Hearts of Iron 4 announced

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!

I’m not really sure why the German unit AI did this, but…

I thought that perhaps it might be due to taking 4M casualties, but Germany had already swapped to All Adults Serve (woo, production advantage: me). It could be that his units had taken hideous equipment losses (many were under 50% strength). Either of these would mean the economy AI had ordered the unit AI to disband some units for consolidation and the unit AI just chose poorly.

More likely the AI just screwed up. Anyway, T-34s are already leading the charge into the former Soviet territories abandoned by the Fascists.

I hope to hear soon about how the AI tricked you into being overly aggressive and cut off your tank armies with a brilliant ‘backhand blow’. Well a guy can dream, right?

Heh, that got me thinking that it would be kind of hilarious (in concept, not in practice) if the devs of a strategy game put in a backdoor where they could hook up to someone’s game and take over the AI without alerting the player.

I only played for a few minutes more after that screenshot before leaving for work, but the Germans rushed some units to close the breakthrough pretty rapidly. They had poor organization and low strength, but I didn’t have enough nearby forces to continue the breakthrough (I had been expecting a breakthrough opportunity in the north, so almost all of my armoured units were up there). I did manage to take and hold 4 or 5 provinces before it became obvious that continuing to advance would be more costly to me than allowing them to continue to crash against my lines.

On the plus side, one of the new provinces was in a Western Polish state, which immediately allocated a new supply limit to me. This allowed my forces, which had been taking ~2% attrition in the southwestern-most of my Polish provinces, to redeploy and now everyone has enough supply.

General status:

  • The air war is starting to turn. My fighter shortages are down to 900 and improving daily. The Germans still outnumber me in the air by 2:1, but my production advantage (mostly due to their conscription choices and rubber shortages) is starting to show.
  • Germany is up to 4.5M losses, has < 1M manpower, and is already on All Adults Serve. It’s only a matter of time before they shift to Scraping the Barrel but that’s only going to extend my production advantage.
  • Italy is up to 2.5M losses, has 0 manpower, but is only on Conscription by Requirement (although that will change once they get enough political power). If they weren’t deployed in Romania, I’d be trying to inflict further casualities…

New plan for when I get to resume my game!

All of my armoured and motorized units (mechanized are only just beginning to come off the lines and I won’t have them in quantity for several months), as well as two of my five reserve infantry armies, are going to divert to the Romanian border in anticipation of a massive attack there. It should be easy going and I’ll be able to neuter the Axis oil supply.

From there, it’ll be a slow slog up through Romania and Hungary (who annexed Slovakia and almost all of Yugoslavia) and I’ll have to divert another reserve army to deal with Greece, but it’ll severely extend the border they’ll have to defend. I feel like the race for Berlin (and Paris and Brittany) is going to start in earnest very shortly.

I’ve been interested in trying a Soviet Union run because it’s the only ideology I haven’t bothered with yet since launch, but as the dev team have crystallised what they actually want to do with the game the parts that haven’t been looked at yet (like the USSR) feel painfully left behind.

It’s like in the run-up to Man The Guns itself, I was torn between wanting to play, and wanting to wait for all the shiny new mechanics etc… I could try the USSR now… oorrrr I could wait until they’re made better xD

I would love to see an update focused on the USSR, France, and a side of Italy (probably my favorite nation to play). Italy isn’t in a bad spot or anything, but I wouldn’t be opposed to them getting spruced up either. :)

Yeah I’ve seen a few people say Italy is probably in the best state amongst the launch primary nations that haven’t been touched yet. Probably doesn’t need serious look for a while.

I can definitely see a ‘Communism’ expansion that will look at the USSR, France (via the French Commune route) and perhaps some other minor Communist players during this era. Not sure what else mechanically it could address that would fit the the theme. More land war improvements perhaps, production improvements?

Hopefully it’ll be the next one, can’t think of anything else that’s a major priority.

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s a decent focus tree, the thing that it lacks is the breadth of ahistorical options that they started including in focus trees after release. You can opt to do your own faction instead of the Pact of Steel, but that’s about it (and it’s still the fascist aggressor scenario, IIRC).

Didn’t the Communists in HOI3 have a mechanic where they could freely give each other resources? It’s been too long, but I vaguely remember something like that. I wonder if the USSR could give Republican Spain or Communist China resources without them having to give up civilian factories or something like that.

I don’t remember to be honest, I played HoI3 from when it launched (didn’t play any of the games before that), but I confess I never bothered looking at the USSR.Just never interested me.

Yeah I think Italy started with the most breadth though, in the sense that you could form that faction with the Balkan states. Like you said, it’s still technically a ‘fascist’ path but at the time it was more than what anyone else had in terms of options, so I reckon it’ll do for now. Like if you had to choose which gets looked at next, Italy or USSR, I’d say USSR wins hands down every time.

Oh yeah, easily. USSR first and then probably France. I also wouldn’t mind seeing Spain get its own tree, but I wouldn’t want to see it include a way to avoid the civil war. I prefer that to be baked into the setting, especially with how it involves the Axis and USSR.

I’m not sure where else Italy would fit, unless they do a Mediterranean-themed expansion after that? Hmmm, focus trees for Italy, Greece, and Turkey? Not sure what it would have mechanically though, sounds more like a fit for a small content pack or something.

Bleh, I’m rambling now which means I’m probably just avoiding the current tedious project I’m working on. Back to the salt mines! :)