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HOI4 Dev Diary - Man the Guns and PdxCon

Hi everyone! We are now back from PdxCon which was an amazing experience. If any of you were there, thanks a lot for coming! I had a lot of fun and interesting conversations with HOI fans and we had a very cool challenge to as Poland inflict as much casualties as possible on Germany in 1939 in just 30 minutes. The winner (all glory to @Zwireq, AKA Zwirbaum) pulled off 1.8 million using clever tactics and a strong cavalry army! What better way to save Poland than to turn the false myth of the polish cavalry charging German tanks around :)

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The myth itself is something based on reality where polish cavalry performed a successful charge early on in the war vs German infantry at the battle of Krojanty. Something the German propaganda machine tried to falsely portray as the poles being unprepared for meeting modern German armor (there were no tanks there). The myth apparently lived on a long time, notably taught in schools and promoted in soviet propaganda… that said, in Hearts of Iron IV at pdxcon the polish hussars did ride out and win!

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The HOI4 booth where we ran the challenge.

We also announced the next big expansion for HOI: Man the Guns.
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Man the Guns will focus on naval warfare primarily but also redoing UK and USA and giving them more fun options. There will also be other new focuses but those are secret for now. We will also be adding fuel to the game which a lot of people were very excited to hear about at pdxcon :)

The UK and US revamps we plan to handle the same way we did Germany and Japan, e.g the changed trees and historical path in the 1.6 'Ironclad' update and the new alt-history paths (despite my perhaps not so subtle hints people have figured out that there is going to be the possibility of a 2nd american civil war among other cool things).

As for the themes we decided to go with naval for several reasons. One, that it fits very well with USA (and they were on the top of our list of nations we felt needed more fun gameplay). Secondly we have already done big changes to both land and air in previous expansions and updates so it was time for the 3rd type of warfare to get its time in the spotlights. Its also currently in my opinion the weakest part of HOI and something we really want to make shine.

We are currently very early in development so things may change, but here are some things mentioned we are aiming to do (in expansion or free update or mixed):
- Ship design and the ability to refit older ships and keep things up to date
- Naval Terrain: different seas will behave differently and suit different ships and fleet compositions
- Revamped naval combat
- Fleets split up into task forces for better control
- New naval spotting system
- Ability to control naval routes and block areas you dont want units to travel through
- Fuel, obviously going to be a massive balance job for us and a big gameplay change for you :)
- Gameplay rules, particularly to help multiplayer groups out when it comes to manage their games
- of course other stuff as well. to be revealed in the future.

We don't have a release date yet, and most of the above is still subject to change because we are are still early. I really wanted to talk as much as possible about what we are up to at pdxcon though :) Hopefully I will see more of you next year there!

We also announced that HOI4 has hit 1 million sales (wooot), and to celebrate that we have decided to make an anniversary edition that comes with a super cool alt history diorama - Italian soldiers raising the flag over the rubble of Big Ben, Iwo Jima style ;). I felt italy invading London was one of the more hearts of iron things there was when it comes to alt-history :)

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We had the first version for PdxCon in the booth fresh from the maker, and you can see it there in the picture above. The anniversary edition is actually possible to preorder already! Just follow this link.

As have been mentioned elsewhere this doesn't mean we are ready to start up regular diaries yet. You guys are not really fans of filler stuff, so we are going to have to wait a little longer for diaries to start up regularly again. I will let you know as soon as we feel ready to start showing things off proper.
 
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Podcat explained the reasoning for delaying adding fuel to Hoi4. Please read the DD.
 
RELee said:
Podcat explained the reasoning for delaying adding fuel to Hoi4. Please read the DD.
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Lol. Should I ? Had no idea I need to allocate time... never mind, I remembered why it was a waste of the said time to get involved in the circular "discussions" on the forum. Since then I lowered my expectations quite a lot and just enjoy (spending less and less time) what I can from the overpriced/over_talked_about for ever work in progress.
 
posts deleted infractions issued...

play nice or don't play.
 
