1. Hearts of Iron IV
  2. News

Hearts of Iron IV News

Dev Diary - Modding Changes


Hello, and welcome back to another Dev Diary for No Step back and 1.11 Barbarossa. Today we will be pulling back the veil a bit and show you how modders can affect and use the new features coming in 1.11.

For those of you who do not get unreasonably excited by hearing about new script commands and changes to databases, the long and short of it is this: We made some fundamental changes to the way the game handles some things, which will probably require your favorite mods to spend some time updating. On the flip side, those changes also allow for some exciting possibilities down the line. If you came here hoping for a release date, we must ask you for just a little more patience. We promise the announcement is very close - but not today.

[h2]Characters[/h2]

Probably the biggest change is in how we handle people on the backend (or ponies, for that matter - we do not discriminate). In the current live version, the game has no real concept of a person as a distinct thing. It only knows about country leaders, military leaders, political and military advisors, and operatives. Cases where a country leader could also be a general had to be handled manually, leading to lots of exciting bugs when the country leader was removed but the general was forgotten about and other such cases.

We have overhauled that side of the game from the ground up with the introduction of characters. This should dramatically reduce the amount of potential zombie generals shambling around, which I am sure the non-zombie population will greatly appreciate.

Characters are defined in the common/character folder, and their definitions look like this:



Every character is defined as a container for different roles they can fulfill, like General (corps_commander), Advisor, country leader etc. Due to technical concerns, Operatives remain their own thing. On the character level itself, things like name and gender are handled. This also means that character names can now be localised and you can refer to a character by ID instead of by name (this helps a lot with character names that have non-english characters in them - turns out this broke some triggers and effects).



This also means that if a character is removed from play - say, through a purge - they are automatically removed from all roles that they could have, which makes such systems a lot easier to do script-side. It also means that if we wanted to allow Zhukov to become a country leader, we could simply add a country leader role for him in the character file, like this:



Or we could also add the role later on, via focus, event, decision... like we do here with Beriya:



hat means there is a lot less confusion and duplication of effort necessary when putting a character into a new role, since stuff like portraits, name etc. are already handled. A broken portrait only needs to be fixed in one place instead of five etc.

Once defined, characters are recruited in the country history file in order to be added to the game. As you can see in the first screenshot, you can use visible triggers for unit leaders to ensure they are not shown if you don’t want them to be.

Characters that can potentially become country leaders are made into country leaders using the promote_character effect, like so:


This is a clear departure from the practice in the live version of the game, where you would create a new country leader in that effect. The old script with create_country_leader and other such effects should still be working, but obviously you don’t get any of the advantages of the unified character system.

So let’s talk about some more things you can do with it!

You can set and check character flags for nefarious purposes:



You can change the traits of advisors without having to make a whole new advisor:


You can check if a character is a certain type of character:



You can save the character as a variable to refer to them later, such as spamming debug messages in the console!



[h2]Tank Designer[/h2]

Next, let’s talk a bit about how the tank designer works on the backend. It shares a lot of concepts with the ship designer, such as modules and module slots. It does, however, work a little differently in some other, important aspects.

While the system pretends that there are only a handful of chassis (light, medium, heavy, super-heavy, amphibious, modern), this is not technically true. Instead, the system maintains a whole host of other, dynamically created chassis. This allows us to make sure that tank designs with the tank destroyer role actually go into tank destroyer battalions etc.

However, these dynamic chassis are still generated from the base chassis, so any changes to them will carry over.

The roles are enabled and disabled on individual modules:


For the unlock of new module categories, you can then use this on a module to unlock that category:


[h2]Railways[/h2]

Railways function a little differently from other buildings. While they are technically province buildings like forts, they are in reality closer to a building that connects two provinces. A railway line is effectively a series of two-province connections, and the lowest one in the chain determines the level of the railroad connection between two supply hubs.

To make it easier to change and maintain the historical railway setup, we have added an option to draw railways into the nudger tool, which you can access by using the nudge command in the console.


