Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The biggest problem is how to handle naval warfare in a manner that can co-exist with the rest of the game and is still fun and interesting, and what can afford player deviations. After all, generally in any HoI game the player and AI will end up building capital ships in multiple times the TOTAL number that took part in WW2 just for themselves. But the whole thing about how to handle building ships and replacing/repairing ships is just one part of the big messy puzzle, even if it already is a big hurdle to clear.

 

[Dayyālu]

This chattering about naval warfare had me check when Rule the Waves 2 (Better Than Hearts of Iron In Every Way) is gonna be out.

Apparently, this year.

Can't wait for playing carrier battlegroups in Excel.



(I'll never finish the LP goddammit)

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Anyhow, anyone actually tried this new DLC? Is it any good or sucks like the others?

 

[Average Manatee]

Anyhow, anyone actually tried this new DLC? Is it any good or sucks like the others?

Doesn't honestly look like the DLC has much. This seems to be an "improve the base game" free patch upgrade rather than a "whore out extraneous features" DLC, good for consumers but bad for their bottom line unless you're going to purchase it just to support them.

EDIT: Ohh, the DLC apparently adds meme shit like reforming the HRE or forming the EU

 

[fantadomat]

It seems lacklustre to be honest,don't know what they were doing all this months. You can create a few countries like Roman empire,Byzantium or Persia. Pretty boring shit. Tried to watch some people play and got bored in an hour,it is the same retarded AI,the same idiotic peace conferences and war mixing. It is the same shit.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah that's what it looks like to me as well.

New focus trees for some countries are nice, but I can get that with mods. Everything else apart from that looks shit. Army groups commanded by Field Marshals and armies by generals is incredibly awkward to use. The Decisions system looks like pointless busywork, border conflict seems retarded...I don't know wtf were they doing for a year?

 

[fantadomat]

It is zero effort dlc,the could have made trees for all the nations by now. It is retarded how countries that actually participated in the war still don't have one while some pointless countries in south america do. Lazy swedish garbage!

 

[BrotherFrank]

The new leader system is new and I don't understand it, therefore I hate it.

Seriously though, how do the new stats for generals work? They seem to get traits just fine but levelling the stats seem like pure rng. I've had leaders fight multiple wars and remain level 1 everything, then another leader gets into some minor skirmishes and levels up easy peasy.
Dev diary ain't useful either, ffs paradox, I don't give a toss about international women's day in hoi4, I just want to find out how your new mechanics work.

Anyways DLC also looks meh to my eyes, the ONLY reason to get it, is because apparently the leader system is incomplete without it. Still not worth the price.

fallout mod talk

I won't pretend to understand how modding works but they are definitely working on expanding on the current map. Whether they go through with these plans and keep developing the mod till the end, especially in light of their previous failures, will have to be seen. I like to live in hope!

Factions can be wonky even with just the current factions, there's enough people grumbling about it that a submod was made to disable faction joining outside of policy events. Ain't tried it myself yet though.

Otherwise fair enough for your other observations especially regarding ai tendency to bleed itself of mp. Can understand how all these things build up to ruin the mod for you.

 

[Average Manatee]

The new leader system is new and I don't understand it, therefore I hate it.

Seriously though, how do the new stats for generals work? They seem to get traits just fine but levelling the stats seem like pure rng. I've had leaders fight multiple wars and remain level 1 everything, then another leader gets into some minor skirmishes and levels up easy peasy.
Dev diary ain't useful either, ffs paradox, I don't give a toss about international women's day in hoi4, I just want to find out how your new mechanics work.

Problem with general leveling in HoI is that it depends on number of divisions * time in combat (for special traits like hill fighter you obviously need your divisions fighting in hills). This means the optimal way to level generals is to make tons of shitty divisions and run them into a brick wall for weeks without making any progress and bleeding your manpower away. i.e. exactly what the AI does. Any sort of intelligent fighting with strong armored divisions + air support means you'll never get enough XP for a level. If you want that panzer trait, have your panzers sit at a strait crossing where they can attack over several weeks at -98% penalty.

You could see it in previous HoI4 versions where China and Japan AIs would quickly acquire a level 8+ field marshal from hundreds of almost pure infantry divisions that fought forever without progress. Meanwhile a player Japan would quickly and decisively decapitate China effortlessly, ending up gaining a half level. Current setup ironically just makes it harder to gain levels by encouraging more specialization.

Otherwise fair enough for your other observations especially regarding ai tendency to bleed itself of mp. Can understand how all these things build up to ruin the mod for you.

Didn't say it ruined the mod, but FODD is just so far ahead in terms of flavor and stuff to do that I see no real point to replaying OWB until they add way more stuff and refine what they have.

