Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Heroic Liberator]

 

[Raghar]

Situation is bit complicated.
UK is fighting France and Japan.
Italy is fighting Germany.
France is fighting Germany, Yugoslavia, Greece and UK.
Poland is fighting Germany, France, Greece and UK.
India is trying to democratically leave UK.
Romania kingdom is kicking Austria ass, (after failed Hungary attempt to create habsburg monarchy again under Hungarian leadership). Also it's on Poland and completely nonconquered czechoslovakia side and is murdering Germany.
Yunan was trying to conquer French Indochina and joined UK faction.

Also US be nice to Japan, I need to conquer evil Australia.

Prognosis is:
Italy would declare war on France. And Russia would say to Poland: Poland do you remember all these peple who used to live in Eastern Poland, all these oppressed Ukrainians. Ukrainians are living as part of unified Russia, and they are Russian relatives. They are pleading to Russian soviet to get back theirs land from Poland. Poland gib these lands back.

Italy, you are in war with UK and Germany. Why are you trying to fight also France? Wouldn't that allow UK and Germany and Greece and Yugoslavia to oblitarate you? Yea, I know Japan is in war with: Germany, UK, Greece, Yugoslavia, Trinidad and Tobago, not yet conquered EVIL AUSTRALIA, India, British Malaysia, Jamaica (yea that was really brutal shock when Jamaica declared war on Japan, but Japan has recovered, it only need to conquer land between Jamaica and Jamaica), Egypt, Bhutan, Quatar (or how is it called when it's under UK occupation Trucial states?), NZ, Jordan (Yea that bitch is conquering Japanese occupied Saudi Arabia, they were far less assholes when they worked with Japan, and now Jordan needs to allow them become THE WORST OBNOXIOUS ARABIANS IN THE PENISSULA nearly on the INDEPENDENT KUWAIT level of Arabian assholes), and I'm pretty sure I missed 10 other countries. But Italy these are often quite far away country that got into war because of an invitation, France is your neighbor who would be pissed because Italy backstabbed it.

 

[sser]

Damn this game is addicting. It's been 15ish years since I got into HOI and forgot how fun it is once you get into the groove. Steam shows me at 24hrs in past two weeks which is pretty high for me as I am busy lately. Also getting that Tetris-effect of going to sleep and then thinking out civ-mil factory problems.

After a few games with Russia I tried my hand at USA. It was actually going alright given that I had no fucking clue what to do with the navies. It's 1943 and I have bombers all over the Axis powers, two land armies in North Africa, and another army bouncing around the islands of the Pacific with the Philippines as homebase. I thought it was going well, particularly strangling Japan by grinding their convoys to dust but right before I closed for the night their doomfleet finally appeared (not a clue where it was all these years) and wrecked my shit. Lost a few battleships and a carrier or two as well. I find managing the navies somewhat difficult because the UI gets really clustered very easily when it comes to who is in what zone. The air bases have a nice line to show you where they're going, whereas the navy it's just one big blotch. Oh well, I'm building an enormous fleet of B17s and B29s to just wreck everything and have scientists looking into splitting the atom.

Oh, and having the US economy go "online" is super satisfying. Once you break into total mobilization, ease up on the exports, and start conscripting, the amount of sheer industry is just insane. I'm building everything out the ass, sending lend lease to China, UK, Russia, and Commie Spain, and still have more than enough left over to supply my own army.

 

[Raghar]

The result of Italy Greece war. Greece has Italy, and Italy's capital is in Egypt.

 

[Baptismbyfire]

How is the AI now? Is it worth playing?

 

[Raghar]

How is the AI now? Is it worth playing?

They didn't hire me as developer, thus they don't even know the biggest problems. Or they are happy with these biggest problems, because they work mostly fine in historic mode.

WWII games are kinda boring, because they have rather simplistic starting conditions. Few large blocks, and Africa countries are subjugated.

When playing in non historic mode, this game kinda needs director. To prevent easy mode when commie italy allies with Russia. UK needs to go nazi to allow Germany to have a chance.

 

[shywn]

The "big picture" part of the AI has not seen much if any improvement.

