Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well in terms of patrol groups it isn't so much that the individual patrol needs much (so far it seems 6DD/1LC is all you need per patrol), it's that you need a lot of patrols.

 

[Raghar]

I tried a ship designer in old game.

Well the thing with the actual missions is really just that you have to set up fleets specifically for each given job. I usually end up having two or three Strike Force fleets (each with just one task force), 4+ Patrol fleets with multiple task forces, and a submarine fleet with multiple raider task forces. I haven't tried mines yet.

Right now the thing I'm having trouble with is grasping the ideal task force sizes, it seems you need a shitload of destroyers and light cruisers for a Strike Force to absorb fire, or something. My Commie US navy got almost pulverized because I was trying to skimp on the destroyers.

Well obviously when DD are much easier to manufacture than CA, or CL, they should be used as escorts. DD are much easier to replenish. (If I remember correctly, Japanese AI used 44 DDs for covering its 4 CVs and one BB and two CA.)

When I looked at my navy DD zipping around at 44 knots with >90 torpedo value, they would do bad things to capital ship when they manage to get at it.


Airplanes are not that brutal, it took me year and half to blow up Japanese carriers when I tried ComChi. I had about 300-500 naval bombers. Sea zones near Bejing and the zone between China and Japan had about 800 mines each.

I found some problematic behavior however. Setting order to patrol made task forces rather inefficient at killing enemy ships. Setting ships at raiding managed to get enemy ships set to escort to fight. Likely setting DDs on escort, would make them much better at finding submarines. (Perhaps at cost of some sunk transports.)

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Seems to me Patrol doesn't even try to kill enemy ships, just tag them for Strike Force to show up. One thing I've been pondering based on what I've read and experienced, it seems LC should be the spotter ship now, with Destroyers having a split of torpedoes and depth charges (plus their own sonar and radar, obv, but LC also takes two seaplane catapults).

And yea, in case of Japan it might be the new meta to just build killer Destroyers with Sasebo and killer Subs to take advantage of Long Lance and the fact they can absorb casualties.

 

[Space Satan]

It's that time of the year again

 

[Life of the Party]

I went back to this thing after some 400 DLCs and was playing unaligned Yugoslavia with a plan of eventually joining the Allies.

The Brits went with No Further Appeasement and the French and the Dutch joined them. Czechoslovakia created the Little Entente with me and Romania, the Romanians went with the Cordon Sanitaire and the Poles went with the Intermarium.

One would expect for all these decisions, alliances and guarantees to produce an all-out war as soon as Germany moves a finger but the only thing they produced was Churchill criticizing me for accepting the dismantle of Czechoslovakia even though nobody asked me anything. After that Romania left the Little Entente and Germany invaded Poland with only the Romanians helping them.

Another game I was literally Hitler and was informed that the Comintern Romania refused to give Transylvania to Axis Hungary. Except it didn't and Transylvania became a part of Hungary anyway and the war eventually broke out over India going fascist.

This whole thing of a focus tree or two every patch simply doesn't work. It causes various focus trees to feel completely disconnected from each other.

 

[what am i doing]

This whole thing of a focus tree or two every patch simply doesn't work. It causes various focus trees to feel completely disconnected from each other.

IMO it's a result of the development style Paradox has trained themselves to with all the DLC. Release woefully incomplete game, then release DLCs over time to milk money from customers and slowly complete the game. But because you make all the game's features separately from each other instead of making a complete game in the first place, your product will naturally suffer. You can't see how all the mechanics and content interact prior to release. Now they design games like that it also extends even to the free features that are neglected on release and then slowly patched in. The worst part is that their customer base, by and large, defends the practice and insists there's nothing wrong with releasing an unfinished husk and then gradually developing the game's content after release.

But in reality, it leads to broken poorly designed games.

 

[Agame]

There is also a problem when you create these huge unwieldy focus trees full of alt-history paths that then have to match up with all of the other nations focus trees, of course there are going to be results that dont match or are bugged. So instead of Paradox focusing on getting the actual WW2 systems functioning correctly, (just reference how broken the current naval AI is in a NAVAL FOCUSED DLC for fucks sake!!!), they are sinking development time into this shit.

