Winds of War

We reached the shore last release. New ground beneath us, every core designer complete, the research, doctrines, spirits, and MIO layers finally in place.

But land this promising doesn't stay quiet for long.

Standing here, you can already feel it: the winds shifting, something building on the horizon. This new territory isn't just ours to build on. It's ours to defend. And a builder who can't test their plans against a real threat isn't actually prepared for one.

That's the work this release is about. Not war itself, not yet. But the organization and preparedness that have to come first if we're going to defend what's ours.

Catalog Update

Before you can prepare for what's coming, you need the best plans at hand: ones worth taking into battle. The catalog needed to catch up with everything else we've built, so this release gives it a long-overdue refresh.

Dedicated Browsable Pages: Divisions, tanks, ships, and aircraft each have their own catalog page, giving you a clearer way to browse the designs the community has published.

Better Discovery: Full-text search across titles, tags, and descriptions. Filter by tag, author, or recency. Sort by relevance so the designs most likely to match what you're looking for surface first.

Streamlined Saving: Finding a design in the catalog and adding it to your library is quicker than ever. When you find something you like, use the save button to add it to your library.

Community Ratings: Every published design can now be rated from 1 to 5 stars. See the aggregate score at a glance, or sort by a credibility-weighted rating that considers more than raw star count. That helps quality rise to the top, rather than sheer volume. If you're looking for feedback on your own design, no stress: designs with the help wanted tag aren't rated, since they're meant to gather feedback and advice.

Setup at a Glance: Published designs now show what they were built with right below the card. Open Research, Doctrines, Spirits, or MIOs to see exactly what the author selected before you save the design to your library or load it in the designer. Everything we brought ashore last release now comes with the designs people share.

The catalog was always meant to be a place worth exploring, not just an infinite scrolling list. Now it has the tools to help you find the designs you're looking for.

Land Combat Simulations

This is the heart of the release: the first time Hoidesigner lets you put your templates and designs to the test and see how they hold up in battle.

The Simulator: Choose your templates and battle-test them head-to-head. One click simulates 1,000 engagements, giving you a statistical picture of how your build performs. You see outcomes across scenarios you configure yourself, not just a theoretical stat sheet.

Beyond 1v1: Real battles rarely come down to a clean 1v1 between two divisions. Build formations of up to 15 divisions per side and attack from up to 3 directions at once. You can model multi-front engagements and combined-arms pushes as they might unfold in a campaign, then see how your templates hold up together on the same tile.

Rich Configurations: Set up a fight across 9 different battlefields. Choose terrain, weather, temperature, air support and air superiority, supply, planning, entrenchment, experience, commanders, intel, shore bombardment, and railway artillery. These are the variables that shape a real HOI4 engagement, so you can test your templates in scenarios you define.

Battle Reports: Every run gives you a projected outcome, including battle duration, manpower and equipment losses, and what was recovered or captured. It's the kind of detail that turns "I think this build is strong" into "I know exactly where it wins and where it doesn't."

Shareable Battle Cards: Turn any completed battle into a polished image straight from the result or your battle log. The card captures the matchup, outcome, templates, final organization and strength, losses, duration, conditions, and terrain in one view, ready to copy, share, or download. Stacked battles keep their formations readable too, grouping different templates and attack directions with each division's final ORG and strength. Got a result that settles an argument? Share the card.

Intel: Every test you run gets logged privately, and the Intel view pulls it all together. Compare controlled tests against each other, spot trends across your battle history, and study the opponents you've faced to understand your own template's real strengths and weaknesses.

Straight From the Designer: Save a template in the Division Designer and send it directly into a battle test, on either side of the fight. No exporting, no rebuilding: the path from planning to testing is a single click.

Preparedness isn't a feeling or a number on a stat sheet. It's knowing how your templates perform across the scenarios you might face when fighting begins. With this update, you can start putting that preparedness to the test.

Hoidesigner Pro

Each battle runs a 1,000-sample simulation and uses computing resources. Run credits help keep the feature sustainable as it grows.

Daily Run Credits: Every member gets a free daily allowance of battle runs that resets at midnight UTC: enough to test the matchups that matter most to your campaign. At 1,000 simulated engagements per run, 10 runs a day is 10,000 simulated battles. Hoidesigner Pro members run without a daily cap, so they can simulate every variant of a build without watching a counter.

More Battle History: Every completed battle is saved to your history, giving Intel a record to draw on. Free accounts keep their most recent battles, while Hoidesigner Pro members get a much larger history with plenty of room to track every build they've tested.

What's Next

The winds are picking up, and this release is what it looks like to actually prepare for them.

Battle simulation sets the foundation for the next phase of Hoidesigner: one where templates don't just get built and compared; they get tested against each other across every branch of your army. It opens the door to immersive challenges, curated scenarios that test your command and army-building skill, and give you a chance to prove you're the best.

The storm we can feel coming isn't here yet. But when it arrives, you'll be ready for it.

Until next time!