The AI is fairly competent at land warfare since 1.5, or at least it knows to defend its ports well. In fact, too well. That update made the Allies AI incompetent, unable to achieve anything resembling the Normandy landings. I do not know if they have fixed that by now. I heard they did something in 1.9 about that. Maybe someone who's had experience with 1.9 or 1.10 can tell me.

Russia will still have its field marshal forever attacking into the German lines and burning all of their equipment in those attacks. The 50 military factories they allocate to artillery alone is not enough to offset those losses.

Sea warfare... The AI will pour its research into submarines and never into any surface ship. Likes to assign its dockyards banging out convoy escort fleets. Not much else I can say about it. It has strike forces and forces on naval invasion duty but how to lure them out for a nice decisive battle is still a mystery to me.


I'm quite unhappy about the direction the game has been heading, where they took the nonsensical congress road-block thing they added to the United States and decided that every country needs something similar, every country must now have a set of (initially invisible!) decisions that may be unlocked from the focus tree and may be required to unlock further focusses and of course these decisions come with non-trivial political power costs and with 30-day timers attached, and they're the only way to untangle the debuff spirits your country starts with.

(Oh, and now every possible equipment designer must be locked behind a focus that is halfway down the tree too. Half of the political figures, too. So much fun.)

I might not hate it so much if those decisions were NOT artificially hidden like that. I might not hate it so much if it stated clearly why must I crush the communists and what benefits might I get from that. But, well, right now it seems that I am expected to play the game blind.

 

[Malakal]

How is the AI now? Is it worth playing?

There is a mod for that and it makes it p good but that basically means minors are very limited in playability then.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

WWII games are kinda boring, because they have rather simplistic starting conditions. Few large blocks, and Africa countries are subjugated.

And you can do the test of simply deleting all of South America from the map and see how long it takes for players to notice, if they notice at all.

 

[Raghar]

WWII games are kinda boring, because they have rather simplistic starting conditions. Few large blocks, and Africa countries are subjugated.

And you can do the test of simply deleting all of South America from the map and see how long it takes for players to notice, if they notice at all.

Well, in HoI4 Mexico has more resources and military than Brazil. Dunno if that's historically accurate.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Sea warfare... The AI will pour its research into submarines and never into any surface ship. Likes to assign its dockyards banging out convoy escort fleets. Not much else I can say about it. It has strike forces and forces on naval invasion duty but how to lure them out for a nice decisive battle is still a mystery to me.

On a certain level, this makes sense. There is a fundamental problem with naval warfare, which is that outside of submarines, convoys, and destroyers, you basically have to win every naval battle or you just flush at minimum a year down the drain every defeat. So you can at least slightly mitigate this by making the AI focus just on the side where attrition is a thing. But I'd say even besides the AI, the general problem with naval warfare is that it's fundamentally busted by being forced to try and follow even remotely historical production, and every attempt at naval battle system Pdox has made has been purely a numbers check so it ends up in a pretty unsatisfying state no matter what until a way in which there could be even a slight element of planning that isn't all fleet production is figured out.

 

[Stavrophore]

The AI is fairly competent at land warfare since 1.5, or at least it knows to defend its ports well. In fact, too well. That update made the Allies AI incompetent, unable to achieve anything resembling the Normandy landings. I do not know if they have fixed that by now. I heard they did something in 1.9 about that. Maybe someone who's had experience with 1.9 or 1.10 can tell me.

The problem is out of supply status that is placed just after you land on a tile that is not a port. You can't make artificial port, something like theyve did in normandy. This completely removes any need for placing defence along the coast. Only place defenders in fortified ports and you won -any units that landed will suffer attrition very fast. Even if you cut off the port with naval superiority, they usually have enough supplies from ground node/VP. Paradox really need to rethink the supply system.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

If I want to take over Canada as the US and preemptively invest in a strong enough navy as to keep the UK from landing if they do join the war against me, do I have to invade Britain nonetheless and force the UK to capitulate or can I just annex Canada without being stuck in an endless war across the pond?

 

[Stavrophore]

If I want to take over Canada as the US and preemptively invest in a strong enough navy as to keep the UK from landing if they do join the war against me, do I have to invade Britain nonetheless and force the UK to capitulate or can I just annex Canada without being stuck in an endless war across the pond?

You need to defeat UK. And then someone else, if they are strong enough and joined allies xd

 

[shywn]

There is a fundamental problem with naval warfare, which is that outside of submarines, convoys, and destroyers, you basically have to win every naval battle or you just flush at minimum a year down the drain every defeat.

There's a glaring problem with naval XP as well: You get loads of if you're in an evenly matched fight. But you get only a pittance if one side is overpowered. Submarines vs convoys? One side is overpowered. Escort fleet vs submarines? One side is overpowered. Strike force vs escort fleet? One side is overpowered. Only strike force vs strike force nets you decent XP, but even then still barely enough to XP-boost one tech.

I toned down my naval XP requirements via defines.lua, just to be able to design a goddamn ship during the war.

But decisive battles aren't really that bad. Ships, at least the bigger ones, usually don't die. They'll have to spend months at a drydock for repairs perhaps, they might lose their experience, but they usually survive.

 

[sser]

Ironically, I've been quite enjoying the naval combat. There's a lot of weirdo UI to work around, but once I figured it out a lot of the headache went away. A huge one is to make sure your fleets have their danger thresholds set right. So have the scouting teams to basically never engage, and even my strike forces I basically left at 'medium' so they didn't get in over their heads anywhere. In the research tree, I would prioritize the fire control techs that greatly reduce your chances of receiving critical blows. Pretty sure those are what knock out the heavies when they could have disengaged.

The aircraft carriers I think you can only max at 3, but I broke it on occasion. You get penalized 20% of your flight, but if you bring in a carrier with 100 planes I don't think it matters much. Battleships are still strong as hell and probably one of the reasons why the US Navy bulldozes. Without the historical attack on Pearl Harbor, you're left with an enormous fleet of battleships, some of them fairly 'modern' for the era. My battleships were still trucking enemy fleets long into the war and I never broke them off - kept them as one big wrecking ball.

Make sure your foreign ports are well protected. I had a fleet docking in like Guam or Wake Island and it got port striked and I lost a carrier. Pretty rough. Not that it matters as the U.S. -- you just shit out ships on the daily and grind the Japanese into dust.

Actually design the ships. For example, I had destroyers made to scout and hunt subs. Heavy emphasis on speed, airplane recon, and depth charges. The destroyers I used as strike force screens mostly carried anti-air and eventually those guns that hit a little bit of everything.

Finally conquered Europe as USA. Wasn't too difficult. America's industrial might is absolutely insane. Not sure if the AI cheats or what it's like to have thousands of bombers blowing up factories, ports, and refineries 24/7.

Unfortunately, some sort of hate between Bulgaria and Luxembourg sparked this little doozy about 3days after the conclusion of fighting:

 

[Raghar]

I looked at AI, and AI decided to keep US at 80 percent exports even when it needed that steel for making convoys, didn't bother to prioritize convoys to have convoys, and lacked steel for ships because of keeping 80 percent of steel in reserves for trade, even when only half was traded.

It would probably obliterate the rest of the world, but without allocating steel to make transports, it didn't have more than 20 transports for all theirs troops.

 

[sser]

I looked at AI, and AI decided to keep US at 80 percent exports even when it needed that steel for making convoys, didn't bother to prioritize convoys to have convoys, and lacked steel for ships because of keeping 80 percent of steel in reserves for trade, even when only half was traded.

It would probably obliterate the rest of the world, but without allocating steel to make transports, it didn't have more than 20 transports for all theirs troops.

I've noticed the AI sometimes flatlines. I had a game as USA I restarted cause Germany didn't bother to do much of anything.

I can say as Germany myself I did have a game where the USA was aggressively involved, landing giant armies in North Africa, Albania, Italy, and France almost simultaneously.

 

[Raghar]

The result of xmass HoI4 as ComChi. As you can see EU got it's multicultural dream. Luckily for theirs population most of these countries are commie. UK for some reason decided to declare war against Russia before war with Germany was over.

 

[shywn]

How many of these hunks of metal do I need to have to take on Japan's fleet? It takes about nine months to build one. Playing as Netherlands in Batavia.

And to answer my own question: Three is not enough, but four to six might be.

A story of four fleets. Two minor ones, two major ones. Locale: Sea area North of New Guinea.

Course of events:

1. Have a fleet of three heavy cruisers (shown above) and 20-ish destroyers as screen act as the strike force. Let the Caustic guy command. (He was the best I had. Plus he had Cruiser Captain.)

2. Set up 400 heavy fighters to patrol the skies to nullify any air superiority the enemy might get from the carriers.

3. Have a single destroyer patrolling the seas doing reconnaissance work. (For some reason, my strike force would not budge unless I had full knowledge of the opposing fleet. Even though they were fully visible in combat!)

4. Set up a new fleet of my oldest submarines, with a greenhorn level 1 admiral, to convoy raid the area. I had to lure the Japanese out somehow, right? The reason behind the admiral choice was to have my strike fleet's admiral take command when he arrived, due to his higher level.

5. Their escort fleet arrives to protect the convoys. My submarines wisely start running away.

6. My strike force starts out of New Guinea, heading to destroy the escort fleet. Luckily just slowly enough to not quite finish with the combat before the next step.

7. Their carrier strike force arrives. It was 40-50 ships in size. To my surprise, most of its destroyer screen had been replaced with light cruisers, which stacked the odds heavily against me. Light cruisers are incredibly resilient as screens. To make matters worse, one of my three heavy cruisers (my pride of the fleet) had somehow been heavily damaged in the fight with the escort fleet and was already running away, with no way to override it.

I had previously tested (when I had their strike force in sight) that I had to set my strike fleet to "always engage" for them to not run away screaming, and as soon as I could see their forces entering combat, that's what I did.

My ships could not hold their own for too long, and had to run away but it was a victory nevertheless. Half of my screens are now at the bottom of the ocean, and most ended up there when they were trying to run away.

I sunk two of their heavy cruisers, many light cruisers and many destroyers. Not enough to lower their screening efficiency below 95 % at any point, however. I sunk numerically more than they sunk mine, and also much more expensive ships than mine. It was a good trade.

My heavy cruisers all survived, but need to spend a few months at a dockyard, and I'll be building two more, as well as replacing my sunk screens.


As far as I can tell, the United States has not had a single clash with the Japanese fleets thus far. So this has all been a solo effort from the Netherlands.

Also worthy of note, for some reason, the Japanese stopped trying to invade my territory navally a long time ago. I wouldn't have needed the elaborate set-up had they still been running invasion support missions with their navy. The AI works in mysterious ways.

 

[Raghar]

Yea, but well you need only few ships to deal with Japan. When a pilot name is Dong, he needs to sink ALL JAPANESE BATTLESHIPS just to not be shit upon.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Speaking of navies...

 

[Raghar]

Speaking of navies...

I read more funny posts on Paradox HoI4 forum and reddit.

It was basically:
"wow we finally would be able to design ships and control gun size and ranges."
"WTF, they created DLC to improve naval combat, and as part of DLC they completely removed gun accuracy and ranges? Now carriers are easily attacked by anything, and naval combat feels like WWI."


...
And they paid money for that.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

So Finlandia doesn't have national focus yet? wtf

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I read more funny posts on Paradox HoI4 forum and reddit.

It was basically:
"wow we finally would be able to design ships and control gun size and ranges."
"WTF, they created DLC to improve naval combat, and as part of DLC they completely removed gun accuracy and ranges? Now carriers are easily attacked by anything, and naval combat feels like WWI."


...
And they paid money for that.

It's another one of those things that ends up being a huge dumb problem, since if they go with simulationism then every Battleship technology and Battleship built is pure waste. Everything is down just to carriers and destroyers, and who can make the most of them. And as usual, just made worse by the time scales of production.

I have absolutely no idea how they could fix the naval system. Even with gun accuracy and ranges it was only marginally less fucked.