It’s only been eight months since the last Hearts of Iron 4 DLC – the Italy-focused By Blood Alone – dropped, and Paradox Interactive is at it again: the studio has announced another expansion pack for its sprawling grand strategy WW2 game, this time focusing on Northern Europe. There’s a brief, snowy trailer for the DLC, which you can watch below.
This latest HOI4 DLC, titled Arms Against Tyranny, has no set release date yet – but, based on the gaps between previous Hearts of Iron 4 expansions, we’d make an educated guess at late Autumn 2023.
In a press release published on Wednesday, Paradox says Arms Against Tyranny will add new and improved national focus trees for Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland – with the latter promising a “heavy emphasis on the Winter War and Finland’s struggle against Soviet invasion”.
Besides the usual geographically-led cluster of focus tree updates and narrative options, Paradox says Arms Against Tyranny includes new options for the industrial side of your war machine, with options to shepherd national corporations to make the sorts of arms you want.
There’s also a new “International Arms Market” mechanic for trading those weapons on the world stage – so you can make fat stacks selling guns to your allies (or enemies, we suppose – HOI4 can get weird).
Among the sundry, rather vague smaller updates we’ve come to expect from each HOI4 expansion, Paradox has promised:
- Customisation of Special Forces units
- Greater divisional specialization
- New unit art
- Ten new songs
We’ll expect to hear more about these extra areas of improvement during upcoming HOI4 dev blogs – for previous DLC releases, Paradox has put these out regularly, with juicy screenshots and inside details of how the new mechanics and content will work. Rest assured, we’ll keep mining those to give you the best bits on a silver platter!
Also as HOI4 fans have come to expect, Paradox says the DLC will launch alongside a “major free update available to all Hearts of Iron IV players” – but we’ll have to wait and see how the new content will be split between the free update and the paid Arms Against Tyranny DLC.
In the meantime, you can look back at the previous expansion with our our Hearts of Iron 4 By Blood Alone review; tide yourself over with some of the best HOI4 mods to shake up the game; or perhaps chase down some weird and wacky HOI4 achievements. Too tame for your taste? Try some HOI4 cheats instead – but you’ll need these Hearts of Iron 4 country tags to work ’em right.
Source: Wargamer
