Hearts of Iron 4 - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

Just to comment on WW1, if you want to see how dynamic it can be try playing To End All Wars. The european theatre is actually far more interesting than WW2, there is so much shit going on.

 

I was making an example of the inevitable conflict between player agency and between historical accuracy, because IRL WW2 makes for a very poorly balanced game. Which in turn requires ultimately arbitrary restrictions, abstractions, or alterations in service of gameplay to make things fun. My point is first and foremost about the enormous gulf between the US and the entire rest of the planet economically, which one obviously cannot put in a game in any form (it isn't even just isolationism which is usually a fairly straightforward thing that all HoI games have managed to handle, it's what comes after the player gets past that), or otherwise have anything remotely akin to the historical economics because then you go further down the rabbithole of trying to preserve historical accuracy elsewhere through endless situational modifiers and exceptions so Germany does as "well" as it did, etc. This is where Kaiserreich has that distinct advantage since due to being fictional it can balance its scenario and have it be all-around more involved (there's even shenanigans in Africa now, the continent of no-one-should-bother in HoI).


Also in regards to the Great War mod, the thing is the combined effects of equipment, terrain/forts/entrenchment, and doctrines that in vast majority of situations it is completely senseless to launch and offensive because the disparity between breakthrough and defense is so enormous it's basically just flushing manpower down the toilet. Ergo, it's better to just hunker down and try to out-tech the other side, which because it'll take roughly three years is not exactly a riveting experience as a game. Russia is the exception because of the hefty penalties they have slapped on them so they rarely make it beyond 1915 in my experience before the German snowball shoves them out of the war.

 

Keep in mind that the USA was still pretty well stuck in the great depression well after Europe was recovering thanks to FDR being awful at economics. In many ways it wasn't just WW2 that pulled the USA out of the great depression, it was the Commonwealth being at war and spending their entire empire's treasury to initially gear up and then hang on for 1939-41. The USA in 1936 had nowhere near the readiness that it had in 1939 or 41. Furthermore a big reason the USA's population was so supportive of the UK and entering the war in Europe was because they owed the USA a lot of money and those loans wouldn't be repaid if Germany conquered them

HoI4 combat has really awful balance and bugs out the ass. Apparently Paradox believes it was impossible to conduct an offensive before the tank was invented. Dumbfucks. Even if you overhauled all the divisions to HoI3 stats though you'd still be left with wonky division behavior and a way too constrictive combat width. I've really come to dislike HoI3/4s combat width since it has no historical basis to be so small and it leads every army to have huge amounts of forces across a wide front rather than laser-focused penetrations.

 

HoI4 (without DLC) is in the Humble Monthly (early unlock).

 

Ok, enough babbling about how games should be made on my part. I have a few specifics to ask.

Is it me or the game in 1.53 became harder since 1.4x ? I started with a non-removed version from inventory of 1.4x, took Germany to learn the basics of game because why not and was able to pull off a roughly "historical" blitzkrieg against France in 40 with cutting and destroying a strong army in Belgium/Northern France first. All that learning the game as I went along, I watched a tutorial or two but other than that - it was more or less a first attempt at it.
However now i'm playing 1.53 and it seems to be more difficult to pull off despite me already knowing the basics. Weird. The last time in a HoI game France 40 was challenging was in Darkest Hour (or was it Arsenal of Democracy? One of the 2). France not being easy is not a bad thing in itself but is unexpected. The AI in 1.53 also seem to behave differently, less suicidal small scale landings or attacks just because the AI "can". Which overall feels like an improvement when enemy AI is involved.

Questions:
Is there a way to prevent Italy joining the war already in 39 when I get puppets involved as Germany ? It's weird but if my puppet is in war against Poland then Italy can join the puppet without asking me if I agree. But If I don't have any puppets they can't do it and don't attack the Allies by themselves. Weird.

Vaarna_Aarne
I downloaded Kaiserreich for HoI4, France in Africa picked my attention (you can go Bonapartist absolute monarchy/dictatorship, how cool is that ) but maybe you would recommend an easier faction to start ?

 

Serus

Yeah, 1.5 patch series improved the AI a lot. Still need to use one of the AI mods (I play with Expert AI 4.0) to get a real challenge, but vanilla AI will do if you're just learning and starting out.