But we have to support the Youtube Meme Lol-so-random retards...

If you really want to know how hopeless it is just check out this beautiful recent example from the official forums:

Who thinks, that HOI 4 could be a much better game, if it wasn't based around WW2?

And this is not someone "trolling", there is probably a fair number of the player base who agree with this sentiment. My question is why even play a WW2 focused game if you are not interested in history or WW2... Its completely baffling.

 

[what am i doing]

I think making content that plays well on YouTube / streams has actually started to become part of their business strategy. It'd explain all the "oh so wacky" dialogue in Stellaris - it's there for streamers to react to.

 

[Agame]

I think making content that plays well on YouTube / streams has actually started to become part of their business strategy. It'd explain all the "oh so wacky" dialogue in Stellaris - it's there for streamers to react to.

Exactly this, its part of catering to the wider casual audience, who generally have no knowledge or interest in history, beyond "punching Nazis" and all of this degenerate meme garbage. And its the reason I will continue to RAAAGE about it, because there is so much potential in these games to be better.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Trithne]

Yeah, that's gonna get deleted. Not sure why Paradox has a say in what mods people can put on the workshop, but here we are.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

It's that time of the year again

cant believe people play full hearts of iron games multiplayer with numerous people..

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

There is also a problem when you create these huge unwieldy focus trees full of alt-history paths that then have to match up with all of the other nations focus trees, of course there are going to be results that dont match or are bugged. So instead of Paradox focusing on getting the actual WW2 systems functioning correctly, (just reference how broken the current naval AI is in a NAVAL FOCUSED DLC for fucks sake!!!), they are sinking development time into this shit.

But we have to support the Youtube Meme Lol-so-random retards...

If you really want to know how hopeless it is just check out this beautiful recent example from the official forums:

Who thinks, that HOI 4 could be a much better game, if it wasn't based around WW2?

And this is not someone "trolling", there is probably a fair number of the player base who agree with this sentiment. My question is why even play a WW2 focused game if you are not interested in history or WW2... Its completely baffling.

lol, WTF...paradox has other games in other time periods too..I hate people

This is why though that I think a more focused game with perhaps more board game type mechanics could make for a better overall simulation. I know that matrix tried that with World in Flames but that was literally one programmer working on that game, it was (and is) way too complicated for a single person to program.

 

[Raghar]

Some build costs for high end ships in man the guns. In case someone wants to plan long term strategy.
Omnipurpose destroyer 2400
CL 6000 (note early can be at about 5300)
CA 8400 (note early can be at about 7200)
Super heavy 18000
High end carrier 12000 - 14900
BB 12000

DD costs can be lowered by making them specialized, but then you'd face destroyer dead because ASW destroyer didn't have anything to shoot aircraft down.

On the other hand, developers created simulation where a torpedo plane overfly carrier and attacks destroyer that's doing AA for carrier, while all ships in the fleet are shooting at it... inefficiently. I wonder what happened with roll against airplane ground defense, and if plane didn't evade, it did some damage. Now we have weird percentages where damage is lowered by fleet AA value, and some weird stuff like that. They still need to simulate attack on ship to see what was hit.

On the positive side convoys can into AA and they are shooting NAVs like champs.

Some people complained about lack of CV damage. Thus there is an example that shows CV can do a lot of damage.

Nimitz is commanding ComChi carrier from a submarine.

 

[Micormic]

You know. The other day I was bored so I fired up HOI4. Then I remembered the game was shit so I quit quite literally 10 seconds into my campaign.


So I fired up HOI3 then realized I didn't feel like spending an hour fixing the ai's retarded OOB.

Feels bad.




Played victoria 2 instead, picked Brazil and began re enforcing slavery in South America until england come kick my ass.


Actually in the mood for a good ww2 game, shame hoi2/darkest hour is such a pain to get to run on newer pc's.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

You can command your troops normally, even if you're using plans.

 

[ZeniBot]

The AI's pretty fucked so you're not missing anything by avoiding HOI4. It felt the most early access of any Paradox game so far. Even now its vastly incomplete and yet its had years and several dlcs under it. Paradox are just that incompetent.

