Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[a Goat]

It depends, really, for instance they only use steel and oil, there's no tungsten involved(unlike with arty), also I don't personally support the opinion that you should ever give up armored units all-together. Have 5 20 width divisions in 120 div army but these 5 will still give you these heavy-breakthrough high-mobility divisions you'll need for some uses(like destroying minors by racing to their VP's or breaking stalemate on some flank by encircling few units in local attacks).

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, problem with lights is you pay 80% of med cost for 40% of the stats. Plus you can't really use their speed if you boost it due to how HoI4's awful HP system works, while if you boost speed of mediums you'll have much better stats for the same speed.

 

[Space Satan]

I think only spanish crap divisions could not breach LARM armour. Even chinese can breach it goddammit.

 

[Space Satan]

DD: Sharks

Spoiler

Today we are going to talk about Naval Terrain and start talking about some of the core changes to the naval game.

We felt that we wanted to make where you fight more important, and where possible give advantages to people fighting in home waters. The sea in HOI4 has previously generally been either “ocean” or “ocean in range of enemy land based aircraft”, and otherwise mattered little. That’s about to change!

To do this we are introducing several terrain types for seas. These impact what ships work best there, how mines function as well as some other stuff. In total seas are divided into 4 types:

Regular Ocean has no special effects, so its similar to plains on land.

Fjords & Archipelagos come with some hefty penalties to big ships, but make it easier to hide (all numbers still quite work in progress btw!)

Deep Oceans on the other hand are not good for light ships. They are also not good place to mine due to their depth and vastness. Subs like this area (mid atlantic gap = bae) because it is also easier to hide here.

Shallow seas are a bit harder to maneuver well in, and not a great place for submarines.

There is also some possible modifiers on them:

Arctic Water is a general bad area to operate in, wearing your ships down and causing potential accidents. It also increases casualties if ships sink for any reason. This modifier works much like Extreme Cold on land so it depends on the time of year and temperature.

Some places in the world have quite a lot of sharks and there are a lot of stories of heavy casualties after the sinking of ships due to sharks. The USS Indianapolis is a famous example where due to several reasons, sharks among those, something like 75% of the crew were lost. It is honestly mostly a cool flavor thing though we wanted to have in

Your performance in these are also affected by Admiral Traits. As we have shown a bit before your Admirals can now gain traits for different terrain types.

• Cold Water Expert reduces the impact of arctic waters
• Inshore Fighter gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in Fjords and Archipelagos
• Blue Water Expert gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in deep oceans
• Green Water Expert gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in shallow seas

You might have noticed some strange colors in the screenshots above. We are adding some more mapmodes, but it’s mostly all pink and full of coder art at the moment, so you are going to have to wait a bit more to see all those. I am pointing it out because I need to show the terrain mapmode a bit to more easily show off the naval terrain across the world

Around the Dutch East Indies several of the terrain types are visible (the colors on land in this mapmode are still in need of some tweaking btw). The brightest there is archipelagos with the other shades of blue being shallow seas and regular ocean and the darker areas is deep oceans.

This is what the Atlantic and Europe looks like:

Notice the deep ocean in the Atlantic and the fjords around scandinavia.


That’s it for this today, next week we are going to start going over some of the more core naval changes. Seeya then!


Reject reason to make the impossible possible!

 

[janior]

it will be a gut patch

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Naval terrain is a good addition, at the very least it will possible introduce defensive light ship group for archipelagos as the third viable naval formation besides battleships+carriers full fleets and submarine hordes. The remaining major issue is really just land-based air units.

 

[Average Manatee]

I am not a naval expert, but wouldn't rough terrain that lowers movement speed give advantage to the big ships? Pretty sure every decent navy in WW2 was capable of hitting a non-moving or steady-sailing target, the only way for a destroyer or cruiser to avoid being torn in half by the Yamato or Iowa immediately is to zig-zag erratically, which is exactly what you can't do in an archipelago or shoreline because you risk running aground. It's only in videogames that you can "duck" behind the equivalent of chest-high walls conveniently placed on maps, in real life you need to stay well away from all of that or your ship is toast.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well it's two-fold really: One thing is that big ships genuinely can't just sail anywhere they want because of their displacement. Which leads to the second, that such limitations both affect a capital ship's ability to maneuver and increase their vulnerability to things like mines and coastal artillery.

