Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[not an artichoke]

Still some serious flaws that need patches/expansions to address before it's worth buying imo

Poor AI will probably always be an issue, but there are some aspects of it that should have been fixed long ago; e.g. the AI British production priorities focusing on 10,000+ fighters while their divisions don't have rifles to fight with

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Patches won't fix anything. It's just going to be a 100h game, after that it becomes too easy for any player with half a brain. I"ve been experimenting with their new "slider difficulty" and I had no problem dominating on Veteran with opposing countries additionally boosted with difficulty sliders. So don't expect that patches improving AI division templates and shit like this are going are going to make any difference.

It's all because national focus is a massive design flaw. Once you learn which country can do what, you can always predict what the AI will do and use it to form your plan of attack. Even with historical focus off.

 

[not an artichoke]

It's a history-based war game with a very limited time frame. Of course you'll be able to predict individual AI development paths fairly consistently. Taking advantage of metaknowledge about the world/game and the systems devs use to simulate it doesn't equal design flaw.

The question is whether the gameplay surrounding your strategic decisions is fun. Right now, much of it is not because of screwups like the one I mentioned, the insane micro of the air game and the problem you mentioned of poor AI division templates.

 

[Space Satan]

Patches won't fix anything. It's just going to be a 100h game, after that it becomes too easy for any player with half a brain. I"ve been experimenting with their new "slider difficulty" and I had no problem dominating on Veteran with opposing countries additionally boosted with difficulty sliders. So don't expect that patches improving AI division templates and shit like this are going are going to make any difference.

It's all because national focus is a massive design flaw. Once you learn which country can do what, you can always predict what the AI will do and use it to form your plan of attack. Even with historical focus off.

Try Expert AI 3.0 mod. It gives AI advanced templates and minmaxing current mechanics so it will be MUCH harder to deal with.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Yeah, I don't expect Paradox to ever be able to code a really challenging AI but I would like them someday to make an AI that can actually play the game they designed. Wishful thinking I guess.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Peculiar airplane priorities aside, I guess a big part in there is that if you wire the AI to use minmaxed meta templates only, you end up with a vicious cycle since that means everyone will end up using only the minmaxed meta instead of sometimes dicking about with prepostrous bullshit.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's a history-based war game with a very limited time frame. Of course you'll be able to predict individual AI development paths fairly consistently. Taking advantage of metaknowledge about the world/game and the systems devs use to simulate it doesn't equal design flaw.

The question is whether the gameplay surrounding your strategic decisions is fun. Right now, much of it is not because of screwups like the one I mentioned, the insane micro of the air game and the problem you mentioned of poor AI division templates.

Try Expert AI 3.0 mod. It gives AI advanced templates and minmaxing current mechanics so it will be MUCH harder to deal with.

Sliders to the max on Veteran already gives the AI huge combat bonuses and like +30% to production and research when compared to me. That should be more than enough to make up for poor templates. But it's not, because ultimately I'm not winning because my units are better, I'm winning because my strategy is better. And this would be fine, but after couple dozen games, you can play completely on autopilot and still win, because your strategy is always the same.

As Axis you use early aggression, ie. as Germany you take Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary by 1938 and you simple outproduce the AI.

As Allies you just wait for openings to attack, like watching for when AI Hitler is working on his Danzing or War, so you can predict when German army moves to Polish border and have an assault prepared.

Both of these approaches will give you enough of an advantage to dominate, regardless of how well AI performs in combat.

And that's the issue here. I'm sure patches will improve things a bit, but far as I'm concerned I already solved the puzzle on How to Win at HoI4, and I don't see that changing even after 3 years of patching and 15 DLCs.

 

[Average Manatee]

Peculiar airplane priorities aside, I guess a big part in there is that if you wire the AI to use minmaxed meta templates only, you end up with a vicious cycle since that means everyone will end up using only the minmaxed meta instead of sometimes dicking about with prepostrous bullshit.

