These Things Need to Be Addressed

[tmorrow911]

I have been playing HOI both 3 and 4 for about 16 years now, on and off. Total of about 3,500 hours. Along the way, certain problems have been fixed, others ignored, some fixes caused new problems. Throughout, however, there have been a number of concerns that seem relatively easy to address, such that the explanation that there is a shortage of development resources doesn't really wash.

1. Supply
Those of you who remember HOI 3 remember the Great Supply Uprising. Users got so fed up with the supply screw ups that Paradox finally addressed them. Actually did a pretty credible job. For those of you too new to know of them, it used to be that all the supply ran to the end of the supply line.....and then just dropped in place. So that units on the front line would be getting supplies while units further back were literally withering away (units used to really suffer when they were out of supply) non-sensically. So, if you were doing Operation Sealion, for example, the units landing in Britain would be in supply, but all of the units behind still in France would be dying. Contrariwise, when you did D-Day, the units still behind in Britain would be withering for lack of supply.

Now we have a different problem that seems to have arisen out of nowhere. Supply is really easy to interdict, just a few planes dedicated to doing it can succeed in completely cutting off a whole sector of a front, so the computer starts running supply by convoy. Problems are: firstly, this is pretty ridiculous, especially early in the game before the US and Britain really mastered the resources and techniques for interdicting supply, and secondly, the convoys run in really unwise ways. Germans running supply convoys into the English Channel did not happen and it didn't happen for a good reason: it's suicidal, both in the real world and in the game. Even the Allies, late in 1944, didn't feel the need to run supply by ship past Antwerp. For a reason. There were immense numbers of mines in the Channel, and, even late into the war, the prospect of a visiting E-Boat was an issue. Beyond this, there is a logic problem. I have German convoys running supply from Venice to Dubrovnik even though there are no German convoy units in the Med (Gibraltar and Sinai Canal both still in UK hands and no German controlled shipyards in the Med) and the railways in Yugoslavia are still completely serviceable. How do units simply appear where they cannot be based on the logic of the game?

2. Convoys (separate but related)
Why can we not control our own convoys? Why cannot I not choose to let a unit go without supply rather than losing scads of convoy units trying to run supply to them? This has been an issue since forever, is not really that hard to work on and yet never has been.

3. Ship Movement (separate but related)
Why can we not have ships move in smart ways without having to do it by hand? Right now, if you send U-Boats, for example, from Germany to the Atlantic, they will promptly head straight to the English channel even though they would not have done this because, both in reality and in the game, it is suicidal. What the player ends up having to do is either suffer the out-sized losses of allowing the machine to do the ridiculous thing or manually guide naval units around such obstacles (e.g. said U-Boat is manually moved to the Norwegian sea, then to the North Atlantic off Iceland, then south into the convoy routes). This really detracts from the game when the player has to waste their time on this. Seems like a pretty simple fix since we already have something similar with ship units and convoys avoiding heavily mined sea routes.

4. Minesweeping (separate but related)
Why do the computer players never sweep or lay mines? It creates a terrible cheat temptation for a German player: just mine the North Sea, the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay and your worries of an Allied return to the continent (other than through Italy) are over. Have the Italians mine the areas around it in the Med and it's impregnable Fortress Europe time! This would also seem to be a rather easy fix.

5. The Amazing Logistical Skills of the US Army Air Corps (and the RAF and the L'Ad'lA).
Air units have the most amazing ability, currently, to instantaneously deploy all over the world. For example, within a day or two of the German invasion of Poland, there will be RAF, Armee de L'Air, Indian, South African, and sometimes even RCAF units not only deployed to Eastern Poland, but flying missions. I am thinking whoever created this functionality never served in a real military or worked for a real company. Not only is this monumentally risky and unwise on a tactical level, and put aside that the Allies would never have even considered it, how the heck do you fly a plane either over hostile German territory or neutral territory, get it to a Polish airbase, get your ground staff there, have them set up fueling, provisioning and arming.....get the picture? But wait, there's more, this is a Ginsu Knife thing. Check out the USAAC, three days after Pearl Harbor, has B-17's on the ground in the UK and flying strategic bombing missions in Northern Italy, the Low Countries and Western Germany. Better still, bombers based near Boston and Richmond, Virginia are bombing targets in Central Europe! Wow! In reality, such a mission was impossible until probably the late '60's with B-52's. Apparently, the AI is not constrained by silly considerations like aircraft's stated operational ranges.

6. The Amazing Logistical Skills of the US Army and Marine Corps (separate but related)
Not to be outdone by the Zoomies, the US Army also has remarkable logistical skills. Within four days of Pearl Harbor, more than a half million American troops are on their way to Europe and just about to land in Britain. Better still, all of these units didn't actually exist in December, 1941, and they include Marine Corps units, precisely zero of which served in Europe! Indeed, of the divisions I looked at, almost all of them never left the US during the war in reality. Funnier still, among these units are the Attu Garrison (yes, that Attu, in the Aleutian Islands), the Corregidor Garrison, and the Canal Zone (yes, that canal down in Panama) garrison. Which leads us to....

7. Europe Uber Alles
Start a game as any country that doesn't have a colonial empire (Germany, USSR, any of several small companies). Stop the game about 3 game hours in and then use the console command "tag ___" the underscore being the country tag (e.g. Eng for the UK, Hol for the Netherlands, Fra for France) to see what is happening. EVERY unit in EVERY colonial location is on the move.....away from the place it is supposed to be defending. They are on the way to either defend the home country in Europe or to stage to the East Coast of the US so that they can go promptly to Europe. Nonetheless, all those good colonial subjects don't take advantage of the colonial powers' absence to rise up and throw off the yoke of oppression. You end up with the hilarious result that most of the units defending the Netherlands, for example, are Indonesians, and most of the defenders of the UK and France are either Africans or Asians....right out of Gemini AI.

8. The Mice That Roar (separate but related)
In HOI 3, we used to have the phenomenon of the world-beating Nepalese and Bhutanese armies travelling the world, making it safe for tea-drinking. It seems that has been corrected in HOI 4, but now we have the same phenomenon with the Mongolians, Tannu Tuvans, the Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Tunisians, the Moroccans, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Palestinian Mandate, the various Indochinese nations and the Italian East Africans. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why these countries were even included as none, in reality, contributed anything particularly meaningful to the war. And, because the production system is in severe need of a revisit (see below), they produce outsized militaries that, in the grand tradition of their predecessors Nepal and Bhutan, travel all over the world making it safe for.....well, I can't come up with a unifying goal.