The railway setup is in the supply menu in the nudger, and you can easily add new railway lines to the existing setup in this way. It took me about a week and a half to do the entire 1936 setup, including tracking down reference maps (with a lot of help from some of our testers).

If you want to add railways through script, you have the build_railway effect. It gives you a lot of options, with the most basic one being to lay out the path one province at a time:



This is obviously a little cumbersome for longer railways, especially if you don’t really care about the exact path. For that, you have the option to define a start and an end province:


The game will then automatically generate a path from one end to the other using advanced neural network-based self-learning algorithms that use blockchain (read: I have no idea how it works but this sounds impressive).

If finding the province is too much work, or if you want to be somewhat dynamic, you can even use start and end states (also note that you can specify what level of connection should be built):



Note that you can’t mix these, so you can’t define a starting province and a target state for example.

There are also corresponding triggers like can_build_railway and has_railway_connection:




The first checks if a railway can be built between two locations, while the other checks if one such connection already exists.

Finally, there is has_railway_level, which checks if the specified state has a railway line in it with the specified level:



[h2]Miscellaneous new effects, triggers, modifiers[/h2]

In addition to the things described above, we have added a number of useful things that some of you might find useful:

  • Building_cost_factor: a new modifier that affects the construction cost of buildings. This takes the buildings from the 00_buildings file, so it should work with mods that add more buildings.
  • Core_state scope list, allowing you to run effects and triggers on a country’s core states:


  • Add_equipment_to_stockpile effect can now take a variant name to ensure that you add the right kind of equipment.


That’s all for today, I hope you enjoyed these little insights and we are all excited about what crazy things you will do with the new tools at your disposal.

[h3]Read the full article here[/h3]

Dev Diary - Officer Corps Recap & AI Improvements


Hi all, and welcome back to today’s developer diary!

It can be very easy to get super-focused on details when looking at individual systems or parts of features - something we often tend to do when writing developer diaries. Each week, we’re going to give you an overview of a core system that we’ve so far introduced in parts, and will include all of the changes we’ve made to that system over the course of development, since we first looked at it.

In addition to this, we’ll also take a look at some changes coming to the AI in No Step Back, so if that’s more your jam, feel free to skip to the end ;D
[h2]
We’ll begin with an overview of the Officer Corps:[/h2]
This image represents a near-final take on what the office corps screen will look like.

As you can see, the branch chiefs, theorist, and military high command have found their way to the officer corps screen, though for ease of access you may still view and appoint them in the country overview screen like before. This kind of change is the sort of thing that comes up during playtesting - while it made sense to collect similar things together, there was no good reason to change the player’s flow expectations.

The manner in which you’ll appoint advisors has changed a bit. We decided during the officer corps development process, to make a bigger deal out of the advisor ‘level’ (specialist, expert, genius) that all non-theorist advisors possess. In addition to adding a flat command power allocation (reduction of max command power) which is reduced by high advisor ranks, political power costs are raised by having a higher rank advisor.

Branch advisors now grant daily experience gain, meaning stacking your command cadre well is vitally important to the pre-war development of your military. To add to the choices, doctrines now cost experience rather than being something you spend a research line on:


For owners of No Step Back, military branches also possess several specialization options in the form of Military Spirits, which are also unlocked with experience:



We found during development that less was more when it came to creating a tightly balanced set of choices, and we’ve limited the number of options in each category to around six, with each category being strongly themed around Academy, Military Service, and Command.

To add slightly more nuance to choices here, we ensured that several options in each category would be made available based on situational factors - ideology, doctrine branch, and in rare cases, country choice, can all make new choices available.

The most important part of cultivating a strong officer corps, is the ability to give your trusted commanders advisory roles. Commander traits earned in active combat can make your characters eligible for specific advisory roles:



Characters promoted to advisory duties this way will continue to advance their advisory rank as their commander level increases - a highly experienced field commander will grow from specialist to genius over the course of their career.

Lastly, we are introducing the preferred tactics weighting system. This allows you to set a national, field marshal, and commander-level preferred tactic, which will weight the chances of picking said tactic in a combat situation. While the national preferred tactic can be switched out for a cost, selecting a preferred tactic for your commanders and field marshals is something that remains a permanent choice, representing their adherence to a particular doctrinal theory.

