Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[AwesomeButton]

- The production system in HOI4, although so much more realistic and flexible than in older games, opens the door to game-balance exploits. Just one example is support companies. In DH they feel more like a luxury that you only reach for when you can afford it and when you know will use it. In HOI4 they become much cheaper to produce, because of the universal "support equipment" resource which can be spent on every kind of support company. You don't have "recon support equipment", "engineer support equipment", etc., it's just a generic "support equipment resource". So you stop looking at them as "support" and start including them in your base templates, because it's easy to be bathing in support equipment, which suits you for every type of support company. If this was DH you couldn't on a whim turn your engineering support brigades into artillery support brigades, once they are already in the production queue.

I mostly agree with your assessment but I don't think it's accurate to say it's very easy to be bathing in support equipment. You do need to be strategic about producing support equipment, depending on what country you're playing. It's quite easy to under-produce and end up halting deployment and reinforcement completely. I think this is overall a better approach than the older games, where you could simply do serial production of your support units and gradually add them to all your divisions.

It's true that you can underproduce, though it hasn't happened to me so far. What I mean was, for one thing, that support equipment is not broken down by type of support company, and for another - that even if you end up in the red, it's very easy to shift factories from any other resource where your stockpile can handle a temporary halt of production. Of course it wouldn't be as effective, but it will save you for the moment. This was not possible in DH. In DH you could indeed set up a production line for, say, AT attachments, put it at x99 and just gradually upgrade infantry divisions as you decide. But this was only good if you had a gearing bonus which was dependent on your policy (sliders), and each such long-producing line would cost something like 4.3 IC if I remember right, which is less negligible than a few HOI4 factories at least in my current measure. I may be wrong.

Something that also bugs me as too obviously gamey is the Military Factories - Equipment production - Army/Air experience dependency. Essentially you are buying division templates by building military factories. It's not difficult to calculate how many military factories you need producing Infantry Equipment per point of Army XP per day. And you really only need this capacity employed for the first 3-4 years of game time, after that you usually will be able to draw Army XP from combat, and those Military Factories become available again.

 

[Raghar]

- No more custom supply depots. No automatic supply depots either. Supply is no longer something you can stockpile at a certain "place" or tile on the map. Instead supply just flows from a point of origin (a country capital) down to divisions wherever they are on the map. The player doesn't care anymore about transport capacity, only about the infrastructure level of the "states" (the province groupings) on the path between the point of origin and the divisions.

- The above simplification leads to the reality that surrounding the capital of the enemy cuts supplies to all its forces, anywhere in the world. Yes, this means that you can literally starve the whole Red Army by encircling Moscow and waiting a few months. Checkmate, Stalin!

There are also supply points that generates limited number of supply. Basically enough for an unit of SH tanks with artillery and AA cause "you gotta be kidding" moment for half year.

- No commanders of air wings.

C'mon. Air war is a mess. There are far harsher problems.

- Command Mana needs to die. It wasn't even in the game at the beginning. Makes zero sense to have some infantry divisions farm XP by training, and as a result of that experience, go on and "invent" an amphibious division template.

Infantery divisions did training near ocean with ambhib ships, and as a result of theirs training they become heavy marine divisions.

HOI 4 lacks money as a strategic resource. Partly this is the reason for trade being dumbed down to "selling" civillian factories for resource inflow. There are no national stockpiles of resources anymore. So you can't build up reserves before a war and then economically expend them during the war. Once you start a war and your supply lines happen to be cut, your production will suffer immediately.

This has been done to prevent abuse. Now player in SP game can't do some absurd/nasty stuff, and need to actually play game. And in MP, it allows decent trade without crazy stuff with loans borrowning, and then basically falling back to trade in physical gold.

- Naval invasions performed using convoys to transport soldiers makes no sense, neither in game nor in historical context. Troop transport ships are apparently not necesseary in Paradox's version of WW2. I hoped this was something that was a stopgap solution and would be fixed in a navy-centered expansion, but apparently not, because it wasn't fixed in "Man the Guns".

