• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

HOI4 Dev Diary - Future and Cornflakes

Hi everyone, this week I'm going to take some time and talk future plans with you all.

Right now
With the "Oak" 1.4.2 patch out the door and the team back from vacation its time to start looking at the future. This week we started work on the next DLC which is going to be a full-sized expansion. A lot of people have been asking for more mechanics and larger changes, and this will be it. As normal the expansion will arrive together with a free update we've dubbed 1.5 "Cornflakes".

As for exactly what these will contain you will need to bear with us a bit. As I said with us getting started on it now we need some time to actually make and test stuff before we start showing it off to you. This will mean that the next two diaries (if all goes according to plan) are going to be covering other stuff while we get ready. My plan there is to get some guest writing in from people who can talk about the business and process side of the company and team.

The five year plan
Not actually a five year plan, but I want to share with you some form of roadmap on what to expect in the future. Some of you may have seen me talk about some of this in my PdxCon talk earlier this year.

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.
  • More player control over naval warfare and fleet battle behaviour
  • A Chain of Command system allowing field marshals to command generals
  • A logistics system with more actual player involvement (now you only care once stuff has gone very badly)
  • Improved naval combat interfaces with good transparency to underlying mechanics (give it the 1.4 air treatment)
  • Improve balance, feedback and mechanics for submarine warfare
  • Long term goals and strategies to guide ai rather than random vs historical focus lists, visible to players
  • 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.
  • Spies and espionage
  • Changing National Unity to something that matters during most of the game rather than when you are losing only
  • Improving peace conferences
  • Update core national focus trees with alt-history paths and more options (Germany, Italy, USA, United Kingdom, Soviet, France, Japan)
  • Wunderwaffen projects
  • Properly represent fuel in some way in the game
  • Add the ability to clean up your equipment stockpile from old stuff
  • Rework how wars work with respect to merging etc as its a big source of problems
  • More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms
  • More National Focus trees. (Among most interesting: China, South America, Scandinavia, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Greece)
  • An occupation system that isnt tied only to wars and where core vs non-core isn't so binary for access to things.
  • Make defensive warfare more fun
  • Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc
  • Allow greater access to resources through improving infrastructure
  • Have doctrines more strongly affect division designing to get away from cookie cutter solutions and too ahistorical gamey setups

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. Oh yeah, and before someone goes "why isn't improving AI on this list" the answer is that its not really something you can ever check off as done. We'll keep working on that in parallel with other stuff as we have since release.

There is no World War Wednesday stream today since the channel is all streaming from Gamescom today, but you can now check out last weeks episode on youtube to see me run the dev team as generals in a massive co-op.
 
Last edited:
I gotta say I`m impressed with the things planned for HOI4, I do however lack things on that list which I have been whining about for the last year and that is:
  • More events
  • More government options
  • More ideologies
  • Event-driven popular support for ideologies
  • A proper cabinet
  • And if possible elections that are determined or at least affected by event-driven popular support
 
Last edited:
Improve flavor and immersion with naming of things in the game. No more Infantry Division Type 1 etc.

Could you please add individual equipment upgrade names. So for instance you could have a list for the Soviet medium armour 2 that goes:
T-34 mod 1940
T-34 mod 1941
T-34 mod 1942
T-34 mod 1943
T-34-57
T-34-85 mod 1943
T-34-85 mod 1944
T-34-85 mod 1945

Also could it start with the first upgrade name, at the moment for example all of the British Hurricane Mk.Is are actually the second mark that gets produced, as unaltered don't get a mark number.
 
Last edited:
Great looking list :)
 
Hm. That sounds like a gamey sort of "gotcha" strategy, and not one that you can find any historical basis for I think?

If you keep up with decryption tech and build radar you can see enemy units behind the front lines. As for a historical basis it is the well know fake divisions for a supposed landing at Calais were created and believed, deception and misdirecting where you were strong and weak was a pretty big thing at the time.
 
