When we release (not announce) [redacted], Man the Guns will be removed from sale and its content will be merged into the base game via a free patch. Elements like the Ship Designer, Governments in Exile, amtracs, naval access controls and Admiral traits will become part of the core HoI4 experience. The British and United States focus trees will include their alternate-history branches by default. If you’d like a refresher on the expansion, you can visit the Man the Guns store page while it remains available.
We’re only a few days away from the formal announcement (yes, this is an announcement of the announcement), but our developer corners have been active for months. Following the releases of Götterdämmerung and the Graveyard of Empires country pack, we committed to using developer corners more often — they’re an excellent way to gather early feedback and preview upcoming work without revealing everything. Sacrificing a little surprise for better quality has paid off: community input has already influenced several changes you might notice in the images below, which have been intentionally cropped for brevity.
There are many more community-driven adjustments we’ve implemented, but you’ll have to wait a bit longer for a fuller walkthrough.
Now I’ll hand things over to our Tech Lead to explain the internal implications of absorbing an expansion like Man the Guns into the base game.
/Arheo
Hello,
As Arheo explained above, we’ll be folding Man the Guns into the base game as part of the free patch shipped alongside [redacted]. Once the merge is complete, the DLC will no longer be purchasable or optional — its systems and assets will be treated as part of the standard game.
The idea of integrating DLC into the base game isn’t new for us — conversations about this go back to the time of Together for Victory, Death or Dishonor and Waking the Tiger. My initial reaction was “why?”, followed by “how do we make this clean?” and ultimately “this is great.” This time I skipped straight to the “this is great” stage. In this post I’ll outline why the team values integrating DLC.
Every DLC adds mechanics, content, units, and art. That’s exactly what we aim to do: offer fresh gameplay and new ways to play. But each new feature also increases the interactions and complexity across the project. Take MIOs (Military Industrial Organizations) as an example: countries created before Arms Against Tyranny didn’t account for MIOs, so after that DLC we had to implement and test MIO support for new countries. We also needed to handle scenarios where players don’t own that DLC, which often forces us to maintain multiple versions of the same system (for instance, two variants of a focus tree depending on ownership).
When a DLC is integrated, we can assume those features exist for everyone. That simplifies ownership checks and reduces duplicated implementations. More importantly, it lets us expand and refine features without worrying about fragmented access among the player base. The result is less development overhead and more opportunity to craft richer, more coherent content.
/pdxen