Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Raghar]

In case you are wondering what would happen when Britain is in axis and declares at Japan, then invite Germany.

What can go wrong? Of course war Iraq vs Iran happened.

2 weeks later.

Honorable mention goes to socialistic Finland, you were loyal to Russia to the end. You even stayed as part of socialistic Russia after the war, moving towards bright future. If US will not declare war against Japan because Australia called it Asia menace, you'd go to bright future, 50 megaton one. US is only country in the world that conserved manpower and send a division to fight Germany. They are probably itching to hit someone this time for real.

Let's introduce us to some nice neighbours. As you can clearly see, Greece and Macedonia are happily living together in the east europe, while offer to liberate Yugoslavia from evil Croatia was refused as too cruel to Yugoslavia. Hungary has finally fulfilled its dream to have country that goes from sea to sea.

Israel would surely be friendly with his new neighbor Turkey, the only weird thing is its capital is Damaskus.

As you can see US is happily live with his new pals Swedes, as part of new Europan friendship. It's awesome that Swedes gave them territory to not force them to go through Denmark straits when they want to visit theirs capital.

As you can see Japan is at its correct place, west from US which are east from Sweden.

 

[Life of the Party]

It really is impossible to get Britain to defend its home islands

I've tried everything to get the British AI to leave divisions in the home islands to prevent a German invasion. I've created a special AI area for just southern England and set its AI prioritization to +2000. I've even created a separate country for the rest of the British Empire, made all of its puppets independent (still allied), and set the priority for Suez to negative ...

But still the AI leaves Britain empty when Germany tries to invade in 1940. Unbelievable.

Maybe it’s just since there’s so much to garrison the home islands are left behind. Is there just a way to ensure that the U.K. makes as many divisions as humanly possible? (I haven’t touched the AI in my modding at all, so this is just an amateurs’ suggestion)

I took everything away from Britain as a country except the home islands and gave it to their allies, but they still send everything to their allies to garrison those lands. I even created a separate faction for just Britain and Northern Ireland, and Britain still gets military access to the rest of the Allies and sends units to garrison them.

At this point I'm thinking we have to create a new country and give it just Great Britain. Maybe that will work.

Sounds like it's being caused by the inaccessible ai_behaviour files...

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

There's already a huge problem if Germany can invade in the first place in 1940.

EDIT: ALso finished my first run in new Kaiserreich version as Japan. Went with the Cool Japan route in regards to the Chinese, and I found it to be a bit disappointing. The problem is that just like with Transamur, you're also largely relegated to a few passive reactions with Fengtian when it comes to managing your puppets from vanishing.

The whole thing with Zhang's replacement is by far the worst example of this, since unlike with Kolchak whether or not something actually ends up happening on schedule is down a HUGE random chance in timing. It just feels rather dumb and unfair when something that's basically a critical matter for you (Mantetsu buffs) can just vanish randomly without you having any ability to do anything about it.

Mechanically it seems like you just benefit way more from ignoring the Cool Japan thing and just pissing off Fengtian asap so you can get more factories, steel and coastline for dockyards, the Burn To Ash strategy is probably also far far stronger than the non-core manpower boost that's the alternative. You'll be building tons of garrison militia anyway to give you special forces cap, and manpower isn't a problem in the first place (I finished with 13 million spare manpower in 1946, 3 million of total manpower came from non-cores with the boost, so hardly earth-shattering compared to the anus-blasting power of +10% division attack and +20% Ground Support)

EDIT2: The new hijinks happening in China seem cool tho.

 

[Raghar]

Wow Kaiseereich has 1.9 GB, that's larger than HoI2. Is it better than HoI2?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yes, but it's not as good as HoI4's Fallout mod.

 

[Beastro]

It really is impossible to get Britain to defend its home islands

I've tried everything to get the British AI to leave divisions in the home islands to prevent a German invasion. I've created a special AI area for just southern England and set its AI prioritization to +2000. I've even created a separate country for the rest of the British Empire, made all of its puppets independent (still allied), and set the priority for Suez to negative ...

But still the AI leaves Britain empty when Germany tries to invade in 1940. Unbelievable.

