Hearts of Iron 4 announced

Your volunteers are in it until the war ends or you enter a war yourself. Pull them back from the front and let them recover.

Sorry another question on research. There are several things in the Engineering research tab that don’t actually tell you what they are going to upgrade. Would someone be able to tell me?

  • Basic Fire Control System
  • Improved Fire Control System
  • Advanced Fire Control System
  • Decryption and Encryption (no idea what these do)

If you have better decryption than the enemy has encryption, you’ll get a bonus in combat. If you can’t crack their encryption, you won’t be able to see all the details of enemy troops on the front lines. Where it would normally show the number of divisions, it will instead show “?”.

If I’m not mistaken (I may be getting the names mixed up), the Fire Control System techs allow you to install those systems onto ships via the ship designer. They provide a good boost to your guns at the cost of some reliability.

So if I’m not doing anything with ships I can just skip it? One of them sounded almost like they referenced AA too.

Unfortunately with all the new naval research, even nations with 6 research slots aren’t going to be unable to get everything as it unlocks. For the USSR, there’s really little harm in ignoring the naval tree altogether (at least until you begin contemplating going alt-history and invading North America).

Those are optional branches, right? Yeah, you don’t need them at this moment.
There’s way too much to research, and while it would be interesting to have to make hard choices, I don’t think the tech trees are really designed for it. After all, the dev team is looking into cutting research costs too.

I am glad that search is more important in naval warfare now, but I worry that the developers have put too much emphasis on ship-based search and not enough on air-based search. Aircraft did the lion’s share of searching for major enemy task forces. I’m not thrilled with the notion that one keeps a fleet in port until destroyers and cruisers find the enemy. Isn’t that somewhat ahistorical? It’s true that Japan had to resort to that tactic near the end of the war, but for most of the war Japan had many ships at sea at any given moment, organized into task forces that depended on the mission.

Likewise, I get worried when I read that the US has practically infinite fuel. The US certainly had lots of fuel in US ports, but getting that fuel to the central, south and west Pacific was a gigantic logistical nightmare. (Ammo, food, medicine, and other supplies, too.) Are logistics modeled at all? Does the US have to haul its fuel from San Diego and LA to Pearl Harbor, Noumea, Wake, etc?

The fleet is supplied from its home port, which is advantageous to have close to the area of operation (it’s where the main strike force will be waiting). If the port is not sufficiently upgraded, or the chain of ports is not (seen on the supply map mode), your fleet will be starved.

For any of you who have played the Soviet Union. How did you setup your German defense? I’m not sur e if I should do forts along the polish border, further back… if I should have 3x24 infantry along German border to soak up first assault and another line further back? Or just fill the area from Kiev to Poland with 1-2 infantry in every single space 80(if I can even get that many built)?

So far what I have been doing is failing lol. I can’t get first built before they invade and once they break through my line winter doesn’t come soon enough to slow them down.

There are so many reasons you are having trouble, it’s a big game. I could write a long post about it but my advice is you load up the Expert AI mod and go into observer mode and watch a game as the Soviets. Things to pay attention to:

  • The order the Focuses are taken in, and advisers recruited.
  • The order technologies are researched.
  • The rough ratios of production/construction in their respective tabs.
  • The design templates he uses for the armies, the amount he fields, and when he trains them.

Between those things you can probably find some really helpful info, as the guy who makes the mod knows his stuff pretty well. The reason I’d focus on those things is that those are all pre-programmed and the AI can’t mess it up once it is scripted, so it will give you an idea of a pretty meta build.

My guess is the Germans are throwing are throwing a bunch of medium panzer tank divisions at you (they always will, and a lot of them) and you don’t have enough tank counters in your general composition. But without literally watching you do a Let’s Play it’s tough to say. So I’d watch what the Expert AI guy thinks are good meta builds.

As a native-born Ontarian, I just want to say that the international boundary drawn around the Great Lakes in that screenshot is incredibly, distractingly, wrong. 😛

Don’t worry. This will be covered in an upcoming $20 DLC.

