Hearts Of Iron IV’s new expansion lets you design your own planes

Grand strategy global war game Hearts Of Iron IV will be engaged by new expansion By Blood Alone later this year, Paradox Interactive have announced. The new pack will let you design your very own warplanes, while also allowing alternate history fans with its focus trees for Italy, Ethiopia and, interestingly, neutral Switzerland. Check out the announcement trailer below.

The new aircraft designer tools allow for the chance to muck about creating a variety of different planes. Paradox give the examples of emphasizing speed with “nimble interceptors” or ramping up destructive capabilities by crafting yourself a fleet of “durable bombers”. Chocks away, chaps.

Hearts Of Iron IV’s three new focus trees are Italy, Ethopia and Switzerland, which could all lead to some interestingly divergent scenarios. You could take on Europe as Mussolini’s fascists or choose to restore the Italian monarchy, or battle the Italians and win as Ethiopia under Haile Selassie. Switzerland is probably the stand-out here, being a landlocked neutral country surrounded by the great powers of France, Germany and Italy.

There’s also some intriguing new options in the form of Peace Conferences. These allow you to set up demilitarized areas of the map, even to the level of entire nations. You can bid on the ships of defeated powers or claw back enemy resources and factories in the form of reparations. If enemies generate enough tension around the globe then you can embargo them too, preventing trade.

It’s not yet clear whether By Blood Alone will be part of Paradox’s DLC subscription service for Hearts Of Iron IV, which first launched in February, but we’ll update this article as soon as we hear more. While you’re waiting for the expansion you could always use fan tools to hop through Paradox’s various strategy games from Crusader Kings 3 all the way through to Hearts Of Iron IV, as Alice0 highlighted.

Hearts Of Iron IV: By Blood Alone will be landing on Steam at some point in 2022. Paradox say it’ll be accompanied by a major free update to the game. Synchronize watches.