Chapter 2: What do we have here?
So, here we are. Hearts of Iron 4, and an Italian campaign guided by the helping hand of Paradox…and led by an impaired genius on drugs. Oh, and I’ve never played this game before. Ever. Only good things can come from this. At least I have my trusty pal Kelebek to advise me, and the entire comment section.
This is Italy as of 1936. As you can see, France is physically very close at hand on land and at sea. Fortunately, the rest of our neighbours are either Switzerland or very weak. Or Germany of course but I hear they are looking elsewhere for territory at this time…
Anyway, the peninsula is nice and all (very visibly distinctive) but not all we have. We also have Sardinia and a small port in the Balkans which will probably become extremely important later on. Sicily of course is ours as well, but Malta (annoyingly) isn’t, which means that we have to worry about both the UK and France every single time we want to cross the sea to get to our shitty little colonial empire (we’ll get to that).
This, as the game helpfully informs me, is the diplomacy screen. Dominated by a massive portrait of Italy’s Glorious Leader, possibly in an attempt to hide the fact that an embarrassing amount of Fascist Italy actually would rather be democratic or *gasp* communists! This is of course true to life, so far as I am aware. Outside of Milan and the north of Italy, this guy wasn’t particularly popular or powerful. He may have managed to get Rome as his capital, but Mussolini never managed to rebuild in his own image like Hitler did; though he did manage to smash a street through to the Vatican to make that lovely visage we know today. Which, of course, marks the continued trend of European capitals becoming more visually appealing under horrible dictators.
Moving swiftly on, this is the afore-mentioned crappy little ‘empire’ we have going on right now. Just eyeballing it, it looks like we have a chunk of the Sahara Desert and some odd bits around the horn of Africa. Now the latter could be useful if we could hold onto it but that would involve a successful African campaign. And we’re Italy so… Anyway, since it is 1936, we’re already at war fighting the Ethiopians for some reason. I will look up why later but right now I can only assume its because they are literally the only target we could conceivably take. That being said, if we can win here, there’s some tasty looking treats over the Red Sea in Arabia. Yemen and Saudi Arabia would net us some nice oil options, and as I know from Kelebek’s time in the Turkish military, they’ll fold like napkins if I attack them. Food for later thought.
Alright, the war situation. So far, it seems we have a pretty good thing going on. It doesn’t look like the enemies (I won’t call them ‘bad guys’ because…well, they probably aren’t) have a working air force or navy and we have some of both in the area. We also have them surrounded on two fronts, which might prove useful. But lets actually learn what to do first before I begin painting a victory banner already.
Well, first the game seems to want me to research some things. Alright then. What exactly do the Fascists know what to do already? As it turns out, not a whole lot.
Right, well getting some automatic weapons in 1936 seems like a base necessity to be honest. Especially for bad guys, as this really is our bread and butter weapon in modern times. And boosting research times is the usual first move for pretty much anyone playing a strategy game when they don’t know what they are doing. Why the Italians don’t have ‘basic machine tools’ already though, I can’t imagine. What exactly was their industry using before if they did not have the capability of making minutely identical mechanical parts? I’m pretty sure we’ve got some basic tanks and machine gunners around here somewhere, so unless they are handcrafted out of wood, we’ve probably got this thing down already. Maybe it’s a union thing.
Ah, and now doctrines! The important step of telling your armed forces how to think. I’m sure the Italians have already put a great deal of thought into what they’ve planned to go for.
…or perhaps, they decided that just
saying that you were a great military power and were planning great things to come was enough? After all, mobile warfare is a thing of the past right? Our trench warfare research says so! Okay, this makes me a little worried about what we’re going to do when we finally do pick on a country with tanks. Not that will happen any time soon hopefully but still… I suppose we shall just have to make sure that our plans are exceptional works of brilliance each any every time. Even the spontaneous ones.
Especially the spontaneous ones.
Saying that, considering the fleets we may yet come up against, I think the fleet in being is a much better idea for us right now than trying to outproduce UK or French ship industry. The only way we're conquering this sea is by owning all the land around it...and even that seems very ambitious for some reason.
The game also helpfully points out that we are at war but little has happened yet. We are stronger and better in many respects than Ethiopia, and we really should win this war. Then again, this sort of mis-match up happens all the time in history and never guarantees success. Generally speaking, being really, really nasty and killing people tends to get results but who knows?
Hmm, something I have not seen much of before because this seems to be new-ish to HOI4. National focuses seem to be a way of either roleplaying an historic playthrough or going completely off script and doing your own thing. We’re playing as Italy, so we probably do want to go off script as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I’m not quite clear on how we do that. For now, we are going off what the game recommends. It seems the Italians declared war without really figuring out what was required to win beforehand (fancy that?). This little focus line seems to end with us getting a bit more of everything and an extra research slot, so I’ll probably stick to this one until we take Ethiopia at least. Then a new tree opens up which lets us get a ton of options about attacking other countries. In fact, it’s so useful that I wish the game pointed this out to me because I wasted a bunch of political power early on gaining a claim on Yugoslavia (spoilers!) when I could have just waited for this branch to unlock.
