Hearts of Iron IV

[Josephus]

Ugh...been playing this game a lot these last two weeks. It's changed a lot since I last played four years ago and there's a lot to wrap my head around. This game is annoying though because it could be good. But isn't. Still, I'm addicted right now. In a few hours I'll bang my head against the wall, and then play some more.

Are you playing using Kaiserreich or vanilla?  KR is much better.

I've never used mods...I'm old.

[Josephus]

I personally find HOI4 to be a strange game.  The QA part of the game seems to be really poor, and the arrogance of leaving major bugs and shortcomings unaddressed for years while pumping out DLCs is infuriating.  That said, I find myself getting sucked in again and again.

It does draw you in, and you think, maybe this time. There are several beefs I have with it. But primarily, the weakness of the AI, in particular the Allied AI. Mostly becasue the various countries don't coordinate. So you have Britain doing Dieppe raids all over the map, whilst the rest of the allies watch. I was playing as the USA and launched a fairly succesful invasion of France, but I needed backup, but the Brits were too busy sending divisiion after division into Greece. Plus half their units were in Africa.

I do find the Axis tend to respond better, particularly to invasions and seem to mass a solid defence. In another game, where I was Britain, Turkey joined the allies. Within days, the Axis launched three separate attacks on Turkey, one from the Balkans, one from Palestine and one from the Aegean.

I'm not sure where the Axis get their numbers from though. They have taken millions of casualties yet keep on coming.

And Germany walks through Russia.

[garbon]

Switzerland mission tree?

[Syt]

Waiting for a patch or two. But I've only 13 hours total in the game, anyways.

I've doubled my playtime over the last week or so.

I'm still not sure if I like the game. The ambition is admirable to cover all the logistics of running a WW2 war economy, from who you put into charge of what, to allocation of production resources, to division and army compositions, to the supply network and more.

At the same time a lot of it feels like busywork. Sure, it's kind of cool to design my own tanks down to types of suspension and how many machine guns to put on them, or deciding who is on my general staff or sending spies on missions to foster insurrection in Tunisia for the French.

And while that's kind of cool for immersion, it's also never hiding the fact that you're "only" manipulating numbers. Combat stats of your divisions, production modifiers, terrain effect modifiers etc. Yes, balancing the design of a tank or submarine to (maybe) give me a bit of an edge is kinda cool. At the same time, I feel not all too much is lost in a more abstract system where I choose to invest resources in research or production and get a "Pz Div +1" after a while.

Part of that may be that the AI is usually woefully unable to use these (and other) mechanics properly. If you look up guide videos on how to handle your navy, and the most common recommendation is "just build tons of the most basic subs, ignore all else," followed by "as Britain, move all your ships to London to reorganize your fleets" then immersion goes out the window fast.

I started one game as Germany, trying to play historical, with all AIs set to historical paths. All went reasonably well till after I took out Poland. I had invited Italy into the Axis, so obviously France roflstomped them in Northern Italy and pushed into Austria. Meanwhile, I had no idea what I was doing in terms of navy and coastal defense, so Britain destroyed my inexperienced ships, landed tons of troops, and I quit that game. Oh, and I had accidentally sent volunteers to Republican Spain instead of Franco. Oops.

Second attempt, playing more conservatively, but I'm already thinking, "great, have to go through all the build up again, manage my construction queues, save my points to re-design divisions/select my general staff perks etc. ..." I get that trying out different paths through the focus tree and different force set ups/strategies is one of the main attractions of the game, but ... ugh. And tbh, the idea of doing something like a proper Weserübung to invade Norway seems rather tedious. Don't even want to think about handling the Pacific Theater.

[Syt]

So while delaying the war as Germany to build up more troops, Stalin decided to go after Poland/Romania ... a bit over a year in, and it's not going well for the Reds (fighting alone against the Allies) ... 