THEY FUCKING SIMPLIFIED GAME IN THE MAN THE GUNS EXPANSION. The previous implementation at least had range in naval combat.

They can easily add transport ships. They could ask me to design decent research and naval building system. They can create templates for MP, and as people in MP how they would like MP implementation to not slow the game.

But frankly, they didn't. And considering how long it takes to finish game even with simplified rules, the only dedicated MP streaming community I seen was Bokuen and people who are playing with him. They typically play mods anyway, because they played too much base game.

- Doctrines are no longer locked by year. You can research your full doctrine tree and give yourself bonuses, ostensibly resulting from your General Staff research, for technologies you do not yet have, and then after the fact, research the technologies that open up the troop types which benefit from these doctrines. This is pretty dumb.

Actually nothing wrong with theoretical research happening to yet undeployed technology. Some countries had GREAT tank doctrines. Some of these even had tanks.

In real life it's really helpful to have doctrine before even designing the weapon system, because at least designers know how would soldiers use that system. For example UK shovel MK2 is vastly different from UK shovel MK1 which was designed mainly for purpose of digging, while shovel MK2 was additionally efficient in slicing people heads off. Shovel MK4 can even be used for opening cans without spilling can content EVERYWHERE.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Here is how I would have designed military doctrines research and division templates cost. It would have been much more simulationist and without mana-like abstract resources.

In your political tab you already have something called Military Staff. I would have the possible assignees to this military staff serve a simliar role to the Research Teams in HOI1/2/DH. The player wouldn't research military doctrines from the Research interface, but instead these theorists would occasionally come up with ideas from which the player would be able to pick from a list of options. Each option would be a set of modifiers, just as the current Doctrine technologies are sets of modifiers. I would have these options be generated dynamically however, and with some variance, depending on who is the theorist in the Military Staff working on this doctrine.

Proposals for increasingly complex division templates would also come from the Military Staff, and these proposals would be based on the doctrine choices that the player has made thus far. It would be possible that the Military Staff proposes a division template using technologies you haven't researched yet - like an armored recon company or a field hospital. Then this would give you a slight bonus to researching that tech.

Division template proposals could also be based on the types of divisions already taking part in ongoing conflicts, to simulate your Military Staff learning from the experience of other people's wars. The system could be made more complex by adding more factors.

You could object that taking away the player's ability to modify templates manually isn't worth the "immersion enhancement" changes. But I'm not excluding the possibility for the player to modfiy templates manually. I actually quite like the ability for the player to customize divisions, it reminds me of the meddling that historically used to occur by political leaders into military organization matters. So I would retain the ability of the player to alter templates, but I would have each alteration cost a temporary penalty to organization and combat stats, until the military people get accustomed to working with this awkward formation that the fuhrer/comrade came up with.

So there, no mana, and more realism at the same time.

 

[jebsmoker]

not exactly related to Hearts of Iron 4 per se, but a friend of mine told me that a few people are still working on Iron Cross. here's some actual evidence:

for those who don't know, Iron Cross was this retail Hearts of Iron 2 mod that was mostly known for its bugfuck insane tech tree. before you could research tanks, you had to research stuff like roads and the wheel. i am not making this up. try to imagine how excessive this is for a moment

the real icing on the cake is that most of the new devs don't know how to actually get the game's files, since you can't buy the game from Gamersgate anymore. i'm actually baffled someone didn't put the games files on some FTP server or whatever

 

[AwesomeButton]

"Lenin left us a great legacy, but we, his successors, fucked it up."
- Stalin, June '41

Ok, so my divisions are much better than the German ones, both infantry and armored, I have the advantage of numbers as well, yet I'm only slowly advancing in the direction of Warsaw, while around Eastern Prussia the Germans have broken through my lines and are quickly expanding the breakthrough towards Daugavpils (shit I wrote this right from the first time, I've turned into a true geek). In Romania, I pushed through the Prut river, but they are still defending well. The war started on the 11th June '41, and we've been going on for two weeks, now it's the 27th.

What could I have done wrong, should I provide more info?