Of course, a host of minor changes accompany the officer corps, including new alerts, better resource tooltips, and adding some of this information into intel ledgers for opponent countries.

[h2]The AI[/h2]

And now, on to a topic that is sure not to evoke strong opinions from anybody here: the AI.

During the development of La Resistance, work was begun on adding additional tools through an imgui that allow modders and users to see various internal data. In NSB, a significant amount of time was spent adding to this tooling and providing support for future AI development, as well as laying the groundwork for easier iteration on AI behaviour and more.

One of our new in-game tools for assessing AI font priorities. These tools will be available for modders, who can continue to fine-tune AI for their own needs through the use of strategies and defines. Here, you can see that the AI has evaluated the topmost defense order as desiring a minimum of 7 divisions, an 'ideal' count of 8, and a maximum count of 50. Defense orders tend to fluctuate quite heavily in 'ideal' unit counts: they tend to be quite elastic to make up for units not needed elsewhere.

While much of the work done here was investment for the future, we’ve also made some pretty big changes to the way the AI evaluates where it commits its troops and more.

While it can be hard to indicate objective improvements in terms of AI, there are several key areas we aimed to improve for this release:

Use of specialized divisions - the AI for assigning armor and special forces to appropriate fronts has received some improvement. The practical upshot of this means you ought to see fewer armor divisions assigned to inappropriate orders (garrisons, pure defensive lines etc), and mountaineers used in frontlines that have the right terrain types.



Did I mention the AI likes tanks?

Unit weight distribution - combined with the new supply system, the AI evaluation of where to put units has been totally overhauled. In practical terms, this is likely to manifest as seeing the AI commit more troops to defend key areas (ports & coasts), care more about the active supply situation on frontlines, and provide something slightly resembling a defense in depth for their own core territory, even during active frontline pushes elsewhere.



You can see that the AI considers supply carefully when assessing front unit distribution. There are certain circumstances in which the logical supply capacity of a front can be exceeded by the AI - notably when a defensive frontline is facing a numerically superior foe, or when the AI determines that it needs to win a war fast.

Once Moscow has fallen, the supply situation can get pretty dire as you push east.

Naval Invasions - logic for AI naval invasions has seen significant improvement. You should be encountering larger, less frequent naval invasions overall. The Ai will try to take advantage of weak points in coastal defences, and generally be more keen to invade to support theaters. This got so scary we had to turn the new capabilities down several times (of course, these can be tuned back up).

Counters - while it can be difficult to determine a ‘right’ time to switch templates or create a specialized template, we’ve improved logic for majors utilizing specialized divisions such as Tank Destroyers in relevant circumstances. You should see the AI care a little more about what you throw at it.

Buffer Fronts - Several AI strategies now involve the use of buffer fronts. These are specially defined area defense orders which will request a proportion of national divisions to man them. Where these differ from regular garrison orders, is that these fronts will ‘loan’ their unit distribution counts to nearby fronts or invasion orders.

For example, the heatmap below show the distribution of US troops several months prior to Overlord. The troops stationed in Alexandria and the UK are using buffer fronts, which will supply frontlines in europe, in order to avoid having to relocate troops from much further away. Here you can see the (somewhat anachronistic) defense of Greek territory being supplied by the buffer front in Alexandria, which is in turn supplied with divisions from the US mainland (arriving through the Mediterranean).

The locations and weightings of these are instructional only.

[h3]Read the full Diary[/h3]

Dev Diary - Poland is not yet lost | No step back AAR


[h3]Welcome to this AAR dev diary![/h3]

Join me as I take on the task of surviving as Poland against both the Soviets and the Germans in the upcoming No Step Back expansion. This diary will function as a sort of compilation of the new features. Normal caveat is that there might be bugs here, and balance are prone to change. It's also a pretty screenshot heavy diary.

Without further ado, let's start.

[h2]1936 - The year of housekeeping​
[/h2]
First off let's start with some housekeeping and strategy. I know that Germany will attack first and I can’t properly defend against both the USSR and Germany. My plan is to give up eastern Poland when the USSR demands it to buy myself time and take out Germany, then swing around and take back my lost land.

