Hearts of Iron 4 announced

@KevinC @rho21 When you do a lend-lease, (as I desperately need infantry equipment), do I have to do anything special to have my troops equip non-standard weaponry?

No, I believe they’ll just use any equipment (of the right type). It may take a day to reach the front lines.

ARGGGGGGG

another loss - Couldn’t contain Romania in the end.

I ran out of infantry and had no extra supply convoys so when the US finally offered a bunch of equipment, it was too late. The loss of all those factories rippled everything. I’d didn’t think they’d break the wall of forts so I built way too much stuff thatvgermany took over.

Thinking of going straight 100 civ factory, before building anything else in next playthru.

Can you block trade to specific countries?

200 factories in 1940, not sure thats enough really.
Setting up your industry game is its own game in itself…

As for defense. just make sure you have tanks behind the lines to counter attack breaktroughs…you can’t be strong everywhere, nor will you stop a breaktrough, but you can counterattack exposed stuff. Make sure you have green air in any zone you want to fight in.

The shape of that front line is very strange. There is only a very small breach on the front with Romania, yet they are way behind your lines to past Stalingrad. What I am wondering is what did you do when the Axis were crossing the Dneipr behind you? It looks like you still held most of the front, but I think I would be evacuating troops in a panic at that point. That thin strip of USSR-controlled territory seems like it might hold something like >200 of your divisions. Why are they still there?

This is where my noobness is hurting me. Basically I setup the front, and then leave my units there to defend letting them do their thing. Are you not supposed to do that? I do sometimes think they are making things worse as they mill about and seem to lose their entrenchment bonus. So I made 6 fronts with 24 units per front along the German-Hungarian-Romanian border. Some places held, others did not. There’s so much to watch that several times I saw an entire group get surrounded and trounced. I’m not sure how to manage these guys once I need to pull them from their designated front. Can you offer some help on how I actually do the next step? Pull back a bit so they don’t get slaughtered?

Green air? Are you referencing supply? Because when I did try to counterattack some weak points with my tanks they were always out of fuel even though we were in my territory.

It sounds like what happened is one front broke and the others just ignored that happening.

I’m not sure the optimal way of going about it, but in general you want to go slow and pause and think about it, at least as you are learning the game. Keep in mind that the front AI is very very stupid, so you can’t really rely on it when things start to go off. I’ll try to post more later.

Green air means you have air superiority. Like in one of your views you are fighting under “red air”. Sometimes easier said than done.

Question: Are you setting one gigantic front via your Field Marshal or individual fronts for each General/Army?

Yea I did my best to try and get air superiority but I couldn’t maintain it.

@MikeJ if you don’t mind writing up how one defends and moves around a front that would be great. I wonder if I should even be using some of the options like garrison or front… if I should get them in place using those tools then delete the front and leave themthem there and move them manually after things get going.

I also found the game is massively imbalanced right now. There is a major convoy bug that favors the Axis, China is dead meat every game, the US doesn’t island hop the pacific, the Brits don’t know how to counter the German sub threat, nor how to use their Navy effectively since MtG, Italy always kicks the Brits out of Africa, and apparently the French Air Force never even takes off when Germany invades them. I ran 15 simulated games last night after my last loss to see how AI Russia handles the Germans and they were even worse than me p. Each game ended the exact same way. Italy controlling all of N Africa and much of the Middle East, Romania controlling the rest of Mideast and half of south Russia, German the rest, and Japan in control or puppeted all of Asia.

Man you are making me want to play a USSR game…

I am no expert as usually I play a more offensive country. From my USSR games, one trick I think I recall was doubling up on the army lines. So two 24-division armies assigned to each section of front. That way if I want to adjust boundaries or pull one army away from a less-threatened area, I could do that without uprooting all the troops defending there. I had to shift armies and move newly-built armies to sections of the front that were doing less well. Mostly I hid behind rivers but I had big supply problems in areas where there was lots of ongoing combat.

