New gamer's perspective on Hearts of Iron4 (HOI4)

[RELee]

I bought and played SC:WAW for about a week's worth of time before I just gave up trying to push through the boredom. I just can't enjoy the IGOUGO or even WEGO games anymore. Paradox's system of play has spoiled me. I know this is true of a lot of Paradox fans. Oh we all give lip-service to the "good old days" of paper maps and cardboard counters and the wonderful games we were playing 20-30 years ago. I dare say that there are a lot of folks here who keep one eye on Matrix and The Gamers Front but we reside here (for the most part). Plus, most of the forum is made up of bright articulate people so I enjoy being here.

 

[safe-keeper]

Thought I would share my perspective (coming from a casual gamer) on HOI4.

Just sat through a 7-part tutorial on Youtube which took 3+ hours of my life that I will never get back. All that just to get a basic understanding of how to play this complicated game.

I thought the GUI was fine. My issue is with how complex the game's mechanics are. I would have preferred the game had been more streamlined.

Then again, I am more interested in making "grand strategy" decisions, as opposed to min-maxing every variable in a game.

Decided not to waste any more of my free time on this game but may revisit at later on in life after I retire and have much more free time available to devote to a single game.

Not a total loss as I was able to buy this game on sale ($38 for 5 packs: Cadet Edition, Together for Victory, Death or Dishonor, Waking the Tiger, Man the Guns).

Moving on to Strategic Command WW2: World at War. Heard that that game's complexity falls between "Risk" and HOI4. At least that game looks like I don't have to spend hours watching tutorials just to learn the basics.

Forgot to add that I absolutely adore the HOI4 soundtrack. I think it is brilliant. If only the game matched the soundtrack in its ease of use for a casual gamer like me.

It's funny, really. I recently picked up Steel Division after playing hundreds of hours of Wargame (a game by the same devs). I complained the campaign missions were a bit too easy. I went to Steel Division's Steam page and found lots of people, without those hundreds of hours in their belt, slamming the game for being way too hard. I'd forgotten how much of a learning curve those games were.

There was a good deal of complaints on game launch about how "dumbed down" or "streamlined" HoI4 was, but posts like this remind me that there is a marked for more of a "grand strategy lite" type of game. I think HoI4 and Stellaris actually were PDX' attempt to reach out to that market, with a game that's still complex, but more approachable than HoI3. Ironically, HoI4 was a pretty ambitious project that turned out really complicated in a number of ways. Working out how to best use the naval interface and battle planner without getting too many grey hairs, for example, can be an uphill battle. And the BP and the naval systems are tools that are in the game to help you!

I had some of the same experience when dipping my toes into War in the East, a game that feels a lot more complex than HoI4. It took a long time before I really got into it, and I still don't play it too often. Maybe with more time you'll learn to like HoI4, maybe it's not for you. If it helps, I think/hope future patches and DLCs will keep improving the UI and the overall accessbility of the game, so maybe it's an idea to keep checking back on it ever so often. And hey, you got the music. Hold on to the music. It is indeed beautiful.

You post has made me wonder if maybe the devs should indeed make a kind of HoI Light game, though. Maybe it shouldn't even be called HoI, but it'd still be a strategy game where you juggle production, research, division-level action, and the other features of HoI, just with a bit less complexity.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

You post has made me wonder if maybe the devs should indeed make a kind of HoI Light game, though. Maybe it shouldn't even be called HoI, but it'd still be a strategy game where you juggle production, research, division-level action, and the other features of HoI, just with a bit less complexity.

Stellaris tried, kind of; making automation work somewhat decent proved to be an impossible challenge.

 

[Iskulya]

I basically agree with this. Most GSGs end up being "difficult to learn, difficult to master". HoI4 can look like one of the easier PDS titles for a beginner, with things like the frontline system automating troop deployment and basic combat. But when that's not enough, it can be very difficult for a beginner to figure out what's going wrong. The best example of this is the division designer, which is an absolute delight for experienced players with lots of options for creative strategies. For a beginner, though, the division designer is practically inscrutable until you've reverse-engineered how all the stats end up functioning in practical circumstances.

Which veteran players are those?

Everyone I play with thinks the opposite of this. The division designer in and of itself offers a lot of possibilities, but the way it's actually implemented in the game is highly restrictive. The way combat width functions in practice means that you're going to want 10, 20, or 40 width divisions. Far from encouraging creativity, it actually does the opposite and ensures that unless you want to eat combat penalties you'll have to choose from a few cookie cutter template options. This also says nothing about the problem where a 40 width division with 20 infantry battalions is somehow magically better in combat than two 20 width divisions with 10 infantry battalions each.

There needs to be some overhauls here to actually encourage more diverse division templates in practice.

 

[Reman]

Which veteran players are those?

Everyone I play with thinks the opposite of this. The division designer in and of itself offers a lot of possibilities, but the way it's actually implemented in the game is highly restrictive. The way combat width functions in practice means that you're going to want 10, 20, or 40 width divisions. Far from encouraging creativity, it actually does the opposite and ensures that unless you want to eat combat penalties you'll have to choose from a few cookie cutter template options. This also says nothing about the problem where a 40 width division with 20 infantry battalions is somehow magically better in combat than two 20 width divisions with 10 infantry battalions each.

There needs to be some overhauls here to actually encourage more diverse division templates in practice.

Combat width restrictions might be an issue for realism, but for gameplay it's only ever a very minor problem. The fact that there's more than a single viable combat width is already nothing short of a minor miracle given how poorly GSGs tend to be balanced. For comparison, optimal army compositions in other games are:

• EU4: Artillery to combat width, then spam infantry
• CK2: Spam camels
• Stellaris: Spam battleships (maybe throw in some corvettes)
• Imperator (at release): Spam horse archers

Expert players in HoI4 will mostly follow the some loose general guidelines when designing templates (e.g. 40w tank divs should have 3-8 mot/mech battalions), but beyond that there's a lot of leeway for experimentation. Things like support companies and precise battalion numbers will differ between SP and MP, and between different MP rulesets (e.g. compare the templates in this video compared to this video).