9. Production
This problem is a little harder. Let me give you an example. Play through to just before Germany attacks Poland. Be any country other than Norway, the UK or France. Stop the game and tag over to Norway (console command tag NOR). You will see an Army has been built that is more than 10 times too large, a Navy that is even worse (probably 20 times too powerful), but the Air Force will be about right....tiny. Tag over to the UK (tag ENG). You will see an RAF that is probably 50% too large, an Army that is about 100% too large and a Navy that is about right. With France (tag FRA), the too large will be the Navy and the Air Force with the Army about right (once you account for all the African and Asian units that are in Metro France as well...). If you're playing Germany, this is going to be really frustrating because you will (inaccurately) lose control of the air from day one (not to mention face UK and French aircraft in Poland.....). The error arises from one large gap: money. The inputs to production are, quite logically, manpower, factory capacity and raw materials. This is fine as far as it goes, but, because there is no financial constraint, every country's military grows like topsy (which they didn't and couldn't). In reality, the Norwegians (as an example) didn't have the cash to replace their 35 year old + naval craft or to add new ones, could hardly afford the few planes they bought (mostly from the UK) and they did not have the social and cultural determination to build an army. Now, to simulate this, you don't actually have to include money, you can just use an approach similar to the existing civilian demands on the civilian factory output to constrain building of new plant and infrastructure. Say only some portion of the military factories are available based on threat level and government type. Norway, for example, believed that NOT arming was the right approach because it would make them look unthreatening. So, liberal democracies that perceive threat respond to it more slowly at first than the authoritarians do. Just a suggestion, I am sure there are other ways to approach the challenge.

10. Casualties
This issue gets very little effective attention. Casualties will decrease your stability, but it is far too easy to overcome the stability losses and just plow ahead getting masses of troops killed. Needless to say, this is both illogical and horrifically a-historical. As an example, Canada suffered more than 70K casualties in the first eight weeks in my most recent game. In light of living memory of the UK's conduct at Gallipoli, there is no way the Canadian population would have stood for this. Canada would have withdrawn from the war post-haste. In reality, Canada suffered about 100K casualties, but that was over six years, not two or three months. I have created a house rule that the Netherlands withdraws when casualties hit 10K, Belgium when they hit 25K, France (pre-Vichy) when they hit 250K, Canada when they hit 100K, Australia when they hit 75K, New Zealand when they hit 25K, India when they hit 100K and South Africa when they hit 10K. Withdrawal, in this instance, means I eliminate their armed forces, take down the PP (in PP's case to -1,000) and CP and XP, delete all their production lines and then just allow them to surrender as their undefended territory is overrun. The Dominions dropping out would be a bigger problem if you are playing Japan than Germany. Germany will never get anywhere near any of them, but Japan could be in a position to invade India, Australia or New Zealand, so eliminating their military entirely is not necessarily a good solution. On the Axis side, Italy should try to get out as soon as casualties hit 250K (like France but any time, not just early on), Hungary when they hit 250K, and Romania should either drop out or try to switch sides when casualties hit 500K. Among the majors, I would propose 500K for the UK and the US, and 25,000K for the USSR, with no limit for Japan and a different limit for Germany: at 3,000K, you start having assassination attempts and then conditional surrender when an attempt succeeds (or civil war, which will also rapidly end Germany....). How to simulate that? Excellent question. Another, easier way for Paradox to solve this would be just to make the casualty related stability losses much worse and much harder to fix. This would encourage players to think twice about that brilliant move they just thought of, if it might also bring with it large piles of dead.

 

[Pikachu_bob3]

10. Casualties
This issue gets very little effective attention. Casualties will decrease your stability, but it is far too easy to overcome the stability losses and just plow ahead getting masses of troops killed. Needless to say, this is both illogical and horrifically a-historical. As an example, Canada suffered more than 70K casualties in the first eight weeks in my most recent game. In light of living memory of the UK's conduct at Gallipoli, there is no way the Canadian population would have stood for this. Canada would have withdrawn from the war post-haste. In reality, Canada suffered about 100K casualties, but that was over six years, not two or three months. I have created a house rule that the Netherlands withdraws when casualties hit 10K, Belgium when they hit 25K, France (pre-Vichy) when they hit 250K, Canada when they hit 100K, Australia when they hit 75K, New Zealand when they hit 25K, India when they hit 100K and South Africa when they hit 10K. Withdrawal, in this instance, means I eliminate their armed forces, take down the PP (in PP's case to -1,000) and CP and XP, delete all their production lines and then just allow them to surrender as their undefended territory is overrun. The Dominions dropping out would be a bigger problem if you are playing Japan than Germany. Germany will never get anywhere near any of them, but Japan could be in a position to invade India, Australia or New Zealand, so eliminating their military entirely is not necessarily a good solution. On the Axis side, Italy should try to get out as soon as casualties hit 250K (like France but any time, not just early on), Hungary when they hit 250K, and Romania should either drop out or try to switch sides when casualties hit 500K. Among the majors, I would propose 500K for the UK and the US, and 25,000K for the USSR, with no limit for Japan and a different limit for Germany: at 3,000K, you start having assassination attempts and then conditional surrender when an attempt succeeds (or civil war, which will also rapidly end Germany....). How to simulate that? Excellent question. Another, easier way for Paradox to solve this would be just to make the casualty related stability losses much worse and much harder to fix. This would encourage players to think twice about that brilliant move they just thought of, if it might also bring with it large piles of dead.

So basically france is screwed? You push into Germany you get 250k casualties and die, you defend and hold you most likely die.

 

[Eruth]

3. (You might need MTG for this) you can toggle sea regions to tell your navy & convoys to avoid them unless there's no other routes.

 

[Jays298]

The only thing I agree with is that supply needs like an intermediate rework to allow more further flow or just fine tuning.

Like the Japanese can't mass troops on the border with USSR unless they get attrition or more supply hubs are made. But have to mask them to maintain non aggression pact.

Right now supply is like a brick wall. And it makes sense. But I really wish it were more granular than "we are 50km past the limit of a triple motorized supply hub so we are dying!".

No one should be dying if you have cars and fuel and logistics.

Also motorization should require fuel. That was a major "easy mode" decision made for NSB to avoid probably having to rebalance oil.

You are correct that AI has no idea what it is doing with troop movements.

All this talk about AI replacing humans and we have game AI incapable of prioritizing.

Though the decision to abandon the colonies to defend Europe is exactly what I did as a player many times.

 

[goodcigar]

All valid points and I've seen other people over the years say similar things. One major thing about HOI4 is that it seems the Devs focused on making HOI4 a sandbox game with alt-history over historically accurate and realistic.

The current Supply system in HOI4 is certainly better than the 2016 launch Supply system but it has serious issues and needs a lot of improvements. It has some very strange design choices in it.

