Hearts of Iron 4: La Resistance announced, adds spies and commandos

The next DLC for Hearts of Iron 4, La Resistance, was announced today at PDXCon, Parardox Interactive’s annual fan convention. The expansion is themed after the French resistance who continued to clandestinely resist the Nazis at home, and has a focus on espionage and asymmetrical warfare.

The banner feature is Intelligence Agencies, which players will be able to customize with a name and logo before investing in Branches that give different bonuses and unlock top secret actions. If you don’t care to play the game of shadows, you can easily set your agency up to counter enemy spies and focus on more conventional warfare. If you invest more time and resources, however, you can gain expanded intel on the enemy, combat bonuses, and even launch commando raids.

The example I was presented with was the little-known but very awesome heavy water raid that took place in Nazi-occupied Norway. A small group of commandos working with the Norwegian government-in-exile sabotaged a key facility that delayed the Third Reich’s development of nuclear weapons. In HoI4, this will be modeled by an event chain Germany will receive that, once finished, gives them a large speed boost to nuclear research. If their opponents discover it in time, they can try to launch an operation that will nix the whole thing. Other operations will include things like targeted sabotage, assassinating leaders, and launching coups to change the ideology of an enemy or neutral nation.

Spies will have new, semi-randomized portraits and names, adding a bit of extra character to the Second World War. They can be recruited from different regions and will perform better deployed on home territory—a French spy can blend in better in France than an American one, for instance. Spies level up over time, but risk leaking crucial information if captured. Accordingly, you might want to equip them with suicide pills. It might be better to lose a high-level spy than have them become an unwilling informant for the enemy.

Hearts of Iron 4: La Resistance is coming soon.