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Hearts of Iron IV News

Dev Diary 1.9.2 Beta + The Future



Hi everyone I hope you are enjoying 1.9.1 and La Resistance. Today will be a smaller diary to let you know that we are putting out a beta for 1.9.2, and also to fill you in on what the plan is now moving forward into next expansion work.

1.9.2 Beta
Since we came back from easter we have been working hard on nailing down some stubborn out of sync bugs. Some of those still elude us so the quest continues but we have also gotten some other things dealt with.

1.9.2 Changelog (so far!)

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# Balance
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- added mil factory to china that was incorrectly set up in 1.9.1

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# Bugfix
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- Soviet now retains the old behaviour of sending volunteers to spain
- Fix end of civil war events no longer firing (initially reported on German Civil war)

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# Stability & Performance
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- Fixed OOS related to different language settings between the host and client
- Fixed OOS due to differing ship name in combat result
- Fixed OOS when joining a MP that has not LaR with a client that has LaR enable while comming back from a game with active operatives
- Added basic land and naval combat details to hourly OOS checks
- Fixed save game formatting of AI strategies for managing production of army roles, to use text instead of unstable numeric IDs
- Enabled the abort on map error for when game files are modified in the installation directory
- Fixed CTD when showing the leaderboard before going back to the main menu
- Fix a CTD on related to clearing strategic air data and processing air activity


The beta patch thread is over here and includes info on how to opt into it :)

We have no release date on this yet, but its not planned to be a giant mega patch like 1.9.1. The goal is to deal with the OOS issues and mop up anything major we missed.

Future

Working from home during the corona pandemic has started to feel more and more normal for us although I really miss hanging out with co-workers at the pub or the like. We are very fortunate to be able to work on at home and not be impacted as heavily as other companies. Paradox has also been super supportive and sending us dinners from local restaurants (gotta make sure they are still there when we go back to work!) and the like.

As for development we are still fixing some stuff but the team is transitioning over to working on the next expansion now. That means that this will be the last dev diary for a while. We will let you know when they kick off again when we know :) If you want to follow work on 1.9.2 keep an eye on the beta thread. That said expect to hear from us from time to time during the work period :).

Stay safe inside your panzers everyone!

Live: An Absolute Beginner Learns Hearts of Iron



In this week's 'World War Work From Home', our tutorial streams enter their third week.

If you're new to the game or can't wrap your head around a certain mechanic, then this might be the stream for you!

Tune in at 14:00 CEST at: https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

Dev Diary: 1.9.1 Patch + Roadmap Update

Today's Development Diary by Podcat



Hi everyone and surprise! We just released 1.9.1 to make sure you guys get all the fixes by easter. We are currently investigating some out of sync MP issues that are proven to be incredibly stubborn to nail down, so a 1.9.2 is planned after 1.9.1 to address that. Otherwise 1.9.1 has shaped up to be one of the bigger patches we have done with tons of fixes and I want to thank everyone who has helped out by reporting bugs and testing the open beta.

Today I also want to share another update to the roadmap like we usually do to the end of a patch cycle. Its both grown in some entries as well as had a couple checked off as of La Resistance.

1.9.1 Patch

This weeks update to the patch is a mix of bugfixes and balance. We noticed that after fixing various ai problems and tweaking balance that Germany and Japan was performing way too good again, so we've tightened up effects from resistance in occupation a bit more compared to last week and given china and soviets some more factories as well as made soviet build a better air force to meet the german air power. This should push back the war winning point further again and give a more average breakdown between soviet&german european victories.
With this we think its good to go so you guys can play with all these fixes over easter.

For those who have been following every week, these are the changes since last beta update:

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# Balance
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- Medium Aircraft Designers now affect scout planes
- Added 4 civ factories to USSR
- added 1 mil and 2 civ factory to china
- changed one civ to 1 mil for PRC
- increased manpower damage from resistance from 1.5% to 1.8%
- reduced compliance gain a little bit

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# AI
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- soviet will now build less naval bombers and a bit more fighters

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# Bugfix
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- Fixed issue with Spanish cores at the end of the SCW. Now the SCW winner will get resistance in the initial states of the "major" (SPD/SPA) Spanish enemy, until they get cored via decisions.
- Fixed annexation effects not being triggered after defeating non-anarchist Portugal.
- French Coup operations should now correctly display their potential outcomes
- fixed air mission icons in intel ledger air map mode having wrong frame
- Fixed a typo in Belarusian spelling and cleaned up spacing.
- The Chinese "Communist threat defeated" event is now suppressed after firing once until a new Communist infiltration is detected (WtT only)
- fixed remove_unit_leader effect not working correctly in some cases
- Fixed "Expand Garrison Control in Burgos" decision not increasing garrison control for the Republicans
- Fix instigate workers revolution britain not working properly
- fixed arguments not being passed to effects when using the effect console command

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# Stability & Performance
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- Fixed CTD on Windows caused by the assumption of the presence of the popcnt instruction
- Fixed a CTD caused by missing pie chart UI element in the diplomacy view
- Fixed CTD while loading a save game for some mods

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# UI
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- Specified Cyrillic script fallback fonts for an old fonts used in a limited number of places, most notably the Autosaving message.
- Fixed untranslated OK and CANCEL buttons in various confirmation dialogs.