So in that sense it really isn't respective of reality, something like the Baltic Sea would instead heavily favour mining and coastal battery rather than small ships.

 

[Space Satan]

Both axis and allies had the same fear about losing capital ships and avoided decisive battles in fears of losing their precious navy. WWII was a war of raids, convoys and a USA-Japan anomaly in the end.

 

[Sranchammer]

Is this is a decent game yet?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Both axis and allies had the same fear about losing capital ships and avoided decisive battles in fears of losing their precious navy. WWII was a war of raids, convoys and a USA-Japan anomaly in the end.

Though in this regard it's also kind of a thing specific to the participants, as Germany simply lacked the navy to even consider risking challenging the Royal Navy, but Japan on the other hand had no choice but try and inflict severe enough casualties on the US Navy to sue for some manner of peace.

IJN is still the best example of that fear of losing capital ships though, and what was ultimately a waste of resources when it came to building bigger and more advanced battleships. The Yamato spent most of the war safely tucked away at port because of how much losing it would cost.

 

[Space Satan]

Saw some dev streams about US civil war. It seems the game still have no solution to "ready shitload of divisions ready to deploy and when civil war starts deploy them en masse" problem. All civil wars could be won easily with this exploit.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Can't really think of a solution that isn't some sort of mobilization system where your divisions show up only during wartime and are otherwise more of a function of how you want your (eventual) army groups to be structured and then built equipment accordingly.

It'd definately make things more complicated for little payoff outside of getting rid of that exploit.

 

[Average Manatee]

Saw some dev streams about US civil war. It seems the game still have no solution to "ready shitload of divisions ready to deploy and when civil war starts deploy them en masse" problem. All civil wars could be won easily with this exploit.

I thought the splitting of forces by event took care of that?

At least whenever I deleted my army as Spain or Germany and remade all of the divisions in reserve the other side still ended up with a bunch of crap to wade through. Not sure if that was my divisions or the event is coded to spawn the same AI army every time.

 

[Space Satan]

DD Spotting

Spoiler

1. Happy wednesday! Today is going to be the first of a few diaries covering changes to naval combat and naval gameplay. The idea of this diary is to give an overview of the different changes, and then future diaries will dig into more details. We are effectively redoing most of the naval aspects of the game which is a herculean task. This means a lot of stuff might still end up seeing changes and are work in progress. My hope is that this will give you a good picture of what we are trying to accomplish. Expect that each of these sections below is probably gonna get its own diary.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Task Forces & Missions
   First up let's talk about how we are changing the management of fleets. Fleets are now made up of task forces. The fleet, like before, is led by an Admiral. The fleet has one area of responsibility and each task force can have individual missions. Some of those missions are designed to cooperate as well between them. Each task force can have various settings to control its behavior (like if you want them to split off ships to repair, or their risk vs aggression stance etc). Fleets, like Army Groups on land are visible and organized into theaters. In this case naval theaters.
   
   
   
   
   These also has a separate section for reserves at the bottom so you have an easier time managing where newly built ships go, and which replacement ships go to where.
   
   Your navy is likely to be the most fuel thirsty thing you have so it's important to manage things in an economic way. Putting all your battleships to patrol the Iberian Coast is not something that will make fuel-economic-sense anymore (hey I invented a word!). To deal with this kind of thing we have removed the old Search and Destroy mission and have a new one called Strike Force.
   
   A strike force flagged task force job is to sit and wait in port where it won’t consume fuel, and to go and assist trouble your more nimble and cheap patrols locate. Search and Destroy also would not make sense to keep around anymore, as in most case the concept of the fleet spreading out is gone. We wanted your carefully assembled task forces to join as one unit and to be in one location always, rather than spread over the map in an abstract way. More details on this in a dedicated diary, but let's get back to how patrol missions can work together with strike forces when we get to the next topic: spotting!
   
