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Hearts of Iron 4’s next DLC will let you split Soviet Russia into 29 separate entities

If the USSR feels a bit too big for your liking, well now you can chop it up into more manageable chunks

An image showing all of the new releasable nations for Russia in hearts of iron 4

Hearts of Iron IV is continuing its long march towards the release of its upcoming No Step Back expansion and the free 1.11 Barbarossa update. The strategy game’s recent series of developer diaries have been looking at changes coming to the new star of the show – the Soviet Union.

The changes coming to this country are so extensive that the project needed its own design team, and we imagine part of this is to do with the fact that it’s now possible to split up the USSR into 29 separate states. These represent a myriad of nations that existed prior to the Soviet Union’s official formation in 1922, as well various socialist republics that formed during the Russian Civil War.

Many of these will only be released via a peace deal, but there are some branches across various focus trees that can bring these new nations about as well. A view of the map with all 29 states can be seen in this week’s dev diary, which focuses on the non-communist options coming as part of the No Step Back expansion. This built on last week’s diary, which looked into alternative socialist options if the player feels like ousting Stalin and going in a different direction to the (free) historical route.

User TotallyJazzed on the HOI4 subreddit – with the help of some other community members – managed to identify all 29 new states:

Twenty-Nine new soviet releasables coming with No Step Back from hoi4

This list has yet to be officially confirmed by the developers, though. As with most of the recent focus tree reworks, there are several different options available to players now, including bringing back the Tsar or going down a fascist route, but the Soviet Union doesn’t have a democratic path.

Related: The best war games on PC

There’s still no official confirmation of a release window for Hearts of Iron IV: Not Step Back nor the free patch.