Hearts of Iron 4 announced

Games
1613

I’ve been playing a UK game since shortly after MtG came out (with no DLC). It’s one of the few majors I hadn’t played before, so the new naval system seemed like the right time.

My impression of the fuel system has been pretty favourable. No real problems keeping supplies high; on the rare occasions it’s started to look problematic a few convoys sent to the US for oil solved the problem. And it achieves the goal of forcing your main fleets to stay in harbour unless needed.

The game went well enough early on, though I made the mistake of complaining about the Germans annexing the Sudetenland and ended up at war rather early. Not that anything happened in the war for quite a while, but the cost of political points was a bit painful. After a while Italy joined in but my forces in Africa were ready and we drove them out (despite German support) after some heavy fighting.

Meanwhile, Germany eventually declared war on the low countries and proceeded to conquer France. I simply couldn’t get enough units to swing anything, though I was able to keep the Dutch alive for a fair bit of time and to retreat all my troops across the North Sea in good order.

The conquest of France caused me a sudden crisis during my N. Africa campaign when all the safe French territory in Syria switched to Vichy and the Germans shipped an army there. I was still learning the new naval mechanics at the time; I had a fleet and patrols guarding the Eastern Med, but they happily let all the troop transports sail right on by. (They wouldn’t have let an invasion through, so it was only the Vichy switch that caused the problem.)

Once I had desperately raced troops over to stop the Germans at the Suez canal, I worked out what had gone wrong and set some subs on convoy raiding to prevent any further reinforcements. I used a naval invasion to land a small force behind the Germans in Sinai, encircle them and wipe them out.

I quickly invaded Sicily and set up a strong defence in Messina, which the Italians proceeded to throw troops against with huge casualties and no success. After a while, a naval invasion to Taranto encircled them. I didn’t really have enough forces so it was extremely close, only a matter of a day or so, as to whether I would lose 8 divisions and the Italians would escape or I could join my divisions up with the ones moving out of Sicily and crush the Italian divisions. I succeeded.

Another invasion captured Rome and cut off and destroyed another line of troops, including some German tanks. Had to concede Rome though; we ended up with a stable front across Italy just south of Rome. No suitable places for an effective invasion further north, so I just defended, bleeding the opposing forces dry with their pointless attacks.

During this time, Germany had attacked the USSR and was doing reasonably well, particularly in the south. It looked as if the Russians would hold on until the Japanese suddenly joined the war. The need to send forces East turned out to be enough to swing it and Russia collapsed in mid 1944.

This brings me to the big problem with this particular run: the behaviour of Japan and USA. The game was set with historical AI focuses but Japan did literally nothing until it attacked Russia in late 1943. No war with China, no invasion of the Philippines, no Pearl Harbour, nothing.
The USA has been even more inert. It is still, now in late 1944, running isolationist policies and refusing the focus that removes them in favour of things like generating war plans in case it needs to fight Canada.

With the fall of Russia, 5000 fighters suddenly showed up in Italy and the 3000 odd I had started to run out quickly. I’ve pulled all air forces out of Italy now to avoid further attrition and my troops are being gradually pushed back. Experienced German troops have been showing up too, which isn’t helping.

Now there’s no reason to believe I won’t be able to get my troops back to Sicily and hold there, but I’m not sure what I can do about the Axis without US help. My only remaining plan is a rather late focus on nuclear and rocket technology to attempt to end the war that way. I can’t even get the discounts for nukes as that focus is locked behind the Tizard Mission, which can’t be used until the US stops being isolationist.

This has left me rather disheartened, so I haven’t booted it up in a while. When I do I’ll have a look at what German and Italian manpower levels are. I have a kill ratio of about 20:1 and the Italians in particular really should be in bad shape with their 5M losses.

1614

Maybe switch over to the USA in the first few days of a new focus and switch to the focus you need. Call it the “time to get off your ass” diplomatic mission.

1615

I wouldn’t put too much faith in Nukes to be honest. Not sure what changes they underwent post MtG, but I was playing a Romania play-through prior to that patch and we ended up invading the UK. It was carpet bombed with nukes and nothing really changed because of it, so nukes definitely need some work.

