Hearts of Iron 4 announced

I hope you don’t mind, but I have a lot of questions as I’d like to try and copy your technique to see how it plays out for me. Some things like research order can vastly change the outcome of the game.

  • What was your research order and focus?
  • Which focus’s did you take? (screenshot would be all that’s needed)
  • How many factories of each type did you build? Did you go all Civ and then all Mil?
  • When did you start building forts? (I’m not sure when to start building so they’re done in time). WHat level did you build those forts up to and did you build them along the German line after the fall of Poland or on the original Polish line?
  • Did you build forts at your secondary defensive line? Also, if the first line was still hoolding, why retreat?
  • Could you take a screenshot of your current line so I can see where you held for your defense line #2?
  • Did Japan take all of China and Italy all of NE Africa in your game too?
  • Could you post a pic of your armor and infantry templates?

Oh man, whew. Okay, let me see what I remember!

  • What was your research order and focus Stay on top of industry and electronics. Feel free to take them slightly early (eg, Oct-Nov of the prior year) in order to maximize the bonuses. I almost completely ignored the naval tree, and only spent any effort on the air and land doctrine trees once I had secured the '39 infantry tech and T-34. My land doctrine tree was Superior Firepower.
  • Which focus’s did you take? I found it crucial to get those early factories from the 5-year plan and armament effort, and then the extra research slot via the Stalin Constitution tree (I prefer it over the Collectivist Propaganda tree mainly because you get an awesome leader out of it). After that, it’s about finishing that purge ASAP. If you follow it in the same order I did, you’ll have ample opportunity to take the Lessons of War focus during your Winter war with Finland. Once I finished with the focuses in the screenshot, I switched over to ‘Construction Focus’ (in the lower-left) to help with my fortification efforts.
  • How many factories of each type did you build? Did you go all Civ and then all Mil? Yeah, so my standard in HOI is to build exclusively civilian factories until I have ~60 (after trade) usable in the construction window. Unfortunately, for the USSR I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that. I think I built about 15-20 (mostly in the far east) with an occasional military factory thrown in there just to get me some extra equipment production. Once I had that, then I switched over to exclusively military for a couple years. I also splurged and built 5 provinces worth of level 3 radar for improved visibility (radar coverage can overlap, but it caps fairly low, so those provinces can be quite spread out).
  • When did you start building forts? Beginning in early 1940, I started building forts on the Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian borders (to level 4 or 5).
  • Did you build forts at your secondary defensive line? Also, if the first line was still holding, why retreat? I didn’t bother building secondary forts. I find that combat is too fluid to rely on such defined secondary lines. Eg, in my case, I did better than expected, and so that effort either would’ve been lost (not used at all), or I would have retreated to that second line and wound up abandoning a sizeable chunk of territory. In my case, I wound up pulling up and retreating to my secondary line because there was a risk that the first line might collapse in a few spots. Rather than letting German divisions smash through those weakened areas, I felt it better to abandon and reform a couple provinces away. In essence, I’m using that defense in depth strategy that rho mentioned a few days ago.
  • Could you take a screenshot of your current line so I can see where you held for your defense line #2? It’s going to be highly fluid depending on the situation in each game. Initially, I drew my fallback defense line with four infantry armies very roughly about 8 provinces behind the border. I expected the Germans to crush through my primary line and I wanted to give myself a breather while they waited for their supply lines to catch up (the AI is risk adverse when it comes to overextending supply lines). What happened was that once I saw that the main line was holding reasonably well, I moved those army groups’ fallback lines up to about 2 provinces behind the main line, using forest provinces or hugging the eastern side of rivers where possible.
  • Did Japan take all of China and Italy all of NE Africa in your game too? I haven’t played a HOI game since MtG where China held and Africa stayed British/French. I actually poured tens of thousands of infantry weapons into China thinking that I could them withstand the Japanese… to no effect (well, I did get some experience out of it).
  • Unit templates I don’t have access to my game right now, but here’s the short version:
    • Infantry templates: I disbanded the NKVD immediately for their equipment. I immediately modified the base infantry template to have 10 infantry battalions (to get a width of 20), saved it, and then created a duplicate of it that I called ‘Modern Infantry.’ I modified the ‘modern infantry’ template, as tech allowed, to include support battalions of artillery, recon, engineering, and anti-tank. The USSR has no need for field hospitals! As Mike mentions above, I periodically update my fielded divisions to this new template as equipment on-hand allowed. If I ran short of anti-tank or support equipment during the years of peace, I would stop training new armies of ‘modern infantry’ and train one of ‘old’ infantry. For reasons of bookkeeping/sanity (important when dealing with the sheer # of units that the USSR eventually gets), I always order infantry training in lots of 24 divisions. For similar reasons, I only upgrade infantry armies in their entirety (never piecemeal).
    • Armoured templates: Once experience allows, I expand the default armour template to include six tanks and four motorized infantry (objective width is 20). My armour units also include support artillery, recon, and anti-tank battalions. This isn’t even close to optimal, but it’s what I prefer. Your mileage may vary. Once I obtain medium tank tech, I’ll duplicate the original light armour template and convert the light tanks over to mediums.

