With the Barbarossa update, as long as your armour value is above 75% of the attacker’s piercing value, you’ll get a damage debuff proportional to how far above 75% it is (to a maximum of the original half damage) – meaning a lot of different tank divisions just got a good chunk more survivable, in the face of legions of chaff infantry with cheap anti-tank guns. Previously, this simply meant you did half normal damage if the armour value was higher than your attack’s piercing value, and full damage if not – meaning you only needed one more point of piercing, compared to your opponent’s armour, to make their armour totally irrelevant. In the armour piercing department, Paradox is adding more of a sliding scale of damage to reflect different levels of armour, versus armour piercing. Previously, 40-width divisions with concentrated damage were disproportionately powerful in the game’s combat arithmetic – but the post says this is now being balanced out – on the one hand, by having these larger divisions receive a larger share of all incoming damage, and, on the other, by spreading out their damage output more broadly across enemy units. The classic ‘40-width armour’ division is also getting a nerf, as part of efforts to encourage a wider variety of division layouts. This, too, would be an additional measure to ensure players don’t simply use the same division templates over and over, it says.

The post also reveals the developers are “looking at reducing the overstacking penalty” applied to armies that have too many fighting divisions for the width of the province they’re in. Plains provinces get a new combat width of 90. Provinces’ width stats will now range from 75 (mountains) up to 96 (urban). Now, the post says, in a bid to “shake up the 40/20 width meta”, many terrain types are having their maximum combat width tweaked away from multiples of ten, to encourage different shapes and sizes of divisions to be used. There is still no announced release date for either the Barbarossa update or the accompanying, unnamed DLC.įor most of the game’s lifetime, combat width (how many troops can effectively fight across the border between one in-game province and another, at the same time) has remained at 80 for almost all terrain types, meaning players were at a heavy disadvantage if they designed their army divisions to have any combat width other than 20 or 40. Hearts of Iron 4’s forthcoming 1.11 ‘Barbarossa’ update will make some pretty meaningful alterations to the game’s critical combat width mechanic, the way armour-piercing attacks work, and the reliability stat for divisions, according to the latest dev diary, posted on developer Paradox’s Forum on Wednesday.

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