In three days, the Hearts of Iron IV summer open beta received two updates. On August 12, Pdxen, the game’s Tech Lead, shipped a technical build with no balance changes at all. On August 14, Paradox restored every adjustment from the first iteration and fixed the problems the technical build had exposed.
Update, October 26, 2026: patch 1.19.3 on September 17 carried over several of these changes. Examples: the Max Strength of Heavy Weapons Companies (0.4 to 0.6), the removal of Regimental Support Tank Destroyers from the line category and the Breakthrough of Motorized Rocket Artillery (12 to 20). The remaining balance work is left to later updates (Steam).
August 12: an update that leaves balance alone
Pdxen explains that Update 2 changes the topic: the goal is no longer balance but modernizing the game’s tech stack. The threading libraries are replaced to make better use of recent processors, which have more cores than those of 2016. Paradox asks players to check that no hardware configuration loses performance. Multiplayer host operations such as kicking and banning players are also hardened after abuses reported on the forums.
Zwirbaum, the game designer behind the beta, announces he is back from vacation. This build carries no balance changes and nothing experimental, but both will resume “in the very near future”.
August 14: balance returns, with fixes
Two days later, a new update restores all the balance changes from the summer beta. It also handles the most critical findings from the technical build: front lines split correctly again, an out-of-sync error introduced by the migration to the new library is fixed, and so are a crash caused by a race condition and a pixel-level difference on borders. Several parallel computations now use the new library better, which improves performance.
What is back for your templates
The restoration brings back the numbers set on July 6, which Paradox justifies by Regimental Support overperforming relative to its low economic cost:
- Heavy Weapons Companies and their motorized version: Max Strength from 0.4 to 0.6.
- Regimental Support Tank Destroyers and Self-Propelled Anti-Air: removed from the category of their line counterparts, with 15 units required instead of 10.
- Line artillery: Max Strength from 0.6 to 0.8.
- Motorized Rocket Artillery: Defense from 15 to 16, Breakthrough from 12 to 20.
Update 1 on July 13 had added more experimental measures, such as a Tank Destroyer Piercing bonus cut from 15% to 5% and a self-propelled artillery Soft Attack bonus cut from 15% to 5%.
What is settled, and what is not
On paper, the numbers returning within two days show a well-controlled beta. In practice, none of the posts mention integration into the main version. Paradox says the experimental changes may never make it there. For players who want to adjust Regimental Support and artillery templates, the beta remains the only place to test these values until a decision comes.