The AI sending its Divisions all over the map is something that annoys me a lot too. Most nations should keep their Divisions at home. Especially Minors and nations which were not full belligerents. Not that many nations sent their Divisions overseas or into foreign territory. And when they did send some overseas it wasn't that many. There should probably be some kind of "tag" to mark Divisions as Homeland so they won't leave the country's borders.

The thing with Plane Wings being able to teleport to any Airbase on the map is something I've complained about before. Airbases should have to be in range to go to. At the very least.

Something mostly missing imo with the game's simulation of Economy is the fact that the more Population you put into the Economy/Production the less you have available for the Military and vice versa. It should be a clear and big tradeoff. There would be ways of offsetting it like allowing women to work mens' jobs and creating more efficient production methods. Manpower health/fitness is also not tracked. In reality many weren't fit for service. And if you scrape the barrel the Manpower quality should get worse.

It's an interesting idea that rapid casualties could have an effect on morale/war support/stability. You could also have the opposite where rapid victories creates higher morale.

 

[William9113]

I think democratic nations (particularly new world/UK) should probably have a bigger malus to taking casualties in general. As it turns out, your voter base doesn't like being sent to die overseas.

 

[Louella]

4. Minesweeping (separate but related)
Why do the computer players never sweep or lay mines?

They do, but it is such a low priority, that you will almost never see it happen.
If an AI country has a naval strategy to prioritise particular areas, and there are mines in it, they'll build minesweepers, they'll also use minelayers.
But this requires them to have sufficient dockyard capacity, and this almost never happens in unmodded games.
Only countries I've seen laying mines start with minelaying ships, started in low-intensity conflicts, and had naval strategies. (Japan and Italy). So they had more than enough ships for their needs that they could spare some for mine warfare.

 

[Herennius]

4. Minesweeping (separate but related)
Why do the computer players never sweep or lay mines?

Never? Not saying that the AI is particularly good in both disciplines, but I have for sure seen them laying mines. I can only speculate for sweeping, but my feeling is that they do it as well, as sometimes my minefields shrink in density over time.

EDIT: @Louella was faster and elaborated things even better

 

[Tisifoni12]

I have given up on HOI4. I have been posting, perhaps less effectively, for literally years, about some of these issues.

I don't know if some of these can be fixed without reworking some of the fundamental game mechanics. Oh, and developing AI algorithms that take account of competing or 'weighted' objectives; holding together colonial empires, not sending panzer divisions to West Africa, etc.

Are there any supply / logistic techs ? I think not.

 

[William9113]

I have given up on HOI4. I have been posting, perhaps less effectively, for literally years, about some of these issues.

I don't know if some of these can be fixed without reworking some of the fundamental game mechanics. Oh, and developing AI algorithms that take account of competing or 'weighted' objectives; holding together colonial empires, not sending panzer divisions to West Africa, etc.

Are there any supply / logistic techs ? I think not.

Sad but true.

The only remedy is to play multiplayer

 

[unclewannaplay]

5. Planes don't fly without refuelling in a straight line over everything, it just saves you micromanagement. I doubt anyone wants to tediously airfield-hop their planes wing-by-wing, they would rather just select the target airbase, and the game takes care of it.
9. HOI4 is a WWII grand strategy game, there is no point to include entire new mechanics for a post-war economy, it is not only out of the game's capabilities, but also out of its scope.

 

[DaddySugar331]

I think democratic nations (particularly new world/UK) should probably have a bigger malus to taking casualties in general. As it turns out, your voter base doesn't like being sent to die overseas.

I'm pretty sure this doesn't apply to WW2. You can just put the dissenting people in jail and continue the war.

 

[Cornutus]

I have been playing HOI both 3 and 4 for about 16 years now, on and off. Total of about 3,500 hours. Along the way, certain problems have been fixed, others ignored, some fixes caused new problems. Throughout, however, there have been a number of concerns that seem relatively easy to address, such that the explanation that there is a shortage of development resources doesn't really wash.

Ok you got a point, played HOI since the very first one came out, observe something similar.

1. Supply
Those of you who remember HOI 3 remember the Great Supply Uprising. Users got so fed up with the supply screw ups that Paradox finally addressed them. Actually did a pretty credible job. For those of you too new to know of them, it used to be that all the supply ran to the end of the supply line.....and then just dropped in place. So that units on the front line would be getting supplies while units further back were literally withering away (units used to really suffer when they were out of supply) non-sensically. So, if you were doing Operation Sealion, for example, the units landing in Britain would be in supply, but all of the units behind still in France would be dying. Contrariwise, when you did D-Day, the units still behind in Britain would be withering for lack of supply.

Now we have a different problem that seems to have arisen out of nowhere. Supply is really easy to interdict, just a few planes dedicated to doing it can succeed in completely cutting off a whole sector of a front,

Supply should be easy to interdict if nobody is protecting it. AKA, there should be "AA" protected versions of truck, train and ship convoys, as well as regular versions.

In 1940, there was a good example of what happens when there is AA defense and if there isn't: the French campaign.

In 1940 German air superiority forced the French to transport supplies and troops by night, which slowed down the French response to the Sedan breakthrough.

On the other hand, when the French tried bombing the German bridges in the rear to cutoff supply, German bridge AA would turkey shoot them.

On the Eastern Front in 1941-1943, the Soviets tried to logistics bomb the Axis, but failed. German minor caliber AA was able to cut anything the USSR put up, including their armored IL-2, that could have even worked against .50 cals but were paper airplanes in front of 20mm.

In 1944, we had the opposite situation: allied air dominance and a lack of German AA (most of it was in the Eastern front it seems), led to Germans being hindered. I haven't heard of

so the computer starts running supply by convoy. Problems are: firstly, this is pretty ridiculous, especially early in the game before the US and Britain really mastered the resources and techniques for interdicting supply, and secondly, the convoys run in really unwise ways. Germans running supply convoys into the English Channel did not happen and it didn't happen for a good reason: it's suicidal, both in the real world and in the game. Even the Allies, late in 1944, didn't feel the need to run supply by ship past Antwerp. For a reason. There were immense numbers of mines in the Channel, and, even late into the war, the prospect of a visiting E-Boat was an issue. Beyond this, there is a logic problem. I have German convoys running supply from Venice to Dubrovnik even though there are no German convoy units in the Med (Gibraltar and Sinai Canal both still in UK hands and no German controlled shipyards in the Med) and the railways in Yugoslavia are still completely serviceable. How do units simply appear where they cannot be based on the logic of the game?

