Hearts of Iron 4 announced

They usually put all the news on this page, and is good enough to check whenever. Ironically, the dev diary I linked earlier isn’t there, someone should complain.

I wrote up my thoughts on Shadow Empires logistics here.

I completely concur with PodCats summary of the problem with logistics in HOI IV, you can ignore it until it becomes a problem. (Although to be fair, I learned to increase the infrastructure in eastern Poland before invading Russian) and once it becomes a problem its really hard to fix.

I have two concerns, first the AI issue. But second the fun and micromanagment issue. I found that both Le Resistance and the Man Guns, added more stuff to do, but it didn’t make the game any more enjoyable. They both really interrupted the flow of the game for me, especially when I was in the middle of invading Russia.

Do you have the source for this quote?

The quote is from the second post in this thread:

There are some other informative posts in the series. Generally bitmode’s posts are super-informative about how the game actually works.

Thanks. I’m always interested in how they manage to do their realtime AI for so many entities.

I noticed podcat replied in the thread, explaining some of what he was seeing was due to mitigating frontline “shuffling” of units that the AI would do. Which has definitely improved since release.

Curious to know if we’ll see changes/improvements here with the Eastern Front focus of this update. I would hope so.

My dream would be that they gave someone with the right skills a good amount of time to rebuild that system. That Podcat seems to know the details of what’s going on there (rather than it being a detail from a coder that left the project years ago) gives me a bit of hope.

I guess I have one more DLC to buy for HOI IV. Barbarossa is generally my favorite part of HOI IV game, sometimes I win but often I lose, so I’m really look forward to this DLC.

The changes to Poland look pretty interesting. I’ve given Poland a couple of playthrough which not surprisingly ended in being conquered by Germany and once Germany and the USSR.

I like the Poland tree, but after the railway stuff I really want to hear about the other mechanics changes they have in mind.

If next is a 2 part DD on Finland or something I might tear whats left of my hair out.

I hear you, but I’m also equally worried that the logistic might turn HOI IV into Shadow Empire.

I think there’s a happy middle ground somewhere between HOI3 and HOI4. I have a feeling they learned some lessons with HOI3 which is why they abstracted so much with the latter.

I like the idea of a rail system given its importance, but yeah I would want to avoid situations like HOI3 and Shadow Empires have where the system can oftentimes be impenetrable. That often leads to situations where you (or the developer, for that matter) just aren’t sure if you’re missing something or if there’s a bug happening or what.

I think a good logistics system involves planning by the player and ways to disrupt it for your enemy. It shouldn’t involve staring at a map and trying to puzzle out why the hell your troops aren’t getting supplies. The why should be obvious from a mechanics and UI point of view, it should be more about how you’re going to get supplies to your divisions marching towards Moscow.

You nailed it, that’s exactly right. I spend some resource upgrading the NE Poland’s infrastructure, but often my Barbosa campaigns (and games) would die when my army would run out of supply. It’s hard to complain that this isn’t realistic, cause well it is, but I’d like to have the mechanism to fix it. Obviously, fixing it involves resources, and time, so planning ahead is essential.

Well, you all asked for it!

Don’t know if this is where the game loses me :)

I like it. My experience with the ship designer was a bit blah, but I liked what some of the mods did with it. This seems more like the approach in the mods.

Isn’t this more like HOI3? I barely played it but remember lots of research in the components of the things you built.

Yeah it doesn’t seem as… I don’t know the word for it. The ship designer just requires a lot of mental work on my part and I don’t really enjoy operating at that level in a game like HOI4. This looks significantly more manageable and just kind of an extension of the variants you could already create using EXP.

Regarding the dev diary, I can’t agree more with this. I really don’t know why anyone works in the games industry. If I did, I would have to pay someone to interface between myself and the community.

Yeah the boards can get pretty toxic at times. I mostly stay off them. I think its a pattern you see all the time - certain people seem to get more extreme in their attitude the more hours they put in to a game.

Well as much as I was really looking forward to DevDairy for the Finnish focus tree :-). I have to admit this has really got me excited. It certainly feels HOI3 ish, but that was the my favorite thing about HOI3 was the design your own tanks.

I rather liked the MTG ship designer, what I didn’t like about MTG was the whole fleet and task force system. I could barely handle the complexity as Germany building 80% subs and putting Dointz in charge. The problem I had was training subs in the baltic and then pause the game and sort out which sub went to which fleet and getting the whole thing to work. I pretty much gave up playing USA or Britain after MTG, but I did play Japan a few times, and defending Convoys was a pain. I can’t imagine the job as the UK.

As Germany, I build a shit ton of light SPARTII highly modded and keep the lines going for the duration… They have the best soft attack per IC in the game. I build almost no Panzer III, and then dump a ton of XP in to building Panzer IV and eventually upgrade them to Panthers. I never have the tungsten and seldom have the XP cost to build most of the other variants. Depending on my chromium situation I build a small number of Heavy Tanks or Heavy Tank Destroyers, adding one battalion to my 40 width infantry

I never research AT guns, which is pretty silly as German cause of tungsten shortages, and 1940 AA guns work against light tanks and even some mediums. I think the tank designer, will force me to make some much needed changes.

You know, that’s a good point. I was talking about the mental fatigue of the designer but I think you’re right, I think it was also absorbing the new fleet system and how the ship designer then tied into that.

I liked that they focused on the naval aspects of the war because that’s one area of their games that tends to suffer. Naval mechanics in EU4 are abysmally shallow for what a key role it played in that era, for example. It was just a lot to take in. :)

As the diary says, the long time between design and action for ships is a real block for the average mediocre player, and, if you’re not being aggressive, you can wait until you throw all the factories in Europe at it. Well, it doesn’t say that exactly, that’s my extrapolation for myself, which hasn’t put as much time into HOI4 as the other company products, and never played other “wargames” (which I know HOI isn’t), even previous versions. Tanks should be significantly easier and immediate.
I don’t know if it’s a coincidence in that it’s the threads I keep open for longer, but it’s nice going back at the end of a HOI diary day and see devs kept going on on their thoughts on modeling the real world in game. That’s kind of the historical/game threads I miss from when PDX was a little smaller and so was the fanbase, now it’s all memes, meta and not a lot of positive back and forth between a few people. Damn kids.