That makes enough sense.
HOI 4 is based around a very narrow slice of human history, if a particularly consequential one, so it probably didn't take that many rounds of DLC before they exhausted most of the historical and plausible alt history content. So now we are just getting crazier and crazier alt history pathways.
We'll probably get wizards soon enough. Nominally tied to the Nazi interest in the Occult, but you'll also be able to get King Arthur to return to rule England and recruit Merlin to train a new generation of magic wielding soldiers.
Edited by Falrinn on Feb 18th 2025 at 8:54:58 AM
It's worth stressing that it isn't the ahistoricality that pissed people off in this case (not talking about the hypernationalists; screw those guys), but that it's a literal border gore path.
And border gore is Serious Business for the Paradox community.
The devs have actually admitted that doing this was kinda dumb in hindsight and as of the latest dev diary, they've reworked stuff.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Feb 18th 2025 at 6:10:25 PM
We learn from history that we do not learn from history-Looks at Drunken's picture-
Oh I hate it.
I am intrigued on the Iraq and Iran paths, though. I remember when I got into Road to 56 for a bit that I played Iraq a few times, but since that mod is broken as fuck I look forward to seeing what Paradox does with it.
Edited by theLibrarian on Feb 18th 2025 at 9:23:52 AM
The really funny thing is that when 4.0 comes out you'll have to learn the game all over again, so get ready for that
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Agreed, that's just hideous. I know HOI 4's team isn't exactly their A team but come on, that should've never made it past the conceptual stage. It's horrible to look at and probably terrible to play.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 18th 2025 at 9:44:22 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang
The team working on this DLC is also a different team from the one that worked on Götterdämmerung, from what I've read - they're the same team that made the South America focus tree DLC. And that DLC also had some... weird stuff, to put it mildly.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Feb 18th 2025 at 6:46:47 PM
We learn from history that we do not learn from history
So they're a literal b-team, incredible.
I don't want to be unfair (I'm sure the game has some talented developers) but it's astounding how mixed the quality of HOI 4's DL Cs has been. Clearly positive changes have been implemented but there's also so many duds.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 18th 2025 at 9:53:20 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang
From what I recall, HOi4 has basically the least amount of people working on it compared to any other actively worked on Paradox title.
That also means the amount of actual research done on any content is lacking, to say the least. Which ends up leading to stuff like a Polish resistance figure being slotted as a collaborator in some of HOI4's content (which obviously didn't sit well with Polish players).
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Feb 18th 2025 at 7:05:45 PM
We learn from history that we do not learn from historyMy thought was that not only does it create boarder gore, the nominal alt history justification for the boarder gore doesn't even make sense given that the Silk Road was rendered largely redundant when long-distance maritime trade picked up...a couple hundred years prior to the setting of HOI 4.
Unrelated, but I finally got a save to the point of defeating an Endgame crisis in Stellaris!
The Praytheon Scourge showed up and my ginormous navy with a combined fleet power somewhere north of 1 million steamrolled it. The 2 Fallen Empires in my game have Awakened but haven't done much yet, might just go to war with one of them for fun.
Edited by Falrinn on Feb 18th 2025 at 10:11:05 AM
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Ah, that would explain it. Insufficient staffing always leads to organizational dysfunction, I'm not surprised to hear that this is a problem.
That really explains a lot about their problems.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 18th 2025 at 10:19:08 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangWhich is freaky, because it's their most popular game per the player charts. Black Sheep Hit?
https://store.steampowered.com/news?emclan=103582791439224844&emgid=527587373100302377
Planet UI and management changes.
Honestly I think this is one of the biggest changes to the minute-minute gameplay of Stellaris.
There's a lot more here then I can reasonably summarize, but basically you will no longer build multiple districts of the same type on a planet. Instead you will have a single district of each type and raise their development level, build zones to specialize them (Industrial and city districts are now different zone options of the city district), and build buildings in the zones to improve and further specialize them.
Looking it over, you are actually going to have a lot more building slots to play with.
Currently you have a maximum 12 building slots, one of which is always occupied by the Capital building. Now you'll have a maximum of 21, 20 not counting the capital slot. You'll get 3 per zone type in the City District, and with up to 4 zone types in a single City District that's 12. Then 9 more from the 3 resource districts. Though it's worth noting that specialized worlds will often have fewer build slots.
In addition there will be much less reason to duplicate buildings. For example instead of a Fortress World having just as many Fortresses as you can cram into free building slots, you'll use Fortress Zones to specialize your City District into providing the relevant bonuses, and then a single Fortress building to improve those bonuses.
As a side note, I finally reached the victory year in a Stellaris Save! I then went and got myself declared the Galactic Emperor for fun.
Honestly I'm not sure what problem they're trying to solve with these changes. "Build one district, get two of the corresponding job" is pretty straightforward: this just seems like an additional layer of complexity and obfuscation.
It's also unclear if the resource districts are still limited by the overall planet size. One image show they are, another show they aren't. They're mockups so I guess we can't draw conclusions from them. But if that limitation is gone that removes some of the challenge from specializing planets.
There's more building slots now but less need for them, since apparently researchers/merchants/soldiers/etc come directly from city districts.
Splitting researchers up is interesting, but it's unclear if we'll be able to have more of some than others or if it's just "research zones give you one physicist, one engineer and one biologist per city district".
Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a choreWith researchers, my guess is that a research zone without any buildings will produce an equal number of biologists/physicists/engineers, but depending on what buildings you construct the zone can specialize into producing just 2 or even 1 type of research.
This would necessitate some new building options, which could actually help make use of having more building slots to play with.
Sorta like research buildings used to work in the tile-era.
The big winners of this new system should be Void Dwellers who now can make any habitat a research habitat and orbitals now auto-build which alone is massive Qo L.
Ecumenopoli also can specialize in research or trade now which is a massive win for the Remnants origin.
The biggest question-mark lies with all origins/civis that gave build slot boni.
Was reminded that Paradox made and recorded their own version of a sea shanty for the Stellaris Aquatics DLC (and even embraced the Swolphin meme and made a 10 hour version of it when it was a smash hit
).
Space shanties. Fiction needs more of them.
One thing I hope gets changed in Stellaris is to allow Federation Presidents to initiate peace deals regardless of if they were involved in starting the conflict.
In totally unrelated news, a minor member of my Hegemony who is only there because they are a vassal of another member decided it would be a great idea to build an outpost right next to a Militant Isolationist Fallen Empire and then refuse demands to abandon it. Now despite being fully occupied in like 5 seconds, they are refusing to sue for peace because the Federation's war exhaustion isn't high enough.
Stellaris 4.0 open beta launched today
It's still in a pretty unfinished state, so I'd recommend holding off for a bit if you just want to play a game, but it is available.
Patch notes have some new details but no major bombshells that I saw when I skimmed through them.
Biggest one is that Juggernauts don't have a logistic upkeep and actually reduce the logistics upkeep of all the ships in the system by 75%.
Edited by Falrinn on Mar 11th 2025 at 7:24:06 AM

HOI 4 is basically all crazy alt history now from what I can tell, the same way CK 2 become in major part about vampires and witches and shit.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran