More focus on planning and high level decisions.
Hearts of Iron III could either be played with full manual control, where micromanagement would be pretty heavy (often to the point where you would struggle to pay attention to all aspects of the game) or with AI assistance, where your control over the systems you surrendered to the AI was very limited. We are developing a planning system that gives you greater control while not being as taxing as the detailed manual play from the last Hearts of Iron game. We want to give you time to look at the bigger picture. In my opinion, this also adds a lot of immersion, since it feels more like I am guiding a military campaign rather just shuffling units between provinces.
For the micro-managers out there - you can still do very detailed plans and update them in real-time, which will basically work like the old manual control but the system will reward successful longer term plans, so expect to have a few things to learn! There won't be any large "automate this" buttons in the game. We want all parts to be fun and playable. If they are not, they get redesigned or replaced.
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/sho ... Our-VisionThe neatest addition to Hearts of Iron IV has to be the battle plan system. Zoomed all the way into your country, you'll find it broken down in provinces, upon which you can place a unit (strategically, you'll want infantry in forests, tanks in flat lands, and so on). You can control your units in a simple fell swoop with the battle plan feature that lets you draw arrows to orient your units and then hit execute to have them follow the plan.
http://www.destructoid.com/going-throug ... 9487.phtml
