Welcome back to another development diary for Hearts of Iron IV.We have talked a lot about equipment in various development diaries. Most of you know that you build individual tanks, guns & trucks for your armies. Of course, we don’t track each individual gun, but instead a set of infantry equipment, where a standard battalion has about 120 infantry equipment required. Currently, a battalion of light armor wants 60 tanks, while a standard support artillery uses 8 artillery pieces. Support artillery is different from regular artillery, which is a bit bigger, and is towed by the rest of the combat battalions and will thus match their speed. To focus on support vs regular artillery is a choice up to the player with support more suited to smaller divisions and certain doctrines.The equipment you have in your divisions is the one that affects things like what your technical capabilities are, like the base for soft attack and hard attack, but the type of battalion determines your capabilities for recon, terrain penalties, organisation etc.If you lack enough equipment, your units will fight with far less efficiency,The cool thing with equipment, as we have shown you before, is that battalions will pick up the best gear they can take from your produced stockpiles, and will attempt to replace old gear if there is a surplus if their upgrade is prioritised enough. This means that you may end up with a division with whatever amount of tanks you can get delivered at the end of a war.While talking about Equipment, I think its time to discuss one, so lets take a deep look at the Infantry Technology Tree.Technologies with big boxes enable new equipment that can be produced, while the small boxes give improvements.In the first line we first get what we call Support Weapons, which provides increases to breakthrough and defence for leg units. After that we have some late-game technology that mitigates nighttime penalties.The next line is the Infantry Equipment research itself. There are 3 separate types of infantry equipment that can be manufactured, each better than the last. There is also a branch later in that line that gives improvements to the AT capabilities of Infantry.Then we have a block of 3 lines related to more motorized units. The first is for the recon support battalion, enabling it and then improving its reconnaissance capabilities. We’ll talk more about that when we discuss combat tactics. Secondly there is the engineer battalions, and how to improve their capabilities for offence and defence. Finally there is the line that allows construction of military trucks and mechanized units.The last block is the Specialist track, where you research Marines, Mountaineers and Paratroopers and how to improve them.Thanks all, and we’ll be back in 6 weeks time, when we are back from Summer Holidays, and lets see how much new stuff you can figure out from screenshot #2.