Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Lone Wolf]

It's been delayed twice due to reworking design and mechanics.

Well, that's never good news.

 

[Space Satan]

DD: Japan

Hi everyone, today's topic is something that has been requested in every diary thread for months, so here we go. its time to cover Japan.

Japan is a different and interesting nation to play in HOI4. They are effectively an island state like United Kingdom, but lacking its colonial empire to draw resources from. If Japan doesn't plan to reform towards democracy and settle with what they have they need to aggressively expand as early as possible and grab resources to fuel their war machine and build up their navy to be able to rival the other major nations.

When it comes to expansion routes there are several available, there was much debate and struggle in japan at the time which to go for. Nanshin-ron, The Southern Expansion Doctrine was supported by the imperial navy and involved expansion into southeast asia and pacific islands (bringing you into conflict with the european colonial masters and America). Its opposite Hokushin-ron, northern expansion was supported by the army and involved expansion into eastern soviet and siberia. Japan's focus tree tries to present these as different paths and also let you decide if you should favor army or navy focus.

Most of the diplomatic focuses for Japan require that you decide how to handle China. Its started by initiating the Chinese Border Incident focus where China is pressured into handing over border territory. Should they refuse Japan will get a war goal on them and can attack. Down this route japan may join Germany in the axis or establish its own faction before setting their aim on french indochina and Siam.

As nations go Japan is very different from the european powers, with its worship of the emperor, spiritualism and self sacrifice for the state. We wanted to make sure to capture this so Japan starts with the national spirit "State Shintoism" which make them more resistant to bombing and improves soldier morale. Their focus tree gets a pretty unique part called "Spiritual mobilization". It will both give more research options as well as improving the average soldiers morale, unlocking kamikaze missions, and if both research and warrior traditions tracks are completed unlock special rocket powered suicide crafts (MXY7 Ohka) which will be very hard to intercept due to their speed.

Japan has one of the world's most powerful navies and their air force is also strong. Their army is also pretty big, but in need of modernizing. Industry wise japan can get powerful but will struggle for resources if no successful expansions are done. As a japanese player you need to be careful with your fleet because naval battles can be very decisive and you do not have USA's powerful capability to quickly rebuild lost capital ships. Chances are if you lose your fleet you will not be able to recover from it in a war with the united states. Focus tree wise Japan can select bonuses to develop superheavy battleships faster and are able to unlock the unique Long Lance torpedo giving them greater range than other nations as well as research bonuses to carrier aircraft.

Historically japan did not develop their armored forces very far so we were faced with some problems when deciding on what should represent their tanks. Japan had plans for some heavier tanks which were never built (in the terrain they normally fight it heavy tanks do not make a lot of sense either), but you never know where a player may take japan of course.

See you next week when we will talk about diplomacy!

 

[AwesomeButton]

BTW, nothing demonstrates the appaling ignorance of history among Paradox' forum members like the fact that they are arguing why Hitler's portrait has been covered up/censored in WWW, yet no one is raising the question, not even in irony, about Hirohito's portrait

 

[Raghar]

BTW, nothing demonstrates the appaling ignorance of history among Paradox' forum members like the fact that they are arguing why Hitler's portrait has been covered up/censored in WWW, yet no one is raising the question, not even in irony, about Hirohito's portrait

And what's problem with Japanese emperor? If US would make a war criminal of him, Japanese would go commie.

 

[Makabb]

Man i have a feeling this and stellaris will be trainwrecks. Paradox should stick to ck and eu and maybe vicky 3 at this point.

 

[Spectacle]

BTW, nothing demonstrates the appaling ignorance of history among Paradox' forum members like the fact that they are arguing why Hitler's portrait has been covered up/censored in WWW, yet no one is raising the question, not even in irony, about Hirohito's portrait

Also nobody seems to have noticed that they are using the Imperial Army battle flag in place of the Japanese national flag.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The use of the Imperial Army battle flag instead of the national flag seems to be a thing even before Paradox tho. I remember WW2 plastic soldiers and Battleship board games from the 90's that used the Imperial battle flag for Japanese, and IIRC every Panzer General game ever and Steel Panthers do too. On the other hand, the Japanese navy still uses the Rising Sun flag, and the JSDF uses a variation of it.

I still don't know exactly why the Rising Sun flag is used instead of the regular flag so often in WW2 stuff.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Regarding what's wrong with the Japanese Emperor. I say nothing, let him be displayed, just as Hitler should be displayed. I know there are legal issues with the Nazi flag in Germany, and the paradoxplaza crowd knows it, but since nobody has tried to cover up Hirohito's portrait and since he has never been a figure associated with Japanese war crimes in the way Hitler has been associated with Nazi war crimes, it's subsequently not a problem for anyone that Hirohito is visible.

What I find funny is the irony of the unexpected side-effects of censorship - provoking some people to actually learn about the war crimes, as well as the hypocrisy of censoring, which inevitably involves the "weighing" of war crimes, on dubios criteria - this dictator is less worthy of censorship because he did the majority of his shit in East Asia, and this other dictator, he was bad, but nah, we were allies with him for a while...

I realize when I say "we" that paradox are Swedish. I'm just imagining them using the viewpoint of the powers that won WW2 and emerged dominant from the Cold War.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Personally I haven't yet noticed this whole Hitler censorship thing. A relatively recent devblog? In earlier ones Hitler was still visible as normal.

You know, the most hilarious part in this will then be the fact that there are two characters with censored portraits in Pdox games, Hitler and Muhammed. Therefore, Hitler = Muhammed. Insheil.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Personally I haven't yet noticed this whole Hitler censorship thing. A relatively recent devblog? In earlier ones Hitler was still visible as normal.

You know, the most hilarious part in this will then be the fact that there are two characters with censored portraits in Pdox games, Hitler and Muhammed. Therefore, Hitler = Muhammed. Insheil.

