NOTE: The 'Production' Paragraph has been altered as of 28/1/14 to reflect new information that came to light since the original publication. Apologies for any confusion caused, but the article should be 100% correct now.
Hearts of Iron IV was the major announcement to come out of Paradox's annual convention this year. Given that it's not actually slated for release until early 2015, I was worried that there wasn't going to be enough to show off that would really allow me to appreciate what the guys were doing with the game. I was wrong. Let's be clear - it's still very early days for HoI4, so there wasn't much to show apart from the campaign map, battleplans, and some of the management interfaces. But it was enough. The map alone is a bit of a revelation, and has to be seen to be believed. On a basic level, the guys have once again improved the visual fidelity of the Clausewitz engine, which is always nice to look at. They've also combined several of the different map modes into one - when you're zoomed out, you're essentially looking at the diplomatic mode, but as you get closer and closer to the ground, the block colours start to fade and the actual terrain features start coming through, so eventually you're left with a view of the terrain, but bathed in a coloured glow of the different nations. Weather and the day/night cycle are also integrated into this master 'combat mode'. Honestly, it's a little bit mind-blowing, and the idea behind it is that for certain situations, like combat, you shouldn't have to keep toggling between map modes. There are going to be other more context-sensitive situations as well, so when you enter diplomacy for example, the view automatically changes to a mode that shows off more of the diplomatic considerations.
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The philosophy behind Hearts of Iron IV is to cut down on the micro-management, but leave the higher-level interactions intact so that you have a more meaningful, and in many ways 'realistic' control of your nation. Battleplans is the most obvious example of this design approach - while (for the moment) you still have the option to control your armies in the traditional manner, what Hearts of Iron IV is pushing for is for you to create a 'Battleplan', and then assign units to that plan and let the combat AI execute that plan for you. Really, you're still telling your troops to go from one province to another, but with the battleplan system you have a more comprehensive tool set to perform a series of more complex actions, and then execute them at once by relinquishing some control to the AI. This is something I can imagine players might feel distrustful about, so the devs really need to make the tools for this mode as comprehensive as possible to make sure the benefits out-weigh the potential possibility of a derpy AI.
Battleplans can be broken up into five 'phases', each phase has its own colour so that you can draw complex plans on the game map and know what's happening when. Current tools are general advance, split advance (so some units split off from the main advance and go another way) Blitz, Paradrop, Air support and Defensive line. These are all subject to change, but it should be indicative as to what kind of things you can do. When you give orders for a phase, the AI will 'prepare' by getting troops into place. The example we were shown was a Phase One battle plan that involved German Troops invading Poland from multiple directions. Once the movement orders were given and troops assigned the AI automatically assembled the forces at the border. There's a button on the phase interface that you can click to 'activate' that phase, and that's when the AI carries out the rest of the plan. If you've planned out a multi-phase operation, the AI won't advance to the next phase until you press that button.
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Production is very different. Factories are built on the region-level, instead of in individual territories, and there are now three types of factories - Military, Naval and Civilian. Instead of straight-up building divisions made up of regiments, you build 'pools' of resources, like tanks, etc..., which you then use to create the regiments and divisions. Hearts of Iron IV uses the concept of 'Assembly Lines' - you create an Assembly Line for a certain item, and then assign factories to it. These factories can come from anywhere, but they have to match the type required to build the equipment. The performance of this is then influenced by the number of factories, location of factories, the strategic resources you control, and also the efficiency of your factories in building that specific product. This ties into the tech tree which we'll talk about in a minute, but you have specific chassis for tanks now (though they are still grouped into Light, Medium, Heavy and S. Heavy) and you tell your factories to build pools of different military hardware.
As an example, you can set up an assembly line to build Sherman Tanks, and it takes into account all the relevant factors and then tells you how many you can produce in a week. If, for example, that line was able to produce six tanks per week, those will go into the tank pool. Then you create your tank regiments and divisions from that pool. When building a tank regiment, it'll use the best tank you have first, and then fill in the rest with whatever else you've got. Replacements also work like this, and are dependant on pools of hardware. The more you build though, the better you get at building individual items. If a new model comes along, you can switch to that, but you lose out on all of the efficiency bonus. The only exception is if it's a chassis of the same class, or a sub-variant of the same chassis. Bombing factories also hurts production in general, but not specific assembly lines. There is also the training of men, which comes from manpower. The quality of the soldiers useddepends on the level of equipment you give them. Again, you need to build pools of decent equipment to have troops properly trained before they see battle.
Tech, and by extension the development of your armed forces, seems both familiar and different. There are fewer Tech slots that you can use to research simultaneous techs, and they take longer to research so that the choices you make are more meaningful. There are proper unit trees for Armour, Planes etc..., and you can see the unit you unlock and it's not a simple matter of 'light' or 'medium' generic unlocks now. You start off by researching the basic chassis, and then once that's unlock you can research sub-techs for that chassis that unlock more specialised units, for example you unlock the German Panzer VI chassis, and then you unlock equipment that allows you to build tank destroyers based on that chassis. Doctrines are back, and are more or less the same except they are laid out in proper progression chains, with branching paths depending on how things are going at the time, or how you predict things might go.
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The only other thing we can talk about at the moment is Politics, and the general progression of the game. Hearts of Iron IV is going to be less scripted than Hearts of Iron III - they want to stick to key events, but only if they make sense. For example, the team believe that Germany may have not been able to annex Czechoslovakia as easy if one of the other major powers had stood up to Hitler, so we can imagine the event in HoI3 where Germany just automatically annexes that territory is going to be removed and made into a more open-ended scenario where it's one of multiple plausible outcomes. The sandbox philosophy of CK2 and EUIV is probably going to influence Hearts of Iron IV heavily, so there should be more flexibility to get a different and unique 'version' of World War II between multiple playthroughs. As far as politics go, there’s talk of setting your own goals - which fit somewhere between missions and ideas from EUIV, and you get bonuses for achieving these goals and how quickly you accomplish them. The game 'officially' ends in 1948, but the team want things to remain as interesting as possible right up till that point, and you'll have the option to just keep playing until you run out of content, essentially.
That's essentially all we know at this point. It may seem like we're trying to sell you on this game so early with not a lot to go on right now, but there's a reason Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV have become as good as they have. The new philosophy of patience, care and attention has done wonders for these franchises, and there's no reason to think that it won't do the same for Hearts of Iron and that alone is exciting. It's going to be a long wait for 2015, but hopefully we'll be able to bring you more information and assets sooner rather than later. Hearts of Iron 4 is scheduled for a Q1 2015 release.
Most Anticipated Feature: Honestly, my mind is still a bit blown from the map-mode integration. I almost cried when I heard it can't really be back-ported into CK2 (not sure about EUIV).