This looks to be a very nice DLC, and I am very much looking forward to it. Since the naval changes have not yet been revealed in detail (in the next two diaries), I thought I should make a general comment here, though. The current naval system is functional, but it suffers from one fundamental problem with the two time scales for strategic movement around the map, and tactical movement within an ongoing battle. In reality, naval engagements were usually short (although they could follow a lengthy period of two navies searching for each other in an area - but this is represented outside of the "battle"). In HOI4, on the other hand, naval battles can last for weeks and even on occasion months. This is not only unrealistic, but means that a naval battle can act as a magnet for fleets even in other oceans. Since ships are added over time, a single battle can result in instant annihilation of the navy of one side (usually the Axis), making future naval warfare irrelevant. A side effect of the current system is also that destroyers are simply cannon fodder since capital ships focus on them even when other capital ships are in range, and victory comes to the one who actually starts sinking the other sides capital ships first.

I understand that being able to see ships move around and chase each other makes the naval combat seem less abstract, but there is nothing a player can do to affect the outcome in any meaningful way. A system with short (less-than-a-gay) engagements, but with more flexibility in how the naval forces are laid out and what orders are given to them would greatly improve naval warfare - and make it relevant throughout the war.

For completeness it should also be mentioned that carriers work a little differently, in that the aircraft are very efficient ship killers, but also suffer huge losses. The battles are thus very intensive, and either the aircraft all get wiped out, or the enemy fleet is decimated. Unfortunately, the AI does not build up reserves of carrier aircraft, so typically after one battle all AI carriers become useless. Also, the carrier aircraft get into very intensive combat with land-based aircraft. In reality, the main goal of of carrier fighters was to distract attacking aircraft to make them miss the ships, while attacking fighters only needed to chase away the carrier fighter so that the attack aircraft could press home their attacks. There were a few battle (Marianas in 1944), where lots of planes were shot down, but this was an exception rather than a rule. However, despite the slightly different mechanics, the global outcome is currently the same: one side typically get annihilated almost instantly, after which the naval war is mostly about mopping up and destroying newly built ships.

If the new DLC could find ways of making naval warfare stay relevant for the duration of the war (just as land combat or air combat does), it would perhaps be more important than many other detailed improvements.
 
"Fleets split up into task forces for better control"

Does anyone know if this means the fleets will be set up like the new army groups. For example you'll have an Admiral commanding 5 Vice Admirals and each Vice Admiral commands a task force. They could do the same thing with the air force.

Thanks
 
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I cant wait to see what you guys do with the naval side of this game. Ive been doing a historical play through with the UK and its a pain in the ass trying to manage all these fleets and build ships for each of them!

Ive noticed in the historical play through that Japan and the UK dont declare war, so China loses then its peace in the pacific with the Japanese doing nothing else. Its actually quite difficult to get the UK to declare war and I dont see why it or I should bother?

The USA doesnt declare war until late ie 1943/44, and is usually pretty useless and the Soviet Union is conquered by late 1940/ early 1941

I havent got any mods active that may be altering this so I was wondering if anyone else is having this issue and if it could be looked at for this update?
 
Some how Mega Corp is coming out Dec 6th but still no word on Man The Guns and Stellaris got a rework from the ground up! Dont get me wrong I love that Mega Corp is dropping but not having a release date for Man The Guns before Megas release is pretty bad.
 
Yeah. The fact for that I paid for Man the Guns months ago now and can't get any word from them is the reason I haven't bought a Paradox game since. Even with all the sales going on. I refuse. The fact that they won't even tell you anything is even worse. I'm waiting to start a new HOI 4 game until it comes out.
 
aramsey3 said:
Yeah. The fact for that I paid for Man the Guns months ago now and can't get any word from them is the reason I haven't bought a Paradox game since. Even with all the sales going on. I refuse. The fact that they won't even tell you anything is even worse. I'm waiting to start a new HOI 4 game until it comes out.
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they Publish Dev Diaries, its PDX they take their time, and tbh I prefer them delaying the release 2-3 months if that means more bugfixing and polishing.
 
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