 

[GarfunkeL]

It's always easy to mistakenly label someone a retard on an Internet board. Thanks for removing all doubts and confirming yourself as mentally handicapped.

GarfunkeL forgot to list that spectacular attack when UK navy totally massacred French navy. That was totally amazing operation, all these ships down with exception of one from 4 running away, including lot of dead French soldiers.

On purpose. I didn't include any port/harbour raids. Poor frogs, getting their shit kicked in like that, and mostly because the admiral in command mistranslated the British ultimatum when he forwarded it to Paris, most likely on purpose.

The biggest problem is how to handle naval warfare in a manner that can co-exist with the rest of the game and is still fun and interesting, and what can afford player deviations. After all, generally in any HoI game the player and AI will end up building capital ships in multiple times the TOTAL number that took part in WW2 just for themselves. But the whole thing about how to handle building ships and replacing/repairing ships is just one part of the big messy puzzle, even if it already is a big hurdle to clear.

Well all the Allied countries built a fair number of ships and Japan managed some construction during the war. Germany and Italy less so, especially capital ships. But the industrial side isn't that bad of a mess when compared to land and air - I mean, most nations are able to field massive armies far beyond their historical capabilities. It's the naval combat model that is a mess. It can't get any more micro-intensive as it is, as that would be impossible in MP. But surely something more intricate than just lining ships up and semi-randomly have them approach or withdraw while taking semi-random shots at enemy ships is possible. Even if it's just a A-H and 1-9 grid of squares where the game plots the ships movements, with escorts screening capital ships and so on. Instead of -15% to positioning if you don't have X number of escorts when you have Y number of capital ships and so on.

 

[yeye]

But surely something more intricate than just lining ships up and semi-randomly have them approach or withdraw while taking semi-random shots at enemy ships is possible. Even if it's just a A-H and 1-9 grid of squares where the game plots the ships movements, with escorts screening capital ships and so on. Instead of -15% to positioning if you don't have X number of escorts when you have Y number of capital ships and so on.

They really need to redo the whole naval system. Building 4 carriers and then a bunch of battleships and screens for your doomstack is the most inane possible tactic and shouldn't be the right way to play the game. Destroyer torps need to be way more deadly to capital ships to make the doomstack vs doomstack game even remotely fun. As it is, the destroyers think they can close with a BB, but they get wrecked, and even then, BB's seem to be able to eat torpedoes like theyre not blowing a huge hole under their waterline. Even HOI3 was better with its ridiculous 6cv,6cl ctf's. At least in that game screens didn't close when they had no reason to.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Hope dies last. They did revamp the combat system for Crusader Kings 2, instead of re-using the EU battle system, and there are some differences between EU and Vicky and HoI land battles mechanically. So it is technically feasible. What they need is a designer with enough time and wits to figure it out.

 

[Raghar]

Looks like I was successful in Japanese approachment with US.

 

[Space Satan]

DD. it took them more than a year to add drag and drop

Spoiler

Hi everyone! I hope you are enjoying Waking the Tiger With the 1.5.1 patch released last week the team has now started on 1.5.2. Today won't really be a big diary, but I figured we could highlight some of the changes every week as they are done rather than have a diary break while the patch work is ongoing. The idea is that 1.5.2 will be available as an opt-in beta on Friday (barring QA veto), but we will be rolling out updates to it until its ready for release. Real release is at least 2 weeks away.

Making organizing commanders easier
People seem to really like our fantastic future tech dubbed “Drag-and-drop” (pending trademark registry), so based on community feedback we have decided to implement this in more places. You can now reorganize your armies and army groups by simple dragging them around (we are working on a similar thing for the theater overview to allow it there also).

XP gain on commanders and divisions
There have been a lot of conflicting feedback on how fast your commanders level up and gain traits. Some say it’s much too fast and some say its prohibitively slow. We did a quick fix for 1.5.1 to try and smooth out the progression curve, but realized we really needed to do something more radical. The issue is that its very playstyle dependent since XP is rewarded for every hour in combat. This essentially means that if you play well, pull off encirclements, use concentration of force or overrun the enemy you get very little XP compared to someone who is just throwing bodies at the enemy to slowly wear them down. To deal with this we are changing how you gain XP:

• Overruns (blocking retreating enemy paths) and shattered divisions (enemy that cannot escape) gives you a flat xp reward per unit that is destroyed.
• The rate of XP gain per hour is reduced over time with max penalty at 1 month long battle (-90%)
• The more damage you do relative to the enemy the better XP reward you get to compensate for those combats being relatively short (up to a 4x difference)

Hopefully these changes should help balance the radical differences between long and short battles and reward players who play smart while not negatively impacting the brute force method too much. We’ll be relying on feedback on how this feels during the open beta process to see how it pans out.


