Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Average Manatee]

I played V2 MP, and it's true that you basically ignore 90% of the economy because it's actually irrelevant to the game. All that really matters is abusing the pop promotion rules (tip: they don't actually need food, or clothes, or anything really) for clergy/bureaucrats/soldiers, along with spamming artillery factories (by far the most expensive but also the most deadly in battle). Then there's the tedious battle micro and micro involved in generals. All factories you just subsidize because anything actually important needs to be there, supply and demand by damned. Since your pops don't actually need their needs you can tax and tariff 100% to pay for it all.

Don't even get me started on the clusterfuck that is the sphereing system. I can't imagine a more micro-wasting activity, made all the worse by the fact that it's 100% possible to abuse AIs into easily getting control of the entire world if you try hard enough, but you'll have to mess with shit every damn day.

Also if you're Japan then you better max your clipper stockpile on day 1, because you'll never actually be able to buy clippers with your shit rank once the rest of the world places their orders and you'll need that shit to conquer for research and westernize before everyone else in the world is a superpower. Literally a game ruining mistake if you hit day 2 without doing this.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well you subsidize until you notice one of those factories is taking enormous subsidies. Then you unsubsidize that one factory. And you're just fucked if you play Laissez Faire without a mod that at least tries to fix the broader economy.

And yea war is also a total fucking pain in Victoria 2 because the EU type combat system is ultimately very very boring and non-involved, where usually the most decisive factors are technology (since Vicky is also a believer in the "huge jump" in military technology effects) and raw numbers so you can encircle and envelop.

But most importantly the sphere system needs to fucking die in the gutter.

 

[passerby]

Victoria's economic most of the systems in all Paradox grand strategy games are fucked up beyond any repair.

Fxd

 

[Humppaleka]

So... Recommended mods for Vic II? Also, any point in playing Vic I outside of seeing how the game has evolved?

 

[Dakka]

So... Recommended mods for Vic II? Also, any point in playing Vic I outside of seeing how the game has evolved?

I recommend Historical Project Mod and Cold War Enhancement Mod. Historical Project Mod attempts to improve the game while sticking to the base game experience. The Cold War Enhancement mod is a continuation of the New World Order mod, I think, and it's good if you want to play in a Cold War or modern day setting. From what little I played of the original Victoria, it seemed nice, but unfortunately I can't get it to run on this machine.

And yea war is also a total fucking pain in Victoria 2 because the EU type combat system is ultimately very very boring and non-involved, where usually the most decisive factors are technology (since Vicky is also a believer in the "huge jump" in military technology effects) and raw numbers so you can encircle and envelop.

I can forgive everything else about it for the most part, but war is easily my least favorite part of the game. I feel it would be a lot more tolerable if you could organize your armies into groups and automatically rebuild them when brigades got destroyed, and if they didn't reinforce from specific soldier pops that inevitably got too low, making you replace them.

Again, you've all got great points. Vicky 2 is obviously deeply flawed, just like HoI 4 as well as so many other Paradox games. To the best of my knowledge though, the unfortunate reality is that Paradox doesn't have competition in the grand strategy market. Maybe they would step up their game if it did. If there are any viable alternatives, please tell me.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Personally I play Vicky 2 on a custom-modded PoP Demand Zero or Concert of Europe (largely focused around making the game more enjoyable to me by changing things like assimilation rates for different countries and fiddling events and modifiers, events in particular with Concert since some things are just fucked up like the First Italian War of Independence). I should give HPM and CWE a try too I figure (I've stuck with PDM and its spin-offs more than anything out of habit).

 

[Nirvash]

I recommend Historical Project Mod and Cold War Enhancement Mod. Historical Project Mod attempts to improve the game while sticking to the base game experience. The Cold War Enhancement mod is a continuation of the New World Order mod, I think, and it's good if you want to play in a Cold War or modern day setting. From what little I played of the original Victoria, it seemed nice, but unfortunately I can't get it to run on this machine.

Cold war is cute but also bloated and imbalanced.