   
   Spotting
   Before Man the Guns the way ships would engage would essentially be based on a dice roll, meaning as long as you were in a zone, no matter how hard to find you were, combat would always ensue. We also struggled with every combat essentially sucking in every ship into a giant doomstack battle. This was also made worse because combats in HOI take a lot longer than in reality, yet movement on the map is similar, making reinforcement much too easy.
   
   To deal with this we have split up combat into essentially 2 parts. Spotting, and actual combat. For a combat to happen you must first spot the enemy fully. Below is a picture showing a patrol force of destroyers closing in on fully spotting a German cruiser group, with a strike force assigned to support. It goes pretty fast because I have built a decent radar net to support my ships.
   
   
   
   
   
   When you get a target to 100% spotting, which is the bar you can see on the left of the red task force, combat can start. I say can, because it depends on your task force settings for how aggressive you want them to be. In this case because it has a strike force to help out the British ships will wait a bit for their strike force to get there (the Germans could engage if they were aggressive and the patrol force weak enough to be taken out fast). Once it’s there the battle will start.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   If the battle would have been a pushover for the patrol group (say a lone destroyer) they would have just dealt with it without calling in the strike force and burned all that fuel.
   
   As for piling in more stuff into a battle to escalate it into the doomstacks of old, the solution is that task forces given the order to join will be slowed based on org level and distance (manual orders also reduce this), meaning there will be a significant delay as they get there and can actually get on with firing. Sort of like a coordination penalty. With battles shorter this means you could clear the field and get away before things escalate.
   
   Combat
   When it comes to combat we are aiming for less decisive battles, where composition matters more, and that are easier to understand, and where its easier to disengage when stuff goes badly. A tall order! Currently this is a bit too pink and coder-arty for a sneak peek, so you are going to have to be patient (something I know you guys are amazing at, so this should be no biggie )
   
   Terrain (recap)
   Different parts of the oceans will favor different kinds of task force compositions, combined with admiral traits etc this will allow for some home advantage and variation in “best fleet”. Check out last weeks diary for more details.
   
   
   
   
   Repair/Production (recap)
   The changes outlined in repair and production is an important part of making this all feel ok. If we want less decisive battles where the enemy is pushed back at sea, then repairing needed to cost something other than simply time. Repair now takes up dockyards and production of individual big capital ships is slower (although the speed to produce several in parallel is unchanged). Read more details in the previous diary here if you missed it.
   
   
   
   
   Ship Design
   We will also allow you to design and refit ships allowing you more options for adapting to changing circumstances and to get the most out of your navy and technological advancement.
   
   Hopefully all this gave you an overview on what we are trying to achieve in Man the Guns and 1.6 Ironclad when it comes to the naval game. Look forward to more detail in future diaries (although we are likely to sprinkle in some other topics in between as well, like our unannounced final focus tree). See you all next week!
   
   
   Last edited: Today at 16:25
   podcat, Today at 16:26
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   With task force now sitting in ports, is there any revamp for how port strike works? To avoid naval bombers just pummeling them. Currently, even air superiority doesn't fully negate port strike missions.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Looks like my strategy of ignoring fleet completely and building naval bombers instead is still going to be perfectly viable.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Generally speaking it might be wise of Pdox to consider simply removing naval air missions (including Air Superiority at sea) and naval bombers until they get naval warfare in itself right.

Honestly, it's not really worth having them there in the first place, since either they totally replace the fleet for most countries (basically everyone except Kwa and if you intend to invade Kwa) or they're totally not worth using.

 

[zool]

Not strictly HOI4-related but for those interested, I started a Darkest Hour LP with Turkey here.

 

[Space Satan]

DD Bueno

Spoiler

Welcome to Mexico, a country ravaged by internal tensions, corrupt politicians, rural rebellions and threatened by the looming shadow of her northern neighbour. In Man the Guns, you will get the chance to work through all these obstacles, reform the nation and turn them into a power strong enough to expand or involve themselves in WW2.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Mexico’s politics at this time were dominated by revolutionary generals who toppled the dictator Diaz and then squabbled amongst themselves, issuing their pronunciamiento (a justification for their attempt to seize power) and betraying one another ruthlessly. Three of the main figures from these caudillos (a word combining the role of warlord, patron, businessman and politician) were President Lázaro Cárdenas, President Plutarco Calles, and military strongman Saturnino Cedillo. The ruling clique gradually turned from coups and civil wars to less violent means of seeking power, but at the start of the game this transition is still taking place.

