Greetings! With the release of the Stella Polaris Patch (1.13.6) last Tuesday it's time to wrap things up for the year. 2023 has been a busy year. The team has been hard at work since the very start of the year, and the first War Effort patch was released during the very first weeks of 2023. Before the onset of Summer holidays we managed to release 5 of those. Together with the follow up patches after the release of AAT, and the December patch, we clocked in at 9 patches, plus a few hotfixes, over the year. So expect to see more of them next year, with the same mix of tweaks and bug fixes, and occasionally minor additions. Of course, the main story of 2023, for us, from a fan point of view, was Arms Against Tyranny and the Stella Polaris free update. The lions share of it was done during 2023. We started talking about the release in May in a series of Dev Corners and we made the official announcement on June 7th. What goes into a year? you ask. Something like 4 million code and script changes I think. Or if you prefer to look at file changes, some 10000 files were touched in one way or another :O

Arms Against Tyranny Stats

After each big release we like to check out stats and take stock of things, and its fun to share this. So I hope you like graphs and numbers as much as we do! First up, let's look at what nations people played during the first week and what path they went down: Finland - 45%

• Finnish Neutrality - 48%
• Right-Wing Policies - 40%
• Soumalainen Sosialismi - 12%

Sweden - 24%

• The Old Enemy Stirs - 70%
• Continue the Second Industrial Revolution - 30%

Norway - 12%

• The Stumbling Storting - 62%
• A Resurgent Labor Movement - 22%
• Continue Nygaardsvolds Government - 9%
• Vote of No Confidence - 7%

Denmark - 12%

• Unify the Right - 80%
• Political Unity - 20%

Iceland - 6%

• Not our King - 90%
• Kingdom of Iceland - 10%

Overall people strongly preferred the more historical route for Finland and restoring monarchies as Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Iceland bucked the trend. I guess ppl hate being a puppet more than they love the king ;D Overall the top 10 played nations are (5h+ games):

• Germany - 22%
• Soviet - 12%
• China - 6%
• PRC - 6%
• Italy - 4%
• USA - 4%
• Japan - 4%
• France - 3%
• England - 2%
• Turkey - 2%

This ranking has held fairly stable, but its nice to see how much it evens out as we make more content (except for the big two - Germany and Soviets).

The Future

The coming year is going to be a really exciting one as we have succeeded in something we have tried to do for a long time - create a second autonomous team filled with brilliant and awesome people! This means that you can expect more stuff and at a quicker pace during 2024 as we now have another team focused on delivering more national flavor and content. In fact they have already been at large for a while :) Without revealing too much this side of the year I will cryptically say: Next year you will see both a new face on something familiar, and take our first step into an untouched continent *Disappears with a mysterious hiss into a cloud of smoke* The Hearts of Iron IV team and I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for a certain Steam event happening Later today.

[ 2023-12-21 13:53:00 CET ] [ Original post ]