Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Alexios]

Is it worth buying this to play the Fallout mod?

If it's on sale sure.

 

[AwesomeButton]

How should I spread my divisions within armies? Is it worth it to group all my tank divisions for one theather in one army?

 

[shywn]

How should I spread my divisions within armies? Is it worth it to group all my tank divisions for one theather in one army?

Yes. Not only dedicate an army for them, but dedicate a field marshal for them. Tanks are meant for pushing. They're the only unit in the game that have good breakthrough. (Special forces come second.)

I forgot to mention a tiny detail - Germany called Japan and I'm currenlty being assfucked in Vladivostok.

You don't have the Walking the Tiger expansion, do you?

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:
View attachment 15590

I really like support companies, but you have too many of them. Each one you add reduces your division's organisation. Remember that only infantry, motorised infantry, and cavalry add organisation, everything else reduces it.

1. Drop the artillery since you already have two line artillery.
2. You don't need both anti-air and anti-tank. Do you have air superiority? If yes, drop anti-air. If no, drop the anti-tank.
3. Engineers are almost always worth adding.
4. I don't know about your light tank recon. I don't have the La Resistance expansion yet, but I understand that there are other, cheaper recon options available. (On second though, maybe you should keep it, because it seems to be the only thing providing breakthrough stat for your division.)

I also made my own infantry template, probably a waste of points, considering how similar it is for now:
View attachment 15591

This doesn't look too bad, but drop the artillery support.

Tank division:
View attachment 15592

Looks all right although I don't get why you're mixing heavy and medium tanks.

 

[AwesomeButton]

You don't have the Walking the Tiger expansion, do you?

I have all of them, so yes.

4. I don't know about your light tank recon. I don't have the La Resistance expansion yet, but I understand that there are other, cheaper recon options available. (On second though, maybe you should keep it, because it seems to be the only thing providing breakthrough stat for your division.)

I was going by the logic that any mixing of tanks into the infantry division would be good because it would add hard attack and breakthrough.

Looks all right although I don't get why you're mixing heavy and medium tanks.

I know it's inefficient, but I did it for "immershun".

I don't get the rule that everything except INF and MOT should decrease organisation. I understand the gamey reasoning but it's quite counter-intuitive. Also, the player is already paying a resources price and a command mana price for including those support companies and alternative brigades, why make him pay an organisation price for making a more versatile division.

 

[shywn]

You don't have the Walking the Tiger expansion, do you?

I have all of them, so yes.

Then you must be playing on non-historical. Germany shouldn't be able to call Japan in. They're in different factions.

4. I don't know about your light tank recon. I don't have the La Resistance expansion yet, but I understand that there are other, cheaper recon options available. (On second though, maybe you should keep it, because it seems to be the only thing providing breakthrough stat for your division.)

I was going by the logic that any mixing of tanks into the infantry division would be good because it would add hard attack and breakthrough.

Yes, I had pretty good success strolling through the continental US with a 12/4/2 inf/art/light tank division in my Japan game. And indeed, I do recommend adding tanks to infantry divisions if you must push with them.

I don't get the rule that everything except INF and MOT should decrease organisation. I understand the gamey reasoning but it's quite counter-intuitive. Also, the player is already paying a resources price and a command mana price for including those support companies and alternative brigades, why make him pay an organisation price for making a more versatile division.

Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me either that an anti-air attachment or field hospital decreases organisation, but that's the way it is...

One more thing I forgot to mention. I've recently been gravitating away from artillery in general. It uses an awful lot of supply.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Then you must be playing on non-historical. Germany shouldn't be able to call Japan in. They're in different factions.

No, I was on historical and ironman, but I justified the war on Germany and then I started it. I think Germany was already allied with Japan at that point. I can check.

My current game is non-ironman because I want to make a pre-war savegame and experiment a little with different army composistions, different front widths for armies and more/less microing them around.

Putting all the tanks in the same army group sounds immershun-breaking, but I also figured that then the best general/marshal bonuses would appy to all the divisions. Feels like a hack though. In general, this game feels overall less historical than older HOIs. What was wrong with HQ units in HOI2 and I think HOI3.

