Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead. I am your host for this week, Len Hafer,

and I am joined here by Kataku's Luke Blunkett.

Hello, everybody. Nice to be back.

He is one of the only people I know that has played more Hearts of Iron 4 than me.

So I brought him on to talk about Hearts of Iron Four's gigantic recent expansion, No Step Back, which completely reworked the supply and logistics systems, finally updated the Soviet focus tree, long time coming, and a lot of other stuff.

Luke, how are you feeling so far about no step back from what

you've played of it? I'll start with some caveats first. This might be a long list. I've obviously,

I've only been playing this for a couple of days. We've been like at Kataka, we've been pretty

slammed with end of year

coverage and end of year games and stuff so i shamefully forgot this had even come out and so it was

it was only the reminder that this podcast was happening and i was like oh man i've got to play this

and so i've only played it for a couple of days so anybody who's like super into the finest

points of how this stuff's all going to work.

I'm not your guy for that at the moment because I haven't been able to like

extensively check any of this out over, you know, dozens or hundreds of hours

of playing it with different factions and different wars and whatever.

That said, everything I have played for the last two days has been excellent.

Who have you checked out so far?

Okay, so I started obviously with the Soviets, because that's like the emphasis of this faction.

I fired up a game and then I remembered really quickly why I never ever play as the Soviet Union because I find it daunting. I find the number of territories and the side, the number of land

borders to be just so, I don't know, I just can't do it. I think I've only played like

two games as the Soviets ever. So I fired it up. I started playing it.

...