The game last until 2080 or something but nothing really change, even when SU implode in mid game, no big nation ever goes to war if not for some minor rebellion or regional stuff like india-paki or arabia.
War is just very discouraged, the onu fast embrago your ass and conquered territory is troublesome to keep. (alot of decolonization stuff)
Play a minor and you are likely to never know war or ever be able to catch up in industry/tech.
Then in late you get some crazy merges like usa eating mex/canada for the "N america union", maybe russia eating something for "eurasia union", UK going full EU merge maybe with just norway etc. (england is perma WP due to absurd prestige and nothing else)
Industry is no better than vanilla, world power status starve everyone else for resources and you can rush some stuff (computer/pharma/health) in very high demant and very low supply for decades.
War is... bloated, no different than vanilla but you can have millions troops to manage.
Politics are.... i dunno, there are like 200+ one time decisions and a dozen of policies plus the normal laws and stuff, is actually one of the most in deep "nation politics total simulator" i played, but in the end is still just cheap numbers and fluff. (like you get 20 "year xxxx conference anti terrorism, yes for some prestige)

I suggest to play a australia a bit for prarice and then get a big shot and go full hitler.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Bloated and unbalanced tends to be a recurring theme with Pdox game mods, a lot of them simply go too far in adding stuff for the sake of adding stuff.

 

[Dakka]

Bloated and unbalanced tends to be a recurring theme with Pdox game mods, a lot of them simply go too far in adding stuff for the sake of adding stuff.

As opposed to official Paradox DLC, which does the exact opposite nowadays.

 

[fantadomat]

It is amusing how the new Parashit DLC have almost nothing,and it cost half the game. They could have at least added a focus trees for all the participators in the war.

 

[Space Satan]

DD/ Less war merging

Spoiler

Hello, hopefully you can tear yourself away from rewatching the Star Wars trailer for just one more glimpse of the Porg creature... because it's Wednesday! Time for another dev diary for 1.5 “Cornflakes” update and the as-yet unannounced DLC. We have been covering several big features in the diaries leading up here, so now it's time to also look at some smaller features from our "bag of tricks"

Control Groups
This might actually be one of my favourites :D Was reminded about this in a forum thread about UI improvements people wanted and realized I had totally forgotten how nice it was. You can now hit Ctrl+number to save any selection, and then hit the number key again to bring that up. It works with any selection, not just divisions, so you can mark areas, air wings etc and jump between them quickly. Double tapping the number key moves camera to the selection.

Consolidate Divisions
Sometimes after hard battles, or when cut off from reinforcement and supply you can end up with a lot of divisions a low strength. Sometimes you need them at full strength right away and can’t wait for them to fill up normally. The DLC will come with a new feature that lets you consolidate divisions together into fewer, full strength (or as close as you can get ones). Units will move towards the strongest division and transfer over their manpower and equipment when they get there. The system also handles doing it with many divisions in which case it will try to form as many full strength divisions as it can.

Minimap & Pinging
A minimap is something HOI4 was designed to live without, but there is clearly a part of the community that really miss it, so you can now get it as part of the DLC if you want. It also comes with some new functionality for multiplayer. You can ping the map to illustrate to allies of things you are discussing, like where you want them to defend or push, or as a quick reminder like “watch out here the russians are about to encircle you!”

Minimap can be toggled to a closed state if you like, and you can still use pings through keyboard shortcuts.

Kick From Faction
With Cornflakes it will now be possible to kick nations from your faction in the form of a new diplo action.

Since this stuff tended to lead to some exploiting in the past (players picking off members one by one etc), we have been working on how AI sees this stuff to make it handle a few things… Kicking is possible in war time also and we have been putting a lot of time into dealing with how HOI4 handles wars in code. Basically the underlying system has been completely remade to stop war merging and the like from ruining your wars, or getting nations dropped or included in ways you wouldn't expect. Its one of those non-sexy things that you can't really show but that is going to make things feel a lot better and avoid edge case bugs messing up your day. This also allows us much more flexibility with how we may want to handle wars in the future.


That's it for today, see you all again next week for more updates!