One more thing I forgot to mention. I've recently been gravitating away from artillery in general. It uses an awful lot of supply.

Can't comment on that yet, not enough experience in major-on-major wars .

 

[Agame]

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.

The spy system is completely superfluous and you can happily ignore it even with majors.

 

[Malakal]

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.

The spy system is completely superfluous and you can happily ignore it even with majors.

Not in a real competitive environment where intel on what your enemy is researching, what forces is he building and a combat bonus that can be triggered are very important.

 

[Agame]

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.

The spy system is completely superfluous and you can happily ignore it even with majors.

Not in a real competitive environment where intel on what your enemy is researching, what forces is he building and a combat bonus that can be triggered are very important.

Ok, sure if your talking multiplayer? Single player it is irrelevant. And in multiplayer a Minor country should not be able to compete with a Major anyway, and will rely on larger allies to cover that.

 

[AwesomeButton]

The fact that a division with no artillery and 40 width is better at defending a tile than a division with some artillery is pure Swedish inbdreeding- or cultural enrichment-induced retardation. How can having towed artillery make you more offensive? As if artillery hasn't been used defensively. Stupid game.

 

[Raghar]

The fact that a division with no artillery and 40 width is better at defending a tile than a division with some artillery is pure Swedish inbdreeding- or cultural enrichment-induced retardation. How can having towed artillery make you more offensive? As if artillery hasn't been used defensively. Stupid game.

This is old video. And they increase attack power when they add more artillery brigades to division. Before artillery was nerfed, it was important to kill enemy soldiers.

 

[Average Manatee]

That video was made by a retard. 750 defense has absolutely zero advantage over 250 defense unless you are taking more than 250 attacks per hour (and against AI even 250 is pretty unlikely to take in reality, keep in mind you also have defensive bonuses and shit boosting you higher most of the time). Not having artillery means your enemies take significantly less damage, meaning they will fight you for much longer and inflict much more damage on you.

The only thing that won him there was the defensive fortifications which are incredibly OP in HoI and the AI suicidally attacks into. But they make defense even more useless since the enemy probably has like 2 soft attack, so any unit at all would massacre endless germans.

There's a lot of issues with HoI4 combat but that is not one of them. If anything its the other way around and infantry without artillery are too stupidly weak at dealing damage. Two pure infantry divisions can slug it out on open ground for weeks before they wear themselves out, its nuts.

 

[Malakal]

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.

The spy system is completely superfluous and you can happily ignore it even with majors.

Not in a real competitive environment where intel on what your enemy is researching, what forces is he building and a combat bonus that can be triggered are very important.

Ok, sure if your talking multiplayer? Single player it is irrelevant. And in multiplayer a Minor country should not be able to compete with a Major anyway, and will rely on larger allies to cover that.

Yes but in SP you can win as Poland against Germany and Soviets with just infantry and artillery (as I did several times). So SP is awful for testing stuff and deciding what options available to you are good.

 

[AwesomeButton]

In a new campaign, I've started practicing with 6 mountain divisions in the Spanish Civil War, which were sent as volunteers to help out Republican Spain.

I managed to create one pocket where I killed 5 Nationalist divisions, but a little after that, the Anarchists of Aragon spawned, apparently it was invitable around the time of my last savegame, and took over Catalonia.

My divisions had to be evacuated because if they are caught inside anarchist territory when the anarchist state spawns, they are completely cut from supply and escaping back into Republican territory becomes rather difficult.

My impression now is that the Republicans are pretty much doomed whatever I attempt. There is a German volunteer tank division which no one on the Pyrenean peninsula can do anything about, unless it becomes completely encircled somehow. Nobody has hard attack. With that division its a matter of time the Nationalists take Madrid and from there the Republicans are in a downward spin.

Has anyone managed to win the war for the Republicans with a volunteer force?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

If you can send 6 mountain divisions, you should have sent 6 light tank divisions. The mountain terrain advantage is not enough compared to running the spearhead (you basically always want to run the spearhead when you send in volunteers).

 

[AwesomeButton]

After already replaying the same 5-6 months twice, no problem to replay again and send tanks. Also, I think I'm now allowed to send 2 more divisions because I recruited 10 new ones since the war began.