A few other things to note:

  • When my war broke out, I had approximately 3000 fighters split between the Baltics, Eastern Poland, and Ukraine. This was nowhere near sufficient and my aerial losses were horrendous. But I happily traded those aircraft losses in exchange for having short periods of air superiority (aka, ‘green air’). Although I have five factories assigned to CAS aircraft production, I’m currently holding those in reserve.
  • When war broke out, I had six or seven armies of infantry (of 24 divisions each) forward deployed directly on my western borders. This gave me a ratio of about four provinces to an army, which I found was mostly sufficient to blunt the incoming attacks. I think by time summer '41 rolled around, I had managed to convert all but one of these to my ‘Modern Infantry’ template. I set a further four ‘old’ infantry armies on the secondary defensive lines.
  • Insomuch as equipment allowed, I kept my infantry armies trained to regular status. I made sure to halt any ongoing training around May '41. The same applied to all aircraft (although you have to manually stop their training once they hit regular).

I think that’s about it. Feel free to ask other questions.

It’s kinda of cool that computer Germany took out a human player. Now admittedly Jpinard is new to the game but he is an experienced strategy game players and didn’t do anything obviously wrong

By most account Germany AI got a buff with Man the guns although sadly in my US game even giving Germany a buff they couldn’t take out France. So, I basically have to quit. It is March April 40 and Germany is stalled in the Belgium. The world tension is at 100% so I can join the allies and send a 1/2 dozen armor and full army of 40 width infantry+artillery… I’m pretty sure Germany wouldn’t be able to take out France.

That is so interesting. Is this with Historical Focus set? The Axis have been on a world-dominating tear every game of MtG I’ve played!

No I don’t have historical focuses on. It’s interesting I always play a pretty historical game, i.e. never switch governments but turn off historical focus. Maybe I should do the opposite keep historical focuses on but play a Commie US, or a peaceful Germany sometime.

Building industrial might in Hoi 4 is a game of its own, there are some real gains by knowing what infrastructure you should build stuff in, and when to build what, For Germany I usually like about 120 civs by 1938 august…then I build factories like crazy, this strategy can be dangerous, as you might have problems short term…but certainly not long. Same goes for Russia, but you can do more as your fun doesn’t start until 41.

@jpinard

Here’s a shot of my current status. The original border is approximately 1-2 provinces to the west of where the middle of my line is. My lines against the Germans in the Baltic, as well as against the Hungarians and Romanians have held.

It’s looking like I’ll lose one heavily fortified mountain province in Stanislawow any day (which shouldn’t be an issue with the other units nearby. If anything, it may make my defense strong as it’ll shorten my border. Spoken like a true party member!

Is there a noob intro video that you would solidly recommend? I love the idea of the game, but I am brand new. I did buy all the expansions as I am weird like that.

@jpinard is brand new too, he might be able to recommend a video!

Quill18 put up a new video series on Youtube for beginners that covers the basics pretty well. It was loaded a couple of weeks ago so the information is pretty current.

Do this for sure. It helps tremendously. And read all my questioning posts lol.

OK this appears to be a major part of the game I didn’t know about.
What do you mean by wait for their supply lines to catch up. Also, you touched on something I’d totally neglected in all my games. I never researched decryption or encryption because I felt like it wasn’t as important as other things. Sounds like I had that backwards?