Lázaro Cárdenas, president from 1934 to 1940, was a socialist who led the nationalisation of Mexican oil concessions, built up state financing of manufacturing industries, encouraged the collectivisation of peasant farms and their protection from landlords via Ejido militias, and is celebrated today for his role in modernising the nation. Historically he helped the transition of Mexico from military dictatorship to a stable and functioning democracy thanks to his ability to both compromise with moderate opposition and undermine domestic threats to the state from extremists.

Plutarco Calles, president from 1924 to 1928 and “shadow president” for much of the reigns of his successors, was a divisive figure to say the least. He attempted to cement the state’s power over the Catholic Church in Mexico using brutal suppression of priests and their faithful, going as far as torturing and even crucifying dissidents. The Cristiada, a rebellion by rural farmers to oppose this forced secularisation, won little success in the field against Calles’ troops, hardened as they were by civil war and supported by modern artillery and bomber planes, but it did cause some concern inside the ruling clique over methods, ultimately leading to a compromise between church and state. Calles still clings to the power he has left, and you must either throw him out of the country or accept his role in the new Mexico.

Saturnino Cedillo, governor of San Luis Potosí, was one of the last of the caudillos to threaten the Mexican state. A survivor, he absorbed remnants of the Cristero rebels into his private army and managed to maintain relative independence in his province which the central government sought to crush. Ultimately he rebelled against Cardenas’ incursions into his power base. Historically his rebellion was short lived as the Cardenas government successfully undercut his support and disarmed his paramilitary forces, killing him in the field within a few months. Cardenas suspected America and Britain of inciting Cedillo’s rebellion by promising support, in order to punish Mexico for seizing their oil concessions, but no such support ever arrived.

Economic Development

Mexico is a major producer of oil at the game start and only stands to increase its role as an exporter as the conflagration grips the world and upsets the flow of trade around the globe. Historically Mexico’s nationalisation of the concessions granted by Cardenas’ predecessors (mostly to Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil of California) caused a backlash from Britain and America which served to isolate Mexico and almost pushed them into the arms of the Germans. In game, you must develop your oil if you wish to become a major international player, and on the way you will build up your infrastructure using either Cardenas’ path of socialism and import substitution, or his successor Avila’s preference, liberalisation and privatisation.

As seen in the Dutch dev diary, HoI4 is getting a new mechanic relating to concessions of resources from one country to another, which transfers the contents of a state free of charge. This will make its appearance in Mexico in the form of oil concessions to Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil of California. Nationalising these assets was a goal of the Mexican revolutionaries from the outset, and became a source of friction between Mexico and the former owners (Britain and America respectively) once President Cardenas actually took steps towards nationalisation.

Military Expansion

Mexico begins in 1936 as a war-weary third rate power, wracked by internal tensions and the legacy of decades of civil war. This was not always the case, however. The armaments industry established by President Diaz prior to the instability was making many advances in weapons technology, aircraft production, and even experiments in tank development. The famous Mondragon rifle was one of the earliest pioneers in semi-automatic small arms. A more assertive Mexico would also likely reject reliance on Italian gunboats and American hand-me-down destroyers if she sought to contest the oceans.

After building up factories and shipyards, you have a choice to make on both the army and naval branches of the tree.

A Mexico uninterested in fighting decisive battles might instead decide to focus on convoy raiding, whereas choosing the contest the surface against your rivals will require a powerful surface fleet. The two “finishers” on the naval tree reflect these differences.

When it came to land battles during the various insurrections against the central government, Mexico utilised her infantry, cavalry and nascent airforce in a powerful combined arms force the rebels were unable to defeat, and you will likewise be able to modernise the different branches of the armed forces until deciding between conventional artillery or aerial support as the “finisher” on the army side of the tree.

