Naval warfare in HOI4 has a way of blindsiding you. You don't feel the cracks as they form. You just wake up one morning, your supply routes are severed, your convoys are gone, and you're scrambling to figure out what went wrong three months ago. It's a different kind of problem than land warfare. Quieter, more strategic, less forgiving of unplanned decisions.

Land warfare gave us four chapters of content to work through. Naval opens the next one.

The Ship Designer

Ships play an important role in HOI4 and can make or break your run. The gap between a well-built heavy cruiser and a poorly conceived one is the difference between a fleet that holds a sea zone and one that feeds the enemy kill count.

The Ship Designer is introduced with this update to extend your planning capabilities. Choose your hull class, fill your module slots, and the naval stats respond as you build: naval dominance, armor, speed, sub-detection, torpedo attack, screening efficiency. You can experiment with a destroyer setup designed to hunt submarines and immediately see where the tradeoffs land, or spec out a battleship focused on shore bombardment and compare it against one that's pure fleet combat.

Naval Doctrines

The doctrine you commit to shapes what your ships are built to do. Fleet in Being keeps your capital ships as a defensive threat. Trade Interdiction is about submarines and economic warfare. Base Strike centers on carrier power and port strikes. These aren't minor stat tweaks, they're strategic philosophies, and your ship designs should reflect them.

Alongside the Ship Designer, Naval Doctrines are now fully integrated with the same path-saving mechanic that's been live for army doctrines. Select your doctrine tree, watch your stats adjust, and save the combination to reload whenever you need it.

The Library

If you've been using Hoidesigner for a while, you've built up division templates, tank designs you're iterating on, and now ship builds on top of that. There was no good place to see all of it together. The Library fixes that.

Every saved design across every designer lives in one view. Browse everything at a glance, and organize it with private tags that only you see, structured however makes sense to you.

You can also pull any published catalog post directly into your Library to reference it later. A bookmark click on any community design adds it to your collection without loading it into the designer.

The Library is also where Hoidesigner's supporters will get additional benefits: expanded save storage across every designer, and more advanced tools on top of what's here today. Free accounts will have a save limit starting next release. More details on this then.

What's Next

This release marks a shift in what Hoidesigner is. It started as a land warfare planner. With the Ship Designer, it now covers two major branches, and the Library means there's finally a place to hold the full picture of your military planning across all of them.

Next, I'll be exploring army and fleet composition tools that bring individual designs together into something that actually functions as a military. Alongside that, more advanced tooling for users who want to go deeper. I'll also be sharing more details on supporter benefits next release, including what free accounts will look like going forward.

Drop into the Hoidesigner Discord if you want to follow along or weigh in on what's coming.

Until next time!

When I launched the first devlog back in January, I laid out a roadmap for three pillars: granular research customization, a community catalog, and the final piece for planning land divisions down to the last detail: the Tank Designer.

The Arms Race delivered the research trees. The Arsenal launched the catalog. Today, with The Armored Front, we've officially closed out Phase 1, and all three pillars are now live.

Beyond Base Stats: The Tank Designer

The Tank Designer has been the most requested feature since day one.

Up until now, division stats in the designer were calculated using base tanks. That's fine when running a vanilla campaign, but for most of us running No Step Back, the specific engine, armor, and gun modules are what actually make an armored division work. It meant your 'perfect' template on paper didn't always match what you experienced in-game.

That changes today.

The new Tank Designer lets you build from the ground up, chassis, engine, armor, and modules, with the same logic you use in-game. As you tweak your design, stats update in real-time: Reliability, Armor, Speed, Soft/Hard Attack, and Production Cost. The stats you see in the designer are the stats you'll see on the front line.

Full Integration: The Planning Loop

A tank design is only as good as the division it's in. Once you save a design to your library, it becomes available to be plugged directly into your templates.

Real-Time Sync: Any template using tanks will automatically reflect your custom design's stats.

The Complete Picture: Your doctrine, research paths, and tank modules now "talk" to each other in one seamless loop.

True Sharing: When you publish a design to the community catalog, your custom tank builds go with it. Anyone loading your template sees your exact module layout and can save your specific armored vehicle to their own library.

Shareable Design Cards & Comparison Grids

Design Cards: Every design now generates a clean, shareable image with your module layout and key stats. Perfect for dropping into a Discord debate or Reddit thread without needing to crop screenshots.

The Grid: The comparison tool is also available for tanks. If you're torn between a high-velocity "glass cannon" or a reliable breakthrough heavy, you can now line up the stats side-by-side to see exactly where your production cost is going.

Support the Project: The Supporter Badge

Building and maintaining Hoidesigner takes time and server resources. If the tool has helped you save a few thousand Manpower (or just a few hours of planning), there is now a way to help keep this going.

