Hi everyone, with the release of Sunflower and a smaller hotfix it's time to start looking at the long game.Some people here might have gotten Hearts of Iron IV as their first Paradox game, or are new around here, so I best explain what I mean with that. For us the release of a game is just the beginning, and we plan on improving it for as long as people are interested. Crusader Kings II has been out for over 4 years and just had its 11th expansion as an example. Always together with each expansion we also release a bigger patch, usually with a bunch of free features too. There are often smaller patches in between also, but the big stuff happens when we release expansions.For Hearts of Iron that means the next step is an expansion combined with the next 1.3 patch we've named Torch. The name of the expansion is still secret but the core theme will be around allied cooperation and the commonwealth (but not limited to this). Long term (and honestly at this point it's mostly speculation), I plan the next expansion to focus on the core of the game - the land war, and after that perhaps naval or air focus. Those are just rough themes and not strict limitations and might change of course. The first expansion will be a bit heavier on content and flavor while the second is likely going to be slightly more code heavy. We will be talking details in future diaries, both about fixes, UI improvements and free or paid features.For the Torch patch the top priority when it comes to AI development will be the island hopping campaign to make playing USA vs Japan more exciting. Expect a future diary on a roadmap for what parts of the game we feel work well, which could do with improvement and roughly in what order we consider priorities for these and ai improvements.We aim to have expansion and 1.3 out before Christmas if all goes wellI hope you are all as excited as me to see where we will be going over the next years of development and growing HOI4Starting next week we are going to be doing dev diaries on Wednesdays instead. That means Wednesday will be HOI day with both the World War Wednesday stream (and expansion related streams in the future) and dev diary on the same day (Fridays are always hard to get the time to answer questions on so this will work better I think). Next week the topic will be the HOI4 dev team. Since release and patch development we have been reorganizing ourselves and I think it's important to present the team as it looks now.p.s @Sideburnout apparently had a bunch of requests for a wallpaper for the Sunflower patch, so here goes! Both Debug Dog and Sergeant Console on an afternoon drive in the desert