This all sounds really really good! Are there any plans to make it possible to refit ships? (eg. upgrading guns, engines, radar etc, or turning battleships into carriers).
 
Hm. That sounds like a gamey sort of "gotcha" strategy, and not one that you can find any historical basis for I think?

Wasn't that basically what happened at Kursk in '43?

PS - Please fix division spam.
 
What I miss the most from HoI4 defensively ( in multiplayer ) is the ability to build planning bonus from fallback lines. I want to be able to hide my tank divisions outside view of my enemy some provinces behind the front, and have them plan attacks on to own territory to cut off future unsuspecting enemy spearheads as they drive deep behind my lines.

So much this
If you keep up with decryption tech and build radar you can see enemy units behind the front lines. As for a historical basis it is the well know fake divisions for a supposed landing at Calais were created and believed, deception and misdirecting where you were strong and weak was a pretty big thing at the time.


Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could recreate 'false' divisions as part of an intelligence mechanism. Like investing rubber in inflatable tank divisions for example.
 
@podcat
Great to hear from You about future :).
One question though, I'm concerned about air warfare.

Are there any plans to change teleportation of planes into actual flying through air zones to reach the target?
 
A great list.

A deeper coc and fuel with a revamped logistics system will be very welcome!

One thing I'd like to see constantly being tweaked is the UI and info feedback. More messages and settings, a log, a limited form of ledger, the addition of equipment type to every time it's mentioned (m tank 2 for example rather than just its name),more map modes such as simple terrain, a slider to control icon clumping behaviour, etc etc.
 
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could recreate 'false' divisions as part of an intelligence mechanism. Like investing rubber in inflatable tank divisions for example.

There is a partial way of doing that, you can make landings with just a single division setting off the naval division alert and I only ever remember seeing ? on the divisions behind enemy lines so you could just put down single brigade divisions. Granted these are more MP strategies which I don’t play and have no idea how well it works against the AI so an actual system in the game would be interesting.
 
Thanks a lot @podcat and the rest of the team !
I love most of the changes you have in the pipeline, specially fuel and spying...

Can you please, oh please, add also : data ledgers, so that the player can have access to all critical data (own country, units, equipment, other countries, industry, resources...) ?
That would not change the game, but make it easier to manage and add a lot of immersion !

Thanks again, keep up the hard work :)

Malick
 
I, too, would like to see message settings in HoI4 (and Stellaris), but based on some dev responses back around the launch I don't hold high hopes for that...

I know. I've brought it up before and gotten the same response. But that doesn't change the fact that PDS are *achingly* wrong on this issue, so I continue to bring it up whenever I can. And hey, they've reversed direction on certain things in the past...
 
This is a great list! looking forwards to the future of the game.

One thing I would like is more politics/interaction inside a faction. Just more than something of "click to join" and fight.
 
Spies and espionage

Currently you can tell pretty much everything about a country, by simply right clicking it! Not only can you see the way they spent their political power, which can be a huge indicator of what they're doing, but in case you want to find out exactly what they've researched (and are probably producing), you go to the request license screen. Another thing you do is look at what resources they're importing. Rubber? Planes. Chromium? Capital ships or Heavy Tanks. Lots of tungsten and oil, but no rubber or chromium? Medium tanks.

Unless you're going to obscure that information, and allow spies to uncover it, making it even more clear what another person is doing would be completely ridicolous. If espionage is going to devolve into a HoI3 mini-game/cat-and-mouse of its own, then please have an option to disable it for Multiplayer.
 
Nice dev diary. Some of the things are really needed and would improve the game a lot.

But one thing I missed on that list that would help the game greatly. Adding multicore support.
HOI 4 has a ton of calculations that are not depended on each other, and could be spread around different threads, like combat calculations, supply for different nations, even AI for different Nations/Factions should be possible to spread around. Even with high end gaming hardware and modern processors, every HOI 4 game turns into a brutal slog once you get past 1944-1945.

Some peaceout events or options would be great too.