Hearts of Iron 4 - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

We casualised the game to the utmost, and now I'm shocked and amazed that 40% of players play on the casual difficulty. Who would have expected?

 

Everyone really,casual difficulty is a lot faster than the others. Even i play some shit on easy when i want it to end fast and the combat is shit.....aka Tranny. Also don't know how they calculate it,in most rpgs you can change the difficulty on the fly.

 

I would rather read a book than waste time on a game I don't like by going through it on easy just so it ends faster.

 

i am kind of fanatical when it comes to rpgs,can't drop it midway. Even finished shit like andromeda and Diversity age:inquisition. It is not like there is an endless supply of rpgs. Also i do believe that one should have finished the game to criticize it well.

 

Playing the likes of Andromeda, Skyrim or FO4 is below me. DAI was a mistake, I dropped it by the time I reached the first battle with Corypheus.

 

This really just shows how Veteran kind of sucks. The -PP penalty fucks with planned paths certain countries want to take while the industry penalties means it's not even worth doing half your research because you'll never produce it before the game has been won or lost. Since you can't replace equipment for shit on a major offensive you're just left with building the usual steel wall of troops and waiting for the AI to kill itself before walking over it.

Also this is number of games. Probably most people who play veteran play once or twice for countries like Germany or France, then play a dozen regular games as various minors like Poland or Netherlands or w/e. So even with "good" players the numbers would be heavily lopsided against Veteran. Better information would be if they tracked how many players have played at least 1 game to 1941 or so on Veteran.

As for recruit... I have no idea. The game is trivial enough as it is. Are people playing it for easy achievements or something?

 

Veteran is just fucking pointless. With 1936 start the game basically grinds to a halt and you're spending next 3 years sitting on your hands doing nothing. In general I dislike difficulty levels that debuff the player

 

I do play EU4 on very hard because it gives some challenge to the game,but i also play HOI4 on easy because the difficulty settings are retarded.

 

Naval supply routes now could be raided. Subs are not garbage now

 

Or more accurately I guess, routes can be raided for direct effect now rather than just to destroy convoy ships which will eventually shut down the route's effect completely when convoys run out.

 

Naval DD

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You can for example see that France has lost 42 destroyers and sunk 67 Italian destroyers during the last year. The interface also lists convoys, so it’s much easier to keep track on how much of the enemies shipping you have taken out and to see how its changed between current and last month.

Speaking of convoys: we have changed how raiding works and how losses in convoy efficiency is handled. Convoy sinkings is now tracked by strategic area rather than route, meaning that if several routes go through an area that is being raided, they will all be affected rather than single routes randomly being hit. This makes things much more predictable and you can’t get around efficiency hits by suddenly stopping a trade or a change in supply situation. The actual effect of a sunken convoy depends on how many are active (so if there are two convoys shipping stuff and one gets sunk thats a big impact, but if it’s 50 then it is pretty minor). The efficiency itself reacts slowly a bit per day to avoid jumps and weirdness. This solution means that it’s possible to keep convoy efficiency for the enemy low as long as you raid enough.



To help illustrate this to the owner of the convoys, we color routes that end up with lower efficiency due to raiding orange. Any area that is hit badly enough gets a special texture and is colored red. You can then focus your anti-raiding efforts on these areas.

We have also been tweaking the detection logic of submarines and how fleets engage. Fleets usually had a really easy time to find submarines due to some strange code thats now been keelhauled (a destroyer could more easily find a submarine that could find itself very easily...it was very philosophical), so we hope that part of naval warfare is going to feel better. Naval combat is an area that has been a bit neglected since launch, so we will be giving it some higher priority in future development.

Development wise the team is now in full polish and bugfixing mode, which means pet peeves like this one get addressed. I bet everyone who has played China or Japan has noticed this at least once:


Ships no longer go across land in the Yellow sea (and other tricky places)


We have also changed how transports interception is handled. Before it was possible to send a sacrificial transport first, and have it get caught by the enemy fleet as the rest of your transport fleet sailed past to invade the enemy. Now ships in combat are still able to detect transports for this case and “suck” them into the same combat. This should fix multiple exploits The way it looks on map (as the later transports may get caught in a different location) is that we show a special combat indicator over them and clicking on that sends you to the main combat in the zone.