I'm introducing the Supporter Badge: a one-time contribution that adds a permanent emblem to your community profile. It's a way for early adopters to support continued development and help cover maintenance costs. For more details, have a look at the supporter page.

SUPPORTER

A Note on Saves

Accounts have been live since The Arsenal, and they are the best way to keep your designs safe and synced. While local saves continue to work for your divisions, they are vulnerable to browser cache clears. Migrating takes one click from the designer, and everything carries over intact. Tank Designer saves will live in your account from day one, as this is the recommended path going forward, removing any risks of losing your work.

What's Next: Phase 2

Phase 1 was about closing the loop on land warfare. Phase 2 is where we look toward the horizon. Air and ship designers built with the same level of detail as what we've built so far, alongside powerful tools to better integrate planning across all branches of your military.

Hop into Discord if you want to chat about what's coming, get an early peek at new features, or talk about anything HOI4.

Looking forward to where this journey takes us.
Until next time!

There's something isolating about building templates alone. No way to see what the community has figured out, no builds to learn from, no sense of whether your approach is sharp or completely off-base.

This update extends Hoidesigner from a personal planning tool into a place where you can publish designs, discover what others have built, and debate every last detail with players who care as much about this as you do.

The Catalog

You can now publish any design directly to the catalog from the designer. Give it a title, a description, tag it, and ship it! Whether you're dropping a guide, asking for feedback, or putting up a build and daring someone to beat it.

Every published design gets its own dedicated page with full stats, the complete template layout, the research path, and doctrine selection baked in. Anyone can load it straight into the designer with a single click and start experimenting from there, or reply with their own take.

For new players, this is the fastest way in. Instead of starting from scratch, you can browse what the community has built, load any design, and start experimenting from a working foundation.

User Accounts & Profiles

Create an account and your templates follow you, synced across every device and browser. You get a profile at /u/username to showcase your published designs, and from there you can publish to the catalog, upvote builds, and get into the discussion.

Already using the tool? You'll see a one-click prompt to migrate your local templates to your new account. Nothing gets lost. And if you'd rather skip accounts entirely, the designer works exactly as it always has.

Template Cards

Hit the share button on any template and you get a clean template card, an image you can drop straight into a Reddit post, a Discord message, or wherever the discussion is happening. No screenshotting, no cropping.

A New Look, Familiar Experience

There's a proper landing page now, and the designer has been updated to connect all the new pieces together: accounts, the catalog, profiles, without getting in the way of just building templates.

What's Next?

The next milestone is the Tank Designer. Design your chassis, pick your engine, armor, and modules, and have your armored designs plug directly into your division templates.

If you want to follow the build as it comes together and get an early look before it goes live, join the Hoidesigner Discord. That's where I'll be sharing progress first.

Until next time!

It's been two months since I launched Hoidesigner, and seeing the community use the tool to blueprint and save their favorite templates has been incredible.

However, a template is only half the battle when planning your runs. The greatest divisions aren't just generated out of thin air. They are engineered through a series of decisions: precisely timing your research, hand-picking which high-stakes breakthroughs are worth chasing, and weighing the trade-offs of every technological investment. Strategic planning is about navigating this complex web of choices long before your troops ever see combat.

This update takes a step further in turning your browser into a high-level war room, giving you the tools to map out the technological arms race before the first bell rings.

Granular Research & Special Projects Planning

In the first version, I used a "Tech Year" dropdown as a shortcut. It worked, but it was an oversimplification. This update makes micromanaging your edge a reality

Research Decisions: You can now manually toggle through individual research trees and hand-pick technologies you're planning on pursuing. Want to see if that 1940 Artillery upgrade is actually worth the research time for your current template? Now you can see your template stats update instantly before committing to it during your Ironman run.

Special Projects Integration: High-risk ventures are now part of the planning. Special support companies and locked technologies become available once you commit to special projects unlocking them. You can now simulate exactly how these projects influence your plans and see their effect on your division's stats.

Your Strategic Paths, Saved

Winning a multiplayer duel or a world conquest isn't only about which template you're using; it's also about the sequence of choices you make during your run to capture a winning edge.

This update unlocks the ability to save and track your strategic paths. Capture your doctrines favorite combinations, research paths and special project unlocks effortlessly with a single click.

Numbered badges on your selections show the order you're building your path so you can reproduce them step-by-step in your campaign. The path order is stored when you save your paths so you can pick things up where you left them when you load them back on.

Unlocking Your Arsenal

With this update, requirements are now enforced on units, technologies, and special projects. Explicit selection of requirements will guide users in having an accurate walktrough on how templates can be built in-game.

For locked units or research, I've added requirement badges and tooltip helpers across the designer to act as your intelligence department if you ever run into a disabled tech/unit that you're considering adding.

Field Tested: Engine Calibration

A blueprint planner is worthless if the math is wrong. I've performed a significant overhaul of the data pipeline and calculation engine to better align with the game logic.