Maybe it’s just since there’s so much to garrison the home islands are left behind. Is there just a way to ensure that the U.K. makes as many divisions as humanly possible? (I haven’t touched the AI in my modding at all, so this is just an amateurs’ suggestion)

I took everything away from Britain as a country except the home islands and gave it to their allies, but they still send everything to their allies to garrison those lands. I even created a separate faction for just Britain and Northern Ireland, and Britain still gets military access to the rest of the Allies and sends units to garrison them.

At this point I'm thinking we have to create a new country and give it just Great Britain. Maybe that will work.

Sounds like it's being caused by the inaccessible ai_behaviour files...

Sounds like they went to the opposite extreme of their games like Vic2 where Britain keeps the majority of their forces at home preventing it from doing stuff while making it a pain to fight.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[what am i doing]

Sounds like they went to the opposite extreme of their games like Vic2 where Britain keeps the majority of their forces at home preventing it from doing stuff while making it a pain to fight.

tl;dr Vicky 2 AI (probably Paradox AI overall) doesn't cope very well with needing to load units on transports

I'm not really sure this is the case with Victoria 2. I have done a fair amount of fighting against Britain in V2, partly because the countries I like to play often want stuff that Britain has (ie, assorted Boer territories as the Netherlands), and partly because Britain is one of the boss countries and it's interesting to fight them. Or sometimes just to carve away at their Indian holdings, which are extremely useful. What I've found is that Britain's home islands are generally very poorly defended. It gets a bit better for Britain in the lategame simply because lategame features tons of Reserves to mobilize and Britain's territorial constraints help funnel their reserves together (sort of like how Italy's shape tends to help guide an Italian AI into doomstacking effectively and makes Italy an ahistorically formidable enemy to fight on land in V2, and opposite to how Russia's vast size paired with direct proximity to Germany means that its reserves start out scattered and makes it easy prey for Germany), but as far as normal forces go, it tends to be underdefended. If you can have transport ships in place before declaring war and land troops before the British navy can catch them, or if you invest sufficiently into a navy to beat Britain piece by piece (you win naval engagements by doomstacking, which the AI isn't good at normally), Britain is actually very easy to beat on their home islands.

Where is the rest of the British army? Sitting in India, or walking across Eurasia and taking massive attrition losses. The AI in Victoria 2 is simply terrible at moving forces overseas, either - I think - because it's bad at reasoning about the cost and value of transports, or because transport scarcity makes it fail to trigger conditions that would cause it to load troops and move them overseas. It's not that Britain is keeping their troops on the home islands out of a desire to defend them, it just sucks at moving overseas. You'll find in any mod that makes the English Channel land-traversable, Britain will move troops into continental Europe if it can. And in any mod that makes the English Channel non-land-traversable, the British AI will be very limited in how many troops it deploys overseas. Similarly if the French AI can get troops into Britain without requiring boats, it will do so - if it has to use boats, it won't (in any significant numbers), even if Britain doesn't have a navy.

NWO/CWE mod AI is somewhat better - still bad, but better - at putting units on land. Transports were made absurdly cheap in those two mods and this seems to have helped the AI by making it have a large abundance of transports.

I think what's happening is that either it has a bunch of separate logic blocks like these, that don't directly interact but that can bring about conditions that trigger the next logic block, without a grand plan:
1 - If I have docked transports and unallocated troops, move to coastal province where docked.
2 - If I have troops on a coastal province with open transports, load troops.
3 - If I have loaded transports not at an enemy coastal province and I am at war, move them to an enemy coastal province.
4 - If I have loaded transports at an enemy coastal province and I am at war, unload troops to that province.
(in this case more and cheaper transports increases the odds of block 1 being triggered, which helps the other blocks happen)

Or, it actually can think in terms of "I want to move troops to this overseas province so I need to bring transports here" but it considers them too valuable to relocate, or because they're attached to a fleet with combat ships it doesn't want to pull the fleet away most of the time. In which case again, more and cheaper transports (and ships in general) increases the odds that it will have "something free" that it can use to move its troops.

Either way, HOI4 fixes this by abstracting transports away into convoys so the AI can just treat friendly to friendly overseas provinces as a single path, and doesn't have to worry about complex overseas pathing or about whether it can spare a fleet to guard its ships. Invasion Plans also probably help streamline this logic for the AI.

