horrible

We investigated tutorials a bit and found that the HOI one actually seems to work the best of the ones we have. a whole 89% of people who start it actually complete it, and people who do complete it have a much higher chance to stick around and play the game (I am not much of a tutorial man myself, preferring to get watch lets plays and the like, but this still makes me happy )

) We broke all our player records during summer. I dunno if the weather was extra bad this year or not, but people seem to have been spending their vacation charging across Europe in tanks.

Constructive Engineering and Training continuous focuses are the most popular by a wide margin

The most popular total conversion mod is Road to 56 (12%) followed by Kaiserreich (8%). 3rd spot is held by Millennium Dawn at 5.5%. The most popular non TC mods are Colored Buttons and player led peace conferences.

Multiplayer games sit at 11% (daily unique players) and 17% use ironman

As is traditional christmas time means 2 things: The dev team all disappear off on holidays and I make some beutifulholiday art... so, merry Christmas everyone!As I said we now go off on a much needed break, so expect diaries to resume again when we get back after new yearsI figured I'd also give a little summary of the year from out point of view. This year saw the release of Waking the Tiger back in march which we are proud of and seems to have been received really well. Then during the summer we hit a new record on amount of active monthly users playing HOI (540k!!). Otherwise we have been hard at work on probably our most ambitious expansion yet - Man the Guns, which we announced (very early) at PdxCon. I expect a lot of people wanna ask me for a release date, but it is what it always is: when its ready. I can promise that we'll tell you early next year though.As is customary I usually drop some cool statistics as well. so 'ere we go:Oh yeah, we were pretty excited to hear that HOI4 had been nominated for the 2018 steam awards under Best Alternative History . I'm not gonna beg you to go vote at all. Totally up to you! I also figured we'd highlight my 2 favorite bugs that have popped up during development. Smoke launchers let submarines lay down smoke to escape... somehow without revealing their position ;D also we had a great one where whenever we iterated on stats for a ship design it would double the stats of those modules, and also double the amount of module slots. @YaBoy_Bobby was the undisputed king of the seas in this abomination:(its a while ago, so its an older iteration of the UI). I have no idea what -75% reliability mean, but I suspect it just explodes if you try to train with it.See you all next year and have a merry Christmas and a happy new year - HOI4 Dev Team