Hearts of Iron 4 - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

Not only that, they need researchable and army XP-variant improvements. Because after your elite German research team has finished their Panther designs they should be reassigned to the '44 series jockstrap development project and German generals need to be invited from the front to lend their field expertise to an improved design.

 

And they vocally insist all these changes make the game deeper and more complex. In reality HOI4 AI can't even efficiently navigate research and equipment in vanilla game, so adding anything on top of that only gives the player a huge advantage.

 

It's actually most "alive" among all Paradox titles.

 

Oh you don't wanna get into that, because ICE came up with a solution that's worse than the problem, while being amazingly cumbersome and OCD.

(ICE grants historical divisions et al through events, templates and all)

Also the naval and air trees must be labyrinths where you go back and forth and where what replaces what is a mystery because even the game doesn't understand it.

(There's some pretty hefty screw-ups overall within individual trees too IMO, since for example Do 335 Pfeil is just way better than other options next to it)


But most of all! Don't forget the gigantic German focus tree where the Wunderwaffe branch alone is so bloated and oversized you just shouldn't bother!

 

I wonder how much of that is thanks to Kaiserreich. Out of these four games vanilla HoIIV is easily the worst by a pretty large margin.

 

Probably a lot due to mods + MP. HoI4 is the only game that can really do both.

 

Paradox fanatics are just retarded,they can eat any type of shit as long as it have the paradox logo on it.

 

and of course the best game out of those 4 has the lowest player count

 

It's also the most difficult for a casual to pick up and quickly understand. And probably the least flashy.

 

Both Stellaris and HoIIV have solid MP community. Stellaris even more than HoIIV, because I often see it in streams. Kaiserreich is overhyped mod, which is not quite different from BlackICE.

 

Uh? KR and BlackICE have precisely one thing in common and that's being HOI4 mods.

I do agree that part of CK2's low playerbase is probably in part due to low MP suitability

 

You mean Victoria 2?

 

You've got something mixed up, here. BICE is an attempt to inject enough detail and micromanagement into the game to make your eyeballs bleed. KR is a sterling alternate-history epic that elevates the game beyond its otherwise meagre potential.

 

And older than the others.

 

Ck2 is steam only now?

 

>normie kings
>best

 

I wouldn't call HoI4's potential or base game "meagre" (because one thing KR does well in contrast to BICE is that they leave much of the basic gameplay intact because all BICE does is bloat it into obese dysfunctionality; sometimes it's better to go with simpler and gamey-ir than detail for the sake of detail), but the thing is that what KR sets out to do it does perfectly well to such a degree that it does elevate the entire game by taking the entire toolbox the game presents itself with and produces a level of synergy between all those factors that could barely be envisioned, and a big part of that is how they are trying to fashion an "alternate-history epic" with their focus trees instead of purely mechanical effects. The return of decisions should serve all the further to improve this.

 

KR feels so much better than vanilla simply because WW2 is not that good of a setting for this type of game. Yes it's a historical era that people are fascinated about, populated by interesting characters and cool technological advancements you can play with. But as a platform for what-if kind of playthroughs it kinds of sucks. The Axis never really had a chance, Allies have on the war before it even started, it was just a matter of time in the end. And that's how most vanilla playthroughs unfold. It starts interesting, you're having fun, but by mid 1940s it just becomes bland slog where you're just pushing to the finish line.

I was bored once so I picked Panama, gave all the Axis powers all the possible buffs, and I just left it running to see what happens. And nothing does. The Germans do take out USSR but after that it just becomes a stalemate. US can outproduce everybody even with the buffs (as they should), Axis can't make advances anywhere, and that's basically it.

 

I agree with this 100%, and think it is indeed one of the fundamental ways in which KR builds itself to such heights. It creates a scenario much more suitable for making an interesting and varied GAME out of.

 

I like aspects of the game, like the factory system and the way armies are handled with frontages etc.

However, the flaws are pretty massive. The combat system is open to serious abuse. A kill/loss ratio of 1,000,000:1 can be achieved if you set up the right defensive network and let the AI try to headbutt its way through. The technology tree is also undercooked, the focus tree lacks impact and real choice (which is probably why it's getting a serious overhaul with the next patch) and longstanding features like the ledger have been inexplicably removed.