Therefore I’ll focus my industry buildup on western Poland since I plan on losing eastern Poland, thus limiting my potential losses.


We start off with the looming peasant strike, which we need to deal with eventually but I like to start out taking care of Danzig first since it gives some easy factories and only takes 35 days. The strike is on a long timer so there is currently no emergency to deal with it from the get-go.


It is also the path where you can get rid of the Embargoed Economy law which is quite crippling. Since I need to build up compliance it takes some time to get rid off it, so I like to get that ball rolling as quickly as possible.

I know that I will need to increase equipment buildup since Poland has lots of borders to cover. I plan on making cheap tanks later on as well just to deal with basic infantry.

I am a bit worried about German bombing, both against my troops but also because I know that the AI likes to bomb trains, so I plan to make a token air force just to intercept bombers as well as AA tanks and get AA into my divisions.

[h2]1937 - The year of toaster buildup​[/h2]
I have started my industrial buildup and in early 1937 I have completed all the must have industrial focuses that I want. There are still quite a handful of very nice focuses to take here, but time is of the essence and I need to deal with the political focuses as well. I am on a very tight deadline.


The national defense fund is particularly good to kickstart the Polish industry.


I have also dealt with Danzig and achieved enough compliance to Ban the Nazi party. This will get rid of the crippling trade law. After that I will switch to dealing with internal politics.



While the industrial buildup was ongoing I was a little sneaky. Krystyna, the gunslinging seducer has quietly infiltrated the Reich with the end goal of preparing a collaboration government to make it easier to capitulate Germany.

I also started hiring military advisors for additional XP gain. Since historical Poland can’t farm XP in Spain, advisors are the next best bet.

This reduced my total command power cap, but it's more than worth it. I will need it to unlock doctrines but more importantly, design my tanks.
[h2]
Mid 1937 - The April constitution​[/h2]


It's now mid-1937 and I am starting to deal with the internal politics of Poland. As I do this people will get more and more irritated, and I would rather avoid a civil war, but I don’t like spending 100 pp to sideline people.


Luckily for me most of the focuses in the Sanitation path can be used to modify the left and right irritation (I like to think of it as a big aspirin).
There are also some really nice “bonus” focuses that can only be taken as long as you are dealing with the Sanitation, and then becomes locked out that I want to try and take. You can kinda mix and match which of these bonus focuses you want to take, depending on how much of a rush you are in.


I get the sense that someone is considerably more annoyed than the other



At the end of it all I manage to keep everyone relatively happy without too much effort.

I managed to pick up some focuses along the way, mostly advisors that will help me later on. It is now December 21’st 1938 and I am starting to feel a tingle in the back of my neck. Surely it's just my paranoia. No one is out to get me, surely.
[h2]
Early 1939 - Defense prepping​[/h2]
So, no ones really out to get me, but just in case I start to plan for all eventualities.


Before I go back and finish up the industrial focuses that I left behind I do a detour to take Plan West, which gives me some hefy temporary construction bonuses for forts.


At this point I start to look into what type of spirits that I have available to me.
Theatre training looks pretty tasty for getting terrain traits much faster, and is relatively cheap. This is a grand battleplan exclusive, but I don’t feel that I have enough XP to switch as I currently need it for other stuff, and it's pretty ok for defending.
[h2]
Designing a tank fit for Poland​[/h2]
When all this has been chugging along I have been researching tank modules. As said previously I plan on making a cheap tank that can deal primarily with light infantry. I need to be rather quick to deal with the German enclave in Köningsberg, while also working within the rather modest industry output that Poland has to be able to get out any divisions before the war starts.


It does not have fancy bells and whistles that other tanks have, but it is relatively cheap. With a Automatic cannon it's also moderately good at taking out infantry, but terrible at going against anything else.

This means that I need to focus these tanks on infantry v tank battles and avoid German panzers as much as possible.