Running supplies by convoy is not a bad idea. I don't like how the AI tries to route German supplies through the English Channel, but it was possible. Short-ranged shipping (especially when it's carried out at night) from harbor to harbor worked fine. Look at how Tobruk was supplied.

The problem is, the game doesn't show how this could be achieved.

2. Convoys (separate but related)
Why can we not control our own convoys? Why cannot I not choose to let a unit go without supply rather than losing scads of convoy units trying to run supply to them? This has been an issue since forever, is not really that hard to work on and yet never has been.

Someone answered above that you an block certain seazones.

3. Ship Movement (separate but related)
Why can we not have ships move in smart ways without having to do it by hand? Right now, if you send U-Boats, for example, from Germany to the Atlantic, they will promptly head straight to the English channel even though they would not have done this because, both in reality and in the game, it is suicidal. What the player ends up having to do is either suffer the out-sized losses of allowing the machine to do the ridiculous thing or manually guide naval units around such obstacles (e.g. said U-Boat is manually moved to the Norwegian sea, then to the North Atlantic off Iceland, then south into the convoy routes). This really detracts from the game when the player has to waste their time on this. Seems like a pretty simple fix since we already have something similar with ship units and convoys avoiding heavily mined sea routes.

Seazones general management again.

4. Minesweeping (separate but related)
Why do the computer players never sweep or lay mines? It creates a terrible cheat temptation for a German player: just mine the North Sea, the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay and your worries of an Allied return to the continent (other than through Italy) are over. Have the Italians mine the areas around it in the Med and it's impregnable Fortress Europe time! This would also seem to be a rather easy fix.

I believe AI used to do that, and there were complaints that this delayed the game.

5. The Amazing Logistical Skills of the US Army Air Corps (and the RAF and the L'Ad'lA).
Air units have the most amazing ability, currently, to instantaneously deploy all over the world. For example, within a day or two of the German invasion of Poland, there will be RAF, Armee de L'Air, Indian, South African, and sometimes even RCAF units not only deployed to Eastern Poland, but flying missions. I am thinking whoever created this functionality never served in a real military or worked for a real company. Not only is this monumentally risky and unwise on a tactical level, and put aside that the Allies would never have even considered it, how the heck do you fly a plane either over hostile German territory or neutral territory, get it to a Polish airbase, get your ground staff there, have them set up fueling, provisioning and arming.....get the picture? But wait, there's more, this is a Ginsu Knife thing.

There are three problems:
1) German Luftwaffe extensively used airlifting their ground aircraft personnel.
2) Everyone else would at best have a mix of flying pilots and bussed ground personnel.
3) The alternative is a multitude of clicks where you order your aircraft to fly from USA to Greenland then to the UK. Not enjoyable, end result is the same.

As much as I don't like teleporting air, I don't see a better alternative in how to represent air unit transport.

Check out the USAAC, three days after Pearl Harbor, has B-17's on the ground in the UK and flying strategic bombing missions in Northern Italy, the Low Countries and Western Germany. Better still, bombers based near Boston and Richmond, Virginia are bombing targets in Central Europe! Wow! In reality, such a mission was impossible until probably the late '60's with B-52's. Apparently, the AI is not constrained by silly considerations like aircraft's stated operational ranges.

I believe this is due to Paradox devs not being aware of subtle differences between ranges.

The B-17 did have the capacity to fly from Virginia to Central Europe I believe: but only if it has no bombs and is filled with gas head to toe.

To counter this, you need to come up with a formula that trades range for combat payload, which is somewhat difficult.

Range issues for aircraft in HOI4 are pretty severe, and I have trouble assessing what math should "make it right".

6. The Amazing Logistical Skills of the US Army and Marine Corps (separate but related)
Not to be outdone by the Zoomies, the US Army also has remarkable logistical skills. Within four days of Pearl Harbor, more than a half million American troops are on their way to Europe and just about to land in Britain. Better still, all of these units didn't actually exist in December, 1941, and they include Marine Corps units, precisely zero of which served in Europe! Indeed, of the divisions I looked at, almost all of them never left the US during the war in reality. Funnier still, among these units are the Attu Garrison (yes, that Attu, in the Aleutian Islands), the Corregidor Garrison, and the Canal Zone (yes, that canal down in Panama) garrison. Which leads us to....

Sending 500,000 mobilized to the UK without fully equipping them, doing adequate training etc, isn't that big of an achievement as you claim.

7. Europe Uber Alles
Start a game as any country that doesn't have a colonial empire (Germany, USSR, any of several small companies). Stop the game about 3 game hours in and then use the console command "tag ___" the underscore being the country tag (e.g. Eng for the UK, Hol for the Netherlands, Fra for France) to see what is happening. EVERY unit in EVERY colonial location is on the move.....away from the place it is supposed to be defending. They are on the way to either defend the home country in Europe or to stage to the East Coast of the US so that they can go promptly to Europe. Nonetheless, all those good colonial subjects don't take advantage of the colonial powers' absence to rise up and throw off the yoke of oppression. You end up with the hilarious result that most of the units defending the Netherlands, for example, are Indonesians, and most of the defenders of the UK and France are either Africans or Asians....right out of Gemini AI.

When HOI4 was launched, there was nothing like "Garrison units". They were added in a later patch.

The role of colonial garrisons is performed by these garrisons, while the divisions act as an "operational reserve" that put down only big rebellions.

To give an example: somehow during the Spanish Civil War, despite the Spanish Army of Africa being deployed to Europe and a very recent rebellion with repercussions lasting until 1936 inclusive (Anti-Atlas operation by the French Army), they managed to transfer most of their force and not lose control.

8. The Mice That Roar (separate but related)
In HOI 3, we used to have the phenomenon of the world-beating Nepalese and Bhutanese armies travelling the world, making it safe for tea-drinking. It seems that has been corrected in HOI 4, but now we have the same phenomenon with the Mongolians, Tannu Tuvans, the Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Tunisians, the Moroccans, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Palestinian Mandate, the various Indochinese nations and the Italian East Africans. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why these countries were even included as none, in reality, contributed anything particularly meaningful to the war. And, because the production system is in severe need of a revisit (see below), they produce outsized militaries that, in the grand tradition of their predecessors Nepal and Bhutan, travel all over the world making it safe for.....well, I can't come up with a unifying goal.

The overrepresentation of minors capacities is a big problem. A lot of it comes from the fact that Faction Co-op is very poorly implemented. Co-oping is very buggy, with AI often joining as a third Co-oper to two partners, so the only way to prevent that is to separate the Co-opers by tags. That leads to minors being buffed, as you want to have something to do before the war starts.

