1876

What kind of penalties are there for being “over the limit” with your field generals and army group leaders? I see one of your groups is 96/24

1877

It absolutely does lol. I wish they could get balance a little better. If they could just get India to stop the advance of Japan that would be a start.

1878

Being a new player I’ve enjoyed Romania. Small country and ability to do some sitting and watching what is going on around us. Making allies with the Soviets has allowed me to entrench along the Western borders and then attack poor Bulgaria. I find ahistorical more fun. The Italians and English are in a different fascist org than Germany. Double Axis!

1879

Have you tried bumping up the Allies up notch? Might help. Before now, the Axis would typically get creamed. MtG seems to have helped them quite a bit!

1880

I think the penalties are severe. I would never use that for combat. That particular general was just for my cavalry units that I use to suppress resistance. I use four battalions of cavalry and one military police company which seems to do the trick.

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1881

Do you buy Generals? You have a lot of them and they are so neat and organized. Mine look Ike a mess!

1882

I do buy them as I always run out of generals when playing as Germany.

1883

Also - I’m in quite a quandary. Inr my quest to conquer the world I’ve run out of manpower. To change my manpower situation I need more war support. Wayyyy more. The only war support I see is War Propaganda against Japan. IT’s supposed to be 1% per week but I never see it budge. Am I reading that wrong? Shouldn’t it be taking me from 53% and making it go up 1% every week since it says "weekly war support +1.00%?

How many have you bought? Do you have a trick to get a lot more political points to be buying them?

1884

Are you playing as the USA? I had manpower problems just once, and I researched a couple helpful National Focuses and changed my Conscription Law. I can look for more specifics when I boot up the game tomorrow.

I’m having an absolute blast, now in 1944, as the US. I’ve mounted a successful counterattack in India, and I just retook Calcutta. Long way to go to Singapore and Malaya, though! I’ve also island-hopped through the Carolines and Marshalls, which was great fun – though I had to bypass fortified Truk, as the Allies did historically. I’ve started bombing the Japanese Home Islands with B-24s and B-17s, from Guam, to little effect, but at least it’s making them use fighters to defend their industry. To get fighter cover for them, I have to take Saipan and Marcus Island, and maybe Iwo Jima. I’m also bombing the Reich, also to little effect, and now the Germans just took Leningrad. Stalin undoubtedly is asking for that second front. Um. Working on it.

The naval game as the US is fun but overwhelming: so many ships to track. Aircraft are easier – fire and forget. Land war is more micro, but it’s not as overwhelming as the fleet!

1885

I agree with this. And clicking all the little icons to see results is laborious. They should have a single button that auto scrolls through all of them so you can just keep hitting a keyboard command and it automatically brings up the report.

For your aircraft carriers, what mix of aircraft are you using? Fighters vs. vs. CAS vs. Naval?

1886

Getting closer :)

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In other news that amazes mainly just me - I have apparently neutralized most of the Japanese navy since I never see any blips with navy combat results around Japan.

1887

That is an impressive fighting force. I see you have fixed your manpower shortage. Were you able to change your mobilization law?

I usually wind up buying anywhere from 6 - 12. It gets darn expensive. I’ll usually stop doing any focuses or continuous focuses as that gives an extra point of PP per day.

If you want to see an estimate of Japan’s navel strength, right click on any territory that they hold and then click on Details.

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And then you should see something like this.

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I’m embarrassed to say it took me over a year to notice that you could see this information about a country.

EDIT: Click on the picture to expand it to see what I am talking about.

1888

Yep! What a huge relief too.

Wow I had no idea focus’s took your political points. I would have stopped using them a while ago!

Awesome about country info. Thanks! More stuff to add to my HOI hints and tips textfile

1889

Wow, 2000+ factories, too. Impressive. Also, you’re in 1958; are you using a mod that extends game time? I thought by default it ended in 1946, but I haven’t reached the end yet, so I don’t know. I’m in 1944.

For aircraft carriers, I’ve mostly abandoned CAS, since I think they underrepresent the terror that naval dive-bombers were historically. I use mostly a 50-50 mix of fighters and torpedo (what the game calls “naval”) bombers (Devastators, etc).

I think carriers are a bit underpowered, but I’ve come to appreciate their use in Naval Invasion Support missions, in which they cover landings like the carriers did historically. It’s satisfying to see the fleet, with the little airplane icon, escorting my invading Marines to the target.

Speaking of Marines, I’ve now taken Saipan and Marcus Island, and I was building up to attack Iwo Jima, when out of nowhere the Australians did it for me! It’s going to be a 12-day battle, so the outcome is still in doubt, but I’m impressed that twice now the Aussie AI has helped me out in a significant way.