Multiplayer desyncs
Looking at statistics from our backend 1.5.1 seems to have improved things and it’s now back to the same level as before Tiger was released. However we still see reports, so we have developed some new tools to help us as well as potentially fixed more cases. We are hopeful about improvements here as well for 1.5.2. Again, we’ll be relying on feedback in the open beta later for this as well.


Doctrine cost changes
With the infamous doctrine-swapping-for-free exploit gone we felt that the cost of switching was perhaps a bit too high now, scaring people from changing up things. To make that a fairer choice starting level of land doctrines now cost half of what they used to (so in line with other techs), making a switch still a serious tradeoff you need to think of, but not as delaying is it is now. The reason it’s not just free is at the heart of HOI4. You step into the shoes of the nation at a historical point in time, so you should need to deal with their current situation. Switching army wide doctrine is one of those things, just like division templates or low war support or stability.


Polish and German border changes
Though some effort was made to adjust states to make german historical WW1 borders possible, as this thread shows, things were still not completely up to scratch. I (Bratyn) decided to put in some of my personal development time to brush up on my map-painting skillz and improve upon what we had already done.

1. The two Polish provinces slightly south-east of Danzig, 6347 and 6321, which previously formed a weird protrusion into Prussia, have now been reshaped with a more east-west horizontal border, with the northern province (6347) being added to the Danzig state. Once Danzig is taken by Germany, this now creates proper borders for Eastern Prussia.
2. I made a minor adjustment to ‘flatten’ the border in the little bit jutting out around Strzelno (I felt it was too pronounced).
3. The two Polish provinces on the tip of Silesia, 506 and 6464, have been reduced in size and remodeled, with the freed-up space going to the provinces around them, as well as a new province (13205) created for the Krakow state. A new state has been created (“Voivodeship Silesia”), to which provinces 506 and 6464 have been added, making it possible to transfer this state via events to Germany, much in the same way as is already done with Poznan and Danzig.
4. While I was at it, I figured I’d fix a personal pet peeve, as well. I reassigned provinces to states all over Eastern Germany, ensuring that the borders between these states now follow the Oder river. I also redrew the borders of the provinces (3514, 3572, 6595, 9535, 11415, and 11517) to follow the Neisse river (which is not shown on the HOI4 map), as well as those of province 6282 (Stettin). This now makes it possible to recreate proper modern-day eastern German borders, for those of us who enjoy that kind of thing.

All of this also involved relocating some industry, air bases, and population from certain states to others, but this should not have much effect on gameplay. Unfortunately, the end result does mean that savegames will have… An unfortunate gap in the map where Voivodeship Silesia is located. Starting a new game when signing up to the Beta or when switching to the patch is recommended, as not doing so may result in some weird stuff (such as units present in those provinces beforehand being perpetually stuck there). This is also the reason why we tend to be conservative with making map-changes, and this is unfortunately unlikely to change.

Glorious end result:

Hats! The people want Hats!
In our ongoing efforts to increase the number of great hats in the game, we have decided to add Paul von Lettow Vorbeck to the German lineup. Best known for his campaign in German East Africa during the Great War, von Lettow-Vorbeck is available for recruitment through a decision after the Kaiser has returned. Given the terrain he fought in during the war, we decided to give him the Jungle Rat trait as well as a pretty good logistics score.

There are of course also a slew of smaller change and fixes we have had time to do, but we’ll leave that for the eventual changelog. If your pet peeve was not mentioned check out last weeks diary covering the main areas we will be working on as this diary was to highlight stuff we had already done.

Next week we will have another update as well as showing off a really really cool thing for modders we have been working with on the side. Stay tuned!

 

[Average Manatee]

XP gain on commanders and divisions
There have been a lot of conflicting feedback on how fast your commanders level up and gain traits. Some say it’s much too fast and some say its prohibitively slow. We did a quick fix for 1.5.1 to try and smooth out the progression curve, but realized we really needed to do something more radical. The issue is that its very playstyle dependent since XP is rewarded for every hour in combat. This essentially means that if you play well, pull off encirclements, use concentration of force or overrun the enemy you get very little XP compared to someone who is just throwing bodies at the enemy to slowly wear them down. To deal with this we are changing how you gain XP:

• Overruns (blocking retreating enemy paths) and shattered divisions (enemy that cannot escape) gives you a flat xp reward per unit that is destroyed.
• The rate of XP gain per hour is reduced over time with max penalty at 1 month long battle (-90%)
• The more damage you do relative to the enemy the better XP reward you get to compensate for those combats being relatively short (up to a 4x difference)

Hopefully these changes should help balance the radical differences between long and short battles and reward players who play smart while not negatively impacting the brute force method too much. We’ll be relying on feedback on how this feels during the open beta process to see how it pans out.