 

If only your own troops could act sensibly when given sensible orders... what annoys me the most is when they never seem to attack already created pockets with enemy divisions inside. They just wander around the pocket instead. I thought at first I was doing something wrong but it seems to be the "default" behaviour. I know, I know - you can command manually but that was what HoI2 was all about, I don't wan't to do it here all the time with all those nice battle plans and the ability to draw cool looking arrows and lines on the map. Besides HoI2 had army corpses for that purpose, here you need to order divisions which is less sensible.
To think about it, it probably makes the big (40 width) divisions. even better than they already are because of combat mechanics.
How do people on the Codex play it when it comes to using battle plans vs manually giving orders to most divisions ?

 

Manual guidance of an active battle plain is worth it, since you need the battle plan for the planning bonuses but there are times when the AI is just being plain stupid like for instance in ignoring pockets. My personal pet peeve is when the fronts get altered by whatever reason (peace events can be very hard in this regard, particularly in Great War and Russia where I had two army groups relocate themselves to a single province of unsupplied Turkish mountains after Russia evented out of the war) which usually leads to catastrophe if you aren't on your toes.

Easiest start for learning things is probably Russia, if you don't get yourself into a renewed civil war you have probably the largest degree of freedom of action right now and overall easy pickings in terms of foreign focuses, and generally the most accessible point for getting involved in other people's business.

Other good starting countries are Japan and Austria due to being again presented with a much larger degree of freedom of action thanks to location and political situation, but they're also more likely to get entangled in bigger things. Japan is due for a rework tho, but the old tree still by and large functions (then again, Austria's rework is still in progress too, but overall basics function). Mostly the issue you have to deal with is the possible war in the Pacific with Germany being kinda wonky in regards to peace events and when or how they trigger.

Commune of France is also simpler than Germany, but overall I feel that those two are kinda boring but that's because of the limitations of geography (which is to say the distance between Berlin and Paris).

National France is good fun, albeit one where you have to work pretty hard since Commune is simply way stronger than you are by every metric and you don't really have much in the way of help or easy expansion, and in case of the Commune you will have to balance between not letting Germany win and making over the sea. I suppose conquering Spain by any means necessary would be a good first step.

Kwa is also a lot of fun, but it is challenging winning the civil war since IMO overall the government is by far the worst off in regards to the combatants, with the possible exception of PSA if they become active participants in the Second American Civil War.

 

Battleplan the fronts, micro the breakthroughs, encirclements and clearing out the pockets. Although pockets can be left alone if you're not advancing very quick as they will eventually just run out of supplies.

 

Yeah, it's funny how HoI4 tried to make the game HoI3 but more automated, yet you end up needing to do more manual work in times like this. By making orders more detailed they had to make it so units are forced to stick to the plan, and as soon as the plan changes they can't do anything.

Just use the frontline planner and do all attacks manually. Unless the enemy is incredibly pathetic. Unfortunately even the frontline planner sucks a lot of the time, randomly shuffling units around and leaving huge gaps in breakthroughs so all your tanks get encircled. On the other hand playing without frontlines at all makes it really hard to visually distinguish borders. The game just isn't meant for manual play.

 

Played a bit more. After learning the basics using Germany I played a Poland Stronk game: Poland, Ironman, random focus choices for AI, going for my own faction from the start.
It took me 3 attempts but still was way too easy. The only difficulty lies in the fact that Hitler might go after You even if You give to his demands in 39. It was actually a pleasant surprise the first time as it is a very plausible scenario. Still the 3rd time a charm and after I gave him one province and did all to stay on good terms he left me alone. Which left me with "only" the Soviets to worry about. But what are soviets on normal difficulty against the combined might of Potato's ~80 infantry only divisions + Lithuania, Latvia and Finland (the last one only initially, they lost to Soviets despite me tying up most of the Red Army).
Took years to slowly grind them down but I wasn't in a hurry. In the end over 10 millions Soviets dead vs my ~250k (yep, more than a 1:40 ratio). Even Lithuanians with their small army killed over~1 million. Completely ridiculous. But the most ridiculous part is that it was done without micromanaging too much and without too many encirclements, probably less than 100 divisions in total lost by the soviets in pockets before the final stage when their army started to collapse. It's just a result from the brain dead Soviet AI that simply throws constantly all his army at my superior and entrenched divisions, often positioned behind rivers. They keep coming. Like lemmings. Once weakened I slowly advanced a few provinces at a time, never attacking strong positions directly, never taking risks. The only problem I had was that my puny economy could barely replace the equipment losses even if I only was building ~2 new divisions at once at a time. Ended the war with ~90 combat divisions.
It was as I said already several times ridiculous to the point of being comical.