Now this production and recruitment system is a bit scary looking and different from CKII. These are professional armies and you have to provide your soldiers with everything from equipment to food. Ah, for the old days of pillaging and raping to make your troops happy… Well, the game is a little helpful in that they tell you what you absolutely
must be making (guns, big guns and bandages) and also recommended building some close interceptor planes and some destroyers. I have no idea what either of those are used for to be honest or how effective they are. We shall, presumably, find out.
Now we are finally on the way to preparing Italy for fighting anyone, let alone fighting a war, we can actually get on to…er…winning a war we’re in the middle of. Oops. At least the ground situation is good. We have planes and a bigger army. They have the advantage of defence and…that’s pretty much it. Maybe supplies will become a problem because we have to take everything through the Suez Canal but for now, I think the British are okay with us doing our killing, so long as we kill people they don’t care about.
Did I say we had a bigger army? Well, we have a bigger army
now but when I got there we just had loads of troops milling around doing nothing. I got them organised, placed on a frontline facing the enemy and looked around for a good commander for them. For such a strategically focused nation, I’m sure I shall have plenty of choice for good generals.
Or maybe I’ll have a choice of two men to lead two armies. Great. Alright then, we can work with this. Giovanni can lead the largest army in the north towards the capital in the middle of Ethiopia, whilst Ugi can lead the southern force and hopefully either distract or smash through whatever smaller defensive forces they have there.
Curiously enough, I think the Ethiopians are actually stronger in the south, which makes me wonder why the tutorial doesn’t point this out or that your troops in the south could do with orders to counter this. Whatever the reason, the fight in the south is going to be much harder than in the north. No airplane cover, no real advantage in numbers and in fact we are outnumbered if they decide to mass in one place. Basically, we have to hope either that our troops are much better than the enemy, or that we make it to the capital without the south falling and those troops turning around to fight us.
I set up my planes in the area to do what they can in East Africa. Gaining air superiority should be relatively effortless but close air support will be vital in rushing towards the capital before anything bad happens in the south. I suspect the air force shall be very important elsewhere. My two best options for expansion, the Balkans or Arabia, are ripe for this kind of warfare.
With everything set up, we shall commence the attack (too early, according to the game, but they tell me this whilst also insisting that I do so anyway) at both ends of Ethiopia. This should be closely watched to see how our troops fair. If we take the country relatively quickly, we can focus on getting claims and warring with other targets. If not, we really need to butter up and batten down our own forces up to scratch.
In the north, at least initially, the game seemed extremely optimistic about my chances. The battles would be over within days and the enemy were very disorganised and quite underwhelming. Of course, it quickly realised that they were still going to fight, even if they had no commanders and no air support. Good grief, it’s a monstrous thing this colonialism business. The only issue we seem to be having is indeed the desert and the supply issue. Attrition seems to stem from these two issues.
In the south, it is much the same, surprisingly enough. The enemy are fighting back much harder true, but the Italians seem to be holding their own. A few times the battles seem to swing from one side to the other but in general we seem to be superior infantrymen as well. This is especially important because in the south the army seems to be made up from colonial troops, which are probably from a gameplay perspective worse than our regulars. This builds my confidence for future European campaigns.
In preparation, I at this time waste some political points getting that claim on northern Yugoslavia and send pretty much all my men in Italy to the front I have with them. My African army will probably also take part, landing either in that one port I have in their territory or be used to take Albania before flanking Yugoslavia. Of course, before then they have to survive in Ethiopia. And of course, they then have to cross a sea which may be full of enemy ships.
A month in and we’re doing very well. Few casualties and great progress in both the north and south. Hopefully we can get the whole army out of Africa and off to the Balkans before too long. Apparently the Yugoslavian strategy of being really nice to Italy greatly offends the Glorious Leader. As you can expect, we shall naturally go to war and die in droves to make sure he feels better.
Our industrial effort research pays off just as Hitler starts getting naughty in his own country (according to the French and Belgians). This does knock up the world’s tension quite a lot but not as much as me declaring my intentions to fight most of the Balkans far too early. Oh well, live and learn. At least I’m not the Nazis.
And the war ends, just as Europe is beginning to heat up for the first time. So…good timing I guess. The tutorial ends as I decide what to do with Ethiopia. I guess I could annex it and connect up my odd bits of land in East Africa but to be honest I would prefer to have a puppet to provide canon fodder for the inevitable war against the empires. I’d prefer to fight and die over more defensive land than that which is surrounded by enemies. However, I also really do need some more space to build stuff and I might,
might need that land for my potential wars in Arabia.
Ah. Opportunity knocks again. Or does it? Whilst the rest of the world is distracted, I can take over the Balkans in peace! I doubt I’ll get away with taking Arabia without the British saying anything but if the Turkish can get away with it, surely, I can.
After all, everybody loves Italy, right?
Yeah, this AAR is off to a great start.