In a way, yes. A certain percentage of your total resource income is made available for export to any nation who desires it. This percentage is controlled by your Trade Law, which is set on the government screen.
Free Trade: Exports 80% of your resources but gives you a 10% boost to research speed and 15% boost to construction speed and factory output!
Export Focus: 50% resources to market, 10% factory, 5% research
Limited Exports: 25%/5%/1%
Closed Economy: You keep all your resources.
One thing to be aware of is that the % your resources that goes to the market you do not have access to. It doesn’t matter if anyone is actually importing them, that 50% you can’t touch yourself.
EDIT: By government screen, I was referring to this:
So that’s what that screen is for, how you use it, and what those changes will do. I probably would have never messed with it as it was just another “thing” on the screen in a bevy of options. I would have also been very confused when going to free trade why I suddenly was short so much stuff. I would have interpreted that screen as saying it was possible to trade that stuff, but you still had it available in-country until you made individual trade deals.
Unfortunately, you can’t export everything except X (usually oil or rubber), which means you and your allies will be closing trade with each other eventually to keep the ones you’re shortest on.
That’s the right approach to take, IMO, and why I recommend people just start playing with the game instead of trying to earn a PhD in HOI4 by watching 27 hours of YouTube videos before diving in. You’re never going to absorb everything all at once, best just to get started and focus on 1 or 2 areas and figure those out. Then move on to the next.
If you want to peel back another layer of the resource onion, you can turn on the Resource map mode and see which provinces are producing what resources for you. If you build up Infrastructure in these provinces, it increases the amount of resources they produce for you!
If I’m understanding this right, because everyone is usually short of oil and rubber everyone neglects trade because they can’t afford any dip in that production? Does that include Dutch East Indies and British Malaysia (though they probably get hammered by Japan pretty early)?
Yea I love strategic resources in games whether it’s Civ, other wargames, or the Total War series. So I’ve been admiring that map mode alot, unsure what to do with it.
Everyone seems to eventually close their trade (on the trade laws), and faction members don’t have special privileges in trade in the first place. I think PDX realized the issue and forcibly stopped it from happening for some countries in the patch (like Romania, without their oil there is no Axis). Hopefully, they’ll improve it at some point.
Industry-poor but resource rich nations like that will probably want to keep trading away their resources. It becomes an issue for an expanding Germany, where initially they might want to trade away their excess steel so they can borrow Civilian factories to build up their war machine. They need to hold onto their oil/fuel, though, so when war is going the civilian factories gained from Steel exports might not make up for the fact that they’re trading away the same percentage of their precious fuel and rubber. They’ll also likely have enough Military factories that they can use every scrap of resource they can produce. Panzers are expensive!
I think they do remember the efficiency of previous factories, I notice when I lose a factory to partisans or bombing it the efficiency returns when the factory is repaired.
I few more hints on getting the right equipment to the right divisions.
On the recruit and deploy screen at the top you’ll see a reinforcement box and upgrade box, with red, yellow and green buttons. That’s the priority of equipment that goes to those functions and the rest goes to the production of equipping new units. I highly recommend setting those too green, highest priority. That way your troops in the field will have the best equipment, as side benefit that also means that brand new divisions will start out with your older equipment. While training/exercising those troops (it is recommended you train them to regular level), they will be burning equipments so that means they are going to be destroying Pz I tanks and 1936 infantry equipment and not the newer stuff.
On the right side you’ll notice I have 5 theaters as the US East Coast, West Coast, Islands, Elites and training command. The first three are obvious. Elite is a special theater I have for armor units, marine paratroopers etc. It is set to highest priority. This ensures that my armor/Marine division always have the latest and best equipment. Training command is where I train troops it is set to lowest priorities so they use the worse equipment.
You’ll also see I have two armor templates the default one and Armor 39 with an arrow as a symbol. Rather than constantly updating the existing template to add more support or line battalions. I duplicate the Armor division and created a new template Armor 39 which includes light SP Art.
The reason I didn’t have enough SP Art to upgrade all of the division, so I do it manually.
As the Soviet Union, you’ll struggle to have enough artillery and/or anti-tank guns for all of your divisions. So I’d recommend you create two or even three template of infantry with different number of artillery battalion. As your artillery production ramps up and you have surplus of move than 1K units you can upgrade an entire 24 division army to the better template. By simply changing their template.
Damaged factories are still in their respective production lines (just marked red). The game definitely tracks individual efficiency of factories in each production line.
What it doesn’t track, AFAIK, is the production efficiency when it is unassigned. So you can’t say move factories from your PzIII line to your PzIV line without them resetting to starting efficiency.
Great ideas. I’m still trying to come to grips with the Recruit & Deploy section. Like I don’t understand what the difference is between setting a specific number in the infinity box vs. a number of added units. One just looks more messy because there’s more stuff on the screen?
The specific number in the infinity box is how many times you want the production line, defined below, to run. If you have 6 units training in the production line and the ‘infinity’ set to 1, the line will end after just 1 run (6 units trained). Me, I always set that number to 1 and just explicitly ‘add unit’ the number of units I want training. I find it’s a pain in the ass to match equipment production with training otherwise.
Functionally it’s pretty much the same thing, it’s just up to you on how you want to organize things. The only thing that really matters is how many divisions you tell the game to build simultaneously.
I do sometimes split them up into multiple groups if I’m playing a large country and want to set deployment locations differently for each group. Like you may want to have one group deploy near Moscow and the other in the Far East.
Divisions per Army. Do you all have some kind of favorite ratio? Or do you just use up as many Generals as you have and split your available Divisions amoungst them?
A general can command up to 24 divisions, so I don’t put more than that. Other than that, the number of divisions is based on what they need to handle geographically. I might have a small specialist force of Marines that comprises of 12 divisions, or a General with the Panzer Leader trait commanding an army of 8 tank divisions that I use to smash through frontlines. Other than that, if I have the divisions they’re usually sitting in the 20-24 range. I want my best generals commanding the most divisions possible. :)
Oh, and I did appreciate your Stalin. You do realize that now that you’ve opened that door you’re very nearly obligated to replace Chairman Mao Meow, right?
If you have a fallback line drawn and are under assault (getting hammered) and want to utilize it by retreating towards it. Do your troops get pulverized en route? Have a huge penalty if they were losing their battles when you issue move command to the fallback line?
Hahaha awesome! Now I need to see if I can edit names without it invalidating achievements. Chairman Meow. Call Stalin “Russian Bluelin” :)
