Is HOI 4 still a Hearts of Iron.
- Thread starter Templer
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Honestly, I don't miss the OOB from HoI3 because it actually was a pain to manage as a major, especially as the Soviet Union. If you leave the OOB and micro to the AI, it will be very inefficient. Especially because HoI3 AI tends to ignore HQ range, and as such, you miss out on bonuses as it doesn't necessarily place the HQs in range of the fighting divisions.
Meanwhile, in HoI4 you don't have to worry about the OOB because it doesn't exist and honestly I didn't like that mechanic in HoI3. In HoI4, there is no need to be afraid of not getting your HQ bonuses because there is no bonus to be had (there are no HQs). You can simply select your units, make a battleplan and voila, you're good.
Obviously, giving stuff to AI in HoI3 is not efficient. Nor is doing battleplans in HoI4. So, you have 2 situations:
1. The most efficient one, full manual control. Good luck trying to make 50 corps, army, army group, theater HQs and assigning leaders to each of them in HoI3. Meanwhile, in HoI3 all you need is: 1 theater, 1 army, 1 leader (field marshal). All of the units in that army (except for tanks, that's a separate army). Much, much easier to setup in HoI4.
2. The least efficient one, full AI control. If you set your armies to be AI controlled in HoI3 and HoI4, as well as the production/tech in HoI3, then yes, there is more to be done in HoI4. But then what's the point of even playing HoI3 if you basically let the AI manage your entire nation?
Last edited:
Just wait until HOI V is released.
Then we will remember the good old times of HOI IV
Then we will remember the good old times of HOI IV
IMO the HOI IV supply system is just a "micron" above having nothing at all. It is very good looking with all those cute arrows “and all” but unfortunately they basically mean nothing apart from telling us if the “supply” switch is on or off (...) on top of this it is riddled with nonsense since one can only do so much when units are living off the land (ie when actual supply is not produced/does not exist in-game). As an example of nonsense behavior that would never, ever happen if a true supply system existed is: say a North American level 2 port being enough to supply the entire German army as long as the divisions move fast enough into adjacent states to distribute the "load"; so under these circumstances that level 2 port alone would be able to supply everyone and their mothers, the only cap to supply is the number of states in North and South America. We can even plan around this nonsense which is something ppl usually label as an exploit. There is more nonsense but this one is my "favorite". With all of this said I still think that for a game that does not have supplies as a "thing" in-game the current system was a clever solution albeit lack luster by comparison with what HOI III has (like I said before one can only do so much when actual supply is not produced/does not exist in-game).While HoI4's supply system is a stacking-limit style system a la EU4, it does differ (significantly, in application) by requiring a flow of 'stacking limit' from the capital - in EU4, the stacking limit in a province is what it is. In HoI4, having a port bombed can reduce it, because it reduces the flow from the capital (and, if over water, it relies on convoys as well - something else EU4 doesn't have to worry about). We both want a better supply system. However, it's not correct to suggest that HoI4's units just 'live off the land' like EU4's.
Last edited:
Each HOI game has clearly done some things better and some things definitely worse than the others in the series. Perhaps, if we're lucky, by around HOI10 Paradox will have tested and refined each of the individual aspects of the game, and can combine them into one HOI game that does everything well. Of course, I'll probably be about 130 or older by then.....
I remember the third and last time I played as the Germans in HoI3... The war against the Soviets was just me pausing every few days to order my wall of 3 Inf 1 Art divisions to advance to the the next province until the Bitter Peace fired. Yes, it's inefficient, but the "strategy" never failed, at least significantly enough for me to remember any specific instances. I could order two divisions to attack five Soviet divisions across the river and it would basically be at that province the time it would be there had there not been any Soviet resistance at all.
Also every month a quarter of the Soviet army would have redeployed across Siberia to the Japanese front and back, every once in a while seriously leaving the entirety of the Western front empty, only to realise and bring it's entire army there leaving the eastern front empty, and realise that... rinse and repeat.
Once the first divisions guarding the border run out of ORG and retreat, the war is over already as no Soviet division can outrun your arbitrarily faster (due to the Blitzkrieg decision) infantry divisions to recover, and any other division that arrives from other fronts will also have low ORG.