9. Production
This problem is a little harder. Let me give you an example. Play through to just before Germany attacks Poland. Be any country other than Norway, the UK or France. Stop the game and tag over to Norway (console command tag NOR). You will see an Army has been built that is more than 10 times too large, a Navy that is even worse (probably 20 times too powerful), but the Air Force will be about right....tiny. Tag over to the UK (tag ENG). You will see an RAF that is probably 50% too large, an Army that is about 100% too large and a Navy that is about right. With France (tag FRA), the too large will be the Navy and the Air Force with the Army about right (once you account for all the African and Asian units that are in Metro France as well...). If you're playing Germany, this is going to be really frustrating because you will (inaccurately) lose control of the air from day one (not to mention face UK and French aircraft in Poland.....).

Earlier versions of HOI4 had a lot of issues with AI not being able to build sufficient air units. I think that has now been resolved, which is why you are seeing what you are seeing.

The error arises from one large gap: money. The inputs to production are, quite logically, manpower, factory capacity and raw materials. This is fine as far as it goes, but, because there is no financial constraint, every country's military grows like topsy (which they didn't and couldn't).

HOI4 economy is the weakest part of the game that needs fixing to the point of a full-scale redesign. But there are a few problems:

Issue 1: HOI4 explicitly does not want to represent anything close to civilian atrocities due to the bad press associated. And economics war is all about trying to win the war by targeting civilians through their basic and consumer needs.

Issue 2: From a commercial standpoint, HOI4 makes a large part of its money from selling minors focus trees. Nerf minors: 50-70% of profits evaporate.

Issue 3: Investing in an economics rework is very demanding in terms of skill, time and research. It's not very profitable because of high costs.

Issue 4: You need to somehow add agriculture to the war. I would argue supply generation based on territory is a good proxy, but then you have to add civilian consumption of food: increasing the pressure on CPU.

In reality, the Norwegians (as an example) didn't have the cash to replace their 35 year old + naval craft or to add new ones, could hardly afford the few planes they bought (mostly from the UK) and they did not have the social and cultural determination to build an army.

I bet they did have that capacity. Finland did, and they weren't much better off. The issue is what are you willing to sacrifice?

Building an army means higher taxes, which leads to a lower standard of living. Not to mention that in those days, after 1-2 years, your aircraft is completely obsolete. So if you decide to build what's available with contemporary technology, chances are a big chunk of your military investment will become useless in just 5 years, while losses in the standard of living will persist.

Norway did not know war will happen in 1940, and did not know it will become a target. In WW1 Norway, Netherlands, Denmark managed to stay out of the conflict. In HOI4 we know that the war will happen and when it will happen, so you can project when you need to max out military production.

Now, to simulate this, you don't actually have to include money, you can just use an approach similar to the existing civilian demands on the civilian factory output to constrain building of new plant and infrastructure. Say only some portion of the military factories are available based on threat level and government type. Norway, for example, believed that NOT arming was the right approach because it would make them look unthreatening. So, liberal democracies that perceive threat respond to it more slowly at first than the authoritarians do. Just a suggestion, I am sure there are other ways to approach the challenge.

It is a valid suggestion, except the threat part. The UK didn't face an actual threat from Germany at any point in time, and yet it was able to build up a military industry from 1938 at least.

The US did not face any threats from anyone: on the contrary, the US was actively taunting Japan and trying to pick a fight. Eventually they succeeded, but their military production got a boost starting from 1939 at least, just like in WW1.

10. Casualties
This issue gets very little effective attention. Casualties will decrease your stability, but it is far too easy to overcome the stability losses and just plow ahead getting masses of troops killed. Needless to say, this is both illogical and horrifically a-historical. As an example, Canada suffered more than 70K casualties in the first eight weeks in my most recent game. In light of living memory of the UK's conduct at Gallipoli, there is no way the Canadian population would have stood for this. Canada would have withdrawn from the war post-haste.

There is a big flaw in what you are saying.

If you think about it reasonably: Canada, USA, Australia had no reason to take part in the European part of WW2. Even the UK had no reason to undergo bombings, bloody battles, de-facto banktuptcy, rationing and much more for the sake of some forgotten Eastern European wasteland.

That was what Hitler built his whole strategy on: there is no reasonable point to endure such losses for some nationalist Eastern European country. From a pure logical standpoint he was reasonable, because the fact that Germany holds Warsaw doesn't change anything for Manchester factory worker, but the fact that he can't buy eggs & bacon and may have to go through WW1 trench madness like his dad, does. A Canadian from Barrie has even less of a reason. Especially when dad can always remind you how Paschendale felt like.

That's why "Phoney war" happened in the first place. It was an attempt by Hitler to have the west accept that Poland is now his or to find a compromise.

The Japanese built their strategy on a similar notion. Why would common Americans be willing to fight and die to protect the Philippines (which aren't even part of America) or some island in the middle of the Pacific?

After Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, that appeared to be especially true.

In reality however, nobody surrendered even when odds were completely against them. In 1940, nobody kicked the warmongers out in the Democratic West, even after they were completely bankrupt. Quite on the contrary, you had Australians fight in North Africa & Greece, and nobody said anything. And that's with memories of WW1, revolutions, huge financial sacrifices the fat cats would have to make.

WW2 actually overturned the WW1 fears of civilian resistance to warfare as a concept. The Korean war where draftee divisions of Americans and Chinese would fight "The Battle at Lake Changjin" combat also made it look like it wasn't as much of a problem.

Only when the Vietnam war lasted 8 years, even despite very limited casualties(having lost 50k dead and 200k wounded: about 12% of WW2 numbers), Americans chose to withdraw instead of escalating further. Although I bet they could have if they wanted to.

If you want a more recent example: check Ukraine and Russia. Both had to resort to drafting people for the army, for an unpopular war. Anyone understands Ukraine has zero chance in winning, and is just attritioning the Russians for no benefit to itself. Russia understands this whole war is no longer a cakewalk, and is now a WW1 remake. And yet neither Russia nor Ukraine have ended the war, despite it lasting for 2 years now. Wars are not governed by reason at times.

In reality, Canada suffered about 100K casualties, but that was over six years, not two or three months. I have created a house rule that the Netherlands withdraws when casualties hit 10K, Belgium when they hit 25K, France (pre-Vichy) when they hit 250K, Canada when they hit 100K, Australia when they hit 75K, New Zealand when they hit 25K, India when they hit 100K and South Africa when they hit 10K.

French lost more than 250k in Belgium alone and even then they did not surrender until Germany took Paris.

Withdrawal, in this instance, means I eliminate their armed forces, take down the PP (in PP's case to -1,000) and CP and XP, delete all their production lines and then just allow them to surrender as their undefended territory is overrun. The Dominions dropping out would be a bigger problem if you are playing Japan than Germany. Germany will never get anywhere near any of them, but Japan could be in a position to invade India, Australia or New Zealand, so eliminating their military entirely is not necessarily a good solution.