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# Modding
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- added MAX_NUMBER_OF_TEXTURES define which can be increased for mods that had more than previously hardcoded 10k texture limit

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# Database
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- Improved French intervention in SCW so that now France, if fighting in the SCW, will be at war with any new Spanish tag spawned.
- Any Spanish tag revived by a foreign ally will now declare war on any foreign country allied to any other Spanish tag.
- Chinese decision to move the capital to Beijing/Nanjing will no longer be available for subjects. This change fixes the issue with Portuguese China moving their capital and making the achievement "Go ahead, Macau my Day" impossible to complete.
- Pierre Laval now starts out as the French starting leader
- Prevented Monarchist France from being able to join the Spanish Civil War on the Anarchist side.
- Portuguese "Volunteers in the War" National Spirits will be removed when the SCW is over
- Added advisor portrait for Agustin Munoz Grandes


To view the full patchnotes for 1.9.1, click here

[h3]The five year plan[/h3]

As I said last time we did this, its not actually a five year plan, but I want to share with you some form of roadmap on what to expect in the future as well as follow up what we have been up to. The list below has been posted before and added to, and stuff that is crossed off we now consider handled (although we might of course return to some items again).

Just to be super clear, this is not any form of exhaustive or final list and unless we have already done it we can't promise anythings. Priorities change etc. The point of this is to give you an idea of things we would like to do. The order of things is also not in any kind of priority order, or order we would do them.


    Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc.
    A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals
    Every starting nation has a custom portrait for historical leaders
    A way for players to take dynamic decisions, quickly. Something that fits between events and national focuses.
    Changing National Unity to something that matters during most of the game rather than when you are losing only
    Rework how wars work with respect to merging etc as its a big source of problems
    Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff
    Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure
    More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour
    Improved naval combat
    Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare
    Properly represent fuel in some way in the game
    More player control over rules. HOI is played in many different ways and say competitive MP and single player rulesets often clash
    A more robust and expansive mapmode system. Having a player mapmode in MP would be helpful etc
    Spies and espionage
    An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.
  • Improvements to frontline stability
  • A logistics system with more actual player involvement (now you only care once stuff has gone very badly)
  • Long term goals and strategies to guide ai rather than random vs historical focus lists, visible to players
  • Improving peace conferences
  • Update core national focus trees with alt-history paths and more options (Germany, Italy, USA, United Kingdom, Soviet, France, Japan, Poland)
  • Wunderwaffen projects
  • More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms
  • More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China, South America, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Greece)
  • Make defensive warfare more fun
  • Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc
  • Have doctrines more strongly affect division designing to get away from cookie cutter solutions and too ahistorical gamey setups
  • More usage of drag and drop and QoL like this. For example controlling template lists.
  • Rebalance ministers and ideas to give more interesting choices.
    Improve weather mechanics
    Strategic and tactical AI improvements

(bold ones were added this update. Striked out ones are done)

You'll notice that some of these are small and some of them are huge. I can't really talk too much details about this stuff though. That is stuff we will do once/if it makes it to dev diaries with feature highlights and has been implemented.

Now is also a good time to get your friends into HOI4 as Daniel is doing a learn to play stream (part 2) at 14:00 CEST here.

See you all next week!

Patch 1.9.1: New Releasables, Art, Balance Tweaks and More!



It's Patch time!

Over the last few weeks we've been running an extensive Beta patch to add some extra content as well as balance and bugfix changes introduced in 1.9.

1.9.1 "Husky" is now live and downloadable through Steam, with a slew of fixes and improvements to 1.9.1. Checksum is 6d23.

We should be compatible with 1.9.0, but if you for some reason want to remain on 1.9.0 or older Here are instructions for reverting to patches since 1.5.4.

Please make sure that any mods you are using are updated for 1.9.1, or your game might not run properly (seriously)

If you discover any bugs in patch 1.9.1, please report them in the bug report forum as usual.

The full patchlog is too long to copy into steam, so to see its entirety, click here



Live: An Absolute Beginner Learns Hearts of Iron



In this week's 'World War Work From Home', we're continuing our tutorial series which began last week.

We'll be covering all the basics, including national focuses, research choices, template and ship designs, and much more. We'll be running this tutorial for a few weeks to make sure we can fit all the important bits in.

If you're new to the game or can't wrap your head around a certain mechanic, then this might be the stream for you!

Tune in at 14:00 CEST at: https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive