Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Vaarna_Aarne]

KR feels so much better than vanilla simply because WW2 is not that good of a setting for this type of game.

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.

 

[Lone Wolf]

I wouldn't call HoI4's potential or base game "meagre"

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.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

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.

 

[Space Satan]

DD: War rework

Spoiler

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!

 

[Beastro]

Kaiserreich is overhyped mod, which is not quite different from BlackICE.

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.

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.

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.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

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

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

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

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.

 

[AwesomeButton]

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?

 

[fantadomat]

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.

 

[AwesomeButton]

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.

 

[fantadomat]

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.

 

[AwesomeButton]

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.

 

[Average Manatee]

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

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

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?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

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

 

[fantadomat]

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.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Space Satan]

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

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

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.

 

[Space Satan]

Naval DD

Spoiler

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 >) as historical Germany, to show how it plays differently now.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

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.

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.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

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.

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'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.

 

[Space Satan]

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.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

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.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

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).

 

[Raghar]

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