No Step Back Feature Tutorials

[MagnusPDX]

Do popular streamers get some sort of "early access" this time, to make videos before release?

Yes, we are working extensively with Influencers and Modders for this release. Their content will start appearing this weekend, so very soon!

 

[maxk94]

In yesterdays Tutorial by Social Streamers, he said that the Railwaygun will employ in Capital...so as China or Britain you cant use it on the continent?

 

[el nora]

My info might not be completely correct because I don't play MP, but I've read a lot about it in the forums because I like ships. So it should be at least 90% correct. The surface ship meta is occasionally being discussed on the forum.

DDs with just a single gun (cheapest one), no AA and no torps, so they are cheap and you can produce a lot of them. There's no focus fire in HoI4 so having more ships spreads the damage better and you lose fewer ships. Good engine so they are harder to hit, effectively increasing their health. A handful of them (a third or a quarter) should have a decent torpedo launcher, adding torpedos to all of your DDs is not cost-efficient. Their main purpose is to be a meat shield for your capital ships.

Hybrid cruisers with a single CA battery (cheapest one) and as many CL / secondary batteries (so guns with light attack) as possible. CL guns cost more steel when going to the 1940 tech, so you want to use the 1936 ones unless you have the steel to spare. Biggest engine, no AA and no armor. Armor just makes them more expensive and easier to hit (lowers their speed and increases their visiblity = hit profile) and doesn't protect against capital ship guns anyway. Because they count as capital ships, they get a +40% boost to accuracy when fully screened, so you effectively have godmode CLs that can't be targeted by other screens, can dodge capital ship attacks pretty well and deal a crap ton of light attack, shredding the enemy screen. Once those are gone, your torpedo DDs will annihilate the enemy capital ships.

BBs are too expensive and the starting BBs are usually too weak and slow, but if you know that the enemy will bomb your ships you can retrofit a few of your starting BBs to have as much AA as possible (stack all the AA and dual-purpose secondary guns you can get). AA is only good on a ship if it gets attacked (the passive damage reduction for the overall fleet is too small to justify putting AA on your other ships and making them more expensive) and because BBs have a very high priority to be targeted by planes, your retrofitted BBs will attract most of the attention and shred the enemy planes because of their high AA values.

CVs are also too expensive, but if your country has some of them already built at the start of the game, you can use them - as long as you aren't in range of land-based enemy planes.

The strategy is to have a single, huge navy. If you micro your fleet (moving them manually to force encounters or join naval battles of your ally), set them to always engage (guarantees that your fleet will enter an ongoing battle on its sea tile) and never repair (you will manually send them to port when necessary).
The meta doctrine is Trade Interdiction: The left branch gives buffs to speed (harder to hit) and visibility (also harder to hit), and survivability is the most important stat for a ship. It also just requires a few tech levels to research in order to get your buffs.
The meta designer is Raiding Fleet (again, lower visibility and speed, making your ships much more survivable) and if your country doesn't have that, Coastal Fleet (it debuffs your ships but also makes them a lot cheaper, which is more important because quantity > quality). If your country has neither (e.g. Italy), you're at quite a disadvantage.

Edit: If someone disagrees because I said something wrong, feel free to correct me. But if you disagree because you don't like this meta, I didn't come up with it and I don't like it either. But this is how meta works.

almost perfect, a couple short corrections

• ca armor doesn't increase their visibility, still doesn't make ca armor useful, as you rightly point out, it doesn't do anything to protect ca, just makes them slower and more expensive.
• cv do amazing work in sp. but in mp, you will always be in your own land air range, and probably also in range of enemy land air. so yea, there's no point.
• designer meta is coastal defense, with raiding backup. coastal defense gives 33% more ships, that's 33% more damage output, 33% more hp, and less chance to get focused down because shots will get dispersed over more hulls. raiding gives -10% visibility and +10% speed, for ((1 - 0.1)/(1 + 0.1))^2 - 1 = -33% chance to get hit.
• ti is the ship meta (it does not give speed, just visibility), but air is dominant, so your air controller NEEDS to have base strike doctrine. if you control your own air (japan), you must go base strike, not trade interdiction.

and yes, italy is not a naval power.

 

[GrandVezir]

ti is the ship meta (it does not give speed, just visibility), but air is dominant, so your air controller NEEDS to have base strike doctrine. if you control your own air (japan), you must go base strike, not trade interdiction.

I'd often wondered if some MP groups run multiple air controllers, to divide Europe and the Pacific. Say, Hungary/Siam vs. Canada/Mexico.

 

[FLUX2226]

but air is dominant, so your air controller NEEDS to have base strike doctrine.

The +40% naval targeting bonus affects land-based planes? I always assumed it's only for planes on a CV but never questioned it.

Trade Interdiction also has +20% naval targeting, but I assume getting another +20% is still more important than making your ships more survivable as Japan.

 

[GSP Jr]

This!

It does say you can only transport supplies on rivers if you own both sides - (so you can't if they could be fired on).

 

[blahmaster6k]

The wait is hard....

Pls answer - will it be possible to destroy railroads with paratroopers / marines - sacrificing some small units to interfere with enemy logistics behind lines?

Paradrop on the VP in a state so that you control it and then press the sabotage button should work.