Diplomatic Relations

Mexico is considered America’s “backyard”, an insulting and imperious attitude for the Yanquis to take but one the Mexican leadership must consider seriously before making their move. Taking independent action on the international stage, aligning towards one of America’s enemies, or threatening America’s economic interests would all be causes of concern for President Roosevelt, let alone his more expansionist domestic rivals. Mexico can gamble on her northern neighbour being too isolationist to intervene south, but if the gamble doesn’t pay off, there’ll be Hell to pay.

Religion
The biggest divide in Mexican society at the time was certainly the place of the Church within society. Most of the Mexican ruling class was strongly anticlerical and a law “on the tolerance of sects” meant that the priests heavily controlled by the state. If you want to change the situation, it will be up to you to progressively support the Catholic Church by giving back their lands and amend the anticlerical laws. If you go down that path the destruction of the separation between the Church and the State will be waiting for you at the end of the road.

Two groups can rise to power hand in hand with the Church: the Catholic conservatives and the Synarchists. The conservatives try to combine their religious beliefs with republican institutions. It would lead to the rise of the Party of National Action of Manuel Gómez Morín. As an alternative, the restoration of the Church can be concomitant with a much more radical group: the Synarchists. That group will try to institute a “clerical-fascist” state, using the influence of the members of the Church eager to seek their revenge on the anticlericalists who ruled Mexico since the 1911 revolution. At the end of both trees, you can contact the veterans of the Cristero War and incorporate them to your armed forces. Such course of action will obviously anger the former ruling class that will surely try to contest power in order to reestablish the anticlerical legal system.

Revolutionary Legacy
At the start of the game, the Mexican army is divided politically as various generals support their own political group depending on their political orientation (they were usually opposed to the Church). One of your first choice will therefore concern the fate of the armed forces. You can choose to control and depoliticize them, transforming them into a professional force or embrace one of those groups and use them to quickly shift the political landscape of the country.

If you choose to support the Gold Shirts, the country will evolve into an anticlerical authoritarian regime. The exact nature of that regime can however vary a bit. Supporting Plutarco Calles (by selecting the “Jefe Maximo” focus) will grant direct control over the state as he was unable to fully control Cardenas. If Calles was previously exiled and the general Saturnino Cedillo was supported however, he will lead the opposition and take control of the government. If none of those conditions are fulfilled, Nicolás Rodríguez Carrasco, the leader of the Gold Shirts will lead the country instead.

As an alternative to right-wing authoritarianism, you can favor the communist Red Shirts and suppress other political movements instead. This revolutionary movement will give the presidential seat to the Trotskyist head of the communist party Hernán Laborde

… unless you invited his mentor to the government previously.

You would then be rewarded by Leon himself, awake and angry, ready to take his revenge against Stalin

It would then be your objective to lead the 4th Internationale and show how superior it is to the 3rd (aka the Comintern).

If you want more peaceful solutions, multiple tools are at your disposal, depending on your political orientation. If you are communist and don’t want to embrace the political legacy of the 4th International, you can try to form the Revolutionary American League and spread communism in Latin American countries.

As a more right wing oriented government, you can support “Hispanism”; the concept that the countries of South America should support each other; and try to form a faction including all of South America. If you are fascist (Synarchist or anticlerical), the effect will change from a diplomatic offensive to a more violent one. This course of action will allow you access to wargoal focuses that could enable you to unite South America by force.

If trying to dramatically change the political order in Latin America is not your thing, you can simply adopt “Realpolitik” and find allies in order to survive this era of global conflict.

Territorial Expansion
If you don’t want to just send a few planes to help the US against the Japanese, several expansion paths will be available to you once your diplomatic status is settled. Most of those will grant you wargoals against neighboring countries and in some cases, the addition of new cores will become possible.

The most peculiar plan is certainly “Operation Just Cause”. If you approve that plan you will be in a border conflict against US in order take control of the Panama canal area.

This will of course anger the US so be careful. The rest is either pretty straightforward or will be food for thoughts until the release.

Mexico was our final focus tree for MTG, so next we return to to the seas for more naval gameplay updates.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

That concession of resources thing could be really good. A big problem has generally been that much of the map is prepostrously resource poor, but it's also kind of necessary due to the trade model. This could actually solve the issue if the concessions were REALLY unequal so extractionary situations are in place.

EDIT: Trotsky conquers America LPs are going to explode all over the place.

