In the previous article, I broke down how Paradox fleshed out the countries of Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia in the latest Death Or Dishonor DLC. But there are plenty of other changes introduced in the DLC worth talking about. I’ve had some time to play around with it and I’ll give my impressions on the new features below.
Map Updates
The map in Hearts Of Iron always looked a little muddy to me up close. It was hard to tell where different terrain types began and ended. This has been greatly improved in this update and now the topography really pops.
In addition to this, the Sahara is now impassable. This was done to fix an AI problem where the AI would devote huge amounts of troops to Africa in ways that were strategically bonkers. From personal experience, I can tell you I’ve had games where I’ve been chasing random divisions across the Sahara for far too long. Some Mountains in the Himalayas got the same treatment and have become impassable as well.
Equipment Licensing
Now if you are lagging technologically, you can acquire the license to all the new hot tech from friendly neighbors. It will allow you to produce that equipment even if you don’t have the technology for it. You’ll take a bit of a penalty to production, but this is a great way for smaller countries not to get totally eclipsed by their enemies technologically. The newer the tech, the more of a penalty you’ll get on the production.
Equipment Conversion
During the war as technology developed, countries would often convert their old equipment to newer variants to save on resources. Now you can do this in game. By selecting the option in your equipment production screen you will repurpose your old equipment. You will only pay the difference in resources and the production speed will be much higher, until the old stockpile runs out of course. There is added technology to help with conversion speed as well.
War Overview Updates
A small touch but the war overview now actually provides useful information… like total units fielded per side and total losses per side.
Air Updates
This is really the big one. The entire system of controlling your air force has been revamped. The old system was incredibly time intensive to move your air wings to different theaters of war and get them up on missions. You would have to left click sometimes, right click others, usually forget which was which and end up doing the whole thing again.
Now air wings show up on the map like divisions. Like divisions, you can send them to different airports or air regions with a movement command. This already makes the whole system more logical and less click heavy.
You can also drag and select multiple airbases to give multiple airwings a command instead of selecting every base and airwing within individually.
It also displays the airwings mission on the map so you don’t need to go into each airfield to see what your planes are doing.
The new air combat window will give you stats for planes shot down over the past day or the past sortie, again a vast improvement over the tiny charts you had to mess with previously.
While all these changes are welcome the air combat one is much welcome blessing. Managing your air force was one of the most frustrating and time consuming aspects of playing this game. This system may honestly save hours off of a full Hearts of Iron playthrough, and that's time I need to spread the World Revolution.
