On 27 October 2026 Paradox shipped patch 1.19.4 for Hearts of Iron IV, a War Effort update built around quality-of-life work, and followed it on 29 October with a hotfix carrying checksum f584. Nothing dated comes after it. The Romania Focus Pack has been previewed across a summer of dev corners and a 22 October dev diary and still carries no release date, and the next major expansion — the thing Paradox would normally be teasing by now — has been pushed back on the record.
That sequence matters more than any single item inside it. This site’s earlier read of the Romania pack, HOI4 2026 Country Pack: Romania and Focus Trees, treated 2026 as a six-to-eight-week drumbeat and read a late-Q3 or early-Q4 window into the Romania preview. Patches 1.19.3 and 1.19.4 have both landed since without it, and Paradox has since said the larger expansion slips. What follows is the accounting: what the year actually bought, which countries the cadence has never reached, and which parts of the road ahead are announced rather than assumed.
What this covers: the live build as of 29 October 2026, every paid Hearts of Iron IV release of the past two years with the countries its store page names, the revision work hiding inside the 2026 slate, and a labelled split between announced, implied and inferred plans. Why it matters: the pack you might be waiting for is undated, the pass that has been on sale for a year is now complete, and the next expansion has been formally delayed — three facts that change what a purchase today actually gets you. Who should care: players deciding whether to buy into Expansion Pass 2 or wait, anyone maintaining guides that assume pre-October balance, and readers who want to know which of the “next DLC” claims circulating are sourced.
The live build on 29 October 2026
Paradox runs several branches at once, and mixing them up is the standard way advice about this game goes wrong. The 1.19 line is what a normal install runs.
| Build | Date | What it was | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.19.0 | 10 June 2026 (notes) / 11 June (launch) | Thunder at our Gates launch patch | superseded |
| 1.19.1 | 17 June 2026 | post-launch fixes | superseded |
| 1.19.2 | 30 June 2026 | post-launch fixes | superseded |
| 1.19.3 | 17 September 2026 | last patch specifically targeting Thunder at our Gates | superseded |
| 1.19.4 | 27 October 2026 | War Effort / QoL update, checksum a783 | live |
| 1.19.4 hotfix | 29 October 2026 | hotfix, checksum f584 | live |
| Energy open beta | 1 and 7 October 2026 dev corners | separate opt-in beta, no new art, untranslated | beta only |
Two of those lines carry the year’s systemic work. Patch 1.19.3 folded in “a solid number of balance changes that were introduced from the Open Beta Summer Edition”, and 1.19.4 rolled out “the last changes from the Open Beta ‘Summer Edition’ … around doctrines and other avenues that concern the combat simulation”.
The QoL list in 1.19.4 is long and mostly about clicks: notification grouping, automated resource trading, automatic diplomatic responses, a repair-priority queue, saved fleet compositions and a focus-tree minimap. The balance side is more consequential for anyone following a build guide: tank chassis module bonuses were re-tiered (interwar −5%, improved +5%, advanced +10%, modern +15% to soft, hard and air attack), tank-destroyer and self-propelled-artillery breakthrough penalties were standardised at −75% for line variants and −90% for regimental support variants, and those same line variants gained a flat 25% defence bonus. Advice written before October against specific breakthrough or HP values needs re-checking before it is repeated; the division template builder guide is the place to redo that arithmetic.
The 2026 catalogue, release by release
Prices below are Steam’s, in South African rand, as fetched on 2026-10-29. Regional pricing applies and sales move them.
| Release | Type | Steam date | Countries named on its store page | Price (ZAR) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warships of the Pacific | Cosmetic | 17 March 2026 | none — 30 ship models | R 76.00 |
| Peace For Our Time | Focus Pack | 22 April 2026 | Czechoslovakia | R 91.00 |
| Thunder at our Gates | Theater Pack | 11 June 2026 | Australia, Siam, Indonesia | R 305.00 |
| Romania Focus Pack | Focus Pack | undated | Romania | no store page yet |
| No Compromise, No Surrender | Expansion | 20 November 2025 | Japan, Communist China, Nationalist China, Philippines | R 458.00 |
| Götterdämmerung | Expansion | 14 November 2024 | Germany, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Congo | R 382.00 |
The Romania pack is the one to be careful with. It exists — Paradox published a dev diary for it on 22 October titled “Romania: A Flawed Democracy”, written by Norrman with Marijn and Alex, the three modders Paradox introduced in August as “modders of the game and now cooperating with Paradox”. It has no date, and it does not appear among the 24 add-ons listed on the base game’s Steam page. Those two facts are the whole of its release status.
