The game can be sort of fun against the AI, though it does absurd and ridiculous things and will waste its fleets and lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of troops to things like attrition and attempting impossible naval crossings.
Honestly you are so advantaged by your basic human comprehension of things like “Don’t leave a couple hundred units to starve to death in no-logistics Africa for no reason”, “Don’t try to ferry troops to Britain with no fleet”, and “Don’t try to fight the British Fleet as the Germans in 1940” that whoever you play, you’ll need to bump the difficulty up if you want a challenge once you get a grasp on the basic game systems and how to design efficient templates.
The Axis AI is also inherently more stupid than the Allies one because of the things it can’t really handle. In my experience the Allies generally win the war in Europe even in extreme fringe situations like the US never joining the war or Germany conquering Russia early, assuming standard difficulty settings.
With expert AI is really quite a good game. Play Italy once just to get a feel for the mechanics. Then try Germany because, the AI is generally speaking better at defense than offense. Japan is probably my favorite country overall to play.
I’m not a huge fan of playing the minors but some of the Commonwealth countries like India (Raj), Australia are fairly interesting as are countries like Romania, with the first couple of expansions.
I like playing both Russia and especially the US, but be warned you’ll often need to restart because the AI at times can clearly botch the first few years of the shooting war.
The other thing I’ll warn you about is the production system, after playing HOI IV, all the other production system you’ve seen in other games will seem silly and simplistic!
Mostly interesting for the new types of gameplay they can add through the new event system: infiltration and manipulating political support. I guess the trick in the long run will be to prevent these subsystems from stepping on each other all over the place.
I’m a bit worried about that also. I actually spent a few hours playing as the PRC month or two ago. Well I think it is cool, they are adding these feature, their resource and industrial base, and technology are all so small that I found playing the country like watching paint dry. I think it would be real challenging to replicate the PRC, rise from controlling a few poor provinces to controlling the biggest country in the world in the space of 12 years in Vanilla.
I will definitely give the PRC another shot after the expansion comes out.
I’m not sure the PRC is ever going to be that interesting in a game whose strength is moving divisions around in land theaters in a conventional manner.
It was kind of fun blobbing through the minors, then helping the ROC beat Japan, then helping the USSR beat Germany, and then kicking off WWIII by invading (and rolling over) the ROC. It was more fun in a “start with a half-decent army and abuse the AI” way than a “realistically model a possible alternate future for the PRC” way though, it’s true.
(EDIT: And I didn’t know about the (pretty broken, which is why they are removing it) mechanic that let you “flip” states at the start of the game so I got very little out of that)
I like RPG aspect fairly well, but I am not sure about the command point aspect. There is already so much to manage, I’m not sure I want get to level of detail of saying give Manstein more supplies or let him make a probing attack.
Plus as always I worry about the AI’s ability to use this new features.
The HoI4 DD I’m most looking forward to now is what they have to say about progress on AI, especially since they hired an additional AI programmer for the team.
Same here. And gosh, two dedicated AI developers on such a small team? I just don’t know what to make of it, since I was told in the Civ6 thread that Paradox has publicly stated they don’t even care about AI! ;)
LOL, great minds think alike. I was about to make a similar comment in the Civ 6 thread.
Between the Expert AI mod and the steady improvements in the AI, HOI IV AI has actually reached the good enough stage for me. Not to say I’m not really looking forward to improvement especially with respect to Naval warfare, and the execution of battleplans still leaves a lot to be desired.
But my last two games as the two of the strongest countries, the USA and Germany. The AI fought me to a draw.
In addition to the Very Hard mode as expert AI, I also gave 2 click bonus to the Axis, and the Allies.
But first time every, I wasn/t able to conquer Russia in a year. I took Leningrad in cheap Amp invasion, but the AI would have taken back except for the Finland and me throwing in reinforcement. My Panzer spearhead captured Moscow in late Oct. But in the south, in part because my Romanian allies put a lot of troops but also just good defense on the AI’s part.
I never got much pass Kiev and Odessa in the south, an interesting thing happens when you fight in a area the infrastructure gets totally destroyed (even when I’m devoting civilian factories to repair.). With no infrastructure it makes supplying your army tough and when they don’t have enough supply they have hard time taking more territory.
By the time I quit, at the end of 41, I had 5K deficit in both support and artillery despite canceling all reinforcements.
It seems to be that HOI IV system are as complex as Civ 6 and if Paradox can make AI capable of playing HOI IV competently. Firaxis should be able to do the same for Civ 6.