 

[dermax]

The supply system desperately needs more of an explanation than provided in this "tutorial". I went from excited to frustrated to "I'm playing something else". I guess big thick manuals are a relic of a bygone era, but having to guess how to play a game isn't very fun.

 

[mustafya]

Yeah I can't get naval supply to work at all and have put the game on the backburner until it is sorted.

 

[Toybasher]

I like the Weather improvements but...yeah man, no one is going to micro their hundreds of units constantly for weather conditions. You either add macro controls for how your units behave in weather or it will just remain a random/pointless/underutilized mechanic.

It's also somewhat misleading to talk about the Finnish-Soviet Winter War attrition when the game doesn't have manpower attrition at all. Only equipment suffers attrition. Which has always been very strange.

Yeah, I remember an idea I had to split attrition into both manpower attrition and equipment attrition,

Extreme temperatures would mostly affect manpower (Frostbite, heatstroke, etc.) but some equipment too. (Vehicle lubricants freezing, truck engines burning out in the desert sun) while weather, terrain, and ground conditions tend to affect equipment. (Sand getting all over someone's rifle and ruining it, trucks getting stuck in the mud, etc.)

Out of supply attrition would affect both. (People give up and surrender because no food, weapons run out of bullets, vehicles break down without topping up fluids and doing basic maintenance.)

Training attrition would only affect equipment. (Yes there's a case for having it drain manpower because training accidents leaving someone wounded or killed but I think it's too much.)

 

[Hydra01]

Any info on how escort efficiency on planes works now? Last I heard it wasn't working at all but now one of the new Air Force Command sprits battlefield air interdiction adds escort efficiency.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

Yes, we are working extensively with Influencers and Modders for this release. Their content will start appearing this weekend, so very soon!

Watching Tank Tutorial... In my opinion what may be of help:

1. Record/upload it in true 1080p60 - this one is not or YouTube upscaling/rendering screwed the quality. The current video quality makes HOI UI text in the video very blurry and hard to read. Since you are walking people through the UI it's critically important they are able to read actual UI text.
2. Rework the sound - right now the music is relatively loud and the narrator's voice is somewhat faint. Most of the time it's possible to understand what narrator is saying - though with some strain of hearing - yet there are segments where the music becomes louder and the voice somewhat dies out.
3. I might be wrong due to p. 2 but it seems there's a problem with narrator's voice. Either the quality of recording is subpar (mike?, background noise with follow-on filtering?) or narrator is not at the best of his form (may be that was the first take at reading?) or simply there's too much text so the narrator has to strain too much to fit it into too short a timing.

PS I attached two screenshots from tank video as seen on different displays - MacBook Air and Win 2K - and how actual HOI4 UI looks on this Win 2K.

 

[Koba133]

Why does paradox use non-native speakers with a heavy accent ? and without proper subtitles ?

 

[MR2]

@FLUX2226 , et al... Would you care to comment, criticize, correct these examples of the "What is the ship meta"? Thank you.

Playing as Germany, I need to sink convoys... SS1T & SS2T

I also need to sweep submarines... DD2E & CL2E

Supporting invasions and relocating allied steel unto the ocean floor... Doom Stack: BB2A, CA2G, CA1G, CL2E, DD2E, DD1T & MTB1G.

 

[Axe99]

Just a heads-up that while I think tutorial videos are a great idea in general, when after struggling with the supply system I thought I'd give the video a look to see if it could help, it made the claim that "the tooltips tell you everything you need to know to fix supply problems" (they don't) and then potentially inferred (in at least an ambiguous way, and arguably misleading) through text and the visuals displayed at the time that building railways without hubs could help with supply issues (it doesn't). A quick cut could resolve these issues fairly easily without making the videos too "clunky", and the supply system is difficult enough as it is to understand in the context of the limited information the game surfaces without the tutorial video potentially adding more confusion.

Other than those two issues, I found the tutorial video a good overview, but it didn't help with any of the issues I had - I needed far more detail to understand what was going on (which was only possible after substantial time on the forums and then diving into the game files).

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

Just a heads-up that while I think tutorial videos are a great idea in general, when after struggling with the supply system I thought I'd give the video a look to see if it could help, it made the claim that "the tooltips tell you everything you need to know to fix supply problems" (they don't) and then potentially inferred (in at least an ambiguous way, and arguably misleading) through text and the visuals displayed at the time that building railways without hubs could help with supply issues (it doesn't). A quick cut could resolve these issues fairly easily without making the videos too "clunky", and the supply system is difficult enough as it is to understand in the context of what the game surfaces without the tutorial video potentially adding more confusion.

Other than those two issues, I found the tutorial video a good overview, but it didn't help with any of the issues I had - I needed far more detail to understand what was going on (which was only possible after substantial time on the forums and then diving into the game files).

I would second this. The streamer said he was "going to show you the new features" and he did that: they are very good as marketing videos whetting the appetite for NSB.

But they are not tutorial videos; four minutes is nowhere near enough time to explain the new supply system (even talking really fast!). Some sort of document in writing was needed, especially because so many players are coming from pre-Barbarossa HoI4 and HoI3 which use the same words/icons for systems that work quite differently.