Hearts of Iron 4 announced

I can’t say that I’ve had an issue with their forums, but why not just check out the Steam workshop page? All their mods are available via that and the user-ratings provides a better snapshot of quality than reading a forum does.

Here’s a link: Steam Community :: Hearts of Iron IV

Like meeper says, just use the Steam Workshop to browse the mods, it’s a better method of doing so than the forum.

In terms of problems logging in to the website, I haven’t seen that before. Sounds annoying!

Are you sure all the mods are in the workshop? It never used to be that way with Paradox games.

I suppose it’s possible that something isn’t in the Workshop, but I think it would be the exception. Every mod I’ve used has been there. Since the game requires Steam, I can’t imagine a mod team putting forth the effort to build the mod and then not distribute it where the vast majority of people are going to see it.

Out of curiosity, I sampled every mod I saw on the first page of the Modding forum and searched the workshop and was able to find them all, including the Victoria 2 converter.

[quote=“KevinC, post:825, topic:74168, full:true”]
I suppose it’s possible that something isn’t in the Workshop, but I think it would be the exception. Every mod I’ve used has been there. Since the game requires Steam, I can’t imagine a mod team putting forth the effort to build the mod and then not distribute it where the vast majority of people are going to see it.[/quote]

Oh right, I was under the (mistaken) impression that workshop mods couldn’t do certain things, so the larger mods were only on the forums. I have a memory of trying to find the Game of Thrones mod for CK2 in the steam workshop but not finding it there. That may have been due to copyright issues, or else just a faulty memory.

I do remember there being size limitations in the past. IIRC, there were Skyrim mods which couldn’t be downloaded through the Workshop. I haven’t run into that issue for a while, though, so perhaps those limitations aren’t there anymore.

(I got curious and googled it and it seems like this may be related, which happened back in March 2015).

Thanks, never got Paradox forums to work for me, but I did see lots of mods at Steam. Also various videos about mods.

New DD on production licenses and map changes

The map changes are very welcome. Clarity and impassable borders. Why does every HoI game start out with a map where it is hard to tell terrain types?

The most interesting part to me was down in the replies, where Podcat seems to confirm is that they are going to implement a market for war equipment:

[quote=Podcat]We thought about that as well for this DLC, but ultimately decided that we wanted to do a proper “market place” for purchasing equipment instead of forcing you to click through dozens of countries trying to find one that had what you wanted on sale. Ideally, you would just put up an offer for 200 modern fighters and someone would offer to sell you all or parts of them (or vice versa, you can check if someone is offering modern fighters and purchase some if you need them).

Any rumor that we also wanted to keep it around for the “Swedish War Profiteering” DLC is, of course, a filthy lie.[/quote]

Edit: The focus of their next patch is fixing the AI and the air war. Hopefully great things coming.

I know Podcat has resisted the idea of impassable terrain, but I’m glad to see he’s coming around. Even back in the initial release, the mods that blocked out the Sahara did wonders for the AI and gameplay in the region. I appreciate that he wanted to “do it right” by just resolving it via AI updates and other tweaks, but sometimes the brute force option works best.

I know he mentioned that it’s still in development and can’t be discussed yet, but I really can’t wait for the air war changes. I think that is going to be the premier improvement of the expansion (or at least I hope).

It would be very nice to see improvements there, but if it’s a choice between working front and strategic AI or super-amazing air war and the current AI, I’d pick the working AI.

So this was kept under wraps and was revealed today: Death or Dishonor.

Looks like this will coincide with the release of the 1.4 update. There’s some more details in the dev diary.

The front AI changes sound like they are moving in the right direction, thought less extensive than I thought they would be.

I’d like to learn about how equipment conversion will work, but I can’t find information on it. I guess they need a hook for this pack to entice people who don’t want to play these countries themselves.

Was there not going to be an air war expansion?

Great to hear about the AI, but for me so far this expansion feels like a dud.

Sounds like improvements to the air war are part of the patch, not the DLC. (And that’d be the right way to do it. That’s pretty core functionality, hard to see how you’d put it in as DLC).

Ya that makes sense. Thanks for pointing that out.

I’m kind of reading between the lines here, but I think it’s an important distinction that Death or Dishonor is a country pack and not an expansion (it’s also priced at $9.99, when expansions are usually $15 or $20).

As @jsnell pointed out, I think the real meat is going into the free patch. It sounds like stuff like AI rework and air war improvements are going to take a significant engineering investment, but you don’t really want to sell those kinds of improvements, they need to be available to everyone. Programmers don’t work for free, though, so I think HOI4 is taking the approach Stellaris did with Leviathans: release a story/country pack along with it, with the core improvements being free for everyone.

So look at it is a meaty free update with a lot of improvements to the AI and air war tweaks. There’s also a country pack coming out at the same time for those that want more flavor in eastern Europe.

Or those who want to do things like re-purpose old tanks into assault guns.

That’s pretty much exactly what has been said on the forum. The tactical AI improvements are welcome news. Although the tactical AI also helps the human almost as much as the AI, unless you micromanage the fronts a lot.
I’m looking forward to the Air update also, it is pain to manage currently. I often pause the game and then move/check all the air units.

I found that 1.3.3 was a step backward overall in the AI’s capabilities, so I’ve stopped playing. If they improve the AI ability to produce things and make intelligent strategic decisions, I’ll happily start playing more.

In general, I’m not happy with either Firaxis or Paradox approach to their expansions for these franchise. I’d happily $20/year for improvements in the base game, rather than adding more civilization, or more focus trees for minors in HOI IV. I think the model worked fine for EU IV, opening new areas of the world and adding mechanism that were appropriate for the new areas. But feels pretty artificial for HOI IV.

Here we go. Podcat talks about Air improvements.

I am starting to think that, as an organization, the HoI4 dev team does not understand the gravity of the current AI problems. They don’t seem willing to consider game rules changes to make things easier for the AI. The AI developer basically throws up his hands that he doesn’t have the available CPU to solve the problem and it’s “not his call” to make gameplay changes.

Case in point, today they have another AI update. Someone asks whether they have addressed the issue of the AI transporting divisions through hostile sea zones. AI dev says he doesn’t have the CPU cycles, no solution coming in 1.4, or 1.4.1. Oh well, nothing can be done I guess!

To put some perspective here, Germany and Italy have a habit of sending lots of divisions to fight in Africa. That by itself is a problem. To make matters worse, they like to send these divisions by sea, through the English channel, down the Atlantic coast, around the Cape of Good Hope and up to Ethiopia. A shorter way to describe this troop movement is Mass Suicide. Or The Most Efficient Way to Get Your Armies Killed For Nothing. But I guess there is Nothing To Be Done!

Wait, say the players, can’t you just block sea transport of troops through sea zones where the enemy has naval superiority (like, uh, the North Sea, the English Channel, the whole freaking Atlantic?). You already do that for naval invasions. Well, checking that would be too expensive, since you have to do it all the time, for every unit. Maybe we could have a cache of recently tested paths? I guess that’s impossible.

I’m not seeing a willingness here to solve the problem. It’s like they are holding out for ultimate solution that will make the AI understand naval transport in a general sense, without using extra CPU. They don’t want to look at specific behaviors that are wrecking their game and put in some hard and fast rules to block it. It all has to be completely sandbox, no scripts, no guidelines.

AFAIK, they still haven’t done anything about Germany’s utterly disastrous railroaded war declarations either. Better to spend that time researching the minutia of Hungarian politics.