 

[Beastro]

Yeah it becomes an issue with Britain when you inch closer to India enough to breech the dam there.

I've never had the AI use their navy piecemeal in Vic2, though I pretty much exclusively play with CoE mod that might have changed that. In it the navy is effectively like what I encountered in EU3s where it doomstacks 95% of it and then moves it around ponderously trying to stamp out the enemy. Until you can get enough parity to stand a chance against that stack there's zero point fighting them and you're stuck trying to work around it by sitting your invasion force in port and leaving the AI to then send its stack off overseas to attack whatever forces you have free sailing around the world. Once you get a feel that they're far enough away using LOS from your colonies, you send the invasion force out and land you armies bit by bit, but if the stack returns you have to run and hide and leave the rest of your army on the defensive and at the mercy of all those reserves. The problem isn't so much that happening but you getting so caught up in the invasion or other stuff, you forget the doomstack navy and suddenly see it heading for your invasion fleet unable to dock it in time and so the losses of that wind up crippling your ability to keep the invasion properly supplied.

At least in CoE they're able to properly maintain sizeable army forces around the world (Like at least a good stack in each sub-region, like one in the Caribbean, West Africa, etc) with a rather absurdly size amount going to Canada (about comparable to the US army for much of the timeline) and they use transports decently enough (and seem to send them from Britain proper often without denuding their colonies). The main trouble I have with Vic2, or I guess CoE however it effects the game this way, is the resource bottleneck of unit production. While Britain is better able to recover from it given it's better position in the world and industry, other navies though practically can't recover from losing their doomstack as they just quay up 50+ ships that sit there going unbuilt and often those are older ships being built because the AI recognizes it's not able to build the better ones resulting in nations subsisting on ships of the line almost into the 20th Century and Blockade Runners until the end.

A someone who wants to love the naval aspect of the game given the era this pisses me off, as does the other bottle necking that occurs, especially in nations like Russia where they simply can't rebuild their army properly without taking 20-30 years to do it due to their bad industry. The result is me using the console commands to give almost every major to middling power effectively infinite money, force a state capitalism party into power in the target nations then go through their regions and manually build the required factories to allow at least a net bonus of those products around the globe to all them to produce what they need, especially when it comes to how the mod changed Tank components that results in them very rarely being built by the AI. After that I go into their army and navy production list and order up the appropriate amounts of units of each, and if it's bad enough, even save edit to dump the required resources into those nations coffers to at least begin producing the first amount.

The annoying thing navy-wise is armies are quick to build once they get started up, but navies can take ages to rebuild from a wipe out later on that isn't helped by their quays being cock blocked (and that is with me cheating to help them rebuild as quickly as possible!), especially when Dreadnoughts can take years to complete (Which can result in me save editing again to alter their completion times, but that's tedious as fuck to do over and over). The result pisses me off and is a reason why I'm reluctant to come back to the game at times.

 

[Space Satan]

Problem with India is extremely low supply and hard terrain. |Huge defense bonuses attack penalties, jungles, mountains othercrap you have to deal with. Honestly it seems only USSR and China is okay with fighting there because Mass Assault gives supply consumption reduction and you are not constantly witting on OUT OF SUPPLY LOW SUPPLY. Abecause you deliver supply from your capital and that means as GER you must have a steady line from Berlin with some ports included.

 

[mondblut]

HoI4 modders are special among the special, it seems.

"Esoteric rapeocracy" made me chuckle, though.

 

[Life of the Party]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-dev-diary-formables-and-releasables.1312060/

 

[Life of the Party]

The final PSA political tree, which can only come about if Hearst collapses the PSA government in a very specific way. Led by Edward Longstreet Bodin, the Spiritualist Party is a mix of his small grouping of disproportionately semi-famous and wealthy followers of various unorthodox beliefs (such as a young L. Ron Hubbard)and the LA based Mankind United cult, alongside a large grouping of other fringe right conspiracy theorists on the West Coast. Also, the "Party" must have Japanese backing to come to power and if Japan finds them to be a liability (namely by being too loud about his most fringe positions) after they come to power they may sideline them for more direct intervention, leading to the left path instead of the right.

