Paradox propose ce week-end deux nouvelles petites extensions pour le qautrième volet de la série Hearts of Iron. La première apporte au jeu plus de 70 minutes de discours de personnages historiques coté Alliés afin de ponctuer de manière originale le gameplay du jeu (fonction de certains évènements).
Ensuite, après un pack d’unités en 3D pour l’Axe l’an dernier, c’est au tour des Alliés de recevoir eux aussi de nouveaux modèles de chars avec donc ici un second mini DLC ajoutant lui plus d’une trentaine de véhicules blindés pour les Alliés ainsi que pour le Komintern.
Au passage, à l’occasion du quatrième anniversaire du jeu cette semaine, Paradox dévoile quelques statistiques sur la popularité croissante de Hearts of Iron 4. Qui a donc atteint un record de 899 000 joueurs lors de la sortie de l’extension La Résistance. L’autre tableau ci-après indique lui la popularité des pays joués cette année comparé à 2016.
Enfin une nouvelle mise à jour 1.9.3 est venue hier améliorer un peu plus l’aspect naval du jeu. Voyez le changelog par exemple par ici dans le forum officiel. Voyez aussi ce précédent article au sujet du patch 1.9.
Pour plus d’informations sur Hearts of Iron IV: Allied Armor Pack, voyez cette page sur Steam. Pour le Hearts of Iron IV: Allied Speeches Music Pack, voyez par ici.
Concernant Hearts of Iron IV, ne manquez pas notre dossier Sur le front des DLC de Hearts of Iron IV, classement général des extensions du jeu. Puis voyez cette page chez l’éditeur ou celle-ci sur Steam. Ou encore le wiki officiel. A lire aussi dans nos archives notre série d’AAR Hearts of Iron IV : valse soviétique (première partie).
Communiqué
Dev Diary: 4th Anniversary + Patch 1.9.3
Hi everyone! This week is Hearts of Iron IVs 4th anniversary. I’ve got some cool data to share with you, new armor and radio packs as well as patch for you to celebrate! All of this releases tomorrow :)
A Look Back & Cool Numbers
It’s crazy how Hearts of Iron keeps growing. I personally started with playing HOI2, and worked on HOI3 as a coder and game director on HOI4, and while people still call it a niche experience for WW2 buffs, it has also grown to be so much more (or us WW2 nerds are more numerous than we think :D). Around La Résistance release we clocked a new record on monthly players of 899k (the 1000 of you that didn’t log in that month are responsible for my OCD flaring up!). HOI4 is quite unique in how stable the growth is. Most games that aren’t multiplayer or the like usually has big dips between releases. I think the two big factors that keeps us so stable is the replayability as well as the amazing mods that keep updating giving people new stuff to play with continuously :) Here is what the curve has looked like over the years:
I also took a look at country popularity between the last year and the release year. These are the top 10 nations currently with comparison to 2016:
Most see relative reductions here because we have in general made a lot more nations playable with more focus trees and other improvements (in 2016 Poland had Hungary’s spot while now its pushed below both Spain and Hungary). There are a couple of obvious increases who all seem to come from focus tree changes also :)
Allied Armor Pack
Tomorrow we also release the followup to last years Axis Armor Pack, this time for the allies. This includes 45 armored vehicles for USA, UK, France and Soviets. On top of this we also add in 32 tanks from the Colonel Edition for those nations also for a total of 77 :) This is one of the reasons that we stopped selling the Colonel Edition last month – it was making it messy to buy cosmetic packs and we didn’t want to split stuff up further.
To make sure previous colonel edition players don’t feel like they get as much, and also because its been such a great year for HOI4, we will be giving the whole pack for free to all those who had the colonel edition. Enjoy!
(the observant players may remember that there is some ships in the colonel edition also, people who have that will keep them but they are not included in this armor pack. We will sort those boat boys out in the future).
Below are some examples of vehicles included:
Allied Speeches
People seemed to like the radio addition last year, but this year we wanted to test something a bit different and more tied to gameplay. We have added 70 minutes of speeches from allied leaders and commanders, set them to music and trigger them based on ingame events. So for example when Japan declares war on USA you will be able to hear Roosevelt deliver his « a date which will live in infamy » speech.
Here is a sample using one of Churchill’s more famous speeches to give you an feeling for how it will sound:
1.9.3 Patch
For this patch we wanted to focus on naval issues and improvements as we didn’t touch that very much for La Résistance. To summarize the most important changes:
Naval tech rebalance It’s best to check the changelog for details here, but our goal has been to make tech investments into more efficient submarines more expensive and sub countering and investments into capital ships cheaper.
Convoys and stun-locking A very annoying strategy in multiple and sometimes in SP has been being able to essentially stun lock an enemies transports of troops in place at sea by lots of small naval engagements with submarines. Even if well screened they still need to wait to retreat and then would get caught again and again, sometimes taking months to get across the atlantic. To deal with this we have increased the retreat speed bonuses from being well screened and also implemented a cooldown system. This system will give transports a cooldown after being caught where they can not be re-spotted again. The length of it depends on the length of their path as well as how well screened they are. For an unscreened vessel they will be caught pretty quickly in more interceptions while a properly screened one can continue on until the invasion beach if its not too far.
Carriers and other naval changes Carriers in the pacific really struggle with the large air zones and the weather penalties. It didn’t make sense to us to apply the area size penalties to a mobile base with so few planes, so now any mission targeting a specific location (port strike, CAS etc) for planes stationed on a carrier will not have this penalty.
On top of this it didn’t make sense to have carriers planes suffer a 100% penalty from bad weather when land based ones had a much smaller one. While I doubt any planes could take off during a really bad storm, it makes little sense when we only really have one level of weather here to make it so brutal, so this penalty has been reduced to 80%. We also felt that if the weather is truly this bad guns really should be struggling more than they do as well as doubled that penalty to 20% to close the gap.
Carriers now also help the fleet overall. The side with the carrier plane advantage in the battle will penalize positioning of the other side, similar a bit in spirit to the effects of air superiority on land. We also made light guns a bit worse and buffed targeting and power of bigger guns to try and strengthen mixed fleets. We have also increased the base detection abilities of carriers a bit to better model how important they were for spotting enemies at sea.
Another thing of note is that we have fixed an annoying interaction between air superiority and naval spotting. Because air superiority applies on average on the zones a task force was operating you could shield them with planes in a zone they were not even in, which might be somewhere your enemy couldn’t even reach and contest. Now it will be looking at the specific area they are in instead.
Out Of Syncs Telemetry was telling us that the vast majority of out of syncs were happening in the first half of 1936, and for weeks we simply could not reproduce this inhouse, but recently we had a breakthrough. We found some data related to technologies that was not properly reset when entering a new game and this is hopefully the core reason for this. We will be looking at telemetry data to hopefully see the OOS frequency take a nose dive, because this stuff is truly hard for us to test fully ourselves, but we are optimistic!
So what are we up to now?
We have been wanting to shorten the time between content update for a while and are going to take a serious stab at it now. That means that we are currently working on two things at once in parallel actually. In the pipe we have 1.10 ‘Collie’ as well as 1.11 ‘Barbarossa’. That’s about as much information as I can give you right now. We are not yet ready to start dev diaries on ‘Collie’ but look forward to it some time after summer vacation. We have some massively awesome stuff planned and I think you are all gonna like it (if people wanna see the roadmap, it was last updated in this dev diary).
As part of the anniversary we are also doing a really cool new take on the 3-day war stream with influencers vs devs and… democracy?