EDIT2: A lot of minors could use those Integration things to make for moar alt history.

 

[Space Satan]

I personally hate South America because of its terrain movement is goddamn slow. Everything is slow in this goddamned continent. Almost every province is a mountain or jungle with huge defensive bonuses. So it is a stalemates with almost no space for maneuver war.

 

[Sranchammer]

I personally hate South America because of its terrain movement is goddamn slow. Everything is slow in this goddamned continent. Almost every province is a mountain or jungle with huge defensive bonuses. So it is a stalemates with almost no space for maneuver war.

Now you know how royalist forces felt

 

[Space Satan]

But it is not one-sided. Everyone is in same situation. You attack - yeah, good luck breaching this crap jungle. Invasion? You are lucky if you capture a port and can spread your forces across the coast but moving inside continent is a pain. South America is the only situation where I use paratroopers. Just to drop them to key points and cut that entrenched forces in the jungle and mountains

 

[Space Satan]

DD Democratic puppets

Spoiler

Hi and welcome to another diary! I am home sick today, so this gives me something to do (besides suffering)! Today it’s time for another Bag of Tricks diary where we cover a couple of features that aren’t necessarily connected. Two of these do fit quite well with the expansions sub-theme of fleshing out democracies. Lets dig right in!

Expeditionary Force Requests
The Allies are made up of many nations and coordinating them can be difficult. To help with this Man the Guns adds the ability to request expeditionary forces from multiple nations directly when organizing your forces.

The AI will respond immediately and assign the troops to your plan if it approves. That means you can control how they get there, should you wish it.

It is also possible to request expeditionaries straight from an empty army. To do that click the new expeditionary army button at the bottom of the new army button:

Useful if you have no units in an area, but an ally i your faction does. Then you could draw a plan there and tell them what to do. AI will prefer picking troops close to the plan if they can.

The AI is pretty helpful, but will not give you more than it can spare and still ensure its home areas are safe. It will also be a bit watchful, so if you always send them ahead to die you might find that it doesn’t want to hand over as much troops anymore. Depending on what plan you draw up it will also try to send suitable units. So marines for invasions for example. This means that for the AI to know if and what it should send you must first draw up the plan before sending your request.

Note that I am talking about AI here. This action isn't available towards players. It's just a lot simpler to talk to each other and use existing expeditionary sending for that.

To be able to request expeditionaries, you must either be the faction leader (which with MTG can now change from whoever created the faction), or have subject nations as the action is also available for those. The action is available for all ideologies, but we think it fits the democratic theme the most considering the plethora of smaller nations banded together against the axis.


Supervised State
Supervised States are a new autonomy level in MTG. Designed to let democracies do puppeting in a way that suits them better, and ensures the targeted nations can't just turn around and go against them.

West Germany is here a supervised state set up by the British. A supervised state is not particularly oppressive, but does come with restrictions.

• The nation is locked into masters faction.
• They will ideologically drift towards master, and can not use other ideology ministers to affect things.
• The master will be able to get some cheaper trade and more trade access.

A Supervised state is essentially on a timer, as they will also slowly regain autonomy, so you can not really keep them a subject forever. They also do not have any other steps and go directly to Free once they are autonomous enough. At this point restrictions drop and they are free to leave factions etc.


On-map decisions
This one is something I’ve been wanting as soon as I noticed that people wanted to be able to do state based or decisions with location. Often the interesting part of a decision is where, and huge lists of states isn't all that nice to scroll through. We actually had to restrict some stuff for Waking the Tiger because the list of states would have become unmanageable otherwise. To deal with that the 1.6 Ironclad update will also make decisions available on map as long as you have the decisions view open. Some are simply mirrored, so you can pick them in either the list or on the map, and some are only on the map. A good example of the second type is the Blackshirt Marches when turning UK towards fascism. A lot of different states with different costs make for overwhelming choice, but on the map it is quite easy to see both where and how costly they are.

Here is one of the prospecting decisions, already activated, if you control Nigeria:

And @Bratyn 's favorite, activating the flooding defenses of Netherlands, directly on the map!

Ships now have a lot of upgrades

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Map-targeted decisions should provide for a good tool for modders.