Hearts of Iron 4

[Safe-Keeper]

With the devs having released eight dev diaries and a short twitch.tv gameplay session, what does everybody think about Hearts of Iron 4? Personal thoughts:

• Love how a lot of micro-heavy features have been streamlined. Same with the UI, it's looking a lot smoother.
• Lots of creative solutions, such as when they drag-and-dropped an arrow into Poland and then selected several German divisions and right-clicked the arrow to assign them to that invasion path. Drawing lines, icons and arrows on the map was fun and useful in Hearts of Iron 3, but in the fourth game it actually has a functional purpose other than notes and whatnot.
• Production lines. Absolutely love it. My only gripe with it is that ships don't physically exist in the world until they're finished and you deploy them. Would prefer it if they were built in shipyards, and were vulnerable to attack until finished.
• Only worry is that it's going to be too streamlined in some areas. Hoping I'll still be able to control divisions if I want to, for example.
• Looking forward to seeing how they're going to handle naval combat. Actually hoping subs will be abstracted.

References: dev diaries are here. Gameplay footage here.
Remember, it's early alpha.

[Red October1984]

HEARTS OF IRON IV!