A big problem is that the base battalion statistics are so out of whack that the gap between min-maxed and not min-maxed is ridiculous. A proper artillery-supported division can have 10x the firepower of a pure infantry division (and in combat it can reach an effective 50x). There's a reason support brigades in HoI2 and 3 were about squeezing just a bit more firepower into your frontage rather than turning your divisions into space marines, and HoI4 shows why that's a bad idea. They've got such a great division designer and logistics system and it all becomes useless when there's a very clear win button.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Peculiar airplane priorities aside, I guess a big part in there is that if you wire the AI to use minmaxed meta templates only, you end up with a vicious cycle since that means everyone will end up using only the minmaxed meta instead of sometimes dicking about with prepostrous bullshit.

A big problem is that the base battalion statistics are so out of whack that the gap between min-maxed and not min-maxed is ridiculous. A proper artillery-supported division can have 10x the firepower of a pure infantry division (and in combat it can reach an effective 50x). There's a reason support brigades in HoI2 and 3 were about squeezing just a bit more firepower into your frontage rather than turning your divisions into space marines, and HoI4 shows why that's a bad idea. They've got such a great division designer and logistics system and it all becomes useless when there's a very clear win button.

Definately agreed. The template designer really needs at least the option to be modded to function in a sense where the division's structure is a "formation", which would mean putting care into what goes where from there being downsides to exposed or over-represented artillery (since artillery is pretty much the de facto example about this in the entire franchise), instead of simply maximizing the terrain modifier/attack/defense value equation for a given theatre/role. Of course, it could end up biting massively in the ass when you switch to a more complex system. Overall I think things would be improved more if there were some manner of limitation on the number of divisions you can have in each region that would prevent establishing a frontwide line in regions that are simply too large and lack defensive geography, in order to force a more mobile warfare in battleground regions. Obviously this could also be tied into the elephant in the war room, how to design a system where an objectively weaker party can fight to a "victory" or actual victory, since in HoI4 so far it seems to me that Finland for example does even worse against Soviet Union than in Darkest Hour because in HoI4 the larger country can focus a historically inordinate amount of forces to bear and has a larger production advantage than in Darkest Hour (though in Darkest Hour with the new manpower system minors were just about unplayable, while in HoI4 there is much more potential for minor games even without exploiting barrel bottoming). In this respect I think just having hax in a national focus tree shouldn't be necessary for the player; ie if a crazy person mods a mechanically mostly unchanged WW1 scenario the AI Serbia should put up a tough fight and player Serbia should be able to hold off the "objectively" impossible odds. And it could provide for genuine strategic feasibility of potentially playing a government in exile controlling a partisan army IF your partisans could exit stage left when not immediately threatened if blanketing regions with more soldiers than people was not a possibility. It could also be linked to a feature I think is missing from these games, which is that countries that consist of more than one theater of operations on their owned or controlled territory must maintain a certain balance of troop allocation (which IMO should be based on theoretical maximums or averages rather than only present quantities) all over or face stiff or even crippling penalties, and it could be added on with some sort of system where a major-minor offensive war will start causing home morale damage and other penalties from heavy casualties and failure to accomplish objectives or even just keep making gains within a time limit(s). With end result being in style of how Kwa de facto lost the war in 'Nam.

Overall I'd say HoI4 is best off yet in this regard simply because of the mechanical flexibility it comes packaged in with, especially from a modding perspective. While the base game has a very simple triad-and-center design for politics mods were provided with the tools to expand on this to a considerable degree and I'm definately looking forward to Kaiserreich's vast expansion of the political ideology landscape, which with events and decisions that are only linked to domestic politics of a country should provide for a much more interesting experience. I did play one mod that toyed around with this idea before, a Finland focus tree mod, but I found that its addition of two further political ideologies that existed in a vacuum only in Finland was simply a waste of the potential of additional ideologies.

 

[Whisky]

Kaiserreich for HOI4, as an alpha, is a very nice music mod with the added music pack.

The actual game needs a lot of work. Still I was surprised to see as many familiar events as I did.

Played until I kicked the royals out of Canada and then I sperged out as Canada kept its Dominion flag.

