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[Orange Wizard]

PTW. I'll probably play HOI4 once I can grab it on sale, then sink a bajillion hours into it instead of doing useful things.

[BFEL]

I am generally a grand strategy nut, and I've no doubt I'll end up buying HOI4 sooner or later, but having been keeping up with development so far through the dev diaries, I don't think they've done a good job of explaining to me what about HOI4 will be better than HOI3 or even HOI2. Prettier textures? Has Paradox hit the Madden football point in their grad strategy series?

Ability to transfer savegames from EUIV (and thus CK2) is one advantage.

Are they going to have an import from Vicky2? Otherwise, that's going to be weird. There's a pretty solid EU4->Vic2 converter already out there, but not a terribly good Vic2->HoI3 one.

Oh, for some reason I stupidly assumed they were going in chronological order to keep the whole thing transferable. Shit. Multiple levels of shit.

[Flying Dice]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Who the hell are The Empire? It's not Japan. That really just leaves the Brits (among IRL nations), who are their close(est?) allies.

Looks like a plan to aid the Bolsheviks against the Russian Empire, or maybe just to war against the latter. Note the naming conventions for those trees: War Plan White is the anti-Communist one, War Plan Red is the anti-Empire one; the Whites were the Russian imperial loyalists while the Reds were the communist revolutionaries.

[Sergarr]

So, can anyone sum up in a few words what's going to be new in HoI4, aside from "grittier" interface?

[Orange Wizard]

It's going to have higher resolution textures.

[a1s]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Who the hell are The Empire? It's not Japan. That really just leaves the Brits (among IRL nations), who are their close(est?) allies.

The US (and other nations) have a bunch of alternate history focuses. A player can choose in the game options to limit AI nations to a historical path. Strike at the Empire is indeed part of the War Plan Red tree.

Thanks, that makes perfect sense now. It's also interesting that none of the Color or rainbow plans are directed against Russia/Soviets (who would end up America's primary antagonist just 2 decades later.) Plan White was about domestic communism.

[Jopax]

So, can anyone sum up in a few words what's going to be new in HoI4, aside from "grittier" interface?

Reworked basically everything.
Research is sparser now, but it's aided by the field modifications. You know gain field expirience while fighting/training your troops which you can then use to upgrade certain aspects of your units (basically all the little subcategories of a unit type in HoI3).
Divisions have been revamped, you put them together like before but they seem to be larger and some of the support units have been changed, also using field expirience to mess with them in different ways.
Production has been changed, you now have civilian and military factories, civilian ones produce stuff to keep you people happy and are the potential for building more or turning into military factories. Military ones produce equipment that is supplied to your units, divisions are now created with just troops and they recieve equipment like guns and tanks as it's being built.
There's national doctrines or whatever it's called, stuff that's similar to national decisions from before, except a bit more structured while also having more alternate history routes, as seen in that USA decisions tree.
Naval combat reworked completely, too long to write up, it seems to be much better now.
Ground and air combat also reworked, not perhaps the base mechanics but the way you control it all. You draw up battle plans and assign units and generals to them which then execute them, seems to be a much more streamlined and improved version of letting the AI do it in HoI3. Air combat is now based off of regions, so you send planes with a mission to a certain region and they'll do it there, or something like that, it's been a while since I've seen it.
Supply system changed, again with regions, supplies seem to be shipped to a region and then spread out to your units in it, depending on how good the infrastructure there is. Supplies also don't seem to be stockable anymore, instead a simple positive or negative income.
That's all that I recall so far, but there's much more really, go rummage trough the devlogs if you want more and more accurate details on it all.

[Sergarr]

So, can anyone sum up in a few words what's going to be new in HoI4, aside from "grittier" interface?

Reworked basically everything.
-snip-

So, almost nothing really revolutionary. I see a lot of small changes that won't majorly affect anything outside of weird edge-case scenarios. Also, some of these "new features" seem to be... old features back from HoI2, like "aircraft can be only sent to regions", larger-than-in-HoI3 divisions, simplification of supply system and so on.

The only change which doesn't sound small is this new command system, but something tells me it is going to be really shitty in actual implementation. Paradox cannot do AI properly to save their lives, so any part of the game which relies on it not being shitty is bound to fail spectacularly unless you painstakingly babysit over its every move, at which point you might as well directly micromanage your entire army.

P.S: Decide to rummage through the developer diaries, to see if there's anything more interesting there. What they did to naval combat is interesting. I predict someone will find out the way to break it within a week of game's release, because Johan & Co are, shall we say, not good at testing.

[a1s]

some of these "new features" seem to be... old features back from HoI2, like "aircraft can be only sent to regions", larger-than-in-HoI3 divisions, simplification of supply system and so on.

