Hearts of Iron 4 announced

Plane designer was kind of inevitable at this point.

Am I the only person who hates the “build your tank/ship/plane out of bits” subgame?

It just seems largely peripheral to the meat of the game. I could understand a checkbox for “does my ship have depth charges/radar/sonar” because those are distinct technologies which you might not have or want to pay for, but most of it seems like unnecessary detail.

Having said that i just picked this up again after a while and had a fun game as Kaiserreich Austria. Germany may have gotten itself into a bit of a mess (as designed) and I didn’t want to be surrounded by communards so I intevened and it turns out that an armoured army combined with air superiority remains overpowered, especially when you trap half the french army in Switzerland (they were able to hold out until I capitulated France because they stayed in supply - I think there was a “liberated” socialist Italy city in there that became the capital. Fair enough though, you can imagine them surviving off Swiss industry)

Just need to polish off Russia and then see how scary the UoB navy is.

Definitely not. I think Sword of the Stars may be the only game where I liked the ship design aspect.

As an alternative, I offer Master of Orion 2.

Yeah, that might be another now that I think about it. I haven’t played MOO2 since last century so my memory is very foggy. :)

And also SMAC!

No you are definitely not. The first three DLC were good, but starting with Man the Guns, I think they’ve made the game worse not better. Of even if not worse, definitely longer. There is just a lot of fiddling especially in Man the Guns, for a Navy that frankly doesn’t matter much.

I really want HOI V at this point and not another DLC for HOI IV

I hate fiddling with individual designs and upgrades.

A “Hurricane 2” is good enough, I don’t need to fiddle with all it’s parts throughout the whole war.

There were 12 Panzer IV variants, like 18 Panzer IIIs, and that ignores all the off shoots like the Hummel or whatever.

I don’t have time for that nonsense. An abstracted “better” version when I research something or spend XP or whatever was fine. I don’t want to adjust the engine and optics constantly.

Ships already felt like crap and making them permanently feel obsolete and also require insane XP and tinkering didn’t help them. I just wanna plop out some Iowa’s not hand design an Iowa and it’s variants.

Yeah, I can’t get myself to play the US or Japan anymore because of the navy stuff. It reminds me of HOI3 where I thought about starting a game but opted not to after thinking about having to set up my OOB again.

The aircraft designer does nothing for me and I hope I can just ignore it because I’m totally down for a new Italian focus tree. It’s probably my favorite nation to play but their tree is just so boring and obsolete.

I wonder if that’s what Dan Lind left to work on or if he just needed a change from WW2 entirely after all these years.

Yeah, I think one of the great advantages of WW2 as a setting is that a lot of your playerbase has built-in knowledge and understanding of the equipment in play. Also, seems like it should be a good source of the types of asymmetry that’s popular in big strategy games.

Anyone taking a stab at the latest DLC “By Blood Alone”? Focus Trees for Italy, Ethiopia and Switzerland, along with improvements for the air game.

Playing a couple of runs as Ethiopia sounds like alot of fun, makes it tempting. But Victoria 3 is coming out soon so hmm…

Not yet. Kind of sucked into Warhammer 3 at the moment. If that starts to fade before Victoria 3 release then I’ll dive in then, otherwise it’ll probably won’t be until the holidays (unless Vicky 3 sucks or is horribly broken).

I’ve been waiting for an Italy tree rework since the first expansion so I’m looking forward to it!

I need to figure out more of the existing stuff still. Is it just me, or do individual countries have mechanics that don’t give you much of a hint on what you’re expected to for what results, and then punish you for doing poorly?

Either way, there’s a very long list of patch notes in an open beta, and some are very wtf.

And some seemingly bad air design balance. Vicky 3 must have eaten into it’s launch window, because it isn’t baked.

They have a new lead with this one as well.

A bit of a lie, it’s no longer in beta.

What’s the general feeling on By Blood Alone?

I still haven’t really gotten around to learning it, but am thinking of trying the new Italian focus trees.

I do have:
Man the Guns
Waking Tiger
Toether for Victory

Any other must-have DLCs?

I picked it up but haven’t had a chance to do a playthrough yet. Too many other games taking up my time at the moment, including Victoria 3 with its recent release. I hope to be getting to this one sometime over the holidays, I’ve been waiting for a new Italian focus tree since the first expansion!

The feeling online seems to be that they broke the game with BA.

I saw that.

I also watched Pravus’s run in By Blood and he didn’t seem to have too many game breaking issues.