 

[Space Satan]

I thought Kaiserreich was a decent mod, but in practice it's just a map recolour and a bit of events with national focuses, pulled out of ass

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I don't think I'll play HoI4 Kaiserreich for a good while myself, because as a fan of the original mod I think it's obvious it'll still take them at least until end of Spring before the mod goes from a playable state to a presentable state. I mean, they were trying to get attention to the fact it's still just the first alpha. It's not even just a matter of simply porting over the megafuckhueg pile of events, since there's still quite a bit more that could be done with the additional possibilities provided by changing to HoI4.

One thing I think they definately should do is add a rule preference that does nothing but set "historical" path for Europe (and maybe other two/three civil wars?) in first half of the war, since there's a lot of countries where you kind of run out of things to do if Totalist France and Airstrip One don't dominate most of Europe.

 

[Raghar]

I thought Kaiserreich was a decent mod, but in practice it's just a map recolour and a bit of events with national focuses, pulled out of ass

I think that's what people appreciate on it. It's not the old coloring, and the theme is sufficiently crazy they can imagine.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

And generally speaking the wacky alt history of Kaiserreich makes for a much more interesting scenario for a wargame from a global perspective, given the number of civil wars and potential aggressors around. IMO probably the only weak spot in this regard is that there's more than a little bit too much wank for Imperial Germany present, which is mostly detrimental in that nine times out of ten things are much more interesting worldwide if Germany gets assfucked hard by 1941.

 

[Average Manatee]

And generally speaking the wacky alt history of Kaiserreich makes for a much more interesting scenario for a wargame from a global perspective, given the number of civil wars and potential aggressors around. IMO probably the only weak spot in this regard is that there's more than a little bit too much wank for Imperial Germany present, which is mostly detrimental in that nine times out of ten things are much more interesting worldwide if Germany gets assfucked hard by 1941.

Yeah, the great part about Kaiserreich is that its a WW2 where you actually need to act like a country in terms of hedging your bets on who is going to win where and who is going to join what side in order to not be destroyed. In normal WW2 it's pretty much a given how things are going to play out unless you really abuse game mechanics to do weird stuff.

 

[Space Satan]

Yeah, the great part about Kaiserreich is that its a WW2 where you actually need to act like a country in terms of hedging your bets on who is going to win where and who is going to join what side in order to not be destroyed. In normal WW2 it's pretty much a given how things are going to play out unless you really abuse game mechanics to do weird stuff.

Or you can just uncheck "historical AI" button before new vanilla game

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

And generally speaking the wacky alt history of Kaiserreich makes for a much more interesting scenario for a wargame from a global perspective, given the number of civil wars and potential aggressors around. IMO probably the only weak spot in this regard is that there's more than a little bit too much wank for Imperial Germany present, which is mostly detrimental in that nine times out of ten things are much more interesting worldwide if Germany gets assfucked hard by 1941.

Yeah, the great part about Kaiserreich is that its a WW2 where you actually need to act like a country in terms of hedging your bets on who is going to win where and who is going to join what side in order to not be destroyed. In normal WW2 it's pretty much a given how things are going to play out unless you really abuse game mechanics to do weird stuff.

Yea, this is actually what's interesting in watching the situation in India, US, and China. Given that HoI4 made moving troops around much more hassle free, it'd also make global alliances like potential global Entente power belt much more dangerous. The other random factors are very enjoyable, but I've found that Germany tends to beat France too often, and because Germany is a passive actor in Kaiserreich this tends to be a lot more boring. Same thing if France doesn't embrace the idea of a world revolution and France and Britain start to support marxist countries and marxist dissidents everywhere, or if France skimps out on providing the economic aid to improve the internationale minors' IC and resources.

How is Otto supposed to save liberal monarchy if the whole internationale totalist world revolution thing solves itself?