 

[Micormic]

The AI's pretty fucked so you're not missing anything by avoiding HOI4. It felt the most early access of any Paradox game so far. Even now its vastly incomplete and yet its had years and several dlcs under it. Paradox are just that incompetent.

I mean we're talking about a game where you can world conquest as bhutan/el salvador in like 7 years.


People defending this pile of shit are probably the 'type' paradox downgraded for. Their old games weren't perfect but HOI4 is next tier garbage.

 

[Micormic]

You can command your troops normally, even if you're using plans.

Ye ok, everyone else who played the shit game is crazy then.



Retard.

 

[Raghar]

HOI4 is so bugged it's almost comical.
On the top of my head, those mechanics (among other) don't work well:
encircling divisions to cut supply; a common bug is that they keep being supplied (control of edge provinces 100%) until you reload
unit joining fights from reserve (the worst units will join the fight, not the best due to an overflow bug)
river detection; game will sometimes invent rivers
naval access level is half bugged; is bypassed under easily reproduced conditions
decryption to see enemy divisions (ever wondered why you get that '?' even at max decryption. Because a common situation makes it so that it compares your decryption against your own encryption, not your enemies)
several air advisors (bonus has no effect); panzer leader trait speed bonus
escort efficiency from air doctrines
units moving to reach battle plan; sometimes they will move through enemy territory even if losing badly
air volunteers
naval pathing was corrected in 1.6.0, used to be bugged too

This is what I found on theirs forums. That's crazy.

EU IV is slowly degrading as well.

 

[Agame]

You can command your troops normally, even if you're using plans.

Pretty sure I did that, and then my troops started going elsewhere I had not told them to

You need to delete any front lines they are associated with, otherwise the AI will immediately hijack them. If the divisions are not connected to front line or fallback orders etc and still moving then something has gone wacko with your game.

A lot of players will set up frontlines before a war to build planning bonus, and then delete everything and go to manual control of all divs. Funnily enough Paradox recently made the planning bonus decay very rapidly if you do this just to counter people who play like this (thats some serious "no fun allowed BS"). But I would never bother with this, personally with both HOI3 - 4 I actually like to let the AI command most of my armies as then the game plays more like you are the leader of a country with subordinates, rather than the Hitler dream of single-handedly microing every divisions movements in every theater. Most importantly it makes the game infinitely more challenging as its harder to cheese the AI when your own armies are doing silly AI stuff.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Well I tried Man the Guns. Fuel and the navy portion of the DLC works better than I expected. It added a lot of depth without adding too much uneccessary micro. Plenty of QoL changes also in the patch, which is nice.

But. I don't know what they've done with balancing, but either Allies are hopeless or Axis are overbuffed or something. Germans defeat the Soviets easily in all the couple of games I played so far, and Japan quickly takes all of the Pacific.

I gave Soviets maximum slider buff last game, then I tried playing democratic Netherlands using the new focus tree (which is really nicely done btw). I couldn't save France, but I managed to save myself, so I'm just sitting behind forts, building a massive army, waiting for that late 1944/early 1945 when I can just roll out of Netherlands and buttfuck Adolf from behind. Except of course they defeated the Soviets AGAIN, and Allied army is nowhere to be seen the whole time, even though they could use my location as a perfect beachead.

I'm now running an India save. Japan defeated, then I kept pumping the Soviets with everything my factories could produce and they're still defending in 1946. So at least that works. I got bored of Allies not doing anything again, so I went and defeated Italy by myself, and now I'm defending it against Vichy and Germans, again by myself. Why by myself? Because UK has 50 divisons at Iraq border, and US has 100 at Mongolian border. And they both have additonal 50 in Venezula, a WW2 superpower which they can't defeat for 5 years now.

Seriously, what the fuck. The DLC is great but the AI hasn't been this bad since release.

 

[Life of the Party]

Germans defeat the Soviets

Everyone does.

 

[Agame]

Germans defeat the Soviets

Everyone does.

Pretty sure PDox is aware of Axis being overtuned, there was quite a bit of discussion on the official forums, I for one am happy that germany is a legitimate threat now. Obviously it does require some tweaking, the question is whether it happens before the next DLC...

 

[Life of the Party]

I saw them lose to Poland.