Next week we will be taking a look at achievements and nation forming, and some neat new UI changes.

Don’t forget to tune into World War Wednesday at 16:00 CET. Today we are going to start a new session (because Daniel was losing so badly vs Japan >:-D) as historical Germany, to show how it plays differently now.

 

Yeah pretty much. Subs were always working great. Admittedly it worked kind of weird, but if you were consistently raiding convoys eventually it was easy to shut down the enemy entirely.

 

I'm always glad to see improvements to HOI4. Maybe it will be a bang-up game in a few DLCs?

 

I'd say changing it to work like this is preferable since this means raiding can't be offset just by increased production, and a % penalty might have interesting tactical considerations. Even just 50% penalty to supply from overseas would dramatically alter force balance in a front, so it'll be especially crucial in for example the Pacific (and probably another thing where Japan is just fucked if they pick a fight with Kwa).

Most interesting consequences will again be the modder applications since as noted earlier WW2 doesn't exactly lend itself all that well to a balanced scenario that can evolve in many ways outside of player intervention.

I still wish I'd be able to disable automatic naval transport tho, the area defense pathfinding AI loves ritual mass suicide by drowning.

 

Subs were always - build hundreds of them, then when war starts they bump into some DD, and there's always some DDs and you got shitload of combat reports, like lost 12 subs, lost 32 subs, lost 19 subs etc.
Even splitting them to 3 packs will not save the situation.

 

Well of course it works like that , what did you expect? The more subs you have in a stack, the bigger chance of detection. Don't have a 100 sub doomstack put in one location, spread it around the trade routes in small groups and it works fine.

 

Subs are more of a poor man's navy anyway, what you build if you can't compete in building a real navy but have still a modest amount of shipyards. Total dedication of a modest capacity to subs (besides convoys) is still a good investment due to subs requiring little tech and XP improvements, reinforcing crazy fast, and if you have enough numbers actually can zerg more expensive ships (though this is only important against countries with limited naval construction ability, it obviously wouldn't work against Kwa but say against Union of Britain in KR it can punch a hole in their navy they can't afford to replace as fast as you replace subs).

 

Just seen a MP game where US conquered Iwo Jima, Russia had 0 manpower, and UK had 0 ships.

 

Sheeit, now that's a meatgrinder.

UK having zero ships would imply they just aren't building any? I mean, even if all their canoes got sunk they'd still have enough to just switch to the fast solution of just making a fuckton of subs. Or is this because the Axis are bombing them so hard all their factories are damaged and they're out of convoys so they can't get chromium and shit?

 

And Japan conquered India, and Finland become commie and joined Russia willingly. Then when Russia was nearly defeated, UK invaded and screamed where is US which pursued isolationist policy (and which was moving theirs transports to Iwo Jima).

Well, UK lost majority of fleet when it was blowing up Japan fleet. Then Germany caught the remnants either in mediterranean, or in channel. Then UK was forced to work hard to make new transports. While Holland holdings were conquered.

 

And Germany still lost the war?

 

HoIIV have a tendency to have comebacks. You forget some front and then lose huge chunk of your troops to encirclement and all your advance collapses. Ger could lose even in almost ideal conditions. You forget to protect your shoreline, here, enjoy your naval invasion and enemy troops spreading like a plague across the rhine. Moscow could be lost to some fast units. Kyoto to paratroopers etc.

 

And when you aren't watching, divisions in that garrison group will commit ritual suicide by enemy navy.

 

Paradox has never managed to make a good naval warfare model and their AI coder(s) have also always been sub-par. It is quite telling when a HoI2 and 3 modder made better AI scripts than what Pdox could ever produce. Regardless, as long as the naval combat model is garbage, no AI script will fix them so instead they have to rely on crutches like unlimited range and zero attrition for AI fleets.

It still cracks me up that after 3 expansions and numerous patches, nobody in Stockholm bothered to ever check whether the ground defence value on airplanes actually did anything. Players found it out after TFH had come out and people did some serious testing thanks to introduction of piercing/armour values and one guy decided to include airplanes. He found out that ground defence stat of the planes is actually not properly called when determining the defence value of a air unit against ground fire.