HOI4 has completely lost its strategic nature

[Louella]

it would be better if the game mechanics punished ahistorical meme designs like four-turreted heavy tanks being a good idea and rewarded things that worked well in history. That being said, I don't think it's necessarily even possible to model tank design in a way that does this.

There are a number of stats that can be added to equipment, that aren't used in default HOI4. You can add ORG to an equipment, so that a unit with its full amount of gear has more ORG than one without. For example.
You can also change the amount of fuel that equipment (i.e. tanks) carry. By default every unit has X hours of fuel storage. Which means that even ultra-high consumption things like gas-turbine tanks, can advance for X hours before running out of fuel. You can change this though, so that speed/fuel logistics becomes a trade-off in designs.

Probably, multi-turreted meme tanks should have an ORG or ORG-recovery penalty, to recognise that they were very, very difficult to co-ordinate.

 

[blahmaster6k]

Yeah It's reaching the EU4 thing with it just adding lots of little things to sell DLC and a poor A.I that is falling behind.

Stellaris and EU4 did improve the A.I in the last half year but not seeing it here.

The majority of stellaris AI improvements went into improving its economic management, it still needs its difficulty bonuses (both free resources and ship strength) to compete with players, and that's after a lot of economic improvements where it now finally builds decent specialized worlds instead of throwing random buildings everywhere and spamming enforcer jobs. As for military management, it's a lot easier to move fleets around when there are only so many places (star systems) it can go to, and only a few potential targets. In fact, the Stellaris fleet AI actually got pretty competent after a single bug fix, which lets them use the take point feature again and lets them doomstack their fleets. But that bug fix combined with better economic management can actually make high difficulty AIs a threat after the early game.

Off the top of my head the Stellaris AI works something like this: It picks a target and sends its fleets to attack a target, following the shortest path to that target. It doesn't really need very complicated logic to decide if it's stronger or weaker than its enemy and what the closest targets to attack are.

Hoi4's map is much more complicated, and it's presumably much harder to get an AI to manage a wide front with hundreds of combats everywhere than to manage a handful of fleets through a handful of systems.

I still don't know why the AI can't be told to build civilian factories first and then military factories though. Maybe the devs don't want the AI to be a complete pushover in ahistorical games where people start conquering in 1936 and so they have it build mils, I don't know.

 

[marcelo r. r.]

AI doing "complicated maneuvers" is a crazy dream, if they make it, the game will have large performance issues.

But its possible AI have a SOLID front prioritization. like many ppl above says, many mod's do it.

- I don't understand why for example, some AI still does weirdo garrisons(and normally useless) while have a large main front issues, Germany, USA are the worst offenders. AI Garrison order should be tied to a large amount of spare divisions if not in a war.

The countries suscetible to be "sea lioned" like UK, should gain special militia divisions for home defense, the divisions can't travel by sea.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Hoi4's map is much more complicated, and it's presumably much harder to get an AI to manage a wide front with hundreds of combats everywhere than to manage a handful of fleets through a handful of systems.

Thanks to one of the "recent" updates, most attacks go along the railroads: form hub to hub - not much different to map in Stellaris (until jumpdrives and whatnot come into play). So the basic strategy is: concentrate spearhead on a hub -> drive spearhead to the next hub -> secure railway with infantry -> move spearhead to another supplied hub (alternatively: use Extra Supplies spell) -> repeat. Infantry is just there to hold the line, it doesn't need to do anything complicated. Just following that would make AI feel much more competent.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

This is one of those "Well yes, but actually no" situations.

So, between offering players the option to do weird things, and the fact that people can't always agree on what was good, and then you add issues like "we want the game to be fun, not a on-rails movie that results in an Axis defeat every time," and the result is what you see now.

This will be somewhat off topic, but:

The ahistoricity of the game is a result of it not reflecting factors that caused early axis success yet late collapse.

E.g. evacuating Soviet industry is woefully inadequate (you should save 90% MIC), and at the same time usability of conquered territory is way overrated (Donbas produced iirc few hundred thousand tons of coal, few percent of pre war, despite lots of efforts to restart it). Logistics at least exist now, but extending supply lines is a minor effect whereas in reality it put immense strain on German railways, and to top that, collapsed western Europe agriculture which in turn collapsed its industry (Germany gets way too much from its conquests).

Otoh, Allies and Comintern have way way too effective militaries pre war. The effect of German early experience is not very pronounced whereas everyone formations couldn't keep cohesion defending and melted. And last time i checked pre war allied production was too high (conversely, soviet too low?), in an attemp to find, i guess, some balance?

And so on and so on.

The end effect is ahistorical balance which fails to portray dwindling axis resources, drawn from the core and expended to expand, under the mobilizing allied juggernaut.