I’m impressed generally with the AI, in fact. I know experts can stomp the AI, but from my newbish perspective, it plays a good game. It encircled and killed 7 of my divisions in Indian once, and it responds appropriately to my attempts to encircle it, shifting troops immediately.

All that said, the game does need some tuning. Germany is now well into the Urals, Italy and Vichy France own most of Africa. I’ve pushed Siam/Japan back to the eastern border of India, and I’m now bombing the Japanese Home Islands, so I’m hoping I might at least defeat Japan by 1946, but the rest of the Axis is ascendant.

1890

As far as game AIs go, I find it quite impressive. It’s a complex game with a lot going on (which means there is just so much that can go catastrophically wrong) but in general it is competent. It wasn’t always that case, but I give the HOI4 team a lot of credit for just steadily working on improving it with every update. Not the easiest thing to manage when they’re also adding new features that the AI has to understand. Throw in the Expert AI mod that improves the division design and the AI can really give me a run for my money.

1891

CAS are useful for providing ground support to naval invasions. That said, I also use 50/50 fighters and torpedo bombers.

1892

Yeah small problems can lead to big consequences. A lot of people complaining recently for instance that the USSR got caught in a loop where is kept shifting forces between west and east, effectively defending neither front.

Actually a lot of the AI problems seem to stem from not being able to properly account for units in transit or “where will I have a shortage if I move these forces to respond to this other shortage”. Happens within a section of a front line, between widely-separated front lines and front lines that are on different continents.

1893

You can specify which kind of anti-naval bombers?

I think one of the AI’s biggest problems is abandoning or purely leaving critical VP points like big manufacturing cities, capitals, or choke-points. I can’t count the number of times I rolled into a totally undefended capital. Last one that happened was Washington DC!

I’m totally perplexed as to what happened to U.S. fighting forces in my game. So as Soviets still, I invaded the US by way of Mexico. As I slowly churned my way north, once I hit the halfway point between the Northern and Southern border of the U.S., the US troops just seemed to all run away North. I took my easy advance to Canada, but was’t sure where they were going nor why. I really should have turned FoW off when I had the chance to see what was going on.

1894

Yeah, I am seeing similar problems in my second play through (Veteran, non-historical focus). This time I decided to try Imperial Japan, and after taking out China I declared war on the USSR since A) they were about to conquer Poland and the Baltics and the Nordics and become super strong and B) Nazi Germany was still fighting the ultra-buff Netherlands, and seemed primed to fall quickly if the USSR moved against them next. So with great trepidation I made the USSR open a Far-Eastern front, hoping to distract them with my weaker armies long enough for Germany to solidify the Western front and threaten the Soviets. And during the entire war the Soviet AI never seemed to find its footing. It kept shuffling troops along the gigantic Eastern front, but it never actually entrenched or made any counter attacks and it just kept getting pushed back, province by province. Once Germany joined in the war on them the entire thing was over in 6 months, and the total Japanese casualties for conquering 2/3’s of Russia was like 50K men.

I think the combat AI has 2 big problems, which sadly were the same 2 problems it had back at release and which I am re-discovering now:

  1. The tactical level AI is terrible. If you use the front system to try and advance, the AI for it is completely brain dead and it will get your troops massacred. Your units will not support each other; one of your provinces will attack, but the neighboring provinces won’t support the attack even through it would completely change the odds of the battle. It will ignore undefended provinces and not advance into them. It will attack into strong provinces and ignore weak provinces. It will attack with your weak armies while leaving strong armies waiting for their turn, which will never arrive. It will constantly shuffle units around on a front, frequently leaving provinces without any defenders at all, and incurring constant attrition from moving across bad terrain. Due to all this, even though the planned attacks get like 50% bonuses to every stat, it’s still not worthwhile to use the tactical AI and you end up micro-ing your advance across the entire USSR. It pushes you to play the game in the least-fun way possible, and pushes you to ignore one of the neatest and most thematic features of the game.

  2. The strategic AI isn’t so much terrible as it is neurotic. E.g. it might do fine for years of war, and then one day it will just abandon an entire front, dooming the nation. Or in odd situations (e.g. my Far Eastern front), it will start thrashing, and will never settle down into consistent army allocations and will just keep re-assigning army groups from one threat to another.

I might finish out my current game, but these (seemingly easily fixable?) AI flaws have removed a lot of the magic from what is otherwise a really impressive game.

1895

The tactical AI isn’t amazing, but this part isn’t true from my experience. The front-line AI will assist from multiple provinces all the time, unless it has those units reserved for a different purpose.