Also for more context much of their support comes from their increasingly popular "Redshirt Conspiracy", which states that the syndicalist revolution in Britain was actually a false flag operation done by the British monarchy to move their military to Canada and reconquer the United States when they least expect it. In fact many believe that syndicalism in the United States is apart of a plan to destabilize the US to help in this task.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

So are the KR mod-mods actually fun to play with, or are they just absurd to look at? At least from a gameplay perspective, Japan getting more involved with the PSA seems like it'd be interesting. But not-scientologists+Limbaugh taking over the PSA sounds like nutty memery.

 

[what am i doing]

I've never had the AI use their navy piecemeal in Vic2, though I pretty much exclusively play with CoE mod that might have changed that.

The general impression I have is that if they start out with a fractured navy it'll probably stay fractured until one of the navies starts to grow more and is treated as the one that gets reinforced. Early in the game this makes Britain manageable - if you're, say, France then you just condense your fleet and attack their smaller fleets. Later in the game as they pick one navy to add reinforcements to, that navy becomes the big one. But, you can get them to split it by docking your navy and waiting for them to try blockading you, then you pick off the small blockade fleets. I think, but am not completely sure, that splitting your navy into many fleets even if they're all close together will make the AI perceive them as less of a threat and be more likely to blockade, but this needs further testing. There does seem to be some sort of threat consideration where they won't blockade even if you're not actively contesting the sea tiles in question.

The annoying thing navy-wise is armies are quick to build once they get started up, but navies can take ages to rebuild from a wipe out later on that isn't helped by their quays being cock blocked (and that is with me cheating to help them rebuild as quickly as possible!), especially when Dreadnoughts can take years to complete (Which can result in me save editing again to alter their completion times, but that's tedious as fuck to do over and over). The result pisses me off and is a reason why I'm reluctant to come back to the game at times.

Agreed completely. It feels sort of realistic in same sense, in that ships do take a while to build, but at the same time the sheer amount of time it takes to rebuild a navy (mostly because you have to do them in sequence and can only go parallel for as many sufficiently levelled naval bases as you have) seems bad from a gameplay perspective, and makes naval losses even more crippling.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

You also can't effectively reform a new fleet in wartime, due to most likely having no route to regroup the newly built ships, unless you are so far away that your ports can't be blockaded without attrition. Which again makes that naval loss even more crippling.

 

[Life of the Party]

So are the KR mod-mods actually fun to play with, or are they just absurd to look at? At least from a gameplay perspective, Japan getting more involved with the PSA seems like it'd be interesting. But not-scientologists+Limbaugh taking over the PSA sounds like nutty memery.

Red Britain is already as crazy as it gets. Speaking of which, here's hoping the planned rework of Britain includes Anthony Ludovici and English Mistery, just to make it all a bit more grounded in reality.

A 1930s civil war in America triggered by Jack Reed, Huey Long and Douglas MacAarthur sounds like a Salvador Dali painting, so why not at least try to improve it by adding more factions and subfactions?

And what about the Balkans free of ethnic tensions, you ask?

 

[Space Satan]

So are the KR mod-mods actually fun to play with, or are they just absurd to look at?

The second. It is clear that mod makers put zero effort in the very concept of balance and gone full BlackIce - shove as much weird and absurd things just for the sake of shoving as much weird things as possible. The value of mods like red tide is the pictures - to play it is pain. You launch it, laugh as some descriptions and then "aw, fuck it, it's a mess"

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

BI at least has some redeeming qualities, big problems there are really just that the tech trees are often very poorly balanced internally (ie, you can just skip 90% of air trees because there are objective best planes) and it does manage to rein in air was a bit by reducing air base size and limiting it in the Pacific Islands. It's fun every now and then at least, just not really a go-to. The KR mod-mods tho seem really flimsy, and Red Flood seemed like inane bullshit.

So far it seems that the mod with the tightest sense of gameplay design is hands down the Fallout mod, OWB is just a joy to play (and their mod-mod for the Enclave knocks the ball out of the park several times over when it comes to creating a specific long campaign). They also with the KR team seem to be the ones who actually care about fixing things, Millenium Dawn remained completely unplayable because it would just crash over all sorts of things in its big summer update and no bugfixing was done.