 

[thesheeep]

DLC for mini map. I thought some of the EUIV DLC were weird, but this is quite something

I'm just waiting for the first game to offer free save games.
"And with this cheap 10$ DLC, you can load them, too!"

 

[Average Manatee]

DLC for mini map. I thought some of the EUIV DLC were weird, but this is quite something

I'm just waiting for the first game to offer free save games.
"And with this cheap 10$ DLC, you can load them, too!"

But you also get to use control groups, a feature seen in every strategy game since Command & Conquer 1 (including previous paradox games)! With such great value I'd expect the DLC to cost at least $30.

 

[fantadomat]

All that is left to do is fix the game,destroy the idiotic peace conferences and make diplo actions(a good one will be a white peace) useable.

 

[Thane Solus]

All that is left to do is fix the game,destroy the idiotic peace conferences and make diplo actions(a good one will be a white peace) useable.

So 10 years, and 200 DLCs?

I think i like the peace conferences, otherwise the map will look like a Picasso. I dont remember much tho.

 

[fantadomat]

All that is left to do is fix the game,destroy the idiotic peace conferences and make diplo actions(a good one will be a white peace) useable.

So 10 years, and 200 DLCs?

I think i like the peace conferences, otherwise the map will look like a Picasso. I dont remember much tho.

More actually never. They heavily lack the skilled personal needed to do this shit. It is very sad when most mods a far superior than your game and don't cost anything. Last good paradox DLC was art of war.

 

[Anthedon]

Minimap as a paid feature? Sweet fascist Jesus.

 

[fantadomat]

Minimap as a paid feature? Sweet fascist Jesus.

Well it is normal,it is sweden after all. The cancer of the western world.

 

[Dakka]

All that is left to do is fix the game,destroy the idiotic peace conferences and make diplo actions(a good one will be a white peace) useable.

So 10 years, and 200 DLCs?

I think i like the peace conferences, otherwise the map will look like a Picasso. I dont remember much tho.

More actually never. They heavily lack the skilled personal needed to do this shit. It is very sad when most mods a far superior than your game and don't cost anything. Last good paradox DLC was art of war.

What's interesting is I don't think Stellaris has been shafted quite this hard. It seems to me like they've got their most incompetent people working on Hearts of Iron 4. I'm guessing Sweden has restrictive labor laws preventing the company from simply firing them, and they settled for making them work on the project that management cares about the least.

 

[fantadomat]

All that is left to do is fix the game,destroy the idiotic peace conferences and make diplo actions(a good one will be a white peace) useable.

So 10 years, and 200 DLCs?

I think i like the peace conferences, otherwise the map will look like a Picasso. I dont remember much tho.

More actually never. They heavily lack the skilled personal needed to do this shit. It is very sad when most mods a far superior than your game and don't cost anything. Last good paradox DLC was art of war.

What's interesting is I don't think Stellaris has been shafted quite this hard. It seems to me like they've got their most incompetent people working on Hearts of Iron 4. I'm guessing Sweden has restrictive labor laws preventing the company from simply firing them, and they settled for making them work on the project that management cares about the least.

Nah that kind of thinking needs some brain power. They are simply stupid,incompetent and faggots for real. I had tried my luck on their retarded forum,but fastly saw that it is an echo chamber of giant proportions.Got banned for criticising their games.Lead dev on stelaris a faggot with a nick of wiz. Most devs lick his ass because he is lover or something like that with johan,the lead dev of EU4 and one of the bosses. If you watch some of the dev multiplayer games,you will see that most of the devs are pretentious faggots and sjws.Paradox is one of most imagination bankrupt devs. The original EU was not even created by them,it is Philippe Thibaut game.

 

[Average Manatee]

All that is left to do is fix the game,destroy the idiotic peace conferences and make diplo actions(a good one will be a white peace) useable.

So 10 years, and 200 DLCs?

I think i like the peace conferences, otherwise the map will look like a Picasso. I dont remember much tho.

More actually never. They heavily lack the skilled personal needed to do this shit. It is very sad when most mods a far superior than your game and don't cost anything. Last good paradox DLC was art of war.

