I almost always play with the historical focus on. In general, with historical focus on HOI games go well within the range of alternative history. I.e. China surrounds Japan invading army, cuts it out of supply and then goes on to take over Manchuria. Or Japan conquers China, then goes after India, and is saved by America. Or Spain joins the Axis Gibraltar falls and UK gets kicked out of Africa.
What you don’t see is AI Brazil conquering the Americas. I’m not even sure if something like Canada taking out America by a human is possible even anymore.
I have seen WW2 literally not happen in the game when turning historical focus off. Germany switched to a Democratic government and joined the Allies, and Japan and Italy were uninterested in wars after that. Was funny.
So I played the first few months of Barbarossa in the Expert AI with some small bonuses for USSR and USA. I was quite nervous at the start because the Soviet divisions outnumbered me quite a bit at the front, I didn’t have as many tank divisions as I would like, and the Soviets had some tank divisions that I couldn’t pierce.
The initial few days seemed to confirm my fear since Manstein’s panzer army got severely bogged down in south-eastern Poland, and the Soviets made a lot of counter-attacks, many of which looked like they were going to win. On the other hand, Guderian’s group broke through the line in Lithuania, wiped out some divisions there and make it to Riga with little resistance. I arced Guderian around to try to make a giant surround of the line. However, by that point, the USSR was pushing into East Prussia and Manstein still wasn’t making much forward progress due to so many counter-attacks. I decided to refocus Guderian and Manstein into cutting off the Soviet push and ended up pocketing 50 or so divisions.
That seemed to take the wind out of the Soviet bear, and I was able to get a couple more pockets, drive Guderian to Leningrad and finally make progress in the Ukraine. I think Soviet casualties at the end up September stand at 3.5 million to 100k for Germany. That about how many casualties the Germans did historically and they still lost, but I think in the game the USSR is pretty much done for. They have giant deficits in equipment, which really takes the steam out of their existing divisions and makes them easier to pocket.
So I think the Expert AI mod got the USSR building the industry well, and building the right division designs, and building the right equipment. But it fell down a bit in terms of timing the divisions - trying to build too many heavy tank divisions at once, rather than only starting the divisions for which you will soon have equipment, which leaves you with a bunch of half-trained and half-equipped divisions when the balloon goes up. Also, you hand very effective divisions to a single AI field marshal in command of the entire front, who it told to basically advance the front a few hundred miles.
Finally, I did maintain air superiority on the front, so the huge numbers of close air support in the frontline air zones made Soviet attacks that should have succeeded into very costly losses. The drove up Soviet equipment losses and bled them as much as the pockets did. I really noticed the effect when the Soviet advances pushed my aircraft out of a couple of front-line air bases, resulting in over-crowding and loss of effectiveness further back.
A couple more notes:
The Blitz command is awesome! Sending Guderian to blitz Estonia and Manstein to blitz Kiev was very sweet. It’s great seeing those “overrun” text popping up.
Overlapping front lines is terrible! I swear I spent half the time trimming back the front-line spam that grows at lighting speed. I think the Russian bent the line back in East Prussia mostly because over-active front-line spam resulted in units relocating everywhere.
I think the word ‘overhaul’ is a bit strong, but it’s been revisited.
Losses have been reduced to a more manageable level and the UI has been tweaked. I wouldn’t say it’s a great system, but it’s better than it was. No more losing 800 aircraft/day at least.
I’ve found the air war to be working fairly well. Losses seem reasonable (maybe even a bit on the low side?) and the UI is better. It’s still a bit of a pain to shuffle planes around when attacking into a new air zone or to add some fighters to a zone the Allies have decided to start bombing. Fighters do a good job of disrupting bombers.
Edit: In terms of losses, in two months of fighting in Eastern Poland, I think I lost 150 fighters and the Russians lost about 800.
In my current game, the UK has deployed about 1500 aircraft to Northern France against my ~2000. They’re losing about 20/day and I’m losing about 5/day. These loss rates are very low by Battle of Britain standards, but I suspect that has to do with a combined lack of range on the allied fighters and relatively poor air detection values.
I think it’s worth it, but I am far more playtime-constrained than money-constrained at the moment. The DLC have a few nice small mechanical features, but nothing big or important at all. They are also nice if you want to play one of the countries with a new focus tree. The major improvements are part of the free patches. You would not be missing out substantially.
Like Mike said, the major improvements are in the free patches. There’s no need to pick up the DLC as a new player. If you really want to play around with Commonwealth nations or play in the Balkans and want more unique experiences for those countries, then pick up the first two DLCs. Until then, the base game would give you plenty to play with.
It’s not perfect by any stretch, but in my opinion HOI4 is an excellent WW2 grand strategy game. And has been mentioned previously in this thread, the production system is the bees knees.
Doesn’t have a whole lot of information, but it’s good to have confirmation that AI is no longer one-man show:
Though I would feel better if the bio had been “was working as a lead on Google brain, but I have so much passion for the game I decided to move to Sweden!”. Though I suppose in that case it would come with “BTW, game now requires a secondary computer for the AI, with at least 4 Titan GPUs”
I’m just about to wind down a week-long game as the Soviet Union. The war had an odd start in 1939 as Poland decided to create her own faction. This meant that they couldn’t be protected by the Allies, so Poland and her pal Romania fell pretty swiftly to Germany. After Poland’s fall, Hitler violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, giving me a justification for war. I was able to jump in and catch Germany off guard, but it still took me quite a while to finish European Germany. France and the UK joined in late, allowing me to grab just about everything east of France with the exception of the Baltics and Scandinavia.
Meanwhile, Japan declared war on me, which, for some reason (troops helping Japan in the Far East?), gave Germany a large base in China. The campaign against Japan turned into a real slog, but maybe I’m just not grasping the intricacies of how the mass assault doctrine works. My boys were just dreadful against every other army but my weight in numbers started to push them back. Well, I suppose that’s the point of the mass assault doctrine – allowing for large armies to push forward while ignoring some of the normal frontage and supply limitations. The terrain did not help but I did manage to have air superiority. UK and France eventually helped and I managed a daring para-drop into northern Japan, allowing me to quickly seize a port and funnel in reinforcements. We wrapped up the war against Fascism in 1945 and I managed to puppet most of the world, including Germany, Eastern Europe, Korea and Japan.
The world plunged into a tense cold war with the USA justifying against Socialist Japan but never triggering war. Communist China did go to war against China, which was in her own faction. Mao joined my faction and away I went to a war with China. By autumn 1947, I had most of northern China under the control of Communist China but the Chinese nationalists were able to take the communist capital. Communist China capitulated, leaving all of my 100+ divisions in the middle of China with no link to supplies. That’s when I decided to call it quits… after all, I got a few achievements out of this playthorugh and performance was a bit slow by now. I wish that control reverted to me instead of defaulting to Nationalist China once the communists bowed out – this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
A fun and rewarding experience, but still some systems and bugs to iron out. I kept getting a popup about UK interference in the Balkans at the start of every game, and Germany decided to declare war against the western countries even though they were on the ropes in a war against me; questionable logic by the AI.