That's a very unreasonable house rule. It is likely to result in a Sitzkrieg without reasonable basis, just because people don't want to risk casualties.

On the Axis side, Italy should try to get out as soon as casualties hit 250K (like France but any time, not just early on),

Italy lost 230k in East Africa in WW2, and another 150k in Operation Compass in 1940. Your games are nowhere near reality from the getgo.

Hungary when they hit 250K, and Romania should either drop out or try to switch sides when casualties hit 500K.

Hungary lost about 140k in Stalingrad alone. Based on your rules, they would need to drop out in 1942.

Romania lost about the same in Stalingrad. Maybe they would have held till 1943 based on your rules.

Among the majors, I would propose 500K for the UK and the US, and 25,000K for the USSR, with no limit for Japan and a different limit for Germany: at 3,000K, you start having assassination attempts and then conditional surrender when an attempt succeeds (or civil war, which will also rapidly end Germany....). How to simulate that? Excellent question. Another, easier way for Paradox to solve this would be just to make the casualty related stability losses much worse and much harder to fix. This would encourage players to think twice about that brilliant move they just thought of, if it might also bring with it large piles of dead.

UK lost 150k in France alone in 1940. 250k in North Africa, 75k in East Africa. Based on your rules UK would surrender by 1943.

USSR combat losses are a big political topic, but they hit 10 million for sure. Germany's losses also hit 10 million approximately.

In short: you house rules lead to frag counting, not actual war.

 

[Cornutus]

I have given up on HOI4. I have been posting, perhaps less effectively, for literally years, about some of these issues.

I don't know if some of these can be fixed without reworking some of the fundamental game mechanics. Oh, and developing AI algorithms that take account of competing or 'weighted' objectives; holding together colonial empires, not sending panzer divisions to West Africa, etc.

Are there any supply / logistic techs ? I think not.

I have similar feelings.

At the same time; if HOI5 comes out, I'm not buying it, until it's perfect. Had enough lessons by now.

I bought HOI3 thinking one day it will get fixed, that never happened.

I bought HOI4 thinking it will get fixed in a year to something decent.

Instead, hacking kills MP, game balance gets screwed even worse than before, while DLCs are a mix long overdue game mechanics and useless minor focus trees.

There's nothing for me to buy here, and I lost hope the game will ever get to decent state. Even though it's an incredibly promising platform.

 

[Danieri]

I think democratic nations (particularly new world/UK) should probably have a bigger malus to taking casualties in general. As it turns out, your voter base doesn't like being sent to die overseas.

Couldn´t this be easily fixeable by giving a huge malus to reinforcement rate on non-core territories from 0 to 100% warscore? (Like 98% debuff to 0%). Just tie this modifyer to war support and tweak the AI so it doesn´t send many troops overseas when war suppor plummets below 50% or something. It´s not a rework but should be doable.

 

[blahmaster6k]

Now we have a different problem that seems to have arisen out of nowhere. Supply is really easy to interdict, just a few planes dedicated to doing it can succeed in completely cutting off a whole sector of a front, so the computer starts running supply by convoy. Problems are: firstly, this is pretty ridiculous, especially early in the game before the US and Britain really mastered the resources and techniques for interdicting supply, and secondly, the convoys run in really unwise ways. Germans running supply convoys into the English Channel did not happen and it didn't happen for a good reason: it's suicidal, both in the real world and in the game. Even the Allies, late in 1944, didn't feel the need to run supply by ship past Antwerp. For a reason. There were immense numbers of mines in the Channel, and, even late into the war, the prospect of a visiting E-Boat was an issue. Beyond this, there is a logic problem. I have German convoys running supply from Venice to Dubrovnik even though there are no German convoy units in the Med (Gibraltar and Sinai Canal both still in UK hands and no German controlled shipyards in the Med) and the railways in Yugoslavia are still completely serviceable. How do units simply appear where they cannot be based on the logic of the game?

As others have said, you can toggle sea zones to manually control where your convoys go and don't go.

2. Convoys (separate but related)
Why can we not control our own convoys? Why cannot I not choose to let a unit go without supply rather than losing scads of convoy units trying to run supply to them? This has been an issue since forever, is not really that hard to work on and yet never has been.

same as above

3. Ship Movement (separate but related)
Why can we not have ships move in smart ways without having to do it by hand? Right now, if you send U-Boats, for example, from Germany to the Atlantic, they will promptly head straight to the English channel even though they would not have done this because, both in reality and in the game, it is suicidal. What the player ends up having to do is either suffer the out-sized losses of allowing the machine to do the ridiculous thing or manually guide naval units around such obstacles (e.g. said U-Boat is manually moved to the Norwegian sea, then to the North Atlantic off Iceland, then south into the convoy routes). This really detracts from the game when the player has to waste their time on this. Seems like a pretty simple fix since we already have something similar with ship units and convoys avoiding heavily mined sea routes.

same as above

4. Minesweeping (separate but related)
Why do the computer players never sweep or lay mines? It creates a terrible cheat temptation for a German player: just mine the North Sea, the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay and your worries of an Allied return to the continent (other than through Italy) are over. Have the Italians mine the areas around it in the Med and it's impregnable Fortress Europe time! This would also seem to be a rather easy fix.

The AI does lay mines, I've seen it often enough. I don't know if the AI sweeps mines (I suspect it doesn't) but the AI nations with large starting navies typically have some starting destroyers with minesweeping gear which helps protect the ships in their fleets from mines. Mines are also heavily nerfed compared to before and aren't that big of a deal now, so sweeping them isn't a very high priority.

5. The Amazing Logistical Skills of the US Army Air Corps (and the RAF and the L'Ad'lA).
Air units have the most amazing ability, currently, to instantaneously deploy all over the world. For example, within a day or two of the German invasion of Poland, there will be RAF, Armee de L'Air, Indian, South African, and sometimes even RCAF units not only deployed to Eastern Poland, but flying missions. I am thinking whoever created this functionality never served in a real military or worked for a real company. Not only is this monumentally risky and unwise on a tactical level, and put aside that the Allies would never have even considered it, how the heck do you fly a plane either over hostile German territory or neutral territory, get it to a Polish airbase, get your ground staff there, have them set up fueling, provisioning and arming.....get the picture? But wait, there's more, this is a Ginsu Knife thing. Check out the USAAC, three days after Pearl Harbor, has B-17's on the ground in the UK and flying strategic bombing missions in Northern Italy, the Low Countries and Western Germany. Better still, bombers based near Boston and Richmond, Virginia are bombing targets in Central Europe! Wow! In reality, such a mission was impossible until probably the late '60's with B-52's. Apparently, the AI is not constrained by silly considerations like aircraft's stated operational ranges.

