diary – 26th of February 2016
Welcome to a new development diary. This time *takes a sip of earl grey* we are going to look at United Kingdom. They start as the leader of the allies (who at this point is basically the commonwealth) and what really sets them apart is their sprawling colonial empire and the Royal Navy – the strongest fleet in the world at this time at 35 capital ships and around 200 smaller vessels.
United Kingdom starts with 3 national spirits. British Stoicism which makes them less affected by foreign attempts to change their political alignment. The War to End All Wars which impacts their conscription negatively (war is not as popular as since the first world war), and finally the King (King George V) boosts their national unity.
United Kingdom has a well developed naval industry already at start with 19 dockyards. They also have 34 civilian factories and only 14 military factories.
United Kingdom has one of the widest focus trees with lots of different options. It’s split into 3 major parts.
Rearmament
The rearmament tree focuses on getting ready for and fighting another war. You will find things like research bonuses to motorized and mechanized troops, implementing the Shadow Factories scheme to allow quicker conversion of civilian industry to military.
Reinforce the Empire
Managing your empire takes up a large portion of the focus tree. The main choices are: Focus on buildup in asia, further developing the commonwealth nations, fortifying the mediterranean (suez malta etc), or securing Iraq and Iran which will set you on a path of war with the Soviet Union.
Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – 46th Development Diary – 26th of February 2016”
Hearts of Iron IV – "World War Wednesday" Part 9 – Where in the world is Japan?
RIP Romania ;_; At least Hungary did not get the whole of Transylvania, just innacurate parts. But Bulgaria got Bucharest, so much for historical accuracy.
Japan does something really interesting in this game, even if it lost most of its developed land. You will see!
Hearts of Iron IV – 45th Development Diary
Time for another diary! Today I’ll be talking about one of the biggest changes in Hearts of Iron IV compared to the previous titles: Battle Plans.
Design Goals
When I started looking at what direction to take HOI4 for unit control and provinces I first looked at HOI2 and HOI3 to see what worked well and what didn’t.
HOI2
+ Fewer provinces making full manual control always possible
– Few provinces leads to a lot less cool encirclements and removes a lot of interesting tactical gameplay
HOI3
+ Lots of provinces allowing encirclements and interesting gameplay
+ HOI3 had a purely cosmetic battle plan drawing system, and still people used it – because drawing plans feels natural in a strategic wargame like this and it feels right to see and makes showing things to others in say AARs easier.
– Lots of provinces means manual control everywhere can be overwhelming, difficult to manage in multiplayer and annoying in areas where you “don’t care so much”.
– You could hand over control to HQ units run by AI for you and give them objectives. The problem was that effectively you had very little control, and features that play themselves are generally not a good idea. Giving up control also isn’t something most players like to do.
For HOI4 we decided we wanted to attempt the best of both. Keep the high province count, always allow manual control override, enough tools to automate parts that didn’t matter and control and feedback when managing lots of units at the same time so you would not be surprised by the system doing things you didn’t tell it. The system is specifically not allowed to be clever, that is the player’s job, so if you tell it to suicide into the maginot line it will say it thinks it’s too risky, but do it anyway.
The battle plan system in HOI4 lets you draw plans on the map which are followed by assigned divisions, but at any point you can go in and reassign things or issue manual overrides. The player’s role is then basically to draw up high level plans and to watch for opportunities and situations to take advantage of (such as small encirclements, or prioritizing fighting a certain enemy, or cutting off someone’s retreat). Generally the strategic situation will change over time, so while you may have prepared a longer plan expect that you will need to improvise and adapt parts as you go or break off a group to manage some emergency, or particularly stubborn enemy section.
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HoI IV Q&A
Gathered from the forums. Please excuse the grammar mistakes (if there are still any left). The questions were originally put in the Twitch chat.
Can you share technologies?
– No, but you can build and give equipment to others.
Are there stances/dispositions for Convoy Raiding Submarines to dictate when they take too much damage and return home?
– Yes
I wanna ask if we can win war with GBR through starvation?
– Not really, no. But you can make it easier to defeat them by starving them.
Will it be easy to make mods for this game to add variety?
– The game will follow the same model as our previous games.
Is it possible to go fascist as America?
– Yes
Any plans for a leader designer or ‘make your own leader’ tool?
– Not at this time. Maybe some day.
Can you create puppet states like nazi france for example?
– You can release countries that exist in the game as puppets. But you can’t create new ones. There are events for certain sitauations like Vichy France for example.
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