Besides Germany the only other problem area I feel is Eastern Europe where deviations either simply don't happen or are automatically cancelled by Germany without cost, or in case of Russia because the second bolshevik uprising is prepostrously underpowered compared to its enemy (like the only time I see it win is when I go out of my way to support them with divisions AND resources en masse, and savescum until Siberia secedes too), so that theater also fails to live up to the very interesting initial set-up of a possibly resurgent republican or tsarist Russia being at odds with its neighbours while totalists in Ukraine and Georgia are scheming, separatism in Siberia is on the rise, commies get down for round two, and Baron Ungern has a dangerous military potential just waiting to pounce (tho IMO they really should up Ungern's claims to straight-up cores in Siberia if he conquers them so Ungerngolia can become a dangerous snowball or Japan's attack dog against Qing).

 

[Average Manatee]

My biggest annoyance with Kaiserreich is that the German-French theater simply ends too quickly one way or another. It's over in the blink of an eye and once the front breaks there's nothing any other power except possibly Russia can do to stop it. I'd really like to see it last at least a good year or year and a half, possibly with emergency forts being set up or w/e it takes to allow the AI to regroup properly.

Yeah, the great part about Kaiserreich is that its a WW2 where you actually need to act like a country in terms of hedging your bets on who is going to win where and who is going to join what side in order to not be destroyed. In normal WW2 it's pretty much a given how things are going to play out unless you really abuse game mechanics to do weird stuff.

Or you can just uncheck "historical AI" button before new vanilla game

Still pretty much the same stuff, just sometimes shuffles the order. You're never left wondering as Belgium whether it would be a bad idea to align with Germany in case France rolls over them. Unless Paradox still hasn't fixed the bug where the AI can randomly forget that a front exists, that is.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yea, the Western Front would be improved greatly if there'd be some defensive lines constructed that would severely constrict the ability to push the offensive past a certain point. My usual solution to my "Germany winning is boring" problem was to make an event that at minimum gives France a turbo-Maginot.

 

[Thor Kaufman]

for people who enjoy gamey LPs, exploiting the allies, tons of (tactical) nukes and other stuff
Soviet Russia/Russian Federation conquering the world
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO8ijwM5d5sjSRyG2ksOoSTKEWIo-qG-p

 

[Thane Solus]

Tried again, played a few games and won(as in completing my objectives: allies rekt, making US facist everytime and reking the Mother Russia with ze Germans)

Still broken:

Germans still dont use planes, because the developers are a bunch of retards. Every time i attack with Axis on Russia, we have no planes and Russia scores around 3k-5k. I saw once they had some strat bombers, but thats about it. Italy might have a few planes didnt check.

In reality they had pretty much the skies until 1942 or so, until the Russia woke up and the allies started to pressure them from the West and lost the battle due to US jew manufacturing power.

Chasing 1 fucking greek CL for 2 years its fun, cause navy encounters are broken sometimes and those fucking sound effects for invasion which never comes, civic unrest and what now, fucking retardo devs.

Attacking Russia with Axis is horrible it takes years because nobody has enough planes to counter theirs, so i usually go south and land grab.

Its fun for a while, but broken, pretty BAD AI... Only 6 months from the launch 2 patches and still far from a complete polished game. Oh and those 10 generic faces for Europe, thanks paradox you POS jews. Its like nobody test this beside retardo people and said, yeah this is great guys 10/10.

Also fuck the mods! Mods are for additional content and features, not to fix the developer laziness or incompetence.

 

[Space Satan]

Allies have planes because they have rubber. And problem is that Japs rarely go for rubber colonies and GER can't build enough synthetic factories

 

[thesheeep]

How much is going on in non-war/combat times in this game?
Looking at it, I'm not sure I'd dig the combat part as it seems to be rather micro intensive (compared to EUIV's "mix three types of buffed units and be done with it"), so for me it depends on what you actually do when not fighting.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Uh, it's far less micro intensive as HoI3. You set up the theaters during time of peace, then give the AI the objectives you want. It's retarded but so is the enemy AI so it doesn't matter.

 

[Makabb]

Uh, it's far less micro intensive as HoI3. You set up the theaters during time of peace, then give the AI the objectives you want. It's retarded but so is the enemy AI so it doesn't matter.

and you micro yourself 1 stack of doom so you make points of breakthrough, that's best way to play.