Hearts of Iron 4 announced

Outdated equipment is also sort of “grayed out” in the production list.

Thank you! @Janster @MikeJ @Strollen @KevinC - you guys rock as always.

  • That grey color. My eyes are just not fine tuned enough to see stuff like that without someone pointing it out. Still hard to see but thanks for that.

  • Any of you using any interface mods or graphic mods?

  • In the beginning of a game when you’re setting up “recruit and deploy” and “production”… how do balance those two so they match? Also, as Russia if I go full factory crazy I can make a lot of stuff. If I make like a trillion artillery on accident… what do I do? Can I sell them or use them for scrap? Are they taking up space in a warehouse somewhere?

  • I actually thought Russia had its own dedicated Focus Tree. It’s not? It seems pretty specific to me!
    Which countries do have specialized focus trees? I have all the DLC.

  • Under foreign territory it shows the nations you occupy and run. I just thought it’d be nice to actually have a map mode that shows the country borders. For instance Ukraine. Sure I can click on each state where I know it exists, but having to click 5 different states to find which ones make it up exactly is tedious. Not that I’m going to “release” these countries, but I’d like to see the areas the occupy. CK2 gave you lots of different ways to view map territorial holdings.

If the production line is expanded (as opposed to collapsed to save space), there’s some sort of patterning behind the unit details too.

I think it’s mostly a matter of working out what equipment you’re going to need down the line and producing that. Actually recruiting divisions to use it is less urgent. I’d base what divisions you recruit on what’s currently available in your stockpile and how much manpower you have.

It does, as all the majors do. They get a rework from time to time though, and Russia is probably due one before too long.

Which ones have gotten a rework so far? What do they do for a rework? Like add more, or change a bunch of stuff up?

  • When you have a pre-planned offensive and the units are doing their assigned task. If you take a few units from that Army and tell them do something else… will they go back to their initial assigned task after they complete their new order? Say I’m invading Finland and see an opportunity to cut off and encircle some Finnish troops. So I grab the closest Russian divisions and have them slice out the back of the Fins. After they complete that order do they just stay there or rejoin their army command’s group order?

So you can stop looking at that smug Stalin and get Trotsky instead. The modifiers also change, but I’d have to google it.

As others have said, the width is 80+40 per flanking support.

Coloured Buttons and Strategic View Adjustments, although there’s plenty that look nice.

By luck :) if you start training, you’ll see how much you need, but you want to change the templates soon, so that doesn’t work. guess it, you have time to change.

US, UK, France (terrible), Russia (almost as bare), Italy (slightly less so), Poland (pre-order bonus), Commonwealth countries (Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, New Zealand), Germany, Romania, Hungary, Mexico, Netherlands, Japan, Chinese states and probably something else.

Not that I’m aware of, and not very important.

US, UK, Germany and Japan.

Yes, they’ll go as soon as they’re finished, though they may be reassigned to a different province within the line. If they’re assigned to a line that goes away (like a pocket), they are reassigned to another existing line. Usually.

So when I count down the side of Finland I see ~14 territories I need to cross from the East if I swept from East to West (I know, I have another group that will slice direct towards Helsinki). So to have the optimum number of Divisions I would use 14? Or 14x4=56 would be max number for crossing with no one left in back cause there’s no room to move?

I’m pretty confused on that whole division width thing.

Assuming an optimal constant attack, you’d want (assuming no flanking attacks):

Number of divisions deployed on border = floor(80/width) * # territories

In reality, you don’t need each territory being attacked by the optimal number of divisions. You want to use infantry to guard your advance and armor to perform encirclement maneuvers. Not only do units out of supply get penalties to attack and defense, completely encircled armies (eg, that have no bordering friendly territory) that are defeated in combat cease to exist - their owner gets no refund of manpower or equipment from them.

I’m sure there’s an optimal number, but it’s not trivial and it’s temporary. Attrition, org/hp loss and front width (in provinces) quickly changes the math. Unless you’re already in a war or have someone with a claim, just commit (bearing in mind that nations can join warring factions at will) within reason and attrition limits).
Not that I’m good at the game, but any time I’m fighting in Africa or Eastern Russia I’m improving infrastructure like my campaign depends on it, because it really does.

Don’t get lost in the weeds, stick to the basics to begin with. Design the majority of your divisions to be 20 width. Each battle has a combat width, which gets increased the more provinces you’re attacking from. As long as you stick to 20-width divisions (or 10, or 40, but like I said just stick to 20 for now) then they’ll be able to fill the battle lines, so to speak.

Ex: You’re attacking directly from province A to Z. There is a combat width of 80. That means 4 of your 20-width divisions can be actively engaged (i.e. firing at enemy troops) at the same time. If you have 10 divisions in the battle, the other 6 will wait in reserve. If you attack from provinces A and B simultaneously, the combat width is now 120. That means 6 divisions will start firing on the enemy at a time, with your four other divisions waiting in reserve.