What's interesting is I don't think Stellaris has been shafted quite this hard. It seems to me like they've got their most incompetent people working on Hearts of Iron 4. I'm guessing Sweden has restrictive labor laws preventing the company from simply firing them, and they settled for making them work on the project that management cares about the least.

Stellaris is still pretty incompetently done. Very basic things are fucked up. There are UI elements like the planets list which will take up 100% of your CPU's time and drive your FPS into the single digits if you open them with more than 30 or so planets active. AI still can't figure out how to invade planets. The game just lags and slows down in general late game. The DLCs have been increasingly low-effort (though HoI4's can give it a run for its money). MP-related things like observer mode, selecting who you want to join as, seeing the galaxy map before the game starts, and chatting are missing or horribly broken and simplified.

Only CK2 and EU4 feel like actual products developed by a professional team. My guess is that they lost someone important shortly before or after HoI4/Stellaris release, someone like "that guy who knows the deep intricacies of our engine and can get shit done even though our codebase is mangled beyond belief". Without said critical person making any substantial changes requires huge amounts of time and delays everything else. It's the only reason I can think of for Stellaris's aforementioned UI lag, such basic things should have been fixed long ago.

 

[Dakka]

Nah that kind of thinking needs some brain power. They are simply stupid,incompetent and faggots for real. I had tried my luck on their retarded forum,but fastly saw that it is an echo chamber of giant proportions.Got banned for criticising their games.Lead dev on stelaris a faggot with a nick of wiz. Most devs lick his ass because he is lover or something like that with johan,the lead dev of EU4 and one of the bosses. If you watch some of the dev multiplayer games,you will see that most of the devs are pretentious faggots and sjws.Paradox is one of most imagination bankrupt devs. The original EU was not even created by them,it is Philippe Thibaut game.

Damn, no wonder they can't develop worth a shit nowadays. The first time I suspected something was really up was when Wiz cried sexism when people thought the militarist voice in their so-called Ethics Voice Packs was ill-fitting and unprofessional. Even back then, I thought he was a complete asshat. I just hoped his piss-poor attitude didn't reflect the overall direction of the company. I didn't read that forum much since then for obvious reasons, but I also remember that even hardcore Paradox fans were mad when Death or Dishonor was released. Let's put this into perspective for a minute; here was a DLC so godawful, so completely devoid of worthwhile content, even the Paradox fanboys on their own forum hated it! The backlash is glorious, and I recommend reading it when you guys have some time to spare.

Stellaris is still pretty incompetently done. Very basic things are fucked up. There are UI elements like the planets list which will take up 100% of your CPU's time and drive your FPS into the single digits if you open them with more than 30 or so planets active. AI still can't figure out how to invade planets. The game just lags and slows down in general late game. The DLCs have been increasingly low-effort (though HoI4's can give it a run for its money). MP-related things like observer mode, selecting who you want to join as, seeing the galaxy map before the game starts, and chatting are missing or horribly broken and simplified.

Too true. At least with 4X style games, we do have some alternatives.

Only CK2 and EU4 feel like actual products developed by a professional team. My guess is that they lost someone important shortly before or after HoI4/Stellaris release, someone like "that guy who knows the deep intricacies of our engine and can get shit done even though our codebase is mangled beyond belief". Without said critical person making any substantial changes requires huge amounts of time and delays everything else. It's the only reason I can think of for Stellaris's aforementioned UI lag, such basic things should have been fixed long ago.

Even with CK2 and EU4, I've found myself enjoying them far less than I did a while ago, although I can't quite place my finger on why, for the most part. For CK2, I think I remember that point being after the introduction of tribal government mechanics which honestly killed the fun of playing in those regions of the world for me. As for EU4, I think it was some time after they introduced the current fort system. I wouldn't be surprised if your theory was true, and frankly it makes me sad. Everything we've seen from them lately points to it. Maybe I should just roll my copies back to a previous version. It's not like we'll ever get any decent content from them anymore.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Stellaris maybe doesn't have perfect development cycle, but at least it gets consistent and sizeable updates. HoI4 pretty much feels abandoned on launch and DLCs are half-assed beyond belief.