Good change, well overdue. Though the K : D ratio rewarding sounds like it will make the "let AI suicide into your entrenched lines for a year before running them over" strat even more powerful.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's a good change, but I think something is fucked with the XP alltogether. I literally sometimes have generals with 24 divisions fight for a year without ever getting a promotion.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yea it's really strange, something just feels off about the way XP is earned.

 

[Anthedon]

How is the AI in the new patch? I've read about the constant attacks that lead to depleted manpower. But is it still abandoning fronts etc.?

 

[Average Manatee]

AI seems a bit better, but it's still nowhere capable of winning a fair fight. Needs at least a tick or two on the boosts.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's a lot better after the patches. Still need to give opposing countries the boosts, but that's okay, every strategy game ever does that.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It's also kind of a sliding scale anyway, some people like yours truly suck at these games so they prefer playing with boosts to themselves. What matters is having a solid mechanical foundation to which the modifiers either way can be applied to.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, solid mechanics are fundamental, because there's no way for the AI to outplay you on the macro and strategic level. That's why I don't mind giving AI artificial advantages, because it is severely disadvantaged due to WW2 setting.

Let's say I'm Allies. I know where and when Germany attacks Poland. I know when and where Germany attacks France. I know when the Italy joins the war and I know it will fight campaign in Africa to control Suez. I know when Hitler attacks USSR. I know when the Americans join the war.

I know all these things and I can - and I do - plan my reactions to them years in advance.

I'm currently in the middle of UK playthrough, with Japan, Germany and Italy all boosted to the max with sliders. I've already done my re-endtition of Normandy landing, took France back and was about to ride to Germany and finish them off. Then out of nowhere Franco decides to join the Axis and suddenly I'm fighting in France on 3 fronts - Spain to the south, Germany to the east and Italy to the southeast. So it's a stalemate right now and not sure if I can finish them off without couple of days of extensive micro.

But that's a rare, rare moment when something unpredictable happens on the strategic level.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

To me it seems that there's just very little to be gained from playing as either US or UK because of the fact they aren't put in a position to cause a major derailing of the scenario. Out of the more mundane options, the best one there is probably Japan since if Japan beats China before 1938 you can have things change massively. Germany is now the biggest example of deviating the scenario if you go with the oust Hitler path since that throws a giant spanner in the works. Hungary is another stealth-wrecker if Austria-Hungary path is taken, albeit it's an example where I need things easier since it takes pretty pro skills to resist German attack which is likely to come without having the modifiers on your side so you can for example build up some land forts in Austria and such.

But that's really the thing, in "historical" path plays you kinda can't go except with Germany, Italy, or Japan if you want things to go topsy-turvy, and out of thos I feel Japan is the most interesting one because they have the greatest degree of freedom of action after war in China.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I agree that playing US is pointless, but I actually love playing UK. I think they have by far the most freedom out of all the countries in the game. They have fleet, they have resources, they have bases everywhere and you can pick and choose any kind of playthrough you want and UK can always to do it. And the same time, they're not as good as to become obscenely overpowered with barely any input from the player, which is the case with the US. You can do a lot of l unorthodox playthroughs with them, like pumping weapons to India and having them show up with a 100 divisions when the war breaks, or bringin Spain to Allies by pumping them with democracy through focus tree, and other cool shit.

Although in general playing Allies has a bit different dynamic about it. The challenge of playing Axis is in trying to win. As Allies it's pretty hard to actually lose, but you can find challenge in buffing Axis through the tits and still finding ways to take them down.

In my playthrough right now I had to blow up Suez to prevent Italians taking it, Franco took Gibraltar, locking most of my fleet in Middetterean. I know cannot remove them and rebuilding them would take years, so if AI Hitler were to start building fleet I'm in trouble. Japan is also almost done overruning India and I actually had some weirdos land in UK when my channel fleet was repearing.

I don't think I'm gonna lose because AI Hitler has already lost like 12m people and he's already on his last consrption law, so eventually I should be able to just grind the Germany out of manpower. But you actually can get in trouble now with 1.5 AI and buffs.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I suppose there's that, but to me in big part there's a question that with UK you have a set of situations that you need to counter. Like, I'd imagine a lot of the older views is something like "kill all krauts" counter-blitzing is what tends to happen. But I've had this sort of I dunno bias against the UK in these games since HoI2 due to that feeling so could be things have become more fascinating.

That campaign definately sounds interesting, and indeed I guess the HoI4 version on India has significant influence.