Also, let's see if the New Order actually ever gets released. Their demo at least was quite promising, but the sort of goals they set seem like it might end up a catastrophe. At least they seem to have finally imposed some limits to what they're trying to get for initial release, since India, Canada, and some other places aren't getting full content at first (honestly, they could have stuck to just Burgundy-Germany-Russia-Japan-US as the initial release).

 

[Raghar]

BI at least has some redeeming qualities, big problems there are really just that the tech trees are often very poorly balanced internally (ie, you can just skip 90% of air trees because there are objective best planes)

Were not in WWII best planes?

For example for Japanese not making 100 mm dual purpose AA gun would be insanity. But they managed to get it too little too late.

 

[Life of the Party]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...stance-will-release-on-february-25th.1313683/

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

BI at least has some redeeming qualities, big problems there are really just that the tech trees are often very poorly balanced internally (ie, you can just skip 90% of air trees because there are objective best planes)

Were not in WWII best planes?

For example for Japanese not making 100 mm dual purpose AA gun would be insanity. But they managed to get it too little too late.

From a game design perspective it isn't a good way of doing things, especially with a non-linear tree like the one BlackICE unique air tech trees use. You actually research LESS air units than in the base game because most of the best planes are stand-alone or 1-2 research paths (also no need to separately work out carrier ones). IIRC ie, the best German heavy fighter by a huge margin is Pfeil, and it's a stand-alone tech.

 

[what am i doing]

From a game design perspective it isn't a good way of doing things

Pretty much this. Simulation and realism are nice, but there are times where gameplay has to come at their expense. And in this case it isn't even a case of realism losing to gameplay so much, because one has to keep in mind, people in WW2 didn't know ahead of time what exact design would be best. But we the player can play through many times and know exactly what plane to beeline towards. That's not realistic. So we're inherently dealing with something that's not like history (us knowing what will be most effective to research and develop, versus real-world leaders and scientists who were doing it for the first time and had ideas about what would be effective, but not the certainty of hindsight), it may as well at least be somewhat balanced. In a way, making different types of aircraft more balanced actually makes the experience more realistic from the player's perspective, because their amount of certainty as to what will be the best thing to research and construct is reduced, and more subject to varying circumstances from playthrough to playthrough.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Navy of course is where it all gets even worse because of the timescales involved on the production side if you do anything but build endless submarines and destroyers. Though BICE hasn't had unique navy trees since MTG. But MTG is its own sort of fucked up in regards to navy due to how vastly it rewards hyper-focus to torpedoes and subs and NAV spam due to how massive effort to a real battleship fleet needs to be; allowing land-based NAV and fighters to participate in naval war was a problem already anyway tho.

It's sort of funny how one way in which Old World Blues shows it's the best HOI mod ever is how it gives basically zero fucks about navies 99% of the time and how much that improves the game.

 

[Raghar]

Actually I wodner why people are complaining about developers that try to simulate stuff. Without simulation there is NO emergent behavior, and thus AI and game system is easily abuseable. WWII wargames are quite boring, because starting conditions of WWII are bad. Typically Germany don't have chance, and Japanese are doomed to lose by themselves, crumbling on theirs own weight by debts caused by too long war with China.

It's far better to allow player to make mistakes, and help balance things by increasing resources to Germany, or Japan.

Best HoI research system was in 2, it had research teams, and in DH version it allowed basically unlimited number of tech teams, based on industry levels. Thus even small country could get decent industry by conquest and catch in critical technologies.

Navy of course is where it all gets even worse because of the timescales involved on the production side if you do anything but build endless submarines and destroyers.

One year for CA.
6 DD per year.
2-3 CL per year.
2 years for CV and BB.
3 years+ for something extraordinally like superheavy battleship with decent AA.

Even as ComChi in recent playtrough I had one carrier group with 3 carriers, and one with 2 carriers and 2 super heavy battleships. And that was without socialistic south china which cost me 60-80 iron, I was forced to conquer democratic Japan to get steel for ship building and tanks.
On the other hand I didn't have enough steel for infantry weapons and tanks and US threw invasion back into the sea, after it reinforced from its adventure in SA.

So you can easily have decent navy and capital ships. However the problem would be fuel. Considering how fuel consuming capital ships are, I was forced to conquer indonesia just to keep my navy going. Larger navy used against COMPETENT US/UK AI would be much harder to use more often than few weeks a year.