Hearts of Iron IV - Development Diary 60 - Release Week and Beta Hotfix Patch 1.0.1

[elcon4103]

Anyone else having a weird bug where above the commander, the activate battle plan has a -20% modifier for "Divisions still preparing"? It has said that for about a year now and hasn't gone away.

 

[Warhammer]

Come on there are plenty of other reasons that EA sucks. Simcity was probably the most botched game release I've ever seen for example.

Heh, for me the worst ever botched game release was Sword of the Stars 2, published by our own very own Paradox. SOTS was a gem in the end, how they managed to muck up SOTS 2 so badly, hard to say.

Hoi 4 hasn't been 'that' bad, just that all the AI problems should have been picked at way before release. All those streams of Daniel and co dismantling the AI with minors etc while at the same time the AI was acting erratically even on stream did not set off any alarm bells? Then theres all the other issues everyone else been highlighting, Air warfare, Port Striking, AI just walking all over your country just because you were fighting the same enemy but you didn't give them permission etc. So many things that I'm very surprised their QA did not pick up (or maybe did......) Ah well, looks like at least 2 full patches before AI becomes less erratic/stupid.

 

[Warhammer]

Air war doesnt really need balancing.

People are complaining about the losses, but the losses are on par with history. The Soviets lost 106,000 aircraft in 3 years of war. Almost half a million planes were lost during WW2 by all sides combined.

Those are perfect. No need to change anything.

Then why don't we have enough factories to crank out Air units IN addition to all the other land equipment? If you increase factory output then that will imbalance the land game, if you decrease the production costs of air units then even minors will have thousand strong air fleets easily, no balance. The way it is now, unless you allocate close to 50%+ of your Mil factories to making air units, you not only won't reach that number but your air fleets will be running at minimal strength the whole game if you are fighting on the European front.

 

[Pete0714]

I seem to recall that it's not part of steam, it's part of the actual game.

Yes, I hope so if they wish to be accurate, my steam is usually offline when I play, and has me really looking like I never play any of my hundreds of games, like I am just a digital collector.

 

[Silver Viper]

yay, go PDX \o/ woohoo

 

[Pete0714]

We need a lot more portraits. The same mustache guy is everywhere in South America.

Well, as someone who complained about this , I am very glad to see 8 in the first patch. I look forward to their continued progress, and i might even buy an expansion or two if they keep showing this kind of good customer service

 

[repent]

Please just fix the air war asap.

 

[f1nalstand17]

Hi everyone and welcome to the 60th dev diary (wow). This week we released Hearts of Iron IV! Initial reception seems to be great. Good reviews and a lot of players playing the game! The team is really pleased with what we have accomplished!

Some fun statistics for first week:
Top nations played:
Germany - 35%
Italy - 13%
Soviet - 10%
USA - 10%
United Kingdom - 4%
France - 3.5%

The most played minors seems to be China, Poland and Turkey.

Hotfix 1.0.1
We have been working on a hotfix patch for solving some performance issues and crashes that have popped up. It is still an optional beta patch, and I expect we will make it available for all on monday. If you have issues listed below and want to try it out go here to check things out early: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/hoi4-1-0-1-hotfix-beta-patch.945139/

Changelog for that is:

Stability & Performance

• Fixed several rare CTDs.
• Late-game performance optimizations.
• Large peace conference resolutions are now faster and also properly indicate that they are active to non-participants.
• Added GUI scaling option for people with very small or very high resolution displays (experimental).
• Added a max framerate limiting system (defaults to 75 fps) to help people with the combination of bad cooling, great graphics cards and very high screen refresh. If you are one of these with heat issues I would love to hear if this solved it (changing max_fram_rate in settings can let you remove its effect by making it higher, or go lower if you still have issues)

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue with deploying troops during spanish civil war when continuing savegames.
• Can now zoom in and out using PgUp and PgDown buttons on keyboard.
• Stopped an exploit where player could redirect a naval transfer into an invasion without preparation.
• Fixed a case where fleets who found themselves outside base range would be instantly deleted.
• Fixed some highlighting issues in tutorial.