Damn it jpinard, now you are making me want to try the Soviets. I did not try them yet.

It’s cool! I’m using this technique right now and I this game I’m doing OK. If Germany doesn’t attack early I should be in good shape as my fort line will have just been completed: https://www.keengamer.com/article/17635_hearts-of-iron-iv-soviet-union-guide

Here’s my forts, and you can kinda see my infantry numbers. My biggest problem is I don’t have enough fighters.

My approach to playing Russia (quite a few patches ago now) was to learn from modern tactics. Specifically, the textbook way to counter Blitzkrieg tactics is to defend in depth.

The primary problem with defending a border is that your forces must necessarily be spread out across the whole line, while the enemy can concentrate their force in a few places. Blitzkrieg tactics involve an armoured spearhead (with air and artillery support) to punch holes through the line at weak points, followed by encirclement of stronger points to cut off their supplies.

Because your forces must be spread out, there’s essentially nothing you can do to prevent the initial breach through the lines - so you need to be prepared for it. As Russia, your biggest advantage is manpower. You can best use that by making more infantry divisions, then yet more. They will be poorly trained and ill equipped (you should have most of your military factories churning out infantry equipment for the entire early game). If you have enough troops to form a second defensive line behind the first (a defence in depth, in effect), you can make it very difficult for the enemy to encircle your forward positions. You may even be able to close your lines behind the tanks and trap them in turn, though I wouldn’t count on it.

Ideally, you would have a number of lines of forts, manned by two lines of infantry forces. As the first line starts to fall, its troops evacuate to the third line, where they recover and dig in. Meanwhile, the second line has fresh troops to slow the advance for a while. This is probably difficult to afford and implement in practice. A few more skilled strike forces scattered around to respond to enemy breakthroughs and attempt to cut them off can pay great dividends.

It’s important to make use of terrain features when placing your defensive lines. Rivers are particularly valuable as tanks have a very hard time attacking across them. Equipping some of your infantry divisions with anti-tank support is a huge advantage too. You probably won’t be able to build enough anti-tank guns for all of them, if you have enough infantry.

Lastly, air power is an important part of breaking through your lines, and pretty difficult to defend against: you probably can’t build enough AA weaponry or fighters to cover things adequately. I’m not certain what to do about this really. Probably just accept the losses and keep retreating in a slow and controlled manner.

Further reading:


Is there a keyboard shortcut to show supply? I need to keep switching to it as my tank crew keep running out. Clicking that tiny little button is hard.

Here’s how things are going. Poorly lol. Just like history! I left my really good troops along the German line to hold them back as long as possible. Desperately trying to get my forts reinforced with troops before they hit them. All those troops you see in my forts right now? Bad - they’re mostly NKVD troops which I know won’t hold well, but if I can get real infantry in there it should be good. Trying to find some weak points in German line with my few medium tanks, but AI is really good at throwing masses of infantry in the way. Some key points:

  • Didn’t get enough advanced fighters up so I’m losing air superiority badly (see pic) in Baltic and Northern Polish regions. I’ll be out of fighters everywhere in no time.

  • German troops are at Minks door and it only has 4 troops. Gah!

  • Should have stuck forts behind Dnieper river and resolved to lose Minks and its critical airfields?

  • My previous 6 games they blew me out fastest in Romania. I massively reinforced that area and the Black Sea to protect my oil and industry and it has held so far.

War Start:

Now:

Air Situation:

They broke through my forts in the Baltic region. I don’t think I can build new forts fast enough to make a new line. Darn, was kinda doing OK too.

On the other hand, the Hungarian-Romanian line has held perfectly.

@KevinC @rho21 When you do a lend-lease, (as I desperately need infantry equipment), do I have to do anything special to have my troops equip non-standard weaponry?

No, I believe they’ll just use any equipment (of the right type). It may take a day to reach the front lines.

ARGGGGGGG

another loss - Couldn’t contain Romania in the end.