For example look here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ed-german-version.902542/page-2#post-20499114
The thread is duly and prudently closed.

There are others, I just searched for "Hitler portrait" in the hoi4 forum.

When it was just censoring flags, I didn't mind because they were easy to mod back in correctly, but portraits will be sort of harder. From what I understand, the shaded version will be just for Germany, the international one will feature Hitler's portrait.

To speak of something more related to the game - I like the world tension mechanic, but I wonder if it, along with other new mechanics to hoi4 won't make the game too locked on the ww2 period, and harder to mod in Cold War content. I really wish I could have a HoI style game about the Cold War. When I played the Cold War campaign in Rise of Nations, I found it really interesting, enough that I played the campaign multiple times with each side.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Right so just crazy German censorship stuff again.

 

[Tigranes]

The use of the Imperial Army battle flag instead of the national flag seems to be a thing even before Paradox tho. I remember WW2 plastic soldiers and Battleship board games from the 90's that used the Imperial battle flag for Japanese, and IIRC every Panzer General game ever and Steel Panthers do too. On the other hand, the Japanese navy still uses the Rising Sun flag, and the JSDF uses a variation of it.

I still don't know exactly why the Rising Sun flag is used instead of the regular flag so often in WW2 stuff.

Maybe it is because it does look way cooler than the horrible flag of Japan - a red ball in a white background. Fandastic flag, very creative, great command of artistry. Lol.

You know that when the day comes the Japanese will splash calpis sodas over each flag, revealing the imperial flag in invisible ink

 

[Sranchammer]

Only whites commit genocide

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

First time this ever happened to me, but I've never been as curious at to the quality of an upcoming game. It could be the worst paradox game yet or it could be decent.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I know what I'm replacing Hitler's portrait with in my games.

Spoiler

 

[Pirata Alma Negra]

If you let AI auto assign leaders for everything but theatre/army group (which were all that really mattered) you'd be able to make an OOB in like 5 mins for most nations, assuming you knew how to work the UI. It was useful for keeping track of your specialized divisions (redeploy your whole marine corps to a port to prepare for an invasion? takes 5s with an OOB, a minute of hunting down units without an OOB).

Yeah, there's a reason Stalin didn't kicked Hitler's ass ordering the 1017º regiment to do this or that. CoC are supposed to facilitate things, if Paradox made them a pain in the ass is not a reason to drop them all together.

Anyway, it'll be fun to send a 10-star field marshal into any libyan shithole.

 

[Average Manatee]

If you let AI auto assign leaders for everything but theatre/army group (which were all that really mattered) you'd be able to make an OOB in like 5 mins for most nations, assuming you knew how to work the UI. It was useful for keeping track of your specialized divisions (redeploy your whole marine corps to a port to prepare for an invasion? takes 5s with an OOB, a minute of hunting down units without an OOB).

Yeah, there's a reason Stalin didn't kicked Hitler's ass ordering the 1017º regiment to do this or that. CoC are supposed to facilitate things, if Paradox made them a pain in the ass is not a reason to drop them all together.

Anyway, it'll be fun to send a 10-star field marshal into any libyan shithole.

Funny thing is the new "draw line to direct units" would work very well with the HoI3 OOB system. Delegating attacks to the AI in HoI3 was crippled by the fact that you could only give really general attack orders that caused your armies to just push at each other until one gave way. If you could give corps-level orders to attack along a specific path and intelligently not overstretch itself, periodically rest to regain org, keeping to the right terrain, etc then it would be very flexible and fun to use. Instead we have no OOB and the entire east front plan is tracing a line to Moscow.

 

[Pirata Alma Negra]

This all-or-nothing system is pretty terrible. Despite that to control anything it had to be taken out of the hierarchy.

The original release didn't even had that oob editor. Those were the days.

 

[Raghar]

Funny thing is the new "draw line to direct units" would work very well with the HoI3 OOB system. Delegating attacks to the AI in HoI3 was crippled by the fact that you could only give really general attack orders that caused your armies to just push at each other until one gave way. If you could give corps-level orders to attack along a specific path and intelligently not overstretch itself, periodically rest to regain org, keeping to the right terrain, etc then it would be very flexible and fun to use. Instead we have no OOB and the entire east front plan is tracing a line to Moscow.

I would appreciate when Germany and Russia wouldn't be forced to fight each other. It would be nice when Germany would have chance of winning and Russia chance to finish industrialization.

 

[cw8]

So D-Day 2016, at least it was mentioned on the latest Facebook page post:

 

[Erzherzog]

There were three aggressive states at that time.

Oh yeah because the Soviet Union invading literally every country along its Western border totally wasn't aggressive or anything.

 

[Irenaeus III]

When they said "there was a clear bad guy" I closed the video.

 

[Tytus]

When they said "there was a clear bad guy" I closed the video.

What, you don't think Stalin was Sauron level of evil? After winning the war against Saruman he basically shrouded half of Europe in his volcanic ash for 50 years.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I think Timothy Snyder put it best when asked about which was worse of the two that when you are talking about two regimes that murdered millions because of ethnicity, class, or other category, you cannot claim there is a lesser evil to be had there.

Guess that the video either goes by the old "The Good War" trope, or doesn't want to offend the useful idiots of present times. Note that the old dude never names the third aggressor state (I would have hard to name Italy as being that important to the course of the war because of how incompetent Mussolini and his regime were), and they correctly mention that World War 2 (and Cold War) were a series of conflicts between three ideologies (liberal democracy, communism, and fascism).

 

[AwesomeButton]

When they said "there was a clear bad guy" I closed the video.

Yes, and Britain and the US were his allies for a while, after which they left him with half of Europe as spoils. Way to go, good guys!