we are physically addicted to stress hormones at this point

Hi! This week is going to be a pretty short diary because we are all super busy preparing for Gamescom and Paradox Fan Gathering in Cologne, but becausewe love our fans we decided to squeeze one in anyway.A big problem when doing historical games is player hindsight. They will know what works and what doesn't and tech rush to those points. For Hearts of Iron IV we want players to have to play through the war to gain the experiences that historically may have been required to make the technological choices. To accomplish this we have split up the tech system in a theoretical part which is just your plain old research, which will unlock new equipment, like for example a P-51 Mustang that can then be produced etc. The other part relies on actual field experience in war and lets you tweak and modify any of your models to create new models (which you may name as well).Let's talk about Ship Variants for a moment. Much like with the Division Designer, the key resource here is XP, although in this case we use Naval XP. Using your NXP you can make changes to any model of ship you can currently produce. Each ship can be upgraded in four areas, although this is not the same four areas for each ship type.In the example here we can see a Carrier, and that it's four possible upgrades are:- Increases protection, primarily from air attacks, but reduces Speed and Deckspace.- Increases number of Aircraft carried.- Increases speed.- This stat is a little more complicated than the others. The other 3 upgrades all reduce Reliability a little while this upgrade counters the effect. Could also be thought of as "systematology" or "ship-shapedness", it's basically how well put together the ship is. A low Reliability makes the ship more vulnerable to critical hits in combat.You can choose to upgrade all four areas of the ship, of course, and get an all-round better ship at a high cost, or you can only upgrade a few stats and have a more specialized ship. Oh, and an interesting thing about ships is that you can change their variant during production, although this will impose increased production time depending on how far along in the build process they were when you changed them, so if you decide your battleship simply must have 18" guns or a better engine you don't need to build it from scratch - although you cannot make large refits to ships once they are built.Most of the HOI4 team will be at the fan gathering so you can argue about panthers with Darkrenown, and say hi to me and Tomasz and Guraan. I will also be showing off HOI4 on a big screen during the fan gathering, so you'll get to be the first non-press people to see it in action.