Armor is also quite low, but as long as the infantry does not pierce it it's fine. I usually prefer welded armor since it provides a good balance between cost and armor. I use Christie suspension and Gasoline Engine to boost the speed of the tank considerably, and a 3 man turret for some extra breakthrough, with a radio to provide some extra breakthrough (gotta have the Poles being able to listen to the latest hits)

I am also setting up a separate tank construction for some AA tanks, which is using the same modules, except I am changing it from a Automatic Cannon to a basic anti air gun
[h2]
Late 1939 - Not peace in our time?​[/h2]


[h3]Uh oh[/h3]



This is how I am currently doing. I have 3 tank divisions in the field, 1 army guarding against attacks in the south, and 1 ⅓ armies defending central Poland, mainly huddling behind rivers. A full army is preparing to take out Köningsberg and then switch around to face the Germans.

As the Germans starts to pile in I spring my trap, reducing their supply to buy myself some time


Early on in the war and I am getting pummeled by CAS and Tacs, and even though my token air force manage to mitigate some damage I am quite happy that I have equipped my divisions with AA

Early in the war I am getting pushed on some fronts but I am sticking to my original plan, following the railway and sniping the ports.

Katowice is lost pretty quickly, despite reinforcing it with forts.

As I push into Memel I realize that my supply is getting awful. I don’t want to have to build railways at this stage as my industry is strained already. I try to alleviate the issues by motorizing the node closest to it. It did improve my situation a bit, but not enough to solve it.
In November there has been some back and forth. The Germans are piling up as I try to make another push against Köningsberg. I also manage to take over and link up a new Supply hub in Allenstein
A thrust has begun to form, and they are pushing quite hard as well. I need to finish Köningsberg fast. Things are looking a bit bleak, but in the darkness there is a hero ready to rise. It's Romania.


Romania coming to Polands aid, colorized

I convinced my neighbors to join our cause, and there they come, a shining beacon of hope.(A better love story than Twilight)

With the aid of the Romanian allies I managed to perform a push to take back some land, but in my negligence the Germans sent some medium tanks to Memel and quickly started pushing me back. As feared my automatic cannons could not deal with these tanks, and supply flow deteriorated quickly as supply lines were cut.


I used some of the XP I gained to add Quick Improvisation. By doing this I got the ability to do several force attacks in a row, finally cutting off Memel from the tanks. They are stranded now. With one last force attack I manage to finish the cornered Memel guard off, stabilizing the front.

[h2]1940 - Death on the Reich​[/h2]
With the last pockets dealt with and Köningsberg that entire army is free to deal with the German front.
Poznań and Łódź will be my 2 first targets since they contain a lot of industry that was lost early in the war.

Planning to go on the offensive decide to promote Marian Rukiei, my field marshal, who has now leveled up enough to be able to be an Chief of Army.

After that I plan my attack. I can see that the railways that supplies the Polish front is largely supplied by 3 points which if cut off, would create 3 breaches that would force the Germans to either fall back or start taking logistical penalties

2 of those are supply hubs which, if I take out, should force the Germans to leave Poznań . I can then go via the sea, taking the ports there for added supply all the way to Berlin.

One rail junction to the south is also susceptible to being cut off, close to Brno. I doubt I will be able to take it in the first offensive but if I can I will go for it. For now reclaiming my core territory takes priority so I will go for the two supply hubs.

Shortly after Hungary is doing what Hungary does and declares war on me, cutting a large portion of my force away from supply. I force deploy my now freed army via rails to respond. While it might have looked bad for a second it has opened up an opportunity elsewhere. I redeploy my tanks…


A coordinated push with my tanks later and Poznań is retaken, a pocket is encircled and the Berlin railway is cut off. Romania is struggling in the south against Hungary. My race-cars sees the opportunity and…


A temporary victory to be sure. The tank is alone and the railway is unguarded. I have some spare units to redeploy and I pray that they will get there in time.

Alas the tank was encircled and destroyed, but it did pull enough troops away from the front to allow me to advance and redeploy troops. With overstretched supply lines I stop my advance to allow the railways to be regauged.

