Hearts of Iron IV Patch 1.13 Dev Diary - Small Features

Pivoting away from a focus on historical focus trees, the latest developer diary has Paradox covering the miscellaneous features arriving with Arms Against Tyranny. Among the features covered are major changes to the division designer, consumer goods, and equipment production.

Division Designer Changes

The most impactful change to the meta has to be the adjustments to the division designer. Artillery, anti-tank, and anti-air guns will no longer be confusingly be considered infantry battalions. Instead, there is a new combat support battalion with these brigades. Additionally, players won’t have access to the entire designer at game start, with the bottom row being locked until you unlock it in your doctrine tree.

hearts of iron 4 arms against tyranny combat support battalion

hearts of iron 4 arms against tyranny division designer changes

These changes are going to force players to be more creative with their designs, now that you are limited to a 4 by 5 grid and cannot have artillery in the same column as infantry.

Consumer Goods Changes

Accompanying that change is a shift in how consumer goods are calculated, with the goal of alleviating some strain on minor countries and making it near-impossible to reach 0% consumer goods. This is done with a new modifier Consumer Goods Factor, which basically just multiplies the expected consumer goods value. Each successive Consumer Goods Factor modifier will be multiplicative, making it harder to reach 0%.

Equipment Presets

For players who don’t want to interact with the games many designers, Paradox is bringing some much-needed relief with historical equipment presets. These designs will closely mimic historical equipment and help quickly make designs to fill specific roles. There is no functionality yet for saving your own presets unfortunately, but they haven’t ruled out eventually adding it.

There are some exciting changes coming with Arms Against Tyranny, but these might be my favorite announced so far. Not having to manually create new equipment designs will be great for more relaxed games. Along with that, the changes to combat width and the division designer will make the 1.13 meta extremely interesting to follow.