Once you annex most of Soviet Union, you get all the factories and resources to take on anyone you want To make things easier Hitler by 44 managed to lose the war against the Allies lead in Europe by... Republican Spain. I just went in in time to grab eastern provinces of Germany. After that I lost interest. I was already building nuclear reactors and researching strategic bombers not to mention producing an upgraded 44 fighter model in large numbers. No point continuing.


Edit: I suppose the challenge would be to pull it off on the highest difficulty (and maybe giving USSR specifically a good boost).

 

Fighting Soviets before 41 is easy mode. Great Purge debuff absolutely wrecks their combat capabilities.

 

AI Germany lasting until 44 with a player-controlled Poland/any Eastern European non-Axis country is a pretty long time.


Hungary -> Habsburg Empire path is also pretty fun, and you have a tougher job resisting Germany since they want Czechoslovakia and you cannot afford to give it up.

 

From what I've played with the 1.5 patch series, it's not that unusual for Germany to last long now. The AI got somewhat smarter about politics. Hitler doesn't just mindlessly trigger every war in his focus tree if he is already in the losing war or a stalemate.

 

The struggle is real

 

So, the crusades in the holy land and nazi germany are alternate history now? Nice illustration, though.

 

Next paradox game = No Mods!

 

It is written by luke wanker,what do you expect?! Doubt that the creature have the intelligence to acquire any basic knowledge from the years wasted on education.

 

Strange how they've chosen HoIIV, the most neutral of the paradox bunch. In CKII you can go on a crusade, expell jews, in Stellaris you can enslave and purge species with quite a variety of methods, including eating them and breeding them for food.

 

Heck, if we want to get technical Stellaris is the only one with EXPLICIT genocide.

 

Most big scale strategies are muss murder simulators. Back then everyone was crying about kids playing violent shooters, they didn't even know what they didn't know. How many people you can kill in your average Duke or Doom? Few hundreds? Thousand? Thats pathetic. I was playing MoO2 at the time and laughing about mass media madness while genociding BILLIONS of people every time I destroyed a colony.

 

My Byzantium in 1940 just after inventing free helicopter tactical bombers rides and preparing to remove the kebab from Ilyria, got very lucky cause Germany kicked out Shitler and went with their own Kaisar, Kwans got civil war and the commie puppet on wheel chair got replaced by Hue Long wanabie. So now the (((Anglo Saxons))) are ducking out between themselves over Haiti of all the things and the three Empires (Germany, Japan and BtR will take on Soviet Union) Polant exist being sensible enough to return Danzig and not being duped onto war by Perfidious Albion.

Comrade Serus yes the ai is very uneven when it comes to closing and liquidating pockets; sometimes you need to direct your divisions manually and this is why I do prefer to use the Superior firepower doctrines which are passive and hence work outside those battle plans.

Playing road to 1956 btw with custom Bizantium mod and some eye candy.

 

I'm kind of mixed in regards to R56 myself. A lot of it provides excellent way to play WW2, but it's also got some notable balance issues like the additional tech and tech choices allowing for crazy stacking of research time bonus. At least it's the only way to play with historical focuses turned off.


(Also the planning bonuses work as long as the plan is active, you can manually move the Grand Battleplan divisions just fine; Superior Firepower is still probably the best universal doctrine choice tho)

 

I play it mostly for alternative history scenarios, KR and OWB as straight historically correct WWII is boring and predictable: its either Gaymanistan manages to overcome USSR till 1942 and hence has resources and industry to fight on or Japan attacks KWA first which causes them enter Allies and its Game Over; you can't win against country which has 700 Oil and is protected by two oceans. For this purpose Road is excellent although some individual country mods (like the one I used for Screenshot) are of course of lot better quality and less op original Greece had for example insane 10% industry efficiency bonus from olives; but where you can play and win as Ethiopia or lead Spanish Restoration from Honduras? Even countries like Iraq or Belgium have interesting focuses, events and choices galore. But I do agree some of those extra technologies are either very unbalanced, at-least its not black Ice where you are forced to research and produce Horse carts, hooves, harnesses and six kinds of arty. Of course I really think the game should start in 1932 when Japanese invaded China and Shitler was on the verge of gaining power; would give you couple solid years to prepare for war and build some industry and allow for a few more nice what if scenarios.

 

The Cold War mod has potential, but currently it's mostly just a mod of watching nothing happen for decades (also some truly bizarre industry and national spirit/focus balance between USSR and Kwa) with features that only make it slower to run.