Everything else in Expansion Pass 2 has shipped. The pass, on sale since 25 September 2025, listed five things on its own store page: the Seaplane Tenders instant-unlock bonus, No Compromise No Surrender, Warships of the Pacific, Peace For Our Time and Thunder at our Gates. All five are out. The 1.19.4 post still advertises an “Expansion Pass 2 Last Chance Bundle”, which is what a pass looks like when its slate is finished.
That matters because the pass is how Paradox has been selling this game’s future. In January 2026 the studio listed 2026 as “beyond all the stuff that we promised in Expansion Pass 2”, naming Warships for Q1 and the two packs for Q2; in April it confirmed the packs had swapped order “so we could give it some extra polish”. In September it said the quality-of-life patch is planned “before the next Expansion Pass comes out” — a sentence that implies a further pass without naming, dating or pricing one.
What the cadence has actually been buying: revisions
The instinct is to read each pack as new map coverage. Each of the last three country packs gives at least one of its countries a tree that already existed in some form, and Paradox says so in its own material.
Australia’s case is explicit. The 12 May dev diary opens by announcing that “the nine year old Australian content” is to “get a fresh coat of war paint”. Romania’s is nearly as clear: the October diary describes the new fascist branch as having “focuses that are similar to the Balkan Dominance Path from the Death or Dishonor version of Romania’s focus tree”, which is a direct statement that a tree from that older pack is being replaced. Czechoslovakia’s is in the title of the 16 April dev diary, “Alt-Historical Czechoslovakia & Divided Nation Rework”, which rebuilds a national spirit the country already had.
So the 2026 slate is two single-country packs that each replace an existing tree, plus one three-country pack in which one country’s nine-year-old tree was replaced and the other two — Siam and Indonesia — are ground the store pages have never covered before.
Meanwhile the free patches have been doing the systems work. The Thunder at our Gates announcement split its feature list in two: the paid pack carried Army Headquarters and Ship Captains, while the free patch carried the division designer rework and Regimental Support. The 1.19 line then added the QoL package, and the Energy rework has been running as an open beta since early October without being attached to any product.
Which trees are still generic — and what Paradox has not published
The generic tree is not a beginner’s tree; it is the fallback. Paradox’s own country-selection dev corner of 24 March describes the mechanism from the player’s side: “if, for example, you have played the original Iceland (generic focus tree) but not the Arms Against Tyranny version and you own the DLC, then we will flag both ‘versions’ of the country as being played.” A country can therefore exist in two states — generic and DLC-specific — and which one you get depends on ownership. The site’s structural read of national versus generic trees covers what the generic tree can and cannot express.
What Paradox has not published is a list of which countries remain on it. Nor could the community wiki’s tree census be fetched for this piece — the wiki served a JavaScript challenge instead of content on every attempt. So no census appears here. What the store pages do support is the inverse: the last paid release to name a country in each region.
| Region | Last paid release naming a country there | Date | Countries named |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pacific theatre | No Compromise, No Surrender | 20 November 2025 | Japan, Communist China, Nationalist China, Philippines |
| South-East Asia and Australasia | Thunder at our Gates | 11 June 2026 | Australia, Siam, Indonesia |
| Central Europe | Peace For Our Time | 22 April 2026 | Czechoslovakia |
| Balkans | Battle for the Bosporus | 15 October 2020 | Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey |
| West, Central and South Asia | Graveyard of Empires | 4 March 2025 | Iran, India, Iraq, Afghanistan |
| South America | Trial of Allegiance | 7 March 2024 | Brazil, Argentina, Chile |
| Nordics | Arms Against Tyranny | 10 October 2023 | Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden |
| Italy, Ethiopia, Switzerland | By Blood Alone | 27 September 2022 | Italy, Ethiopia, Switzerland |
| Eastern Europe and the Baltics | No Step Back | 23 November 2021 | Soviet Union, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania |
| Western Europe and espionage | La Résistance | 25 February 2020 | none named on the store page |
Read it as a coverage ledger, not a to-do list. A region absent from the 2025–2026 rows has not been ignored — the Balkans, South America and the Nordics each have trees from their own pack — but the cadence has spent two years in the Pacific, Central Europe and the Danube, and nothing in 2026 touched Africa, the Middle East or Latin America. The base game’s own store description shows how old some of that coverage is: it summarises the four earliest bundled expansions by region rather than by nation — Death or Dishonor “focuses on eastern and central European middle powers”, Together for Victory “focuses on British Commonwealth nations”, Waking the Tiger “focuses on China and Japan”, Man the Guns “focuses on naval features and alternate history paths for the United States”.