 

[AwesomeButton]

From the new patch notes, pretty important in my situation in Spain right now:

- The external actor on the losing side of a civil war no longer get their units wiped if they were in the winner's territory as long as the civil war did not become a full blown out war

Well, while I'm at it, I guess I can be that person this patch:

Update 1.10.1 'Collie'

################################################################
######## Update 1.10.1 "Collie" ########
################################################################

####################################
# Battle for the Bosporus Country Pack
####################################
- New Focus Tree for Greece
- New Focus Tree for Turkey
- New Focus Tree for Bulgaria

####################################
# Features
####################################
- Reworked Focus Tree for Yugoslavia (Death or Dishonor)
- Reworked and tweaked the starting position for Romania (Death or Dishonor)
- added a number of new releaseable nations to the game
- The Heavy Cruiser 3d Asset Pack has been merged into the base game
- added a special infantry model with Pickelhaube for Unaligned Germany (Waking the Tiger)

##################################
# Bugfix
##################################
- Fixed a bug where Serbia was using the incorrect country colours.
- Banning Communism or Fascism should now also remove foreign communist/fascist influence national spirits.
- fixed foreign equipments not showing up under stockpiles ui
- Yugoslavia may now complete industry focuses if the owner of the province is their subject
- fixed enemy ship count now showing up in strategic region ui
- added some missing descriptions of special ship hulls (MtG only)
- Fixed some mods being erroneously removed at game start
- The external actor on the losing side of a civil war no longer get their units wiped if they were in the winner's territory as long as the civil war did not become a full blown out war
- Yugoslavia will now lose the Anti-German Military spirit if the military has already instigated a coup.
- Rocket sites will now properly delete remaining stock when captured and not crash the game further down the line
- fixed a missing national spirit icon in the French tree
- fixed some issues with AI operative assignments that was trying to make them assign same operative multiple times
- Fixed operative being stuck on rescue mission when there are no operative left to rescue
- Added a nudger generated file to the list of files to backup and remove by the Clear Cache action
- Added missing "do nothing" option to an event
- Set ROM starting ruling party to non-aligned
- Updated Institute Royal Monarchy focus to start with 65% Non-Aligned support
- Fixed a typo in wtt_events_l_english.yml for Germany Anti-Soviet Pact news pop-up
- removed Italian_generic_land_4 soldier and added Britain_generic_land_6 soldier instead.
- new hat for error dog
- added portrait to vanilla GER

##################################
# Balance
##################################
- naval supremacy is now scaled to a percentage depending on enemy intel level instead of getting reduced to 0% at low intel
- Germany can no longer annex Yugoslavia with a single focus and no input from the Yugoslavian player under certain circumstances

##################################
# Stability & Performance
##################################
- improved performance of national focus gui when there are focuses with many prerequisites or expensive allowed triggers
- Fixed OOS triggered by displaying the description of some focuses and event effects
- Improved performance of CPoliticalMinister that was evaluating decision with an ai_factor of zero
- Fixed CTD when interacting with the army portraits while merging armies
- Fixed CTD in AI code
- Added allowed trigger for ai strategy plans
- Fixed CTD related to carrier air missions
- Fixed OOS caused by localized state name
- Fixed CTD caused by effect from history trying to access the not yet initialized graphical map

##################################
# Modding
##################################
- add the modifiers navy_leader_start_level, navy_leader_start_attack_level, navy_leader_start_defense_level, navy_leader_start_maneuvering_level, navy_leader_start_coordination_level to match the sames for army_leader.
- Fixed has_dlc trigger to return false when the name of the dlc is not known
- Added support for nesting localization strings, i.e. use a localization key within another localization string, enabling strings like "Unlock $nukes$ in the $technology$ screen" where 'nukes' and 'technology' are localization keys.
- Added support for dollar signs in localization strings. Normally a dollar sign denotes the start or end of a variable. With this change "$$" will produce a single dollar sign in the resulting string.
- add_equipment_to_stockpile effect now accepts variables as producer
- added faction_leader scope change
- added custom_modifier_tooltip support for dynamic modifiers
- added add_victory_points/set_victory_points effects
- Added console command Audio.PlayEffect to play a scripted sound effect at will
- added can_be_produced trigger to equipments so they can be blocked for certain countries for production
- Added the ability to specify a variable refering to an idea for triggers and effect has_idea, add_ideas, remove_ideas, swap_ideas, add_timed_idea and modify_timed_idea
- Added support for the triggers is_enemy, is_friend and is_neutral to adjacency rules to enable script to determine which rule to use. Evaluation order is documented in adjacency_rules.txt.
- Added global.province_controllers game variable array that returns an array containing the controller for each province, where array index is mapped to province ID. For example global.province_controllers^4135 returns the controller of Gibraltar.
- Added equipment buildable trigger