 

[thesheeep]

What could I have done wrong, should I provide more info?

Without more info, that's pretty impossible to tell, could be anything from getting basic templates wrong to forgetting to use air (or using it wrong).
Two weeks isn't much, though - the general HoI strategy is to let them throw themselves against your fortifications until they start running low on people & supplies and only then push.
Except if you are so dominating that you can simply push no matter what - but that is highly unlikely against Germany.

One thing I did find, though (but maybe that's just Kaiserreich?) is that tanks are overrated. Sure, they can give you an advantage early on and some nations are so strapped for manpower they still need em, but starting from a certain point, everyone will get that high penetration tech bonus, making every infantry division into tank-busters and you'll see that "armor penetrated" sign everywhere.
At that point, all you get are fast glasscannons with a low manpower cost.

 

[AwesomeButton]

What could I have done wrong, should I provide more info?

Without more info, that's pretty impossible to tell, could be anything from getting basic templates wrong to forgetting to use air (or using it wrong).
Two weeks isn't much, though - the general HoI strategy is to let them throw themselves against your fortifications until they start running low on people & supplies and only then push.
Except if you are so dominating that you can simply push no matter what - but that is highly unlikely against Germany.

One thing I did find, though (but maybe that's just Kaiserreich?) is that tanks are overrated. Sure, they can give you an advantage early on and some nations are so strapped for manpower they still need em, but starting from a certain point, everyone will get that high penetration tech bonus, making every infantry division into tank-busters and you'll see that "armor penetrated" sign everywhere.
At that point, all you get are fast glasscannons with a low manpower cost.

Maybe I roleplayed too much - I built the soviet armies on the western border approximately how they were IRL - each army with one mech corps (two tank divisions and one motorized, which I substituted for an infantry because I didn't have the mana to develop good motorized divisions), some with two mech corps, besides the baseline two-three rifle corps which are three rifle divisions each in most cases. I also threw myself at them as soon as I had the casus belli ready. I'll post screenshots of the division templates later but mine are much better than theirs, filled up with support companies, and my tank divisions contain one heavy tank brigade each. I know tanks are too nerfed and it's even recommended to build only one tank category, but I thought if I can't LARP Stalin why am I even playing this :D

EDIT: when I'm talking about corps, I'm not that crazy to make each corps into a separate in-game "army", I just added the according number of divisions into each respective army which I had organized as an in-game "army". Back in DH I could recreate the corps too, but apparently that's too much for the zoomer playerbase.

 

[thesheeep]

Maybe I roleplayed too much - I built the soviet armies on the western border approximately how they were IRL - each army with one mech corps (two tank divisions and one motorized, which I substituted for an infantry because I didn't have the mana to develop good motorized divisions), some with two mech corps, besides the baseline two-three rifle corps which are three rifle divisions each in most cases. I also threw myself at them as soon as I had the casus belli ready. I'll post screenshots of the division templates later but mine are much better than theirs, filled up with support companies, and my tank divisions contain one heavy tank brigade each. I know tanks are too nerfed and it's even recommended to build only one tank category, but I thought if I can't LARP Stalin why am I even playing this :D

I think you mostly analyzed your own "mistakes" here.
If you gonna LARP Stalin, then you'll have to larp getting rekt as well until Germany runs out of steam (and hope that the Allies don't fuck it up, which they admittedly tend to do due to naval invasion incompetence).

Though the worst mistake seems to be the "throwing yourself at them" right from the start.
Superior tech helps, but it won't make you dominate if it isn't multiple years ahead (which is unlikely in 41).

I mostly play small-to-medium-sized nations (never played Germany, for example), but that is something I'd never, ever do. Even if you end up winning, it will be a phyrric victory - and since manpower works somewhat decently in HoI4, you will regret throwing men away in the long run (admittedly, some nations might be an exception here).

Don't know too much about the math behind armor & damage so I can't really tell if one heavy tank in your tank divisions is a good idea or not.

