This is quite possibly worse than Leviathan. This is so bad that I… I don’t even know where to start.
They broke peace conferences, for starters.
Yes. The thing everyone hated, they made orders of magnitude worse. Want to de-Nazify Germany? Too bad, you ran out of the now finite pEaCe pOiNtS and while you were able to create a puppet Germany, you ran out of points, so Hitler still exists and is in power in Bohemia. You can do nothing about this.
Bordergore? Well, this absolute farce now means it is also worse.
The new focus-trees? Mediocre. Who cares. Barely qualifies as enough for a free-update.
I legitimately have no words. I can’t even think straight. There is so much wrong that it’s like trying to focus on one pixel on a static-screen, I can’t pin down thoughts.
Air-wings? They are now hard-limited to 100. Aircraft-carriers? They no longer automatically upgrade the aircraft. You have to manually delete the carrier-wings and replace them.
Medals? They cost political power. Not command-power, political power. Functionally making them not worth the absolutely garbage buffs they give A SINGLE DIVISON.
Generals? You can now no longer just promote one like an admiral. You have to promote a division commander. How much does this cost? 100 command-power.
Embargoes? You can only embargo a nation that has generated 15 world tension. This effectively means the only nations anyone can embargo are Italy or Germany.
Just… don’t buy this. Not even a patch will fix it. The devs have stated a lot of these absolutely despised, garbage, incompetently made systems and “mechanics” are working exactly as they made them to.
Honestly, consider just ditching the game. I’m not sure it can be saved. It’s in such a horrendous state that it would take months of patches just to bring it back to pre-BBA quality.
I don’t want to give up hope. I loved this game. But it has been the absolute worst managed Paradox game, of all time. It is the single greatest waste of a community, of potential, that I’ve seen.
Man this is sad. I have 2000 hours into the game. It is been almost year since I played it last.
Honestly, No Step Back with its supply system only slightly less complicated than Shadow Empire , pretty much killed the game for me. By Blood Alone didn’t even sound that interesting to me, other than the Italy focus tree. But this reminds me of what happened to Surviving Mars, the new studio DLC broke it and took a few patches to get working again.
HOI IV, was surprisingly good at release, but still had bugs some QOL issues, AI and several missing area. The first 3 large expansion were all worth gettng, and I think HOI IV hit the top of Chick Parabola.
Man the Gun greatly added to the complexity of naval warfare, but the AI never learned how to design ships, so I think it was a net negative to the series. La Resistance, added spies, and added a lot more things to have a check on. It really was out of place for a grand strategic game. So now two and run that made the game worse, or the very least greatly decreased the speed that you could play the game.
WWII is an evergreen topic, it is like dragons and orsc. There will always be demand for games on the subject.
Doing one every 5 years or seems like a much better idea than adding increasing complexity.
I’ve been stymied a time or two wondering why the invasion wasn’t happening and wishing the UI was more clear as to what the problem was, but your bullet points covered everything I was going to suggest to check.
Naval invasions do take some time to prep. If you’re sending 10 divisions, it’s going to take around 70 days, if I remember correctly. You mention months went by, though, so I’m assuming this is taken care of as well, and I believe you should see the days counting down.
Is this the only naval invasion you currently have drawn on the map? The 10 division limit is for all naval invasions, not 10 divisions each.
It’s been at least a couple years since I played and the last few campaigns didn’t involve navy, so my memory is really fuzzy on the details.
From the screenshots it doesn’t look like you’re at war yet. It appears you’re currently creating justification for the war (“Cancel Justifcation” as the second option on the right, with “Declare War” greyed out).
Once that action is completed, you should be able to declare war and head on in.
It means it’s out of position. Can be an issue (not here) when there isn’t enough supply, but, then, it wouldn’t invade well supplied either.
It really depends. I can’t find the numbers, but it varies according to world tension, number of claimed states, regime, being at war, number of ongoing claims… Best way is to check when doing it, or where KevinC shows.
I am both trying to declare war on them, and guaranteeing their independence. I stopped guaranteeing it, let the justification run its course, declared war, and the divisions landed in Albania.