Also, what if I just said, screw fighters, I’ll just add anti-air support groups to all my infantry divisions. Could that work? If I’m also slowly putting out some fighters too to help?

Also - would it be possible for me to put units in Cairo to help the dumb British hold that and the Suez Canal? The AI is super stupid and never bothers defending those critical ports. I went to an earlier save and sent volunteers but they were sent to Albania and I couldn’t figure out how to relocate them to Egypt.

It means that even if they have an empty path before them (say, all the way to the capital), they’ll be too scared of encirclement to just go.

It certainly worked before, if you put enough (probably fattening them to 30 or 40), don’t know about now. The fighters would still be easy targets, though.

For this… am I missing something? You have to do land battles before you get points to work this with right? So you can’t really do a full new infantry division template until you’ve fought with volunteers in China for a while?

I don’t know what he did, but there’s an exercise/train toggle. It not only makes your troops more experienced (to a point), it gives army experience and some experience to the leader.

Also, did you remove the support artillery from the basic infantry template when you added infantry to make it 20-wide? I realize you have it for the good infantry group.

Also, if I modify a template to remove certain things, will it all go back in the pool?

There are a few splits in the tree. Could you screenshot it to see which way you went? Thanks :)

This is solid for beginners. Thanks all!

Yes.5

What about Field Commanders?

@jpinard

What Perky_Goth said. Also, have you noticed sometimes that your units will have a little yellow exclamation mark beside them? That means they aren’t willing to move where their orders tell them to because there isn’t enough supply available in that province. The AI does the same thing when fighting against you. I haven’t found a way to exploit it, but it will slow their advance. If the AI has struggled at defeating a defense for an extended period of time, then they’ll occasionally pause and allow their planning bonus to grow again. It’s a combination of all of these things that I was referring to.

I’m not sure I’d completely ignore fighters because even if you’re hopelessly outnumbered (in my game, the Germans are able to put up about 5k fighters total to my now-dwindled 2k), you’ll occasionally get the air superiority bonus. Personally, I don’t bother with anti-air. The malus reduction isn’t significant enough to devote so many factories to it to IMO.

Since you’ll primarily be fighting the Germans, you could probably forgo decryption. But if you don’t at least keep up with them in encryption, then they’ll get a combat advantage of 2.5% per level of difference between your encryption and their decryption. So by '42, they’d be seeing a 7.5% advantage in combat against you if you ignored encryption entirely. That’s too significant to ignore in my opinion. I say you can ignore the decryption only because the Germans will probably research encryption, so you wouldn’t get a benefit.

Meh. North Africa doesn’t hold a real strategic interest for you at the moment.

Spanish civil war. Keep that fight going as long as you can. I immediately sent 5 full divisions to fight it in my game and managed to help the Republicans win it. I left it with something like 45 army experience. Also keep in mind that you get army experience whenever equipment you produced is used in battle (it doesn’t show up on the experience tool-tip, but you can see it ticking anyway), so I trickled them some infantry equipment (~200/mth) to them for that. I did the same when war broke out between Japan and China. If you want to be a real arms dealer, you can trickle your equipment to both sides.

This should give you plenty of army experience to slightly modify your divisions. Remember, adding an infantry battalion to your base template should only cost 5 experience, and the support divisions are 10 experience each. Provided you duplicate your templates at the right time, it doesn’t actually take much experience to ‘optimize’ all your templates (probably <60 by the start of the war). Also, don’t neglect Boris Shaposhnikov for his 0.05 army experience/day bonus for being your theorist.

Hah. Remember, I started my Land Doctrine tree late. In January, '42, I’m only actually taking the first of the Integrated Support techs now (I don’t put line artillery in my infantry templates – support only – so I wouldn’t benefit from Dispersed Support).

Random edit tip: don’t forget to appoint Mikhail Kalinin once you’re at war. The 30% stability hit for being at war will reduce your stability to something like 33% (assuming you forgo the Collectivist Propaganda focus line). Kalinin will restore it to to near 50%. Having a stability of less than 50% will incur increasing penalties to political power gain as well as factory and dockyard output. The production hit if you’re at 33% stability is going to be something like 20%, so this is key!