One thing you CAN do, if that is possible, is to create (and hold) a staging area in western Europe. That way, the AI's incompetence in doing that themselves won't matter as they will happily use your landing area as a staging point for their own invasion.
It's what I did playing Canada - you can't win the war as Canada, but you can allow the Allies to not fuck up that way.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Maybe I roleplayed too much - I built the soviet armies on the western border approximately how they were IRL - each army with one mech corps (two tank divisions and one motorized, which I substituted for an infantry because I didn't have the mana to develop good motorized divisions), some with two mech corps, besides the baseline two-three rifle corps which are three rifle divisions each in most cases. I also threw myself at them as soon as I had the casus belli ready. I'll post screenshots of the division templates later but mine are much better than theirs, filled up with support companies, and my tank divisions contain one heavy tank brigade each. I know tanks are too nerfed and it's even recommended to build only one tank category, but I thought if I can't LARP Stalin why am I even playing this :D

I think you mostly analyzed your own "mistakes" here.
If you gonna LARP Stalin, then you'll have to larp getting rekt as well until Germany runs out of steam (and hope that the Allies don't fuck it up, which they admittedly tend to do due to naval invasion incompetence).

Though the worst mistake seems to be the "throwing yourself at them" right from the start.
Superior tech helps, but it won't make you dominate if it isn't multiple years ahead (which is unlikely in 41).

I mostly play small-to-medium-sized nations (never played Germany, for example), but that is something I'd never, ever do. Even if you end up winning, it will be a phyrric victory - and since manpower works somewhat decently in HoI4, you will regret throwing men away in the long run (admittedly, some nations might be an exception here).

Don't know too much about the math behind armor & damage so I can't really tell if one heavy tank in your tank divisions is a good idea or not.

While we're on the subject of larping, I forgot to mention a tiny detail - Germany called Japan and I'm currenlty being assfucked in Vladivostok. I won't even react surprised they broke the the non-aggression pact they had offered me a month prior.

 

[AwesomeButton]

So, it's 84 infantry (infantry + 7 mountain), 45 tank divisions on whole west Axis front. The templates are such:

Basic infantry was gradually upgraded to:

I also made my own infantry template, probably a waste of points, considering how similar it is for now:

Tank division:

The Germans' templates look pretty weak in comparison:

If you gonna LARP Stalin, then you'll have to larp getting rekt as well until Germany runs out of steam (and hope that the Allies don't fuck it up, which they admittedly tend to do due to naval invasion incompetence).

Though the worst mistake seems to be the "throwing yourself at them" right from the start.

I half-expected this to be so, actually. Based on my experience with The Great War Redux, I saw that the attacking side is always at a disadvantage because of entrenchment bonuses and river crossings, but I thought this effect was stronger in the mod than it would be in the vanilla game, because they had tried to simulate WW1 warfare, and because divisions would be much more upgraded in the vanilla game.

It feels like bonuses from division support companies and from doctrines aren't enough to make a tangible difference, since the Germans are doing quite well with pretty sloppy divisions.

 

[AwesomeButton]

The fact that there exist guides which describe and advise for "a no-aviation build" of USSR or of any country, and that from empirical experience it emerges that the best strategy is to ignore medium and heavy tanks, says enough about the gross balance issues the game has. IMO first they have to fix the balance, then ensure that the AI is recognizing the balance changes and is taking advantage of the wider variety of viable division templates. At the moment DH is a much truer WW2 simulation than HOI4, even with HOI4's production system. HOI4 has mostly the flashy graphics going for it and little else. Important systems are gutted.

I think I'll post this as a steam review.

 

[Malakal]

Tanks and assault guns are very very strong and so is airforce but you can win without those if you don't have the industry for them. In MP both are vital to victory to the point where pre war Germany will have 80% of its factories on fighters.

If you want to nit pick blame the AI, you can beat it with most useless strats...

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yea, tanks have value, even light tanks, because of their high Breakthrough stat which makes them notably better on the offensive. Light tanks combined with motorized is a basic way for encirclements.

