Hi everyone and welcome to today's dev diary. I’m home with a nasty cold, but lets power through and check out some more stuff coming in Death or Dishonor and the Oak update. Today’s main topic is Equipment Conversion, or how to choose the StuG Life. Using older chassis to mount more powerful guns etc was very common in WW2 era Germany, in fact its most produced armored fighting vehicle the StuG III was essentially a PzIII with its turret removed to make room for a more powerful gun. We've always let you build these self-propelled variants in HOI4, but its not been possible to convert existing vehicles before. Now if you get Death or Dishonor it will be! This is a great way of getting rid of older stuff you might not want to deploy and keeping it relevant for longer.
If you look at the top production line there you can see that the conversion tickbox is enabled, and that the line is using suspiciously little resources and running at high speed. This is what it looks like with the box unticked:
You can only enable this if you have spare equipment that is possible to convert from sitting around in your stockpile. When converting you pay the difference in resources only rather than the full amount and production speed is much higher.
Note that it lists in what order and what will be converted (although here all I had for the diary was PzIIIs). So what exactly can you convert?

• Any base model (PzIV) or upgraded variant marked obsolete (say PzIV B) to a newer one (PzIV C). This goes for planes too.
• Any base model or variant (up to one tech level back) to a self propelled. So you can convert a Medium Tank 1 to a Medium Tank Destroyer 1 or Medium Tank Destroyer 2 (the second one would then cost more resources).
• The above also works for licensed or captured equipment (although you can't convert a captured T-34 to a PzIV C, they need to actually be upgraded versions of the same thing).

There are also some new techs that help improve conversions to be even more efficient. 2 of them in the machine tools tree and Dispersed Industry also gives a base bump.
For modders its fairly easy to mess around with this, check out the spoiler for scripting examples: medium_tank_equipment = { is_convertable = yes } medium_tank_artillery_equipment_3 = { can_convert_from = { medium_tank_equipment_2 medium_tank_equipment_3 } } We have also been updating the war overview interface to make it nicer and more informative. its now possible to see total losses, fielded manpower, industry and also to be able to sort by each column.
Another thing is that we now showcase capitulation a bit clearer (see Free France) and its now also possible to get out of capitulation. Previously this only happened at the end of the war which led to some weird cases where a France who had reclaimed all their territory still wouldn't be able to stop their side from giving up if the other majors had fallen. Now the capitulated state is reset if you reclaim your original capital and get back 90% of their surrender level. This weekend is PdxCon and next Wednesday we will be taking a look at new air stuff! Also do tune in to the World War Wednesday stream at https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive with maybe only Daniel at 16:00CET (unless he manages to snag another sidekick than me). It will be full "hot code!" mode and start a new campaign as Hungary to show off stuff from last week's diary. // podcat Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Hearts of Iron IV Wiki Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary Archive