Sweet! And don’t worry, shit is about to hit the fan around the world and you won’t have to worry about manually declaring war much anymore, haha. That’s really funny about justifying/guaranteeing simultaneously. :)
These games (Paradox grand strategy) can be a lot to take in but just keep asking away if you have any questions. Qt3 is pretty good at jumping in for some near-to-realtime help. :) Good luck in Albania!
Yeah, in some ways you’re operating at a much lower level than Vicky or EU4 so there’s a lot of nuts and bolts to figure out. In other ways it’s a simpler game, since the scope is smaller. They haven’t done the learning curve favors with some of the added complexity they added over time (such as the naval ship designer added in Man The Guns).
It’s my favorite WW2 game but there are definitely some warts, some of which have been added post-release. I don’t think the ship designer or the espionage stuff was worth the extra cognitive load, for example, although the former in particular is pretty cool for the rivet counter types. To be fair, though, I don’t tend to like ship (or whatever) designers in games, whether it’s Stellaris, HOI4, or a Master of Orion clone.
One thing I will highlight is their production system, which I think is hands-down the best designed system in the game once you’ve got a handle on it. The way it models production of weapons and arming your troops with them is fantastic, especially with how they were able to do it in a… I want to say intuitive way, but that’s not quite right. It adds a ton of depth without a ton of accompanying complexity. I know @Strollen is a fan of what they’ve accomplished there as well.
Extra cognitive load is excellent way of putting it. I very much have enjoyed the use of ship/unit designers in games like MOO/MOO2, Planetfall, and way back to Alpha Centauri. In HOI IV, you spend a lot of time fiddling with a designer for not that much result.
Like Kevin, HOI IV is my favorite WWII game. It is just that “less is more” in many cases, and that’s definitely true for HOI IV. One advantage, Kevin and I had is that we started learning at the beginning so the additional complexity, was the proverbial frog being boiled. I don’t envy anyone trying to learn HOI IV, with all the expansion at this point. Because even if you don’t have all the expansions they’ve made so many changes to base “free” game like the new supply rules, that it will be daunting.
There is a limit to how many divisions can invade, you can research amphibious tech (at the bottom of the naval tech tree), which increase the number of division that can invade and their speed to make, the invasion, and believe provide additional supply.
The production system is a thing of beauty, Victoria 3 system while nice is in someway is a step back.
@Kevin I’m curious would you like to see an HOI V or continue with more expansions?
I’d like to see a HOI 5 at this point. I feel the same way about EU4 and Stellaris. I actually really like the long tail of support/development that Paradox gives their games but I do feel like it hits a point where they’ve kind of taken an existing design as far as they can and adding more just starts to make things feel… stretched thin and bolted on.
Adding focus trees and that sort of thing to HOI4 I think is fine but I don’t think it needs any new mechanics or mechanic overhauls. I think they had a pretty cool design and they took it as far as it could go. I’d like to see a fresh take on things with a sequel or even another franchise entirely, for that matter. Maybe that Cold War Gone Hot idea they flirted with before, or something else.
I have a feeling Dan Lind may have felt the same way and that’s why he handed the project off and is working on something unannounced. Could very well be HOI5, but maybe after sooo many years doing Hearts of Iron he’s ready for a change of pace.
I have the latest round of Earth based Paradox grand strategy games. I think I might be done with them after this though. You buy a Hearts of Iron and of course it’s riddled with bugs and they do a not bad job of fixing a good amount of them but then they keep adding what I feel is bloat-ware to the game.
This wasn’t so much of an issue with previous games as I could have a local copy and could decide what level of patching I wanted, but that’s not the case anymore. I can’t play the version of HOI IV that I want now as I don’t even own the goddamn game legally anymore. I’ve only paid full price to rent it until such time as Paradox decides that they don’t want me to have the game. And I have seen this all been raised before and people have yelled about all the free content that goes into the Vanilla game without and DLC and I want to respond that I don’t need or want the free fucking U2 album*.
It bums me out because I’ve put in a very large amount of hours (Steam says 3700 but that takes into account me leaving the game running overnight many times) into HOI IV and I think it’s no longer the game I loved and no longer the game I want to play. I do want to say that I very much got incredible bang for my buck. Just a shame that it’s not something I’ll be playing in the future.
Yeah I’d like to see that as well. In my dreams they move away from discrete province-based movement and units and front lines move in a continuous fashion.