Don’t worry about min/maxing this early on, just get involved in some battles and you can visually see what’s going on. A certain number of divisions will be shown as active, the other in reserve. It’s not necessary to make sure that combat width is always maximized for every single engagement, especially when fighting up in the frozen north.

Just keep these basics in mind:

  • Design 20-width divisions to start. You can branch out to other designs later.
  • Infantry are awesome at defense and take heavy casualties on offense. As Russia, you’ll have lots of shooty mans so don’t sweat it too much your first few games.
  • Tanks are awesome at offense but lack the staying power and defense of infantry. When designing tank divisions, make sure to include infantry too! Try something basic like 3 or 4 tanks and the rest infantry to start.
  • Assign front lines and offensive lines to your generals. Let the AI do a lot of the lifting for you early on, it wont’ be necessary to micro like crazy and understand all the stuff about combat widths initially.

You can’t run out of storage space but equipment sitting in storage isn’t helping you win wars so you don’t want to keep too much just sitting around usually. It might not be optimal to produce too much artillery but you can generally find a use for the stuff. Say switch an infantry battalion in your standard infantry template to artillery and your divisions will have a nice firepower boost.

Is it (now?) possible to redesign old divisions - like in the “I made 10 trillion artillery” example, can you retrofit artillery to infantry divisions that are already created?

It’s always been possible to redesign old divisions (unless I’m misunderstanding your question).

To change the template a deployed division is using, click on their icon (i.e. the helmet icon for an infantry division) and select the new one. If you want to change the composition of those existing divisions, you can edit any of the templates to add more artillery or put in a new support company, etc.

Yes! Making changes to templates for deployed divisions will cause them to pull (or return) equipment. You can also change the template for a deployed division to something else. And divisions will pull the best stuff (in priority order) if their template allows them to. It’s really very slick and awesome.

Edit: One thing you can do is specify say a training panzer division template that uses only light/obsolete tanks. Create a new division with this template, let them use up the old equipment in training, then switch the combat-equipment template when they are fully trained. That way you don’t waste high-end tanks on training.

A more exploity variant of that is to train the division as an all-infantry division with the target manpower of your other divisions. Train them up so they only use cheap infantry kit then switch then to tank divisions. They lose some experience, but not as much as if they were new divisions, so again you save on equipment losses in training. Though that is also a more micro and annoying path.

So when I get new equipment via research. Say a better tank, gun, or artillery piece. Do you suggest making new divisions with it leaving the old divisions with the old equipment? Or upgrade all the old divisions? Which doesn’t that reduce their experience or something like that?

You only need to alter the divisions if you’re swapping types. For example, if you want to replace Light Tanks with Medium Tanks, you’d need to adjust the division template. If you just got a new Light Tank, you don’t need to change anything. Your newer tanks will filter in to your divisions. You can set the priority of templates to say which ones you want to have the newest and best equipment first. Use the old stuff for garrison units, prioritize new stuff for your elites.

Where things get tricky is decided what to allocate to building 1941 medium tanks vs 1939 medium tanks. Your factories gain efficiency over time, so swapping out your production from 1939 to 1941 might really hurt how many tanks you can put out for a while. Finding the right balance for this is a key part of the strategy.

I believe there is even a way to prevent a division replacing its old equipment with new equipment once it’s available. Not sure what it is though; generally the default behaviour will work fine.

The logistics screen that tells you how many of each version of each type of equipment you have is really useful for tracking purposes. It can also help you work out what you have far too much of (usually old infantry equipment in my experience), and so what you can afford to give away as lend-lease.

Oh, one (pretty obvious) tip for playing the USSR: send volunteers to the Spanish Civil War when it breaks out. This gets you some valuable experience and gives you something exciting to do during the early years before tensions get high. With care you should be able to win the war and cost the Germans and Italians a few divisions. For a first game, it also gives you a low-stakes opportunity to experience the combat system before you’re thrown straight into dealing with the whole Eastern Front.

Sometimes people want to switch over part of production to new tanks and keep part on the old. However, unless it has changed, I don’t think the UI allows you to do this in a nice way without losing efficiency unneccessarily. So it can be helpful to have 2 or 3 lines of say 1939 tanks and switch them over to the new models one at a time.

The ‘equipment’ tab on the division designer allows you to uncheck the ‘Use new equipment’ checkbox. Not having this checked means they won’t use any equipment not already selected in the tab. One downside of this is that if you ever do run out of that older equipment and forget to revisit the template designer for that division, your divisions may be very short of equipment. Although you do get a warning if you need a particular type of equipment that isn’t currently being manufactured.

This is one thing that concerned me as I couldn’t remember exactly where it was this happens. I assumed it was in the production screen. But since you can assign and de-assign factories so willy nilly I wasn’t sure if it was those little itty bitty factory icons they were talking about or the fact you had something on that list period? Also where does it show the bonus for factory production for factories producing same thing for a long time?

I’m confused? Why would new tanks filter in on their own if you haven’t changed the division template?