HOI IV - Open Beta

Generals!

I'm Zwirbaum, Game Designer for Hearts of Iron, and today I will be bringing up to you a new Open ‘Balance’ Beta that we will be running for the near foreseeable future. As opposed to the recent open betas, like for our War Effort patch (1.17.4), this beta will be much more focused on a specific area of gameplay, it will not contain any new focuses, paths, or anything like that. The main purpose of this beta is to present to you, our community, ahead of time, some of the balance changes we are thinking about, give the opportunity to test it in practice, see how it feels, give us feedback in return, which we can then use for further fine-tuning of the proposed changes, resulting in better gameplay experience for everyone.

Now to give some extra information about this Open ‘Balance’ Beta - if everything will go according to plan (knock on wood, as game development and life can throw a curve ball at you at unexpected times) - beta build will likely be updated every week. Those updates may be chonkier or smaller, may contain a bit more experimental, somewhat crazy changes, or be just relatively fine-tuning the values. In the meantime I will be listening, reading and interacting with the community to get feedback and what do you think about the direction of those changes. I will try to provide some of the commentary on those changes, and give some of the reasoning behind those changes.

However please do remember the following thing: I am not a telepath, so without your opinion and constructive criticism, it may be hard to guess what your opinion is on the changes.

Finally, as opposed to our usual open betas, changes we are testing MAY not end up (immediately) integrated into the main game, with the conclusion of the beta. We will see what the impact it will have on the global balance, AI performance and whether we will need to polish it a bit further.

Now saying that, the first of the changes should be relatively non-controversial (I hope,) and are mostly aimed at reducing the amount of inconsistencies, a bit ‘jumpy’ progression in certain places, and making tweaks to make certain elements of the naval gameplay a bit more friendly. There will also be some Service Manpower requirements reductions for the Navy, which should ease the ‘threshold of entry’ for the countries that are not blessed with abundance of manpower.

And that is pretty much all from me, at this time.

Thanks for reading, and until next time, farewell!

/Zwirbaum

How to join this Open Beta:

This beta client is Musketeer v1.17.5.1.e15e (4e4e)

To install Open Balance Beta client, follow these instruction: [olist]

Right-click the game in your library

Select Properties from the drop-down menu

Select Game Versions & Betas

Select the beta branch called open_balance_beta [/olist] Finally, to report any issues you find in relation to this beta, please use the bug report forum and make sure to include the version you’re using. That way our Jira won’t go nuts trying to figure out what bug report belongs to what.

Open Beta Patch Notes

Balance

Supply Consumption

Carriers 1.2 → 0.8

Battleships 0.8 → 0.56

Battlecruisers 0.48 → 0.32

Heavy Cruisers 0.4 → 0.24

Early Destroyer Naval Range 1500 km → 2000 km

Basic Destroyer Naval Range 1800 km → 2500 km Service Manpower 325 → 300

Improved Destroyer Naval