As I have unlocked some tactics I set mine to Elastic Defense for some extra defense. I would have liked to have Blitz


But I feel that I don’t yet have enough tanks to make do with this tactic. I'll switch it around later

Through some shenaniganry Germany managed to get a hold of Norway and Sweden. I set a small task force to deal with this. It should be simple as I took every German port, so even though I know that there are German units guarding it, they are basically sitting ducks.


As expected the Soviet Union finally woke up and on the wrong side at that.


Although I planned for this already I cant resist leaving them a parting gift

As the end of the Third Reich draws near I draft plans for doing after the USSR.
The tanks made at the start of the war are now inadequate to go up against the Red army and as such I am drafting new designs


Tank destroyer with a high velocity gun and a Squeeze-bore adaptor for extra piercing


Main battle tank with medium canon and wet ammunition storage


Anti air


Flamethrower tank (these are support companies, which mainly gives attack boost modifiers to Urban, Jungle, Fort and Forests and are mutually exclusive with engineers)
[h2]
1942 - Death throes of the axis​[/h2]
In the first month of the new year Germany finally capitulated after a series of tank offensives. Supply started to become an issue, first due to lacking trucks for motorization and after a while just due to the sheer amount of troops in the field.

The last city to fall was Vienna (I am super happy that I did the initial collaboration government , otherwise I would not have enough victory points.


The state of the world

I grab my tanks to go straight for Hungary and Italy. Obviously I prioritize Hungary first to liberate the Romanians (yes I know I should go for Italy but it’s not my fault I get emotionally attached easily). Although I am stopped pretty quickly due to the German remnants holding key strategic railways which prevents supply from reaching the new front.


Once the railways are fixed Italy is a piece of cake to steamroll since they lost most of their troops in Germany.



The final tally of the war is as follows. The vast majority of casualties inflicted (90%) on me was early in the war from Germany where I struggled the most.


Post peace conference looks similarish to what it was during the war, with the added wormy southern Slovakia in the middle of it all as a bonus

The absolute nerve. Its alright we don’t need them where we are going

I now have time to prepare to retake Eastern Poland

[h2]1943-1946 - Years of the big quiet​[/h2]
Fast forward a couple of years to rebuild my armies to take on the Soviets. Not much happened in between since the bad man was destroyed.

I now have an army of tanks ready, with an army of mechanized to follow up behind them.

I got the cost of mechanization down to quite low by upgrading its production cost.


I also produced some Railway guns for support, which now give these effects (as per popular request)


And this is how my tank template current looks like



The plan is to follow the Kiev line up to Moscow since its mostly plains.


I want to avoid the north as much as possible since there is mud and marshes galore, which really makes offensives difficult.

I also sent a part of the army to Burgas (Bulgarian coast) in the south (which was why I grabbed that part of Bulgaria to begin with) to make a naval invasion using mulberry harbors into Baku to cut off the oil for the Soviets. I formed the Międzymorze to invite Turkey into my faction since I couldn’t get access with my submarines otherwise.


With everything planned and ready I guess its ok to knock and see if anyone's home?



I successfully land on the shores near Baku. Some of the divisions land without a port, although that is no problem at the moment since I have mulberry harbors, so I don't have supply issues, but I need to take a port for permanent supply quickly.

As you can see I also have transport planes delivering supplies by air, stationed in Turkey which also helps in really bad areas.


When I land I am met with fiery resistance and although I manage to take a port before the mulberry harbor is destroyed I realize that I will be unable to take Baku immediately. Although an opportunity presents itself as Sevastopol is vulnerable and lightly defended. I take 4 tanks and zoom across the Island, managing to encircle a lot of the Soviet southern front.

As the southern front collapses the Soviets are forced to retread from Baku to fill it

In the meantime a titanic air battle is happening in Eastern Poland. The enemy is trying to bomb my trains, and as the majority of my trains are War Austerity trains that leaves them vulnerable to bombing and disruptions.