I much prefer the sandbox potential/chaos of Hearts of Iron 4, but I think they should probably work on the ‘Historical’ option to rail-road things a bit more, like in HoI3. It’s possible the US/Japan behaviour is a glitch - ‘historical’ still isn’t 100% guaranteed to give an historical procession of events, but it’s what people want when they choose it I suspect so no harm in working on it from that perspective.

I’ve thought for a while though that if you want to play a WW2 strategy game that let’s you relive the history, I wouldn’t rely on HoI4 being the game to let you do that. Something like Strategic Command is probably better suited atm.

1616

Nukes are a damned joke in HoI4.

I once dropped 13 on France. They had zero manpower and were getting overrun across the line.

Thirteen!

Considering 2 broke Imperial Japan, that was a bit much, imo. Apparently they do almost nothing as coded. They lower the threshold to surrender a tiny amount. They don’t hit manpower or anything else iirc. Hell, they don’t even harm units.

1617

According to the wiki:

1618

It’s still effectively nothing though.

No nation would’ve fought against nukes if they didn’t possess them.
The upside is there are mods, so it’s a fairly easy fix.

1619

I’ve never seen it used, or used it myself, on Japan so I can’t comment on that stuff specifically. The rest is potentially true, apart from war support based on my own personal experience.

Like I said, I saw the UK carpet bombed by nukes and they didn’t capitulate until we’d taken the whole British Isles.

So ya I agree they seem essentially useless right now, regardless of what the Wiki says.

(Not accounting for any changes brought in by MtG - I haven’t used nukes since the Ironclad patch)

1620

I don’t know about that. Germany took a lot of damage from the air and didn’t surrender easily. If say Germany defeated the USSR and was master of continental Europe, dropping atom bombs on a couple of cities wouldn’t have made them surrender by itself. It would depend on whether they thought they could develop a response before the damage was too great (with “too great” being quite a high level). Initial atom bombs were on the level of 1000-bomber raids against cities.

Similarly if the Germans had the bomb in say Jan 1945 and managed to nuke Mink or even Moscow, I just see it pissing the Russians off and moving up the capture of the rest of the country.

It seems crazy to go against nukes today, but the initial atomic weapons weren’t as destructive, long-ranged and as difficult to stop as today’s weapons. Also, today we aren’t used to the scale of the slaughter and destruction that even conventional weapons can bring.

It does seem like something is off. Carpet-bombing should put war support in the toilet, which should mean even a small loss of core territory should trigger surrender.

1621

Maybe not, but if you could drop one on every major city and 2 on Tuesday… no nation would fight through that. Especially since you could literally nuke their leadership. As far as military effectiveness they weren’t like later bombs, but as far as psychological effectiveness? They were awe-inspiring.

I mean we’re talking multiple nukes across multiple cities in our examples. I nuked France 13 times. 13! No nation would keep fighting that. The enemy can literally vaporize whole cities, repeatedly, but somehow that doesn’t affect surrender?

The Japanese were losing more people to firebombing raids than the nukes took, but that didn’t break them. Two nukes did. That is psychological power. A nation that venerated suicidal actions wasn’t willing to fight against that.

If the Germans had nukes and nuked Stalingrad, I think that would’ve ended up a very different story. Maybe not if they were already losing at that point, but we’re talking about situations where the other side is actively losing the war or at the very least sure as hell not winning it and they just shrug. “Meh, nuclear weapons, one plane can vaporize a city, whatever. I’m more upset about my working conditions at the factory or whatever.”

For me I nuked France 13 times and they never surrendered. Ever. I had to conquer the entire nation. And then they actually still held out for a bit in Africa until Italy took that over.

This is all with MtG btw, so they’ve never changed it. But, like I said, there are mods that make them actually do meaningful damage to manpower and surrender. And it’s not like it’s an “I win” button or anything. It hits like 20k manpower from a province and increases surrender by a fair amount. If you can drop them repeatedly I think the surrender hit increases dramatically, modelling the “holy crap they could have tons of these things we can’t possibly win,” fog of war that would exist.