 

[fantadomat]

Nah that kind of thinking needs some brain power. They are simply stupid,incompetent and faggots for real. I had tried my luck on their retarded forum,but fastly saw that it is an echo chamber of giant proportions.Got banned for criticising their games.Lead dev on stelaris a faggot with a nick of wiz. Most devs lick his ass because he is lover or something like that with johan,the lead dev of EU4 and one of the bosses. If you watch some of the dev multiplayer games,you will see that most of the devs are pretentious faggots and sjws.Paradox is one of most imagination bankrupt devs. The original EU was not even created by them,it is Philippe Thibaut game.

Damn, no wonder they can't develop worth a shit nowadays. The first time I suspected something was really up was when Wiz cried sexism when people thought the militarist voice in their so-called Ethics Voice Packs was ill-fitting and unprofessional. Even back then, I thought he was a complete asshat. I just hoped his piss-poor attitude didn't reflect the overall direction of the company. I didn't read that forum much since then for obvious reasons, but I also remember that even hardcore Paradox fans were mad when Death or Dishonor was released. Let's put this into perspective for a minute; here was a DLC so godawful, so completely devoid of worthwhile content, even the Paradox fanboys on their own forum hated it! The backlash is glorious, and I recommend reading it when you guys have some time to spare.

Stellaris is still pretty incompetently done. Very basic things are fucked up. There are UI elements like the planets list which will take up 100% of your CPU's time and drive your FPS into the single digits if you open them with more than 30 or so planets active. AI still can't figure out how to invade planets. The game just lags and slows down in general late game. The DLCs have been increasingly low-effort (though HoI4's can give it a run for its money). MP-related things like observer mode, selecting who you want to join as, seeing the galaxy map before the game starts, and chatting are missing or horribly broken and simplified.

Too true. At least with 4X style games, we do have some alternatives.

Only CK2 and EU4 feel like actual products developed by a professional team. My guess is that they lost someone important shortly before or after HoI4/Stellaris release, someone like "that guy who knows the deep intricacies of our engine and can get shit done even though our codebase is mangled beyond belief". Without said critical person making any substantial changes requires huge amounts of time and delays everything else. It's the only reason I can think of for Stellaris's aforementioned UI lag, such basic things should have been fixed long ago.

Even with CK2 and EU4, I've found myself enjoying them far less than I did a while ago, although I can't quite place my finger on why, for the most part. For CK2, I think I remember that point being after the introduction of tribal government mechanics which honestly killed the fun of playing in those regions of the world for me. As for EU4, I think it was some time after they introduced the current fort system. I wouldn't be surprised if your theory was true, and frankly it makes me sad. Everything we've seen from them lately points to it. Maybe I should just roll my copies back to a previous version. It's not like we'll ever get any decent content from them anymore.

Ohhh yeah,i loved the shit storm when they raised the prices during the steam sale and DoD DLC.I even made a thread on the codex . They are sadly going downhill without any a breaks. Most of their games are total shit by now,and are only playable thanks to the mods. They do need some creative,or at least educated people in their team. Looking at their DLCs for CK and EU,i see wasted potential. I can't program to save my life,but with a team of half decent programmers i could make 3times better dlc because i have imagination and ideas. Sadly that is not my job,and we will keep getting stupid dlcs that cost half the game. Oh also their forum feels very dead to me,i visit it from time to time. There is constant traffic and new threads,but almost all of them are with less than a page of responds. Also love how mod are banning people for nothing,a lot of the users have "probation" tag. Love how stupid people commit slow suicide,and don't even understand it.

 

[fantadomat]

Stellaris maybe doesn't have perfect development cycle, but at least it gets consistent and sizeable updates. HoI4 pretty much feels abandoned on launch and DLCs are half-assed beyond belief.

Yeah but hoi at least have interesting mods.While stellaris have shit core mechanics. There is no predetermined map,no linier research progression,no clear territorial rules that could mage empire great or shit and many other problems that make making of asymmetrical map/game really hard.