As the caucasus frontline is in shambles I see an opportunity to cut off the entire supply chain. The entire frontline is supplied by just one railway, which I manage to cut off. Effectively forcing the Soviets to retreat towards Stalingrad

As the year comes to an end I have pushed quite a bit into the USSR. However I am having a harder and harder time advancing towards Moscow. The city of Bryansk is giving me quite a headache as it's quite well defended and attacking cities from multiple angles is less effective than other terrain. It also has a supply hub that I need in order to advance further, and my lines are quite stretched.


I stop for a while, build up the railway and then let them eat 2 nukes to the face. After that a breach is formed in the frontline as my tanks push towards Moscow. At its gates fierce fighting commences.


It does not help that it's January and a lot of the provinces outside Moscow are in deep snow. The red army is pretty exhausted at this point with most of its armor being destroyed. Eventually Moscow falls under a barrage of tanks, fighters and tac bombers.

During this Leningrad falls under a combined assault from Sweden by the allies and Rostov is encircled, entrapping a lot of the remaining southern army that defended Stalingrad.

[h2]1947 - The year of “please just capitulate”​[/h2]
Even though a lot of the army that defended Stalingrad is dead and the red air force lies in a scrapyard somewhere it is still somewhat tricky to take as the red army still controls a long stretch of the railway.

Trying to take Stalingrad head on is still impossible, so I focus on cleaning up the infantry protecting the Stalingrad outskirts. As supply becomes better (relative) I can finally perform the last push and take the city. This puts the USSR quite close to capitulation, and I only need to snipe a few victory points.

Casualties just before Stalingrad capture and their eventual capitulation.

That's that! I tried to show off as many features as possible, and I hope you enjoyed reading through my craziness.. Now I guess there's only one thing to do, as a reward for being a true friend in need



[h3]
Read the full article here!
[/h3]

Looks like Paradox grand strategy games are collectively more popular than Civilization and Total War

Strategy games are no longer as niche as they used to be, but they still don't command the attention of gamers at large in the same way that FPS games or other multiplayer games can. As such, there are few titans to look to as the genre's key pillars, but you can definitely point to Firaxis' Civilization, Creative Assembly's Total War, and Paradox's spread of grand strategy games as such beacons.


If you're the kind of player who enjoys a good chart, such as the ones that can be found on SteamDB, you might see Civilization VI and Total War: Warhammer II sitting pretty high up the list of most-played games on Steam (looking at current and daily peaks). But you might also be surprised to learn that, when viewed in the context series as a whole, the picture of which strategy games are more popular overall changes quite a bit.


User Beneficial_Energy829, posting on the Paradox Plaza subreddit, has pulled together some graphs that look at rolling daily peaks of players for Paradox, Civilization, and Total War titles, going back to 2013. Civilization VI may be the most popular individual strategy game, but for a while now Paradox Development Studio games appear to have been the most popular strategy games in that mix.


Read the rest of the story...


RELATED LINKS:

Hearts of Iron 4 DLC No Step Back releases next month

Hearts of Iron 4 is making people real now

Hearts of Iron 4 cheats - a guide to the best console commands

Hearts of Iron IV devs are going to shake up the strategy game's stale meta

From competitive multiplayer games to the most niche strategy games, the concept of a 'meta' - a set of optimal choices that bring the most desired outcome - is not new. Sometimes changing up a game's meta is done liberally, but in grand strategy games like Hearts of Iron IV, you can't just throw up a quick fix.


But where there's a will, there's a way, and the developers are finally coming to tear up the old order and bring about a new era for warfare in Hearts of Iron IV. This is something the dev team have been talking about since May, when they first detailed some changes coming to combat, but former game director Dan Lind came back for this week's dev diary to outline some additional changes that are going to bust the status quo wide open.


The WW2 game has had a rather stale combat meta for quite a few years now - known as the 40/20 meta - which relates specifically to how you design combat divisions in terms of their combat width, a key stat when it comes to large-scale formations in battle. On top of the province width changes mentioned earlier in the year, the devs are also changing how combat divisions choose their targets in battle, and how damage is spread.


Read the rest of the story...


RELATED LINKS:

Hearts of Iron 4 DLC No Step Back releases next month

Hearts of Iron 4 is making people real now

Hearts of Iron 4 cheats - a guide to the best console commands