Hearts of Iron IV: HOI4 ULTRA (Historical Industry Project)

Authors description: HOI4 ULTRA (Historical Industry Project)

Version 0.6 beta for HOI4 1.7.1

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Discord group [discord.gg]
Paradox forum [forum.paradoxplaza.com]

What is ULTRA?
HOI4 ULTRA’s goal is to give a historical feeling to Heart of Iron. Our ambition is to make the less changes as possible from the vanilla, but rather adapt it to a real historical balance and is meant to be played in Multiplayer.
The original goal was to give an historical repartition of the industry, but we decided to add/fix/tweak other contents we feel important.

Reasons to play or not to play ULTRA
– You should not play ULTRA if you want memes games
– You should not play ULTRA if you want to world conquest with [insert irrelevant minor nation]

– You should play ULTRA if you want more historical immersion without changing the whole game
– You should play ULTRA if you want a multiplayer game balanced toward History and realism
– You should play ULTRA if you want to feel the power of a major country during WWII

Compatibility
HOI4 ULTRA is compatible with HOI4 1.7.1 version
NOT Ironman/achievement compatible
NOT compatible with any mod changing the checksum. If you want your favourite mod integrated, just ask it (and the mod creator too) and we’ll see what we can do.

All current DLC (TFV, DOD, WTT, MTG) required for a complete experience. We cannot promise potential issues if you play without the required DLCs.

The alternative histories focus trees are supported but less develloped and tested than historical path

For the moment, only the english version is supported

Main feature – Industrial rebalance
The primary objective of our work was to “correct” the industrial balance in the game :
In vanilla, industry is balanced around “playability” and not around History. For the HOI4 devs team, each minor country should be “playable”, the Axis should have a chance to “win”, global conquest should be a possible achievment…

We don’t agree with this view and want rather to play in a situation with historical settings concerning the relative power of each countries.

That’s why we did a research work about the industry in the WWII timelapse in order to translate it into a mod. Our main sources are The Wages of Destruction from Adam Tooze and The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy.

From the later, we took the concept of “war potential” for each 1936 country and translate it into ingame industry (civilian, military and dockyard). To gives some figures, the 7 Great powers have more than 90% of the world IC and the gap between the last major power (Italy) and the first (the USA) is more than 1 to 10.
To have a better repartition, we made each vanilla IC equivalent to 2 IC in the mod.

To stay in the border of plausible, we also had to change 2 keys elements : the industrial growth rate (nerfing heavily industrial snowballing, we now get a growth rate under 10% per year in 1936) and the ressources system. Coal, Iron and Bauxite were added and globaly ressources are less expensive to get (depending of the ressource) to avoid overpowered minors from lots of ressources and majors having to trade away half of their industry.

Other features
We tryed to keep things as close to vanilla as possible, so most of our work here are balance tweak for a more realist gameplay. Here is a list of some features we added or changed :

– Combat width system (from 80 to 96 base width)
– Division designer (10 max support + 15 max line)
– Many focus/decisions/events/ideas tweaks
– Some new events/decisions/focus/ideas including surrender events chains for every majors and a Enigma/ULTRA feature
– Research and equipment balance (including the addition of some plane models and a land doctrines overhaul)
– Naval overhaul “Naval Rework” mod integrated
– Integration of QoL mods

Projects and perspectives
Since we never test enough, we’ll be pleased to hear your feedback and suggestions to improve the mod within the same philosophy.

Sub-modding is also encouraged if you want to integrate your favourite mod or create a feature inside the mod, you’re welcome 😉

We plan to do an overhaul of the equipment and technologies to get major-unique stuff.
A french localization is scheduled. Perhaps a german one too. For the other langages, any help would be appreciated.

Partnership
We are in partnership with the World Ablaze team. We share ideas, concepts and features. Make HOI4 more realistic is the main goal of both mod
Try World Ablaze!
We helped them to make their industrial balance and they are helping us for our future equipment and techs overhaul.

credit
A big thanks to all the contributors, testers and data researchers!

Special thanks to all excellents modder which let us borrow part of their work into ULTRA :

– Hauptbahnhof Alex for the many tweaks and features ammassed trough invaluable multiplayer experience into his Improved Historical MP mod.
– Atreides for his BIG resources features in the Yet Another Mod – The Case of Resources mod.
– Chondrite for two excellent QoL mods : Allied Construction Projects and Strategic View Adjustments
– Aerodil for the great planes features in Realistic Air Missions
– CrouchingLemur for the excellent !More Unit Levels – Vanilla range mod. Realy can’t play without it!
– Wunderwaffle for the nice WW’s Buttons+ mod
– Dziurkacz for the cool Coloured Puppets mod
– Gundahar for the obligatory Coloured Buttons mod
– Batsy for the nice portraits in Reichkommissariat Leaders mod
– Elouda for the totaly awesome Naval Rework mod
– Vengurd for the many geographical and demographical informations in the great American Focus Rework mod.

If I’ve forgotten anyone, please tell me so I can credit you