Hearts of Iron IV News

Grand strategy global war game Hearts Of Iron IV will be engaged by new expansion By Blood Alone later this year, Paradox Interactive have announced. The new pack will let you design your very own warplanes, while also indulging alternate history fans with its focus trees for Italy, Ethiopia and, interestingly, neutral Switzerland. Check out the announcement trailer below.

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[h3]Greetings Generals[/h3]

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!

[h2]Teaser Trailer[/h2] [h2]Wishlist it here![/h2] [h2]Join the discussion here![/h2]

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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[h3]
Why? The Live System:[/h3]

• Good ship design is unintuitive.
  
• Combat revolves around exploiting oversights
  
• Ahistorical meta
  

[h3]Goals[/h3]

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

[h3]Rebalance Overview[/h3]

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

[h2]
Tech tree[/h2]

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.

[h2]Ship Designer[/h2]

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

[h2]Join the full discussion![/h2]