The same store data carries a supply-side signal: of the 24 add-ons on the base game page, 11 are country content, 6 cosmetic, 6 music, and one is the subscription — which grants “all expansion and country packs released to this point” plus art and music, but not Community Content Packs, as a monthly charge rather than a purchase.
Announced, implied, inferred
This is the part where roadmap writing usually goes wrong, so here is the split.
| Claim | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| A Romania Focus Pack is coming | Announced | Dev diary, 22 October 2026 |
| Romania’s release date | Not announced — undated | No date in the diary; no store page among the base game’s 24 add-ons |
| Romania’s tree content | Announced in outline | Old Kingdom/New Kingdom funding branch, Iron Guard path, historical 1937 election path, two industry branches |
| The next major expansion is delayed | Announced | Studio Gold, 4 September 2026: “we have decided to delay our next major expansion” |
| The expansion’s name, date or subject | Not announced | Nothing published |
| Dev diaries for it start after Romania | Announced as a plan | Same post: aim “to start with Dev Diaries earlier than previous years, most likely after Romania releases” |
| A Congress rework | Inferred from a tease | 1 September corner asks if players “would maybe like a rework” of the American Congress System |
| A further Expansion Pass | Implied only | QoL patch planned “before the next Expansion Pass comes out” |
| Canada content in production | Announced as work in progress | Dev corner, 29 September 2026, from “the content designer working on Canada (obviously the most important nation in the DLC)” |
| An energy/power-plant system | Open beta, explicitly not tied to a product | 1 October corner: “not planned for any expansion, but perhaps a future war effort”; 7 October: “We are still not sure if we should release this or not” |
Two cautions. The Canada corner says “the DLC” without naming it, and it lands in the same week as Romania previews — do not assume they are the same product. And the energy system, the most concrete unreleased mechanic in the public material, is the one thing Paradox has explicitly detached from any expansion.
What the next expansion is most plausibly aimed at
Counting the 2026 dev corners by topic is the strongest available evidence, because dev corners are where Paradox tests ideas before committing them. Between 7 July and 7 October the studio ran fifteen inside that window: civil wars, airborne units and air supply, civilian economy and consumer goods, military production, national focus flavour, army quality and expertise, the American Congress tease, industrial might, the Great Depression, energy (twice, once as an open beta), strikes, old Canada, and two Romania corners. Twelve of the fifteen are systems or nation-agnostic design questions. The remaining three are country work — the two Romania corners and Old Canada on 29 September — and the Romania dev diary itself came outside the window.
The reading that fits is not that the next expansion is an economy expansion — Paradox has not said that, and the one system it has built in public is explicitly excluded from expansion plans. The narrower reading: the delay buys time for system work, and the systems being prototyped now are candidates for whichever release follows Romania. A studio with a country pack ready would not be asking its community what it thinks about labour strikes.
For a buyer that is unglamorous: nothing ahead is dated. Romania is undated, the expansion is undated and unnamed, and the pass on sale for thirteen months is complete. Of the four 2026 releases, the two country packs and the cosmetic pack are on sale individually; the Romania pack is the one you cannot buy.
For players the consequence is narrower. The live build is 1.19.4 with the 29 October hotfix, and its balance pass moved tank, tank-destroyer and self-propelled-artillery values that a lot of existing advice depends on. Steam’s current-players endpoint for the game returned 42,952 people in-game when this was checked — one sample, not a peak, but enough to say the patch landed on a populated game. Any guide that predates 27 October describes a different build until its numbers are checked.