How big were divisions in HOI3? Because in HoI2 they were the basic unit (all the major nations had dozens or even hundreds of them on the field at any one time)

[Sergarr]

some of these "new features" seem to be... old features back from HoI2, like "aircraft can be only sent to regions", larger-than-in-HoI3 divisions, simplification of supply system and so on.

How big were divisions in HOI3? Because in HoI2 they were the basic unit (all the major nations had dozens or even hundreds of them on the field at any one time)

Variable, AFAIK. You could put just one front-line brigade (3000 men) and one support one (1000 men) for a total division size of 4000. Or you could put five front-line brigades and have a 15000-sized division. Front-width mechanic prevented the "build larger battalions" from automatically being always the better choice.

[snelg]

The main thing about the OOB system from HOI3 is, most people who played hoi1 and 2 hated it, because it made managing large scale armies like the Reds nearly impossible on any meaningful amount. This new system seems like it will allow for higher level planning without having to hope the AI does the lower level stuff correctly, and also doesn't mean you have to micro 600+ units across the entire Barbarossa front.

I did enjoy the first two games in the series as well, probably spent a fair bit more time playing and modding them than I should have. But something that the OOB and cooperating generals managed to do was make it feel like you created an army, rather than a pile of divisions.
I totally agree that the OOB system had its issues. But I think scrapping it was unnecessary when it could be improved in many ways and have a more interesting and impactful role, becoming more of a target for the enemy. Which I think is the problem with the previous solution, it offered mostly just a malus if you didn't do it. It should be something more interesting. It does take a few minutes to set up the OOB, but I hardly consider that much of a problem as it saves a bit of time later on in finding things (which could be due to not using the ai for controlling units).
I don't really see the problem with the AI messing things up as I generally don't use it for anything anyway. And really, I find if you have the ai controlling the army there's sadly not that much left to do in the game. If anything I think the new system will cause some really awkward moments where the ai of your units will screw you over (I haven't read up on this recently but basically the ai is supposed to complete simple objectives you give it if I understand correctly, correct me if I'm wrong).

They have actually said they have counters. It's on the wiki and linkeds to a thread where the devs confirmed thy will be an optional feature. From what I have seen from the diarys and especially the video is definitely not dumbed down.

I wasn't aware of this. Unless it was the one from some time ago where the little icons along the soldier model were the counters rather than the replacement for the model which people asking for them are generally looking for.
I Looked on the wiki and found some nato counter icons so I guess they might be in there one way or another. Although my guess is that they would just replace the other icons which wouldn't help that much. The problem here being if anyone wonders that the soldier model works for Europa universalis and Crusader kings where there's not 600+ units to micro + enemies + allies present to try to keep track of. (The video linked in the opening post has units firing in the wrong direction etc. which doesn't help quickly making out what is going on). Who would have thought camouflaged men don't stick out very well in a similarly coloured background?

Here is a few screens of a random save I had lying around showing the problems the 3d models had in HoI3, I think the little counter accompaniying the model in HoI4 is going to help with knowing the size but things like movement might be difficult. It looks a bit different compared to HoI4, but I hope my fears will come across somewhat. Models also don't show units out of supply in HoI3 as seen here.

Spoiler: "model - terrain" (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: "model - political" (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: "counter- political" (click to show/hide)

Due to the game being modded (black ice being the mod here) there's custom counters for many of the German and Russian divisions so the Romanian ones might be the more interesting to identify. That said using models instead of counters could also cause some trouble introducing new units or custom divisions like in this case to HoI4 and be able to tell them apart.

[redwallzyl]

here's the dev quote about counters.

"we'll have counters. Not because we need them for this time the sprite interface is going to contain just as much information but because some players will want to keep the boardgame feel. I personally used counters in hoi3 but I wont in hoi4 I think. Adding traditional counters is going to be one of the last things we do during beta so dont expect to see them for a long time."

[snelg]

here's the dev quote about counters.

"we'll have counters. Not because we need them for this time the sprite interface is going to contain just as much information but because some players will want to keep the boardgame feel. I personally used counters in hoi3 but I wont in hoi4 I think. Adding traditional counters is going to be one of the last things we do during beta so dont expect to see them for a long time."

Many thanks, I wasn't able to find the quote.

[BlindKitty]

The supply system in HoI 3 was... Not all that good. Especially at first, where I was stopped dead in my tracks halfway through Russia not because of poor infrastructure there, but because 100% infrastructure around Berlin just couldn't handle the flow of supplies, and since all the supplies were sent from the capital (why, oh why?!) my divisions were starving. Due to traffic on Berlin's highways.

Also, I hated managing the planes, and forcing AI to only automanage planes, and not ground units in the same theater, was a major PITA.

Well, we will see. Many of the ideas seem good, but dumbing down the research doesn't seem all that great, and really, the most important thing are not the ideas, but the implementation.

[Sergarr]

dumbing down the research

Haven't noticed that, what do you mean, exactly?