AI, especially in a strategy game, is extremely difficult to code. Nations have planes, and nations have to decide where to send their planes. Where else to send them than where they could help out where the fighting is going on? I have zero problems with the AI using its planes where the AI thinks its planes are most needed.

If the AI is bombing Europe from the USA, that's a bug, not an intended design feature. I personally have never seen this happen. I would suggest submitting a bug report whenever you encounter this issue.

6. The Amazing Logistical Skills of the US Army and Marine Corps (separate but related)
Not to be outdone by the Zoomies, the US Army also has remarkable logistical skills. Within four days of Pearl Harbor, more than a half million American troops are on their way to Europe and just about to land in Britain. Better still, all of these units didn't actually exist in December, 1941, and they include Marine Corps units, precisely zero of which served in Europe! Indeed, of the divisions I looked at, almost all of them never left the US during the war in reality. Funnier still, among these units are the Attu Garrison (yes, that Attu, in the Aleutian Islands), the Corregidor Garrison, and the Canal Zone (yes, that canal down in Panama) garrison. Which leads us to....

There is nothing wrong with this. It sounds like you want the unit controller AI to look at the names of individual divisions and keep them in states mentioned in the unit name? That's just ridiculous honestly, it's a strategy game AI that wants to send its divisions to where it wants to use them to fight. There's nothing wrong with the USA sending as many divisions as it can to Europe if the AI is planning on fighting in Europe and needs the divisions there.

7. Europe Uber Alles
Start a game as any country that doesn't have a colonial empire (Germany, USSR, any of several small companies). Stop the game about 3 game hours in and then use the console command "tag ___" the underscore being the country tag (e.g. Eng for the UK, Hol for the Netherlands, Fra for France) to see what is happening. EVERY unit in EVERY colonial location is on the move.....away from the place it is supposed to be defending. They are on the way to either defend the home country in Europe or to stage to the East Coast of the US so that they can go promptly to Europe. Nonetheless, all those good colonial subjects don't take advantage of the colonial powers' absence to rise up and throw off the yoke of oppression. You end up with the hilarious result that most of the units defending the Netherlands, for example, are Indonesians, and most of the defenders of the UK and France are either Africans or Asians....right out of Gemini AI.

Same as above. Also, those divisions aren't there to defend against civilian uprisings, that's what police are for. Those divisions are presumably there to defend against attacks from other nations or be stationed to be able to respond to an attack in the region. There is zero reason in-game for divisions to be tied down to the states that they start the game in, that would actively sabotage the AI's ability to fight wars.

8. The Mice That Roar (separate but related)
In HOI 3, we used to have the phenomenon of the world-beating Nepalese and Bhutanese armies travelling the world, making it safe for tea-drinking. It seems that has been corrected in HOI 4, but now we have the same phenomenon with the Mongolians, Tannu Tuvans, the Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Tunisians, the Moroccans, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Palestinian Mandate, the various Indochinese nations and the Italian East Africans. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why these countries were even included as none, in reality, contributed anything particularly meaningful to the war. And, because the production system is in severe need of a revisit (see below), they produce outsized militaries that, in the grand tradition of their predecessors Nepal and Bhutan, travel all over the world making it safe for.....well, I can't come up with a unifying goal.

Again, if Tannu Tuva has an army and Germany is invading the USSR, Tannu Tuva should send its army to help protect the USSR. A division doing nothing in central Asia is a division being wasted when it should be helping in the war.

9. Production
This problem is a little harder. Let me give you an example. Play through to just before Germany attacks Poland. Be any country other than Norway, the UK or France. Stop the game and tag over to Norway (console command tag NOR). You will see an Army has been built that is more than 10 times too large, a Navy that is even worse (probably 20 times too powerful), but the Air Force will be about right....tiny. Tag over to the UK (tag ENG). You will see an RAF that is probably 50% too large, an Army that is about 100% too large and a Navy that is about right. With France (tag FRA), the too large will be the Navy and the Air Force with the Army about right (once you account for all the African and Asian units that are in Metro France as well...). If you're playing Germany, this is going to be really frustrating because you will (inaccurately) lose control of the air from day one (not to mention face UK and French aircraft in Poland.....). The error arises from one large gap: money. The inputs to production are, quite logically, manpower, factory capacity and raw materials. This is fine as far as it goes, but, because there is no financial constraint, every country's military grows like topsy (which they didn't and couldn't). In reality, the Norwegians (as an example) didn't have the cash to replace their 35 year old + naval craft or to add new ones, could hardly afford the few planes they bought (mostly from the UK) and they did not have the social and cultural determination to build an army. Now, to simulate this, you don't actually have to include money, you can just use an approach similar to the existing civilian demands on the civilian factory output to constrain building of new plant and infrastructure. Say only some portion of the military factories are available based on threat level and government type. Norway, for example, believed that NOT arming was the right approach because it would make them look unthreatening. So, liberal democracies that perceive threat respond to it more slowly at first than the authoritarians do. Just a suggestion, I am sure there are other ways to approach the challenge.

Yes, army sizes are different than they were historically. Is this bad? Not necessarily. If you want a game that more accurately reflects the OOB in 1939, either the 1939 start date or a different game may be for you. You're not going to get better historical accuracy without heavily railroading the game, which would have a side effect of limiting the options the player has to make his own decisions on how to manage his country. A large part of the fun in HoI4 is doing things different from how they played out in the real timeline. It sounds an awful lot like you want a game with a predetermined result where everything plays out exactly the same way as it did historically, and vanilla HoI4 is not and does not try to be that game.

As for this line:

If you're playing Germany, this is going to be really frustrating because you will (inaccurately) lose control of the air from day one (not to mention face UK and French aircraft in Poland.....).

If you're losing the air war as player Germany against the AI in 1939, I'm sorry to report that you have an unfortunate case of skill issue. Not only can a player Germany build many more fighters than the UK, the player can build fighters that are so much better than the AI's fighters that you can trade 20:1 and destroy the entire RAF in a matter of weeks even if you did start out with fewer planes.

