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HOI4 Dev Diary - Back from PdxCon

Hi everyone! We are now back from PdxCon (most of us) and landing in our new offices, so brace for a ton of pictures! Oh and we announced the new expansion! If you haven't see the trailer <3 start there:


PdxCon 2019
PdxCon this year was imo one of the best ones so far. It was held in the Funkhaus Berlin. This place was super cool, and was basically the center of all radio and recording for DDR from the 50s until the german reunification.
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We had announcements (among them CK3 and La Résistance!), LAN parties, presentations and Q&A sessions with fans as well as a scramble-for-africa multiplayer game on sunday. Most of all though it was super fun to chat with fans and modding groups (several ones were there!)

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WW2.. in hot pink!

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A very humble picture of @Bratyn on a throne ;D

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HOI boardgame preview

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Animals in the audience?


In our booth we ran a challenge which we plan to be an achivement for LaR, just like we did with 30min of Hel last year. It was called "Don't Die for your Country" and was to capitulate France and Poland as Germany with as few of your own casualties as possible (and no using paratroopers). The final score was 475 casualties :O
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@Voigt was the winner, and you can read about how he did it here.

We had a ton of fun and basically just crashed when we got home ;D it felt a lot like coming home from a music festival :)


La Résistance

So 'ere we go... Our next expansion is now announced: La Résistance!

Its main theme is Espionage and Resistance and the main country focuses are France, both sides of the Spanish Civil War as well as Portugal. We will be starting off by going through espionage in the coming weeks in details
For more info check out the announce post and there will probably be uploads of videos from PDXCon and my talks popping up on youtube in the near future.
also here is a fresh unused screenshot to wet your appetites...
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WIP etc ;)

New Office

We have a new office, and it is INSANELY COOL. Me and Daniel have been cruising around and checking it out this morning. Here are some highlights:

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Meeting rooms with battleplans and maps!

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armed artists...

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Mugshot-wall for employees :)

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WILD ANIMALS

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Toilets with inspirational quotes o_O

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Aliens

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A space wall where you can literally sit and stare into space...

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Casual meeting areas :)

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Extra big meeting rooms

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The Bar :)

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And finally our awesome lobby


Thats it for today. See you again next week when we will start digging into the new LaR features!
 
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I have to say, I think you guys made the right call by moving more towards doing one major per DLC now. For the Soviets, people seem to want one of two things. A tree based entirely on communism, since there was so much variety and different possibilities there alone, but also some kind of civil war and potential restoration of the monarchy, republic, fascism, etc. It seems that with the approach you've taken with Spain, we can actually have both, just as two different trees.

...

It doesn't end there either. Poland had an extensive espionage campaign in the late 20's and early 30's to try to build an underground network of Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalism called 'Prometheanism". IIRC they abandoned this for diplomatic reasons ~1934, but it seems like something that would work well as plausible alternate history option for the Polish rework. Plus there's the whole matter of the Soviets being able to utilize foreign communist parties as de facto espionage networks. The Soviets have a huge, unique advantage here. I can see why you said you wanted to get some mechanics in place before moving on to them.

Amen. We’re getting less focus tree content, but the espionage system can open up so many interesting opportunities. I really liked your idea of communist parties boosting espionage networks in other countries - that would introduce some much needed asymmetry between the factions, and give countries an in-game reason to keep communism support low.

EDIT: Also, a fun espionage feature would be to allow us to nudge the AI towards certain focus tree choices. For instance, playing as the UK and spending espionage resources to nudge Yugoslavia towards democracy. No idea if that’s doable with how the scripts and AI is set up, but IMO it would be a more immersive way to change AI paths than the game rules in ahistorical mode, and would add another element of tension in the prewar buildup.
 