Bug Reporting: If you see any discrepancies, please flag them! Accurate data is critical to making this tool useful, and I treat these reports as a top priority.

What's Next?

The arms race never truly ends. During this beta phase, I'll be focused on addressing your feedback and making the research integration feel seamless within the division designer. I'll also be adding a few missing research trees (Air & Navy) which aren't blockers in our designer at the moment but would be useful in strategic planning.

This system sets the foundation for other future types of designers which could see the light in the future.

The feedback and bug reports have been incredibly helpful, please keep them coming! You can reach out by clicking the feedback button in the footer of the designer.

Until next time!

It's been an incredible first month since launching Hoidesigner. After sharing the tool with the community on Reddit (here and here), the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Players clearly see the value in a platform where they can visualize, customize, and save their template creations.

Whether you're building a 14-width infantry hold-the-line template or a 35-width medium tank division, understanding the trade-offs behind your designs and which doctrines to pair them with is key to a winning strategy. This is my first log as I document my journey in building this platform, with the hope that it becomes a staple tool for the Hearts of Iron 4 community.

The Basics: Save Templates Across New Campaigns

If you’ve played more than one campaign of Hearts of Iron IV, you know the routine: You start a fresh campaign and immediately have to manually recreate your favorite infantry or tank templates from memory.

The Reality: In-game division templates are locked to your specific save file. They don't carry over, and you can't export them to your next run. This has been a community pain point for years. Hoidesigner was built so you can carry around your template designs over multiple runs specifically to bridge this gap:

• Global Saves: Your designs are saved locally on your device without requiring any accounts.
• Cross-Campaign Access: Close the game, start a new run, and your favorite "Space Marine" or "Blitzkrieg" designs are right there on your phone or second monitor, ready to be replicated.

Compare Templates Side by Side

With several templates saved, the next question is: which one fits this situation? Same infantry with different support companies (engineers vs recon)? Or swapping in artillery versus extra line battalions?

Comparison tools: The comparison grid and compare against feature let you pit your templates against each other. Select multiple designs and see their stats (soft attack, breakthrough, defense, production cost, and more) laid out in one view. No more flipping between templates or memorizing the stats of all 5 templates you're comparing; you can see at a glance which template hits harder, holds the line better, or fits your industry. Whether you're fine-tuning for a specific front or deciding what to use for your next campaign, these tools help you make the call with real numbers.

Feature Spotlight: The NCNS Doctrine Overhaul

The biggest addition since launch is the integration of the new Grand Doctrine & Sub-doctrine system. With the latest No Compromise, No Surrender update, players can now toggle between Grand Doctrines like Superior Firepower or Mobile Warfare, then drill down into Sub-doctrine Mastery levels.

This allows you to see the instant impact of sub-doctrine mastery bonuses on your template stats before you spend a single point of Army XP in-game.

Feature Highlight in Action:

Tech Year: Planning for the Future

A 1936 Infantry battalion is not the same as a 1939 one. As you unlock new technologies, your stats evolve. Our Tech Year Dropdown automatically applies the best technologies available for that era to your templates.

Planning for a 1941 Barbarossa defense? Toggle to that year to make sure your Anti-Tank piercing is high enough to counter German Panzers with the tech available at that time.

Community Feedback: I’ve heard you! Some of you requested more granular control over specific technologies (like choosing between different Artillery upgrades). This is on my radar for future updates, so be on the lookout for more customization options in the near future!

What's Next?

The roadmap for the coming months is driven by the feedback I’ve received and a vision for where I want to take this tool. While I'm staying flexible to ensure the designer evolves alongside new game updates and DLCs, here are the three core areas I’m currently exploring:

• Granular Research Customization: While the "Tech Year" dropdown is a great start, I’m contemplating a system that would let you toggle specific research tech and projects. This will allow you to see the exact impact of individual upgrades, like specific artillery shell types or special force unit levels, rather than just "era" unlocks.
• Community Catalog & Curated Templates: I want to make it easier for new and seasoned players to explore templates and discuss strategies. I'm exploring a "Catalog" feature where users can publish designs that the community can rate, tag, and discuss. Whether you're looking for optimized meta builds for a competitive lobby or a historical roleplay division, this will be your go-to library to explore templates and get inspired.
• The Tank Designer: This is significant milestone on my long-term wishlist. I’m planning for a system that eventually allows you to design tank chassis, engines, and armor modules directly within the platform. The goal is to let these custom designs plug into your tank templates so you can get a more accurate representation of your tank division’s stats and production costs based on your custom tank designs.

Note: These themes represent the intended direction of the platform rather than a fixed schedule. Priorities may shift as I dive deeper into the requirements and continue to gathering feedback. My goal is to make sure every feature is accurate and stable before release, so I appreciate your patience as the tool evolves!