Hearts of Iron 4 debuted early this summer and immediately became the most unique, distinctive and complex World War II strategy game ever produced. It’s a tour de force of a game—although one that’s very hard to learn. But, like most Paradox games, it had its flaws—some bugs, some crashes, a confusing interface, and some balance issues. Well, Paradox has now released the “Sunflower Patch,” the game’s first major update, to make the game even better. And it certainly does.

Hearts of Iron 4 Sunflower Patch: Big Balance And Interface Changes

The Sunflower patch for Hearts of Iron 4 is primarily focused on balance changes, bug fixes, and improvements to the AI and user interface. As is often the case for Paradox, “balance changes” are an expansive set of options, and sometimes result in wholesale changes and reinventions of game systems. Others are simple changes to territory or AI strategy. Here’s Paradox’s abbreviated list of the biggest changes:

• Changes to how peace conferences are handled, based on a design by Steam user Neutrino
• Hotjoin now available for multiplayer games, so you can connect to a match already in progress
• Custom difficulty settings let you adjust the relative power of Germany, Italy, France and the Soviet Union
• More nations can now be released as independent countries
• Re-sync button added to address connection issues without rehosting the game
• AI more likely to update templates, build nuclear reactors and cancel unnecessary production
• AI less likely to risk encirclement, opt for a Communist France or throw everything at North Africa
• Naval combat has been balanced to prevent light cruiser spam
• Changes to national territorial cores (Portugal loses, Sinkiang gains)
• A number of crashes caused by modding have been fixed
• Submarines better at finding surface ships, worse at finding other subs

New features like the revamped peace conferences and the custom difficulty settings are really exciting, but that’s just the beginning of the Sunflower Patch. There are a huge, huge number of changes, many of them under the hood. It’s totally worth checking out the full list of changes, just to see how much improved the AI and interface is with the new patch. It’s good stuff, and it makes Hearts of Iron 4 even more exciting. The patch is out now, so give it a try… and trust that this will just be the first of many.