Oh, and also my war against the US only took the one month needed for their completely mechanised army to run out of fuel after I landed around Washington DC (Most of my army not being intercepted by their navy), surrounded it and bombed it's port out of existance. The rest of the "war" was just cleaning up.
Any employ of tactics against the HoI3 AI was just to finish the war faster. I really get confused every time someone says "HoI3 was better than HoI4".
Also every month a quarter of the Soviet army would have redeployed across Siberia to the Japanese front and back, every once in a while seriously leaving the entirety of the Western front empty, only to realise and bring it's entire army there leaving the eastern front empty, and realise that... rinse and repeat.
Once the first divisions guarding the border run out of ORG and retreat, the war is over already as no Soviet division can outrun your arbitrarily faster (due to the Blitzkrieg decision) infantry divisions to recover, and any other division that arrives from other fronts will also have low ORG.
Oh, and also my war against the US only took the one month needed for their completely mechanised army to run out of fuel after I landed around Washington DC (Most of my army not being intercepted by their navy), surrounded it and bombed it's port out of existance. The rest of the "war" was just cleaning up.
Any employ of tactics against the HoI3 AI was just to finish the war faster. I really get confused every time someone says "HoI3 was better than HoI4".
Dissent needs to be implemented back into the game aswell as resistance to occupation after peace treaties are signed.
As will HOI4, only it will probably work way better than 3's what with the devs having gained more experience since then and the quality of life/UI of HOI4 mostly being vastly better than that of 3
.(with the exception of how we get way too little information on battles and whatnot, of course
)
Never said it was the only factor, but it is a big part of it. Want to win the Air war? Spam. Naval? Spam. Land? Spam. If you want you can ignore tactics, and strategies, and just spam divisions. Its Human wave all over. The only time i doesn't work is when both sides do it, and god awful supply system put it to a stalemate.
Oh aye - I'm not in any way suggesting I don't want a better supply system (and continue to state the case where it's appropriate, including in another thread that's active at the moment), and the example you give (where a supply port only needs to handle the heaviest load of any one state in the overseas territory, rather than the whole lot) is a good one (a similar but inverse issue is how an overseas force can only be supplied through one state's worth of ports - so if you have three level five ports in three states, it's as third as good as having three level five ports in one state). There are plenty more things but you don't need me to go into them, I'd be preaching to the choir
. I was just arguing that it's deeper than EU4 (where there are no convoys, and you don't need to worry about ports at all).Edit: I do still think it's better than HoI3's though - and also that it's a very hard thing to do right (logistics).
Actually, that is exactly what you said.
If you say it is "nothing but a numbers game," you have clearly stated that there is nothing but numbers involved with winning. If you wish to change your position, or indicate that you misspoke, that's fine.
But if you want to say "it is a big part of it," we should keep in mind that production is a big part of WWII. Gaining a production advantage over your opponents should be important to winning, even if it's not the only strategy worth following.
Okay fine the game is numbers game. I mean the USA usually Spams between 350-500 Divisions(90-Division Gamble anybody?). That's as much as the Soviet Union. UK spams 200 itself(only had about 40 historically). Then you have counties with 20, 30, 50,000 Aircrafts.
hoi3 is not a real strategy game cau all you need to do is select your units and tell them to conqur paris!!
Hearts of iron IV is a hearts of iron game because paradox say so and they are the creators of HOI. The name hearts of iron is used by a number of grand strategy games that have in common being set in or around ww2.
Similar with Victoria being set during the industalization or Europa Universalis being set during early modern times.
Similar with Victoria being set during the industalization or Europa Universalis being set during early modern times.
I don't build that many as the US. Why would I? Who spams that many divisions as the US, besides an AI that has done some silly things.
I didn't even have half that many the last time I was on the winning side in MP as the UK. And that included divisions I recruited from Malaysia and India using colonial templates.
But leaving aside that for the moment, you keep listing division numbers as if they mean something. If you understand the mechanics of the game, you would know that division numbers mean very little. I could recruit 1000 divisions with 1 battalion of INF each if I wanted. If you are just measuring the number of divisions in the army, you aren't telling anyone anything about combat capabilities or spam.
