How does anyone play multiplayer?

[markslawson]

I've never played multiplayer, except maybe once so long ago that we sent in moves by mail, and I understand how it would work in games like the Civilisation series, but HOI4 is bad enough in single player when you can pause as much as you like to think about stuff and switch between fronts. Not only do you have to set battlefronts in different parts of the world, but worry about the air war, naval combat, espionage, in the latest patch, technology research, production, domestic politics (what focus next?), diplomacy and oh lots of stuff. Then, because you were distracted and didn't listen to the alerts, you may suddenly find yourself invaded by a country you did not realise you were at war with, and the invading forces are already some distance inland. Don't get me wrong its a great game - better than Stellaris, I think - but how anyone does multiplayer is beyond me.

Incidentally devs, have the AIs ever complained about the complexity of the game? Not only do they regularly get beat up by the human players but they have the additional strain of dealing with new features. I can see them going on strike to demand greater AI participation in the development process. It would be a human rights violation except, of course, they're not human.

 

[Secret Master]

but how anyone does multiplayer is beyond me.

We run the game slowly and allow pauses. It takes us a couple of months to get through a single war. But it avoids a lot of "We lost the Suez, because no one was paying attention to the Middle East" kinds of things.

Most groups don't allow pausing, so you see simpler builds and strategies, because you literally can't look up from the war.

The disadvantage of allowing pauses can be illustrated by a meme I posted in our Discord while playing as the US two weeks ago.

(When playing the US, I tend to think up trolling names for divisions and equipment. This time around, I named most US aircraft and ships either using words from four different languages on a single plane, or by copying names from Axis ships and planes.)

 

[Rashie]

Start with a minor country for early attempts at getting used to multiplayer, one that doesn't have a whole lot on it's plate while getting used to not being able to pause.

New Zealand is good for this, alongside your performance being less critical to your team's success.

 

[him_15]

Most of the Multiplayer are advanced or elite player. Especially those who play major nations. Otherwise it's a complete chaos.

 

[Metz]

Strategy games like HoI tend to have a specific build order. Each country has variations of optimum building order. So in this sense, if you know a country well then research, production, and idea focus should not be a problem. Espionage is mostly built up during the late pre-war and the early war. If speed is 3 then it should be easy to adapt with practice.

 

[Voigt]

The buildup phase is normally quite quick, where you probably already know how to buildup your nation and what focus to pick. The 10day grace period for Foci and 30day for research help there alot.

In wartime the games gets slowed down, SCW and Sino-Japanese War, since it is against AI speed 3 or 4, attack on Poland speed 3, attack on France speed 2, attack on USSR speed 1.

It is true that for example for Germany the subwarfare is mostly fire and forget, meaning you build your subs, you assign your regions to raid in, and then only now and then assign more subs per taskforce you produce new. A coop player can help there alot.

Thankfully most systems aren't that time sensitive, meaning for example with espionage, it is enough to look into that screen every few minutes, to check if the spynetwork reached the desired strength or something.

Overall the game is mostly, think of a new build-up strategy, do it quite quickly so reach the war fast, and then slow the game down so for one you can use your produced equipment from your new build up strategy against a human player with human production numbers, but also micro like manvour tank battles to try to encricle and counterencricle enemy divisions.

 

[Secret Master]

but also micro like manvour tank battles to try to encricle and counterencricle enemy divisions.

What I absolutely love about MP is that you never 100% sure who is encircling whom at any time until the divisions are actually wiped.

I can't count the number of times where you think you are running some kind of encirclement, then the enemy does something that looks like his own attempt at encirclement, and the next thing you know, it's raining PARA and amphibious invasions and counter offensives and panzer divisions just randomly start appearing out of nowhere and you think to yourself, "Wait, whose offensive was this, anyway?"

 

[FindFloppies]

Just don't confuse with HOI4 MP with anything to do with WWII. The strategies used can be very strange, and not very intuitive or not even logical, and depend more on how the game engine does things than anything to do with combat or history.

 

[MR2]

The struggle is real! @markslawson

What with struggling with accumulating CIC/MIC/FTRs, which Template to use, finding some critial must have Focus just traded away all your critical resources...