Many of these things can be corrected with patches, which I'm sure Paradox will couple with paid expansions.

 

And I just remembered, in that save Japan didn't even take Australia, because even unbuffed US fleet can still produce enough ships to keep Japan bogged down forever. So you have a major country, artificially buffed to the tits, and they still can't even take out the nearest minor countries.

Really, I think vanilla game simply had to be that way. Even the real-life Axis leadership never hoped they can make Allies actually surrender. Hitler from the start was counting on UK suing for conditional peace, and likewise with Japan, Yamamoto warning from the start that in a prolonged conflict they are fucked.

Paradox suck ass but I can't honestly blame them for this part, they just put historical pieces in place, history could only go one way, and so does the game.

AH mods are the only way to go forward for this game.

 

DD: War rework

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When playing, the biggest changes you will notice is that wars merging now is a lot smoother. War score, casualties and such are properly tracked and retained. Its now also possible to fight 3-way wars (or more) so we can handle Axis vs Comintern vs Allies vs The Japanese co-prosperity sphere etc.

The war interface has also gotten a bunch of changes:

• You can now filter nations like minors, capitulated, or nations who aren’t called in yet
• We show nations that could be called in, but aren’t in blue (so you can see that the soviets have not called in Republican Spain yet), this is instead of the old interface where there was separate lists, now a button appears if you yourself have the power to call them.
• We group up factions and summarize stats for them for easier comparisons
• The interface lets you pick among your wars, but there is also a War Summary that collects all war allies and enemies in one big page. The interface also scales with your screen size, so it's much easier to get an overview of large complex wars now.

One of my favourite new things is that we show a breakdown of the casualties, so you can see how many casualties you caused for a specific nation:


Difficulty Settings
We are slowly building up better and better telemetry on HOI players and I really love to share it with the community when it’s surprising, and this one surprised me a lot actually! It turns out that close to 40% of players prefer to play on the lowest difficulty setting. I would have expected this to be quite a bit less!



As number of hours you play goes up people migrate away from recruit a bit. So for players with less than 50 hours played, 60% of them use Recruit and after playing 200+ hours only about 28% still use Recruit. Veteran shows the largest relative change. For beginners, it is 1.4% who use it and it goes up to 3.5% for 200+ hour players. The vast majority use Regular. It's the difficulty setting that doesn't give you any bonuses or penalties so this is usually what people prefer. My design philosophy is to try and stay away from direct combat bonuses and such that will make you learn the game in the wrong way. I prefer buffing things that allows a player to play more sub-optimal, so faster research (or slower so you must make more optimal choices), smaller losses on efficiency when changing production lines or less impact of lack of resource and such. It's also important to only affect the player as you don't really know which of the nations will end up on their side or as enemies. For example, in HOI3 depending on country it could actually be easier at harder settings, since certain nations were advantaged by that in an allied role.

So what are we doing about this? First of all we are adding two more settings (the gods of symmetry demand it!). A new difficulty before Recruit called Civilian and a new harder difficulty called Elite.


I also thought I would mention that we haven't really analyzed the custom difficulty settings yet but plan to in the future. I always recommend them to tailor your game. Say if you want a particularly strong Soviet to fight as Germany.

See you all again next week! Also don't forget to tune in to World War Wednesday at 16:00 CET where we start a new campaign to show off all the new stuff in Waking the Tiger as a Chinese warlord on the rise!

 

All Paradox games (and most other strategy game at that) fail when circumstances require the AI to do naval things and project an amphibious invasion.

 

40% of players are casual cucks CONFIRMED!!!!

C A S U A L S
U
C
K
S L A U S A C

 

I have no idea why they are against combat bonuses/debuffs in difficulty levels. At least it doesn't slow down the game. I'd imagine most people don't play on Veteran simply because it's too slow, research and PP happen so slowly there's basically nothing to do. I'd much rather play on Regular or even Recruit and load up the sliders and AI mods if I want a challenge.