That's one reason every time I do a production test to see if a nation can reach historical numbers, I always work with people on the forum who know a lot about the historical OOBs so I can recruit the correct number of divisions with somewhat historical templates to measure war fighting ability.
In fact, your arguments keep implicating game mechanics as being flawed, when it seems like your real complaint is AI. Just because the AI spams, it doesn't mean spam is the only way forward or even most efficient. How you use your divisions and planes is really important. That's why I brought up encirclements. If the Soviets lose 400 battalions of INF to panzers in the first six months of the war, who gives a damn about spam?
The United States produced just over 21,000 fighters in 1945 alone. This doesn't count over 20,000 other aircraft, including thousands of bombers. And 1945 was a year that the US didn't stay at full military production for all 365 days.
I tell you what. You want to complain about aircraft spam, go and run the US until August of 1945. Let's see if you can even come close to historical US production numbers. You can do the test on normal difficulty; don't occupy any other countries to artificially boost your IC (I know that trick).
I'll wait right here while you run out of aluminum. And that test was conducted under an old patch where you could still run factories with zero aluminum. Good luck getting 220 MIC on planes to function even at a reduced speed under the current rules.
Here's another one: try to build Germany's 33,000 BF-109s, while also building the 20,000 FW-190s, and thousands of bombers, and also meeting your quota of Panzer IVs, Panthers, and Tigers. Oh, and don't forget to build all the artillery Germany produced during the war. And do it without defeating the Soviets or occupying Baku, Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Moscow, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, the other Axis powers, and the US.
HOI 3's supply system was far better In my opinion because you actually had to make supplies, supplies also cost supplies to move so having long supply trains would inevitably cost you more supplies.Oh aye - I'm not in any way suggesting I don't want a better supply system (and continue to state the case where it's appropriate, including in another thread that's active at the moment), and the example you give (where a supply port only needs to handle the heaviest load of any one state in the overseas territory, rather than the whole lot) is a good one (a similar but inverse issue is how an overseas force can only be supplied through one state's worth of ports - so if you have three level five ports in three states, it's as third as good as having three level five ports in one state). There are plenty more things but you don't need me to go into them, I'd be preaching to the choir
Edit: I do still think it's better than HoI3's though - and also that it's a very hard thing to do right (logistics).
HOI4 has a single HUGE fatal flaw in their supply system and it is that supplies go through states and not individual tiles like in HOI 3, this can lead to scenarios where you could easily repair the infrastructure (or build more) but the enemy has control so your units have to suffer with 0/10 infra because it was damaged and the enemy has it low on their build queue.
I understand that it was made that way for simplicity but it really just takes away from the game and makes some fronts annoying to deal with.
HoI3's system could also leave units virtually next-door to your capital out of supply, and the rate of supply 'progression' was fixed and the path it took often far from that desired (and it took hundreds of hours of gameplay to have any idea what was going on, and then even once you knew what was going on there was no way to clearly change it).
That said, I have no issue with some preferring HoI3's system over HoI4's - they both have very different strengths. Bringing their strengths together and removing their weaknesses (with the addition of one or two other things) would be my preference
.I fully agree about the cost of maintaining units being a good thing (I've been banging on about it since the HoI4 supply system was announced), as well as the issue of the time it takes for supplies to catch up to the front. Neither system made any attempt to represent the cost of a logistics system, something I'd personally like in there at some point.
Yeah, the fact that you don't produce supplies in 4 is kinda weird, especially considering how the same game has you build individual guns, tanks, and howitzers for your forces.
A compromise for 4 could be to have you require trains to transport supplies, the same way you need convoys when moving stuff across sea zones. Trains would be vulnerable to bombing and partisans, and you would also lose trains in states with active fighting. If you had too few trains, the game would prioritise keeping armies and divisions set to high priority.
Also, yes, it should take some time for supplies to reach a new state. Perhaps each new state you captured could have a modifier that reduced max supply, and this modifier was gradually decreased to 0% over time. The effect wouldn't need to be severe, except maybe for beachheads, but if, say, you were advancing deep into Russia, you'd feel its effects if you advanced too quickly. This would lead to interesting dilemmas where you had to decide if you wanted to keep advancing to take territory, or wait for "the supply lines to catch up with you".