[grumbler]

So while delaying the war as Germany to build up more troops, Stalin decided to go after Poland/Romania ... a bit over a year in, and it's not going well for the Reds (fighting alone against the Allies) ... 

It's been so long since I've played the game sans Kaiserreich that I found it peculiar that Italy, for instance, isn't divided into four countries and French North Africa is the same color as France. 

[Josephus]

I've been playing consistently since May, and I realize I suck at it. I can only win as the USA (take Japan out first, then do D-Day). Everyone else I either fall into a WW1 quagmire or I get butt kicked (USSR). I keep hearing how I should blitz with armor and use infantry to fill gaps, but armor is only effecitve in plains. Even in slightly hilly territories, the penalty is too great and I get bogged down. And supply....man I take two territories and I'm out of supply.
And yeah, on Youtube, there's a lot of number crunchers out there, and number crunching is not my thing. No one seems to agree on an optimum width anymore. No one agrees on optimum templates.
And yeah, the ship and tank designers are bewildering. Sorry, I don't know enough about destroyers to know what is the most effective type of gun on the rear end. And now they're introducing aircraft designers.
Yet, I keep returning to it. 

[Darth Wagtaros]

I tried to play recently. Too many options to keep track of, and it didn't seem like there were enough of them that truly made a difference to the game flow (how would I know if they did or not?)

Some of these problems go back to HoI I. 

[Syt]

Continued my game. Russia got smashed into a million pieces. Romania took the bulk of it. I pushed Denmark to become fascist, and the US immediately declared war on Denmark.

Occupied Yugoslavia turned into a puppet state, and got couped. So I dow'ed them ... and couldn't attack. I had transformed my army into all armor + mechanized. Turns out I couldn't get enough supplies down there to get anything going (the armies of my "allies" hanging around the border regions didn't help. So I nuked Belgrade, but that didn' move the needle to get them to surrender. I think I'm done with this run.

[DGuller]

So while delaying the war as Germany to build up more troops, Stalin decided to go after Poland/Romania ... a bit over a year in, and it's not going well for the Reds (fighting alone against the Allies) ... 

That happens pretty much every time when you delay the war as Germany.  The biggest danger of delaying the war as Germany is that you may die from boredom.

[Syt]

Yeah, I noticed that.

What I'm noticing is that while the game seems to give you tons of options, there are optimal paths of playing - the ideal navy (or the meme navy that uses exploits), the ideal divisions, the ideal focuses etc. Even just retrying a historical playthrough of Germany I quickly find myself settling into fixed patterns that I just tweak. For focuses - go Rheinland, then 4 Year Plan to rush the extra research slot, then Anschluss/Sudeten/Danzig, with occasional tank/air focuses sprinkled in if my standing armies aren't big enough for other focuses yet.

Build up industries like crazy. Tweak divisions to be stronger. Hire Hess & Bormann for those 15% political power bonuses. Not sure yet if upgrading my intelligence techs all the way as soon as I can is worth it. The missions seem mostly like fluff (except decryption). In tech, rush production/research bonuses, and a bit of military tech.

There's little variations in any of this, I feel, unless you want to go alt-history. Now, other games (War in the East, Warplan, Strategic Command) also offer very little variation in how you can do things (you might get a decision in Strategic Command on whether or not you want to spend some production points to do Weserübung or deploy the Afrika Korps), but it doesn't seem buried under a ton of fluff. I think my issue might be that there's "optimal" ways of playing and the game punishes you (inadvertently) for not following them, because it puts you behind. Or am I completely off mark here?

And I wish there were ways of streamlining things. Upgrading equipment is one of the least fun things for me to do in any game. Not because I don't see the value in it, or the logic, but because it stresses me out. "I've developed new weapons, and I could upgrade my units, but in a few months, another two techs are ready and I should wait for them to do a full redesign to make it more efficient, but I'm also a bit behind the enemies ..." I guess it allows for reflecting different design philosophies (e.g. Germans tinkering a lot with their production models during the war, vs. the Soviets who kept building existing designs despite known flaws and then later doing a bigger upgrade). I guess I wish there was an easier way to do it than designing a new unit, then assigning it to production, then waiting for the new stock to be rolled out to the units in the field and used in new division designs.