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Hi Podcat (or another dev),

I really liked the music in the trailer. Is there any chance that this particular track (or one similar to it) will end up being included in the game as part of the DLC? :)
 
Hi Podcat (or another dev),

I really liked the music in the trailer. Is there any chance that this particular track (or one similar to it) will end up being included in the game as part of the DLC? :)
I think its just a trailer track, but we got a bunch of cool music coming with the DLC
 
Will the German player get an event around 1943 along the lines of "It appears that the Abwehr has been working for the enemy..."?
 
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I love Board Games and wanted PDX to get into Board Gaming for a long while. But... I really didn't like the Crusader King implementation. It was overpriced, had tons and tons of minis for no reason and no gameplay value, and reviews were mediocre. The board game community would be happy to buy your games. There are lots of board games that do moderately well that are more complicated than your video games, let alone a board game adaptation. Make it at a reasonable price point and sell it to them too. It'll get a good reception and get them into your games (board games are about "interesting choices" and so are PDX games).

Also board games cannot be patched and while they can be expanded, if that is required to fix a real flaw with a game it is not going to make people happy.

I saw that Hoi the board game only has the western front if you don't have the expansion, but if the game is good I'll pick up one and maybe both. Please no minis, delay the release if the game or its rules aren't ready, and make sure the rulebook is very good even if it makes it longer.
 

In the Soviet Union the NKVD was large and powerful, doing both counterintelligence and spying. However, foreign military agents belonged to the GRU, and that means Infiltrate Army, Airforce or Navy should read GRU instead of NKVD. Maybe you could have Intelligence Community screen with various services, at least for the Major powers? Why:

The Soviet Union: NKVD (counterintelligence and foreign operations), and GRU (military intelligence). NKVD and GRU were also used by the Soviet leadership to spy eachother to find traitors.
The USA: FBI (counterintelligence), and OSS (foreign operations).
Germany: Abwehr (military), and Sicherheitsdienst (SS), competed against each other. In 1944 SD won, Abwehr was abolished.
The UK: DMI (Directorate of Military Intelligence) with many branches, including MI5 (counterintelligence) and MI6 (secret intelligence service), and SOE (Special Operations Executive) espinage, sabotage and reconnaissance against the Axis.
 
If I remember correctly (my memory is good, but short), back in the days when first HOI4 dev-diaries started, there were a vision diary, where it was mentioned that one can create fake battle-plans (for the enemies to spy on).

Is this still on the table?
 
I love Board Games and wanted PDX to get into Board Gaming for a long while. But... I really didn't like the Crusader King implementation. It was overpriced, had tons and tons of minis for no reason and no gameplay value, and reviews were mediocre. The board game community would be happy to buy your games. There are lots of board games that do moderately well that are more complicated than your video games, let alone a board game adaptation. Make it at a reasonable price point and sell it to them too. It'll get a good reception and get them into your games (board games are about "interesting choices" and so are PDX games).

Also board games cannot be patched and while they can be expanded, if that is required to fix a real flaw with a game it is not going to make people happy.

I saw that Hoi the board game only has the western front if you don't have the expansion, but if the game is good I'll pick up one and maybe both. Please no minis, delay the release if the game or its rules aren't ready, and make sure the rulebook is very good even if it makes it longer.
Board games can be 'patched', it is called errata.
 
Remember when you would get that new game in your Strategy & Tactics magazine only to find out 2 months later with the next magazine that they changed a half-dozen rules that had typos in the original game?

Fun times.
:D
 
Why Portugal?
 
As much as I enjoyed the new Spanish and French focus trees (and I enjoyed them a lot), two things come to my mind:

1) La Résistance? The most efficient resistance movement during WW2 was arguably the communist partisans led by Tito in Yugoslavia. Any news regarding Yugoslavia or are those guys going to be forgotten?

2) Germany, China, Japan, UK, US, and now France got their focus trees revamped. If I'm not mistaken, USSR is going to get a full expansion later (and I guess there's a good chance we'll see some modifications to Poland's tree then). With Spain and France getting new trees, Italy would be perfect for a Mediterranean-focused expansion, but it seems it won't be the case here... so the question everybody should be asking is: when we'll get Italy revamped?