Hearts of Iron 4: Death or Dishonor announced
Becomes just another story
A mid-sized expansion for Hearts of Iron 4 [official site] will focus on expanding Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, Paradox announced today. Named 'Death or Dishonor', the expansion will bring unique National Focus trees to those countries Paradox say were "caught between the dueling ambitions of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany." They're calling it a 'Country Pack' rather than a full expansion, though it will bring a new feature or two. And, in the traditional Paradox way, it'll be accompanied by a big patch. AI and air action are both due touch-ups in that.
Death or Dishonor will cost $9.99 (should be £7), or come as part of the season pass. Paradox liken this Country Pack in scope to Stellaris's Leviathan 'Story Pack', focused on a few small areas. Also arriving in Death or Dishonor are features like Equipment Conversion, to "update your arsenal by converting older units -- or make use of captured enemy vehicles and gear", and the option to license military technology from other countries or make a little scratch by licensing yours out.
Update 1.4, nicknamed 'Oak', will arrive free alongside Death or Dishonor. Full specifics aren't in yet but Paradox say this about it:
"We wanted to make sure to take this time to deal with some big, complicated and difficult things that the community had been asking us for for a long time. First up is improving air gameplay, the other is the AI. After the 1.3 update there were a couple of areas identified where the most important was German AI performance. We started digging into that and there were a couple of hurdles to solve. 1) First of all divisions along front lines were not fighting as effectively as they should which led to a lot of "shuffling" and fronts slowing down massively. That meant that Germany struggled a lot versus soviet union. 2) Axis minors did not manage expeditionary forces very well when it came to helping out Germany. 3) In some cases Africa could end up as a big battleground draining precious axis materiel and weakening them (this one we solved with impassable sahara, check last diary). 4) Unit usage such as garrison and template and production management were far from optimal."
This dev blog post digs more into the AI improvements.
Paradox haven't confirmed a release date for all this but I'd guess around the end of May - they tend to announce expansions one month before release.