1622

I’m not saying that everything is fine in your examples. Clearly something seems broken, since the rules as written should have war support basically zeroed out after nuking half a dozen cities. Even with the mechanics as written, there should be some mechanism for surrender even if no VPs are occupied.

I’m simply taking exception to the statement I quoted. There are situations where a country would continue to fight on against nukes, depending on how many nukes and the balance of power in other respects.

1623

Fair enough, and I suspect that’s why it’s coded to be so lame. They didn’t want the USSR winning the war cause they dropped a single nuke on Berlin or whatever, but it feels the opposite, like nukes are stupid and pointless. They don’t even speed up wars you’re already winning handily, which is just silly.

1624

Yeah to be honest, from a gameplay perspective I really don’t want nukes to end games. I realize it takes quite some time to get there anyway, but I’ve never been very fond of “superweapon” type finishers in a strategy game. Granted, that doesn’t mean they should be useless either, considering they have the tech in the game.

Personally, I’d prefer the game just avoided nukes all together but I understand why they would feel the need to include them in a history game covering WW2.

1625

To me, HOI begs for two things regarding nukes:

  • An out-sized effect for their first few uses. As in, ‘Holy crap what was that! We’re all going to burn!’
  • A diminishing return from continued use that is gradually replaced (or abruptly replaced if they aren’t used continually) with a MAD mechanic.
1626

Well you touch on an interesting point there - Nukes have specific historical relevance to WW2, but only as a strategic, war-winning move on behalf of the Americans right at the very end. It’s not really a tactical asset that’s relevant to the history of WW2 overall.

The problem is, as designed Nukes in Hearts of Iron 4 become tactical assets that can be deployed at will the moment you secure the skies, and you can have abundantly more than the two historically dropped by the Americans.

I think I’d rather remove them to the realm of the Focus Trees, or perhaps a combination of Focus Tree, Tech Tree and maybe Decisions. For a ‘Historical’ play-through it should be easy enough offer a set of Focuses and/or decisions, locked behind stats like length-of-war, casualties, war support, tech events etc… that allow you to drop the nuke as a last-ditch “let’s try and end this”. It can work, or it can not.

In the alt-history sand-box stuff this wold work quite well as well if you gave these decisions to all the majors.

So they should be present, they should be relevant to the context in which they were used, but I don’t think you should be able to stock-pile them like their tank chassis or w/e. Not for the WW2 era stuff anyway. Maybe once a nuke is used and the war ends it can switch to the system as-is, laying the ground for Cold War/Post War mechanics and scenarios.

1627

I just remembered a really important thing I needed clarification on.

What do you do when you get an upgrade to a weapon type or unit? Do you just hit the upgrade button and take the hit to productivity? Do you add a new production line to it and slowly move factories into it?

1628

The answer to that really depends on your current situation, future outlook, and industrial capacity of the country you’re playing. There’s a lot of strategy involved in managing your production.

If you have a large stockpile of that equipment you can probably just move it over, but if you’re struggling to maintain a buffer between training new divisions and replacing losses on the front, that might not be wise. Some people split up production lines for equipment for this reason, so you can shift one line over to your new tank while the previous one continues to efficiently produce the older model.

1629

Never actually stopped to think about the strategic implications of that before. I just go right ahead and switch over to the newer model.

1630

Basically playing as Russia as I’m about to start my new game, wondering what I should do here. It’s certainly less complicated to just upgrade, but always being behind on production is tough.

1631

In my USSR game, I was very careful about when I switched production over to a newer model. As Kevin said, it’s almost always been down to how much of a stockpile I have of the item and whether I can afford the production hit.

1632

If you guys don’t mind, I’m going to outline my exact battle plan and update my original post with the battle plan as I figure out what is available to research and what I choose, along with what my factories are doing and when. I really want to hold back the Germans and I’m still doing something wrong.

Thus as I screw up you can easily point it out LOL :)