Content

• Added 9 new unique nation leader portraits.
• Improved some VP/state names in China.
• Improved a lot of alternate ideology nation names and party/leader names.
• France can now send volunteers to Spain if they choose the Support Nationalists focus.
• Fixed many localization issues, both in english and other languages.

Here are some cool portraits @Sideburnout has been adding to the patch to flesh out minors:

Right now we are working on the first proper patch that we plan to release just before vacation in july. You will get more detailed info in coming weeks but the main focus will be:
- AI
- Air warfare balancing
- Making sure invasions are harder to pull off, easier to defend against and more cleverly done by AI
- Improving peace conference scoring
- Quality of life interface improvements
- Bug fixing

Enjoy the game and we'll try to keep up with the amazing activity here on the forum!

The Hotfix has introduced a problem for me where in the late-game, the game slows to a crawl and freezes. Anyone else have this issue? How do I get around it?

 

[tmx-Morc]

GG all

 

[neusaap]

Here are some cool portraits @Sideburnout has been adding to the patch to flesh out minors:

Not trying to nitpick here, but half of Latin America, South Africa and Luxembourg all don't even have specialized portraits for their special historical leaders (and what means ahistorical, SA doesn't even have a generic portrait for their commie leader) and although it's good having extra specialized portraits and the fact that at least British Raj has a special portrait, I honestly think there's something wrong with prioritizing here...

 

[coragamy]

Great game, I just wish moving/assigning missions to air units was less tedious!

 

[SwedenIsNotOP]

Can you add more national focus trees for the minor nations, like maybe in future dlc? Sweden needs to have its own tree man come on

 

[Fulmen]

On the other hand, I find that 99% of the trashing is coming from the crowd who wanted HOI 3.5, and 99% of the praise are coming from those of us who finally find the series accessible enough to get through more than an hour of gameplay.

Perspective.

Thing is if you never properly played HoI3 or even 2, then you don't really even realise how much the game got dumbed down.

 

[Linio]

Germany - 35%
Italy - 13%
Soviet - 10%
USA - 10%
United Kingdom - 4%
France - 3.5%

/facepalm

 

[Silver Viper]

oh btw i was looking around in the game files, Iran's fascist name and flag are kinda ridiculous! im sry but it is. i showed them to an iranian friend and he actually did burst into laughter... he said the fascist iranians called for making of "Greater Iran" not New Persian Empire. plus u guys can use the "Pan-Iranian" flag for inspirations to design the fascist flag.

i thought it might help u guys, if any of devs see it that is! anyways keep up the good work

 

[fredgiblet]

I thought you guys will chill a bit post release but amazing to see that you're already working on improvements for us!

It's literally their job. There's very few companies that stop working on a game at release, in fact these days most of them have day one patches and are working on the second patch by the time the game is out.

 

[Strangeplz]

I am very very very pleased with this announcement air combat and naval invasion reblance. From the two most recent games released (stellaris,HOI4) i gotta say HOI4 is much more enjoyable for me and look forward to the future of this game.

EDIT: Also interesting at the most played nations i am curious how do you get your numbers from? Also japan is not even on the list and i find it the most enjoyable japan has such a well done tech tree.

 

[fredgiblet]

have you guys noticed that the german ai on historical mode often attacks switzerland and/or finland?

A few hands-off games will probably have it happen

I noticed them attack Finland, which was odd. I would point out that Hitler WANTED to attack Switzerland and probably would have if they had finished the Soviets.

 

[gman551]

I wouldn't say the reception has been great. There's been a lot of criticism by users and reviewers alike.

Haters gonna hate

 

[gman551]

Well, as someone who complained about this , I am very glad to see 8 in the first patch. I look forward to their continued progress, and i might even buy an expansion or two if they keep showing this kind of good customer service

There's slightly more pressing issues with the ai.

More Portraits are great but the ai stuff like suicidal amphibious operations needs to be fixed immediately. A few portraits are kinda the least of our concerns atm. In the future though absolutely more variety is great.