10. Casualties
This issue gets very little effective attention. Casualties will decrease your stability, but it is far too easy to overcome the stability losses and just plow ahead getting masses of troops killed. Needless to say, this is both illogical and horrifically a-historical. As an example, Canada suffered more than 70K casualties in the first eight weeks in my most recent game. In light of living memory of the UK's conduct at Gallipoli, there is no way the Canadian population would have stood for this. Canada would have withdrawn from the war post-haste. In reality, Canada suffered about 100K casualties, but that was over six years, not two or three months. I have created a house rule that the Netherlands withdraws when casualties hit 10K, Belgium when they hit 25K, France (pre-Vichy) when they hit 250K, Canada when they hit 100K, Australia when they hit 75K, New Zealand when they hit 25K, India when they hit 100K and South Africa when they hit 10K. Withdrawal, in this instance, means I eliminate their armed forces, take down the PP (in PP's case to -1,000) and CP and XP, delete all their production lines and then just allow them to surrender as their undefended territory is overrun. The Dominions dropping out would be a bigger problem if you are playing Japan than Germany. Germany will never get anywhere near any of them, but Japan could be in a position to invade India, Australia or New Zealand, so eliminating their military entirely is not necessarily a good solution. On the Axis side, Italy should try to get out as soon as casualties hit 250K (like France but any time, not just early on), Hungary when they hit 250K, and Romania should either drop out or try to switch sides when casualties hit 500K. Among the majors, I would propose 500K for the UK and the US, and 25,000K for the USSR, with no limit for Japan and a different limit for Germany: at 3,000K, you start having assassination attempts and then conditional surrender when an attempt succeeds (or civil war, which will also rapidly end Germany....). How to simulate that? Excellent question. Another, easier way for Paradox to solve this would be just to make the casualty related stability losses much worse and much harder to fix. This would encourage players to think twice about that brilliant move they just thought of, if it might also bring with it large piles of dead.

I'll give you this one, manpower is very inflated in hoi4 and every nation can field many more troops than it should be able to. There are historical accuracy mods that address this, you can look at the workshop and see if there is something you like there.

Are there any supply / logistic techs ? I think not.

 

[Lamartine]

Supply is really easy to interdict, just a few planes dedicated to doing it can succeed in completely cutting off a whole sector of a front

This isn't a huge problem for balance because first you need air superiority. Paradox could add more AA to help fight it, like AA trains and AA trucks, but overall it's not a problem worth solving.

Why can we not control our own convoys?

Why can we not have ships move in smart ways without having to do it by hand? Right now, if you send U-Boats, for example, from Germany to the Atlantic, they will promptly head straight to the English channel

As others have pointed out, this is already in the game in allowing us to block access to sea zones.

Why do the computer players never sweep or lay mines?

Mines do very little and it's no great disadvantage to be Axis if they don't use them.

Air units have the most amazing ability, currently, to instantaneously deploy all over the world.

Here I really would like to see change. If I click on my planes in New York and click send them to Manila, I want them to island hop over there. The planes should calculate the jumps from base to base automatically, but it's still being done. This would open up an interesting diplomatic action to negotiate air base access with foreign powers. And interesting strategy for Japan to prevent American air reinforcements by capturing all the Pacific airfields

, the US Army also has remarkable logistical skills. Within four days of Pearl Harbor, more than a half million American troops are on their way to Europe

It's more fun than your units having a built in delay to move orders as a simulation of logistical challenges

all those good colonial subjects don't take advantage of the colonial powers' absence to rise up

Colonial occupation and soldiers are abstracted through the occupation system. On map divisions aren't the ones suppressing revolts.

the Mongolians, Tannu Tuvans, the Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Tunisians, the Moroccans, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Palestinian Mandate, the various Indochinese nations and the Italian East Africans. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why these countries were even included as none, in reality, contributed anything particularly meaningful to the war

What games are you playing with all those independent nations!?

 

[blahmaster6k]

It's more fun than your units having a built in delay to move orders as a simulation of logistical challenges

I don't think anyone wants to play a game where the game artificially simulates you having 10000 ping.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

Issue 2: From a commercial standpoint, HOI4 makes a large part of its money from selling minors focus trees. Nerf minors: 50-70% of profits evaporate.

IMHO it's not just PDX profits but rather DLC minors truly make the game interesting and create stickiness. If not for those then what to do in HoI4? Play few runs for majors then put the game aside for a nostalgic playthrough two years from now?

 

[herr anfsim]

9. Production
This problem is a little harder. Let me give you an example. Play through to just before Germany attacks Poland. Be any country other than Norway, the UK or France. Stop the game and tag over to Norway (console command tag NOR). You will see an Army has been built that is more than 10 times too large, a Navy that is even worse (probably 20 times too powerful), but the Air Force will be about right....tiny. Tag over to the UK (tag ENG). You will see an RAF that is probably 50% too large, an Army that is about 100% too large and a Navy that is about right. With France (tag FRA), the too large will be the Navy and the Air Force with the Army about right (once you account for all the African and Asian units that are in Metro France as well...). If you're playing Germany, this is going to be really frustrating because you will (inaccurately) lose control of the air from day one (not to mention face UK and French aircraft in Poland.....). The error arises from one large gap: money. The inputs to production are, quite logically, manpower, factory capacity and raw materials. This is fine as far as it goes, but, because there is no financial constraint, every country's military grows like topsy (which they didn't and couldn't). In reality, the Norwegians (as an example) didn't have the cash to replace their 35 year old + naval craft or to add new ones, could hardly afford the few planes they bought (mostly from the UK) and they did not have the social and cultural determination to build an army. Now, to simulate this, you don't actually have to include money, you can just use an approach similar to the existing civilian demands on the civilian factory output to constrain building of new plant and infrastructure. Say only some portion of the military factories are available based on threat level and government type. Norway, for example, believed that NOT arming was the right approach because it would make them look unthreatening. So, liberal democracies that perceive threat respond to it more slowly at first than the authoritarians do. Just a suggestion, I am sure there are other ways to approach the challenge.

I think this was solved better in previous iterations, where standing armied actually cost supply which limited further production, especially for minors such as Norway. HOI3 introducing mobilization/reserve units was an interesting development on this, which I think is something that could be explored much further. Norways (starting) standing army in HOI4 is way too big (navy isnt that far off but has twice the actual number of coastal defence ships), but its actually not too far off the army Norway would have mobilized if actually mobilized. In my oppinion, HOI4 lacks a good way to model conscripted armies, which puts minors like Norway in a way too powerfull position when the subject of a surprise war.

Norway, for example, believed that NOT arming was the right approach because it would make them look unthreatening.

I know this is a slight tangent to your point, but I just need to correct this, as it is a misconception introduced by PDX developers in AAT that I believe is quite innacurate. Norway actually had a period of unprecedented re-armament during this period in time. Too little too late no doubt, and like many liberal democracies military spending had not been prioritized during the great depression, but the "narrative" told in AAT i believe is quite misleading.

If youre interested, I wrote a post on this to try and aid the developers in correcting this a bit ago.