Me too. I used the rivers to good effect, but as soon as they get an opening they pour so many infantry in I can’t counterattack and the swell just grows to what you saw above. It is kinda frustrating to put 10 hours into preparing just for this German assault, then seeing all your carefully made plans fizzle then explode… 12 times in a row.

So, one large Field Marshal front or smaller individual fronts for each general/army?

I had 3 Field Marshals. 1 for the German Defensive Front, 1 for the Black Sea and Hungo-Romania front. And 1 for attacking units as I wanted to maximize point bonus’s for units by mixing FM’s and Generals.

So along the German front I had 24 units cover 4 states each. Then the next 24 would cover the next 4 states etc all the way to the Black Sea. So 8 sets of 24 infantry covered the entire enemy front leaving me with a few tanks, horsies, and NKVD in the back.

BUT… I found out maybe I hurt myself? I hadn’t edited my Infantry template til late and a lot of them look like this: Are they missing stuff like the engineers they’re supposed to have?

I would trim those templates for sure. I would work to get them down to 20 width, that can be super important. If you have 80 combat width and 4 infantry divisions of 24 width, only 3 (3x24=72 width) get to participate in the battle! The 4th is left hanging out int he reserves, not contributing. Also, they have no anti-tank capability. If you watch a combat, you will likely notice that many German divisions have a Shield icon next to them. This means that your infantry lack the ability to pierce their armor. There are two problems with this:

  1. If you are unable to pierce the armor of an enemy division, they effectively get two dice rolls for damage on your defenders. Its like doubling their firepower against you.

  2. Take a look at your Soft Attack (58.1) vs Hard Attack (11.4) values. This is going to be a major issue against Panzer divisions, because they’re going to have a fairly high Hardness rating.

What’s Hardness? It’s the percentage of the division that is affected by Hard Attack instead of Soft Attack. So for a division with 60% hardness, that means 60% of their division uses your Hard Attack stat to determine damage you inflict. So 60% of their division is only getting hit with 11.4 damage instead of your much more respectable 58.1 soft attack (the 40% remainder of their division will get hit with that, which represents the infantry they have in it).

So, right now you’re struggling with defending and holding the line, you’re not too worried about major assaults. Just to see what kind of impact it has, I’d make a quick change to that infantry template:

  • Remove both line artillery and add one Infantry brigade. This will mean you have 10 infantry brigades for a width of 20.
  • Strip out the Recon or medical support and replace with Artillery and Anti-Tank support.

This will result in Infantry divisions that have higher Organization, which means they will be able to stay in the battle and hold the line longer. It will also (hopefully) give them sufficient Piercing to bust through Panzer armor, effectively cutting their damage against those divisions in half. It will also raise their Hard Attack, which will allow you to do more damage against those tanks and wear the Germans down. Right now their armored divisions are likely rolling over your infantry forces and suffering few casualties in the process, freeing up German industry to product yet more tanks and planes.

I’d just start with that and see if you notice any difference in how your lines perform. Not that the Germans WILL still push you back. Your goal is to slow them down, bleed them, and stretch out their supply lines.

EDIT: I couldn’t remember the exact details of Armor, so here’s what the wiki has to say about Armor/Piercing. I think you’ll see how critical it is that you’re able to punch back against those Panzers.

I’d also worry that the division has only a small fraction of required artillery equipment and none of the support and trucks.

That’s a good point, It looks like only 12/72 artillery pieces are actually there, so the division is under-equipped. No support equipment either, which means likely no Engineers to dig in and entrench.

So when I make those changes to the division template, how long til those changes show up to the guys in the field? Like if I had all the stuff they needed stockpiled…

Also, what about anti-air?

If I start from scratch, the moment I have the option to make the new template you mention - should I do it? Or should I get base infantry in the field so I’ve got lots of infantry, while making the stuff they need to be outfitted, then make the division change later and hope they show up in time? The race against the clock is so challenging.