When you have Armor stat superiority you basically have a crushing victory on your hands, hence why keeping up with Piercing is important. And why Heavy Tanks are so costly (and Medium tanks too relative to Lights, since Lights have fuck-all Armor).

I half-expected this to be so, actually. Based on my experience with The Great War Redux, I saw that the attacking side is always at a disadvantage because of entrenchment bonuses and river crossings, but I thought this effect was stronger in the mod than it would be in the vanilla game, because they had tried to simulate WW1 warfare, and because divisions would be much more upgraded in the vanilla game.

It feels like bonuses from division support companies and from doctrines aren't enough to make a tangible difference, since the Germans are doing quite well with pretty sloppy divisions.

The Great War and The Great War Redux simulate WW1 warfare mostly through drastically lower Breakthrough than Defense, which leaves the attacker at a disadvantage. So it will probably take a while before you can either motorize your infantry and/or start fielding tanks in large numbers to start mounting an offensive, and you'll probably need to throw some dudes to their deaths to gain an Aggressive Assaulter field marshal and as many leaders with Adaptive as possible (since due to the disparity between Defense and Breakthrough, terrain penalties are also more notable, especially compared to say BICE where by the end of the game you will have commando super-heavy tank divisions crossing mountains like a bawss). Usually the problem with those is that the German AI is too aggressive for its position and will leave itself open to attacks by exhausting its division organisation on useless attacks without having divisions that would just defend (which the Entente will have sort of by accident because Britain and France do not simultaneously throw in all of their front to a useless attack so someone's always the backup defender).

It works relatively well, usually the problem is really just that there is no stalemate peace option, and in Redux in particular I felt that compared to the old mod there was never a problem with manpower running out.

Tanks and assault guns are very very strong and so is airforce but you can win without those if you don't have the industry for them. In MP both are vital to victory to the point where pre war Germany will have 80% of its factories on fighters.

If you want to nit pick blame the AI, you can beat it with most useless strats...

Isn't the MP meta more in Strategic Bombers and Heavy Fighters, or did they fix Flying Doom Fortresses destroying fighters by the boatload per lost Flying Doom Fortress?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Tanks and assault guns are very very strong and so is airforce but you can win without those if you don't have the industry for them. In MP both are vital to victory to the point where pre war Germany will have 80% of its factories on fighters.

If you want to nit pick blame the AI, you can beat it with most useless strats...

Why is then common that in Multiplayer there are house rules on strategic bombers? Or on destroying factories? I also read about an exploit where the USSR intentionally allows uprisings on its territory in order to cause damage to its infrastructure as it retreats from those states (although I admit it sounds very Russian).

 

[Stavrophore]

Havent played HOI4 since long time, apparently they've disabled the code that enabled nuke mods to decrease state population. The game is really SJW. No civilian casualties, no terror bombing. Truly a total war simulator. And that's their politics since first HOI. Unless other company tries to tackle the market, we won't have any meaningful civilian mechanics in HOI series.

 

[thesheeep]

When you have Armor stat superiority you basically have a crushing victory on your hands, hence why keeping up with Piercing is important.

The problem is how much the latter invalidates the first.
As soon as a certain year rolls over and everyone gets the best piercing, all tanks become extremely expensive glass cannons and I don't really think that's very useful to most countries.
The high damage doesn't offset the fact that they crumble the moment some random infantry division with piercing (which in late game means every division, probably even horses and bikes) sneezes at them.

Until then, I agree, but I'm just not convinced those maybe 3 years or so of true advantage from armor is worth the investment over just ignoring tanks completely (except light ones I guess, for circling?).

Btw. that's one of the things that seem to be much better in Old World Blues. Don't think I've seen any robots there (kind of the tank equivalent) ever being faced with lots of piercing.

 

[Malakal]

Tanks and assault guns are very very strong and so is airforce but you can win without those if you don't have the industry for them. In MP both are vital to victory to the point where pre war Germany will have 80% of its factories on fighters.

If you want to nit pick blame the AI, you can beat it with most useless strats...

