New DLC for HOI3 - "Stars and Stripes"

Hi everyone,
In this first Developer Diary, the Dies Irae Team, Danevang and I, Devildread, is proud to present: Stars and Stripes, a USA focused single player DLC.



With Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes, you will be able to play the United States of America and only them, but like you never played it before in an Hearts of Iron game.
In this diary, we will talk a little bit about some features related to the Dies Irae serie and some other ones we wanted to include.

The features are listed below, and bold are the ones we will talk about in this diary. We hope that the titles will excite your curiosity.
+ A new face of war
+ Famous US divisions
+ The nerve of war
+ Awakening of the Giant
+ Lend-Lease
+ A-historicity
+ AI on steroids
+ Battlescenarios

[INDENT]A new face of war[/INDENT]
As you might know, the particularity of Dies Irae is to offer a special country specific feeling from the start of the game to the very end. In order to achieve that, we created a whole new interface for the USA. The interface has been changed to some battlefield colors and typo we all recognize as being US Army and Allies Stars. Pictures will tell you better than me so here we are, click on them and admire the genious work of Danevang!




[INDENT]Lend-Lease[/INDENT]
In Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes, due to the USA focus, we wanted to introduce an original law/decision/event mechanism for the Lend Lease and diverse help you can send to your allies during the war and before your involvement.
Along the course of the war, you will have to take several decisions leading to a greater and greater involvement in the weapons and materials to the belligerents of your choice. In DI:USA, you can select what you want to send and to whom, allies, comintern or even axis, based on your current government. Which means if you manage to have fascist in charge of USA, you can totally decide to send ammunitions and tanks to Germany, or ammunitions only and no tanks, or go the historical way and send help to the Allies and war material to UK. But if you think this is too much and Germany is overkilling everyone on earth, you can decide to stop the convoys anytime.



The whole thing is managed with a new law in the politics section of the game, allowing you to choose between nothing, supplies against cash, supplies only, light material (trucks and ammo) or heavy material (mech and tanks). If you ever choose to send units to your allies, the Lend Lease units have a special counter ingame so you actually see which ally division is equiped with your material and you can follow their exploit along the course of the war.
When you choose to send heavy material, you only send free units to the head of your faction (UK, Germany or Soviet Union) and supplies/fuel/supply throughput bonus to any member other than you.

Of course, choosing to send help will make your factories to run with better efficiency and will grant you several bonuses we will mention in the future diaries!

[INDENT]AI on steroids![/INDENT]
Put your allies or foes AI on steroids!
Something I wanted to include in the Hearts of Iron serie since the beggining is a clear distinction between the ally and the ennemy AI. When I want challenge, I usually play hard or very hard difficulty levels. But as the USA, with a late involvement in the war those difficulty levels could sometimes result in a situation I don't like. For instance The allies could have resisted in 40 and crippled Germany, thus eliminating any challenge in Europe for me. This is why I created for Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes a new feature: the Gameplay Difficulty settings.

At the start of the game, an event will fire asking you if you want to use that feature. The concept is simple: you decide to grant very hard difficulty bonuses to the faction of your choice. And since it could lead to several balance issues I mentionned earlier, inside those factions you can choose some more refined options. See yourself:





Suit your needs and play the challenge YOU want!

Of course, besides those events you will find some more challenge due to several events, modifiers and strategic effects we gave to the actors of WWII. Dies Irae team is happy to provide blood, sweat and tears to our beloved gamers.


This is the end of the first Developer Diary for Dies Irae: Stars and Stripes DLC. We hope you enjoyed it and let's continue next week with some more features explained to you!


Dies Irae Team, Danevang and Devildread