I am not sure if such thing would be railroaded more, i don't think so. Of course by now players would revolt if faced with getting mere 10% of what they are used to get from conquest...

 

[Qswhisper]

This is more so the case in hoi4 since it isn't designed purely around competitive balance but is a mixture of game balance and historical accuracy. It's also very difficult to translate the way things work in real life into a game engine, especially a strategy game. Every layer you "zoom out" so to speak, the harder it is to model the little things in a way that represents the real world.

Good man, I enjoyed your articulate statement. But it seems off-topic...what I mean is that it is reasonable for the best tank design to exist in a certain play style, and it is important that different tank designs should correspond to different game play play styles.

For example, if I choose the military doctrine of mobile combat, then I should design a tank that focuses on high speed mobility; if I choose the military doctrine of superior firepower, then I should design a tank that focuses on super high attack power.

In other words: I can agree that HOI4 has the perfect high speed maneuvering tank; the perfect super attack tank, which is why I proposed the automatic design template. But I can't agree that there is an all-round tank in HOI4, which can have both high speed mobility and high attack power. That's why I said "HOI4 has completely lost its strategic nature".

Designing a medium tank with very high Soft Attack, with 70% reliability, 8km movement speed, applicable to all military doctrines, both offensive and defensive, that is the problem with HOI4.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

In other words: I can agree that HOI4 has the perfect high speed maneuvering tank; the perfect super attack tank, which is why I proposed the automatic design template. But I can't agree that there is an all-round tank in HOI4, which can have both high speed mobility and high attack power. That's why I said "HOI4 has completely lost its strategic nature".

Designing a medium tank with very high Soft Attack, with 70% reliability, 8km movement speed, applicable to all military doctrines, both offensive and defensive, that is the problem with HOI4.

But you can hardly call 8kmph a "perfect high speed manoeuvring" when you can make tanks that outrun strategic redeployment

 

[Secret Master]

I have my complaints with the designers, but most of my problems with it are the existence of "trap" options that serve no purpose from an optimization standpoint. A prime example would be rocket launchers in the tank designer, they simply have worse stats than howitzers but are researched later. There is zero reason to ever put one on any vehicle except for the memes, and yet they are in the game.

There was a brief period of time upon release when rocket tanks were viable. They had no tungsten cost, and they could be used on frontline tanks (not forced to SPART). This gave them some uses. I think that rockets were patched within a week. But during that early period, I did have 25,000 rocket tanks in the Red Army at one point.

Also, you can now use rockets on SPART to achieve one of the most wondrous things in HOI4. Negative breakthrough.

Anyone pushing with infantry can now say to themselves "At least I'm not pushing with rocket tanks."

Honestly, from a balance perspective it's a distinct possibility that the game was better off without the tank designer. Personally I think the new partial piercing mechanics alone would have done a lot to balance the preexisting battle between armor and piercing. Armor being expensive but optional as part of the tank designer throws that all out the window and makes unarmored metal boxes with guns the best thing you can do with your industry.

I think the designer is just "XP for tank upgrades" on steroids. Except that the baseline is super cheap with low armor, not the baseline models from before the designer which were medium armor and guns for medium cost. There's got to be a better game design term for this, but the designer (for tanks at least) sets the latitude and cost of armor on a continuum that's so expansive that it encourages either crippling over armor (if no one could pierce it) or crippling under armor (since everyone can be kind of pierced). If it just had three armor schemes/types (welded, cast, sloped or not sloped, and so on) then you couldn't do what players like I do and use extreme designs to goof up the system because the rules that kind of work start to fray at the "edges" of equipment stats.

You'll note that planes don't have "click for more armor." They have to sacrifice modules and range to add armor. There's also not piercing with planes, so yes, it's less complicated to balance in that regard. But I think that system works fairly well given how air combat works.

 

[Dimmie_Dumm]

Of course by now players would revolt if faced with getting mere 10% of what they are used to get from conquest...

We already have way less from the conquest than we used to, and I don't see much complaints here. I'd probably enjoy ~10% too, provided resistance is also improved (i.e. its strength goes down each time it attacks the garrison).

But far more than that I'd enjoy a game where people are not meant to be just shoved into divisions because that's simply the only way to utilize them as per the game design, while industries, agriculture, transport and science all run on their own.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

We already have way less from the conquest than we used to, and I don't see much complaints here. I'd probably enjoy ~10% too, provided resistance is also improved (i.e. its strength goes down each time it attacks the garrison).

But far more than that I'd enjoy a game where people are not meant to be just shoved into divisions because that's simply the only way to utilize them as per the game design, while industries, agriculture, transport and science all run on their own.

Well, i'm basing this impression on Stellaris which is in revolt after last DLC introduced soft leader cap, but maybe HoI is different.