Isn't the MP meta more in Strategic Bombers and Heavy Fighters, or did they fix Flying Doom Fortresses destroying fighters by the boatload per lost Flying Doom Fortress?

MP is often modded but in HORST I haven't seen anyone use strat bombers for other reasons than maybe trolling enemies (put 500 over an air zone, bomb a bit, move them when they send fighters, repeat). Also usually fighters rather than heavy fighters but depends on area you want to use them (Pacific war heavy fighters are obviously better since airfields are far in between).

 

[Bigg Boss]

Is it worth buying this to play the Fallout mod?

 

[Malakal]

Tanks and assault guns are very very strong and so is airforce but you can win without those if you don't have the industry for them. In MP both are vital to victory to the point where pre war Germany will have 80% of its factories on fighters.

If you want to nit pick blame the AI, you can beat it with most useless strats...

Why is then common that in Multiplayer there are house rules on strategic bombers? Or on destroying factories? I also read about an exploit where the USSR intentionally allows uprisings on its territory in order to cause damage to its infrastructure as it retreats from those states (although I admit it sounds very Russian).

Probably for the same reason many groups limit submarines, its a micro game of whack-a-mole to change convoy routes and keep sending fighters where enemy is sending strat bombers...

 

[Raghar]

Is it worth buying this to play the Fallout mod?

PIRATE THE SHIT OUT OF THIS GAME. And send them letter they should made either game that's not about WWII, or simulate loses of civilian population as well.

 

[Bigg Boss]

I don't trust pirates.

 

[Raghar]

Also I tried la resistance DLC and it sucks. When you are playing low tech countries that don't have even civ factories to make intelligence agency, you know fuck all what certain big countries around doing. And then you are fucked.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

When you have Armor stat superiority you basically have a crushing victory on your hands, hence why keeping up with Piercing is important.

The problem is how much the latter invalidates the first.
As soon as a certain year rolls over and everyone gets the best piercing, all tanks become extremely expensive glass cannons and I don't really think that's very useful to most countries.
The high damage doesn't offset the fact that they crumble the moment some random infantry division with piercing (which in late game means every division, probably even horses and bikes) sneezes at them.

Until then, I agree, but I'm just not convinced those maybe 3 years or so of true advantage from armor is worth the investment over just ignoring tanks completely (except light ones I guess, for circling?).

Btw. that's one of the things that seem to be much better in Old World Blues. Don't think I've seen any robots there (kind of the tank equivalent) ever being faced with lots of piercing.

Infantry Breakthrough is so low that they won't catch up even later on. The combined arms tank division succeeds on the offensive because of the high Breakthrough stat that leaves infantry taking more hits. In lategame you also probs have the industry to absorb material losses (further reduced by high Reliability from Maintenance Companies, a must for any tank division). My take is usually that the proportion of tank brigades in the army rises in direct relation to IC.

With tanks, the question is really a matter of how much industry you can set aside specifically for them. The tank+motorized/mechanized divisions are the units that can hammer through and thanks to constantly rising speed are able to improve and improve at overruning enemy divisions even without encircling. Motorized on its own while easier on the IC and material requirements (I'd actually say that the biggest consideration in choosing between Medium and Heavy Tank for the second tank division type is material surpluses on Tungsten and Chromium, rather than their armor and speed) but doesn't match up to having tanks thrown in.

Pure tank division is a total waste obviously, you need at least 50% motorized or mechanized (or cavalry, if you're using heavy tanks) to meatshield the tanks (and to make them able to defend anything).

 

[thesheeep]

With tanks, the question is really a matter of how much industry you can set aside specifically for them.

Since I mostly play small-mid sized countries, the answer is generally "not a lot".

 

[Malakal]

Self propelled artillery has the highest soft attacks in the game combined with good mobility and solid armor, a combined arms tank-self propelled-mechanized division will absolutely slaughter infantry, especially under air support. Also you need some kind of infantry (mech or mot) to have any kind of org.

Once you achieve a strategic breakthrough with your tank divisions you just race around enemy lines and encircle them, that is the basic of both modern warfare and HoI4 warfare.