I really thought being a dictator would have been much easier...

 

[AOW]

I play cooperative with a friend. To be clear, we each have our own country and we work together. In our current game he is playing a fascist UK and I am playing Italy in an ahistorical game. We took out Germany, France and Spain along with most of Africa (fascist South Africa joined the Cominterm of all things) and we are now teaming up to take on the USSR. We try not to use cheesy tactics or otherwise abuse the AI (though stupid is as stupid does sometimes). We use sliders as necessary to help balance our games. It's good fun. We get to do our own thing without any silly multiplayer meta BS and help each other conquer the world.

 

[Praetori]

Don't get me wrong its a great game - better than Stellaris, I think - but how anyone does multiplayer is beyond me.

Most PDS titles share the same MP capabilities.
You either play fast RTS-style matches which usually means someone cascade-failure-losing because of an oversight (overpowered attention-wise). Or you play something akin to a Beer-and-Pretzels style game with likeminded. The latter takes time (like tens to hundreds of hours) but allows you to delve deep into the mechanics and details of the game.

 

[Voigt]

HoI IV MP is more PvP focused, since with even like 8 people it is enough to fill up all major nations, so the ai of the game is mostly a non-factor which helps the game alot. Also the overall shorter games help it to organize rounds, and make it less dramatic to kick a nation out by defeating it. Even it is faster I had it super rarly in like 1000h HoI IV MP that someone lost because of a oversight.

For something like EU IV or Stellaris, it can be PvP but the world is big enough, that even with like 10 players, you can mostly play cooperativly for like 200 years against the ai and then turn on each other. Overall a more slow paced game, which takes like 12 weeks (one game per week) or so to finish one game. Which can be hard to make sure everyone has time for 12 weeks on this specific timeslot. Also for me those games were mostly all beeing in the same channel for the most time and just talking with friends, while the games progresses.

Both systems have their pros, but I prefer the somewhat faster paced HoI IV MP, since it is unique in the sense you can only have such a PvP experience in MP, and when it is shorter with only 1~3 weeks you have to commit far less time for a single game.

 

[Secret Master]

The strategies used can be very strange, and not very intuitive or not even logical, and depend more on how the game engine does things than anything to do with combat or history.

We try to limit the ahistorical nature of the game by modding the game for our MP group.

For example, we got tired of the 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year German offensives against the Soviets, so we made weather effects (both mud and the deep winter) much harsher. Now the eastern front has an operational tempo closer to the real war where the Soviets actually have times they can recover.

We also did little things to make the game more historical, like reducing airbase sizes by half, capping fortifications at level 7, forcing Germany to implement the harsher occupation policies on the Soviet Union, and a special national spirit on the US that nerfs basically all fort and airfield and RADAR construction speed in the Pacific to prevent every damn island controlled by the US from turning into the US version of Okinawa before a shot has even been fired.

We also redid the convoy requirements for lend-lease because, at one point, it took fewer convoys to ship a division than it did to lend-lease the equipment the division uses.

We still get crazy stuff every once in awhile, but it's usually the result of a reaction to an odd outcome in the war, not silliness for the sake of silliness. For example, in one game, Japan joined the war 18 months early. Ahistorical move? Yes. But it wasn't silly, because the Raj had been basically left undefended due to the Allies committing all the Raj's division to the East Africa campaign.

(We also gate US entry to Japan's entry, so Japan going after the undefended Raj 18 months early was a race to see if Japan could occupy everything before the US could mobilize 18 months ahead of schedule. Both sides felt the pucker factor on that one.)

 

[FindFloppies]

We try to limit the ahistorical nature of the game by modding the game for our MP group.
[snipped the rest for length. Interesting!]

Yeah, the min-maxers tend to find any loophole and then drive a whole army through it, repeatedly, regardless of any weird effects on 'game intent'.

The people just out to have a little fun abusing the AI with friends, or taking over the world in a more normal way, are not who I was talking about.

 

[markslawson]

all interesting stuff.. tnks for that guys..

 

[Anaraxes]

What I absolutely love about MP is that you never 100% sure who is encircling whom at any time until the divisions are actually wiped.

Off topic -- but if you don't play Go, you should give it a try.