Hi guys, since the expansion Victoria II: Heart of Darkness releases tomorrow I thought we should run a Q&A thread during the day.
So if you have any questions to us the devs or one of the beta testers - post away!

Brief description:
Victoria II: Heart of Darkness, the second expansion for the grand strategy/ political simulator Victoria II focuses on the Scramble for Africa as you compete with other colonial powers and experience international crises which require Great Power mediation if the world is to avoid war. Read all the devdiaries here: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?671476-Victoria-II-Heart-of-Darkness-Developer-Diary-Archive

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Hi guys and gals! I hope you are all having fun playing Hearts of Iron III: Their Finest Hour. My goal with this dev diary is to tell you a bit about how we do expansion projects, the reception it has gotten and what we have been up to to make it even better since release.

From what I’ve read so far on forums, both here and in the deep reaches of the internet fans are really liking the expansion. This makes me and the dev team very happy and proud! The reason we are in this line of business is after all that we like to make gamers happy and make products both we and others like.
It also seems to me from reading around that many new people took advantage of the sales of the base game when TFH came out and tried it for the first time. This usually only happens for expansions when they turn out well and get recommended by word of mouth to friends. So thank you all for playing and enjoying the expansion! ...

Hello again, I'm doing an extra diary because I forgot talk about modding and technical things in the last diary. So if all you want to do is play the new expansion you can probably stop reading here, this diary is for modders!
Anyone still here? Good!

New Expansion Format
One of the big things we have done is make sure that installing the new expansion doesn’t stop you from accessing the old expansions and DLC. This means you can still play For the Motherland with Dies Irae - Götterdämmerung and Stars and Stripes etc if you so wish. The expansion is now installed in a sub-folder named "tfh" which contains all the new files and ensures it doesn’t mess up any of the old files. ...

Hello and welcome to the last developer diary for Hearts of Iron III: Their Finest Hour expansion. Today we are going to talk about all the little bits and pieces that didn’t quite fit into any of the other diaries

Interface
We have done quite a bit of work on the unit interfaces so they should be much easier to use now.
The OOB browser now expands into two windows with the click of a button making it much easier to reorganize your troops by drag-dropping them to a new position without having to scroll.


We have also made it easier to give orders to multiple units - you can now group select units and Detach from HQs, Create new HQs above them, Upgrade, Prioritise, or toggle Reinforcements/Upgrades for all selected. ...

Hello!
We are nearing the end of development of Their Finest Hour expansion now and everyone at the team is polishing and balancing like busy little bees. This will be the last diary to cover a large new feature, so this week I'll be talking about lots of little things like AI improvement and new modding support and we might soon have one or two beta AARs to show you what the expansion is like to play!

Espionage is one of the systems in Hearts of Iron III that haven't seen a lot of changes since the original game came out. So we definitely felt it was time to go back and see what we could do to make it more fun and interesting! ...

Hello and welcome to the third development diary for TFH. Today I'm going to be talking about our new battle plans interface and how it impacts multiplayer, and also show our new battle scenarios.

Battle Plans
We have added a new mode that lets you construct detailed plans. It works as an overlay on top of any mapmode and can be toggled on and off. This lets you draw up complicated operations in advance and plan your game.
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Hello again! We have kept working on A House Divided after its release and other than bug fixes we have gotten some fun ...

Hello! I thought I'd fill you guys in on whats happening with A House Divided now after after release. It seems like people are pretty happy with it, which also makes me very happy, but that is no reason to stop updating and adding things. We are currently hard at work on the 2.2 patch, which I hope we can release as a public beta patch during next week and I'm going to tell you about a few of the features and changes in it. ...

Welcome to this week's development mini diary for A House Divided. It's a mini diary because it's a Christmas special (which ...

Welcome to this week's development diary for A House Divided. We have now presented all the major new features of AHD and are focusing on fixes and small cool ideas to make playing more interesting and streamlined, so expect this and coming diaries to be a mix of topics. ...

Welcome to this week's development diary for A House Divided. This time the diary is dedicated to uncivilized nations. In the original Victoria II uncivs were a bit overlooked and had a few problems. The political and social reforms don't really fit in well in Zulu society and trying to have a westernization process that is possible for said Zulus without making things way too easy for China wasn't really possible. So we decided to redo the entire system for uncivs. ...

Welcome to this week's development diary for A House Divided. Much like a pirate's blunderbuss it's going to be filled with a mix of all sorts of stuff.

Dealing with your sphere can sometimes be a micromanagement task, so we set out to improve this. As you found out in diary 8 you can help support your sphere claim by investing in their infrastructure or factories, but this is more of a long term help. To help with the more immediate influence battle we have now changed how influence is used once you fill up influence to max (without spending it on an action). What happens now is that any "overflowing" influence gets deducted from your strongest competitor removing the need to be quick about hitting ban embassy etc and will help automatically protect yourself when someone is moving in on your sphere. ...

Another week, another development diary! Movements like abolitionism were an important part of the 19th century that deserve to be better represented in the game and many players still feel that the way pops join rebel factions feels a bit random. This addition hopes to solve both issues. ...

The topic for today is Foreign Investment. In the Victorian era, as well as today, diplomatic and economic influence often go hand in hand and we wanted to capture this, as well as giving some empire building role-playing for the end game. ...

Welcome to this weeks development diary for A House Divided. This time we are going to talk about quite a number of things, but the common theme is military improvements.
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Hi and welcome to another development diary. Today’s topic is messages and how to manage the flood of information given to the player.

In Victoria II you can set different levels on messages: pop-ups, notification icons or only shown in the log. Most of your messages will be shown as notification icons. This works ok to keep down the information level, but you still need to manually filter through a lot of messages you aren’t really that interested in to be able to read the ones you are. This is even more of an issue when playing multiplayer and not being able to pause the game, and missing important happenings can be devastating.
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Opening today, applications are being accepted for a limited number of spaces for the closed beta of Victoria II: A House ...

Hi and welcome to this weeks development diary. This time we are going to talk about some of the new mechanics you can use to steer the political landscape in your country.

To do this we are introducing a new gameplay concept called Party Loyalty. It simulates both the "our family has always voted conservative!" phenomenon as well as how funded and organized certain parties are in your states. It effects how people vote during an election and is also in turn affected by the election, so if the conservatives won in your state they will build up some party loyalty because of their local success no matter the outcome on national level. As a player you can affect the party loyalty in a state using a set of new national focuses as well. Election events have also been changed to show more clearly what parties think and how much the decision will affect things.
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Welcome to this weeks dev diary for A House Divided! This time we are going to talk about the new system for declaring war.

Instead of the old system where you either have a casus belli or have to spend infamy to declare war you can now manufacture new casus bellis yourself. This is something that takes time and you can only do one at a time. The time it takes to produce a CB is dependent on a number of factors: relations, national status (uncivilized nations have an easier time to declare war on other lesser countries for example), your governments military policy, cultural tech level and the actual type of casus belli you want all matter. You can no longer declare war without a valid CB, but you will still be able to add more war goals once a war has broken out. If you lack CBs for this you will however accumulate infamy in the same way as before.


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