##################################
# Database
##################################
- Added a series of decisions for Yugoslavia to promote a communist uprising in Bulgaria, Albania, and other Balkan nations
- Added General entry for Constantin Sanatescu
- Hooked Iraqi fascist leader into vanilla
- Added Kurdistan tag, history, and leaders

 

[shywn]

I'm underwhelmed by the patch notes. Was expecting more bugfixes and balance changes.

- naval supremacy is now scaled to a percentage depending on enemy intel level instead of getting reduced to 0% at low intel

This one, I guess, is worthwhile though. (Based on what I've read of La Résistance, I mean. No first-hand experience.)

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Personally I'm not, I was hardly expecting much from the "we need an excuse to not make an Eastern Front DLC *NOW*!" DLC. But fixing the naval supremacy oddity is nice I guess.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I tried out Democratic Bulgaria 1936-1942 last night. Impressive details, and for the first time, I have freedom of action to navigate internal politics and achieve goals within internal politics. The factions hack/system is very promising and provides a bit of randomness and intrigue to the campaign, so it's not just sitting and watcing research/focus bars fill up. The campaign actually gives the feeling of steering between the big powers with a small and weak state. That is until you build up and reach the fantasy focuses like Prussia of the Balkans and Take on the Giants.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Can anyone share the flag that Paradox has chosen for the (Communist) Balkan Federation which is formable with this DLC? I'm guessing that they went with a modified version of Rigas Feraios' red-white-black flag.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I don't know if it's the patch, but when I retried the Civil War assistance with 6 tank divisions, the Republicans are even bigger pussies than they were when I was sending mountain divisions. I did 3 successful pockets, the first was the usual northeastern one at the start of the war, the second was in a protrusion slightly east of Cordoba, where I split the 6 divisions in two groups of three and attacked from both sides of the river, so I wouldn't have to cross it. I killed one German and one Italian volunteer division there, the German being an armored division. The third pocket was around Madrid, which the Nationalists had briefly taken. And still, the Republicans can't hold ground for longer than it takes me to eradicate the pockets. They are simply beyond help. Here is a challenge for any of you here who want to try it.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Whenever I feel like playing HoI4, I am reminded of the absolutely atrocious national nomenclatures for many of the states when going for an ahistorical regime and I lose all desire to do it.

Being a storyfag is suffering.

 

[AwesomeButton]

You can always turn on historical focuses only for the AI.

I'm a bit let down by the combat simulation, but with realtime, not that much can be done anyway.

The real deal for a historical WW2 wargame is Gary Grigsby's War in the East / ... War in the West (2 separate games).

My unfinished LP: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/war-in-the-east-road-to-leningrad.119730/ In fact I did win the scenario and have savegames of each turn, it was just taking me so long to add all the flavor stuff to each post... I should finish it one of these days.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

You can always turn on historical focuses only for the AI.

True, but the game kind of turns schizophrenic then if you are playing a major nation and derailing the geopolitics of the period. The AI bypassing focuses invalidated through your actions while still following the historical path they took with the aforementioned geopolitical context in mind is silly.

But I'm thinking mostly about the country you play. They should at least give us the option to rename our own nations instead of playing with completely historically implausible names. It kind of ruins the fun of going for that if the map you are painting has one lame name onto it.

Then again, that's just a personal quirk of mine. I'm guessing that the community didn't care or otherwise Paradox would've changed it.