Hey there!

So in the same vein as Paradox Interactive, we decided it would be interesting to write and release development diaries. Our main goal with these is to share not only information about our next major content update for Hearts of Iron: New World Order, but also to collect our thoughts and allow for suggestions.

Before we begin, a bit of background. This mod is currently being worked on by a two person team of indie game developers. We are also ginormous history nerds, which is why we end up playing games like Hearts of Iron, Victoria, and Civilization. Its also why our projects, be they tabletop, card, or digital games, often feature historical elements and references. We often find ourselves talking about the history behind the game whenever we play, and that leads us to our first point; Joseph Goebbels.

For the two people who don’t know, Goebbels was the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 45. The only reason why it is possible that some players don’t know him is that in Hearts of Iron, he exists as Germany’s Fascist Demagogue, which means that he is rarely ever picked, as not only is the additional fascist pressure near useless as Germany, he is overclassed by the captains of industry, war industrialists, and backroom backstabbers that dominate german politics. To this end, we have decided to revamp the minister system into a new format: CABINETS.

Right now in HOI, you select three ministers from a larger pool that shape your internal policy. This is interesting, but we feel that the mechanics of this can be greatly improved. As a result, we will be creating six distinct cabinet positions; Interior Minister, Foreign Minister, Finance Minister, Industry Minister, Science Minister, and Media Minister. Each will have a host of options, which will feature ministers that you can expect, as well as a few deep cuts from history.

Germany in particular will have a wide variety of potential ministers, probably the largest in the game, to represent the complete disaster zone that was the Nazi political scene. With dozens of different figures leading their own organizations and desperately working towards the Fuhrer, you’ll spend a lot of time moving ministers around.

To go back to the earlier example, if you appoint Goebbels as your Propaganda Minister, he will not only increase your fascism drift slightly, but also improves your political power gain. As other ministers may cause other political drift, he can be useful for shoring up your ideology. Unfortunately, he will also cause your international opinion to tank slightly, as he was basically Hitler’s Hitler.

Is that not your style? Why not appoint philosopher Ernst Bergmann? Ernst may cause your research times to increase slightly, but he provides the same fascist drift with a national unity boost.

These Ministers will do the work you appointed them to, but they also like to run off and do their own thing while you run the country. As a result, each Minister will be tied to at least one event that can fire during their reign. Give Bergmann enough time, and he will be able to craft a religion for the German people to increase their devotion to the fuhrer tenfold.

We currently plan for each major nation to feature a unique set of ministers to choose from when creating their cabinets, alongside a generic pool to be used should no custom ministers be created. In addition, with enough feedback, I will reveal the effects of another planned Minister for Germany.

We hope that the first update including Cabinets will provide custom Cabinets for the United States, Soviet Union, and Germany. This isn’t to say that the next patch to be released will feature this, I really hope to spend time on figuring out how to make the AI nations use our added features, but we also want to set forth goals and establish dialogue in order to present the best content we can.

In addition, this is just super rad and we want to share it with you guys as soon as possible to gauge initial feedback.

Until Next Time!

Beau and Derek