That said, what happens to your old equipment?

For a beginner it's all pretty overwhelming and finnicky, and it kinda makes me wish I could automate some areas or at least set broader goals that the game then executes. "Research advanced medium tank hulls, armor and engines, plus this gun upgrade. When finished, create new design and assign to production, replacing previous model." Or, even better, let me design a tank to replace an existing model, then assign two research slots to it, and the game does the rest, if I don't want to micro it. I mean we have a fair amount of automatic work happening when assigning armies to fronts and battle plans, and even air forces are very abstract (microing will be more efficient, but I wouldn't want to go back to micro-managing the Eastern Front in previous titles anymore; if I want that, I'd play War in the East or Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa).

I guess I can be happy that you generally will only have one type of medium, small, heavy tank instead of being even more granular e.g. producing Pz-III, Pz-IV in various variants in parallel and assigning them to different division templates.

I admire the ambition to model all these aspects of managing a conflict like WW2, and it's awesome for immersion, but I'm also not sure how much the granularity is really adding. Can anyone help me out with this? I feel I'm missing something to make the game "click" for me.

[Syt]

3rd video about the new features coming with the next expansion (includes plane designer):

https://youtu.be/_6HMyuuqGh0

Part 1 here: https://youtu.be/fC9XeEfDR7k
Part 2 here: https://youtu.be/Ar9Bxp3Px3c


Per latest video they'll add a commander to EVERY DIVISION, and they will have a log about what actions/battles the unit took part in during the war. You can award medals to those commanders/divisions which will give them some bonuses. Also, you can recruit division commanders as Army generals.

Battle plans will be dynamically named. So if you create a battle plan as Germany against Poland it might get named "Fall Weiß", but you can also select your own names (yet they still can't assign flavorful names to armies, army groups and theaters ... really love getting "Army 1" and "Army 2" as Germany )

[grumbler]

In my version of the game I can rename every ship, squadron, division, army, theater, fleet, etc.  I can even rename plane models.

[Syt]

In my version of the game I can rename every ship, squadron, division, army, theater, fleet, etc.  I can even rename plane models.

Yes, but major nations have a pool of names that will be assigned. Ships have various naming lists that are preselected or that you can change, divisions get simple local language names (1. Infanteriedivision, 2. Infanteriedivision), plane squadrons get "Stuka-Geschwader" or something. It applies to most things that can be renamed. Game will have a country based names list that is applied by default and that you can override if desired.

That's why I was surprised that when you form an army as Germany it's named "Army 1" instead of "1. Armee", and if you create an army group it will be "Army Group 1" instead of "Heeresgruppe 1" or "Heeresgruppe A". It's a minor annoyance but mostly a weird inconsistency. I'm sure there's some coding reason for it, same as the misplaced Kiel Canal (though I've seen that some overhaul mods correct that placement).

[grumbler]

Yes, but major nations have a pool of names that will be assigned. Ships have various naming lists that are preselected or that you can change, divisions get simple local language names (1. Infanteriedivision, 2. Infanteriedivision), plane squadrons get "Stuka-Geschwader" or something. It applies to most things that can be renamed. Game will have a country based names list that is applied by default and that you can override if desired.

That's why I was surprised that when you form an army as Germany it's named "Army 1" instead of "1. Armee", and if you create an army group it will be "Army Group 1" instead of "Heeresgruppe 1" or "Heeresgruppe A". It's a minor annoyance but mostly a weird inconsistency. I'm sure there's some coding reason for it, same as the misplaced Kiel Canal (though I've seen that some overhaul mods correct that placement).

There are tons of name-replacing mods, for virtually every country and name-type.