Quick Questions - Quick Answers

[2653Man]

Well I should have mentioned that I am play HOI3 Vanilla to 1.4 have Semper Fi DL'ed but not ready to install. Romania actually has 2 Cluj and Bucharest. Just trying to determine what works best. Minors have the toughest row to hoe with low IC and poor tech in most cases. Just trying to find a winning strategy :rofl:

 

[misterbean]

It's been a long time since I have played vanilla. TBH, going to at least For The Motherland is highly recommended. But, of course, that is your choice.

With the little caveat that things may be different from FTM and TFH, the best strategy for Romania, would be to unite the Balkans: Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia. Probably in that order. If you can do that before 1938, you could target either Austria or Czechoslovakia. Or you might want to grab Austria first, so that you can attack Yugoslavia from another angle. I did that once, in TFH, and annexed Asutria, but I was too slow to grab the Czechs before Germany got their hands on the Sudetenland.
If you do get the rest of the country, you will be just short of 100 IC. Slow down, build some factories, trade to get relations up with Germany, France, UK and Russia, because this gives you really big amounts of threat.
Turtle for a while and let your Mp recover. I'm not sure if going for Turkey right away is a smart move or not. And you will probably still lose Bessarabia to the Soviets. Not much you can do about that, I think.

 

[koerake1]

How many army groups can i attach to theatre?
And is there any change to find out a distances?

 

[gunstickuncle]

How many army groups can i attach to theatre?

you can have 255 subunits of any type per theatre hq

And is there any change to find out a distances?

klick on province A, hover cursor over province B, see distance (only works if A is a land province)

 

[Gen. Marshall]

Well I should have mentioned that I am play HOI3 Vanilla to 1.4 have Semper Fi DL'ed but not ready to install. Romania actually has 2 Cluj and Bucharest. Just trying to determine what works best. Minors have the toughest row to hoe with low IC and poor tech in most cases. Just trying to find a winning strategy :rofl:

With the little caveat that things may be different from FTM and TFH, the best strategy for Romania, would be to unite the Balkans: Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia. Probably in that order. If you can do that before 1938, you could target either Austria or Czechoslovakia. Or you might want to grab Austria first, so that you can attack Yugoslavia from another angle. I did that once, in TFH, and annexed Asutria, but I was too slow to grab the Czechs before Germany got their hands on the Sudetenland.

If you can get Austria and Czechoslovakia quickly (through Hungary), definitely go for it. Germany will annex those countries sooner or later so if you can get them quickly, you're set. Also, don't worry about overextending yourself. The AI will generally never attack you, so keep an aggressive strategy until you have a big target in sight.

When playing a minor like Romania it's very important to mind your manpower. Don't build too many reserve infantry divisions, and make sure they are all upgraded. Going for special forces or armoured techs is a good way to make sure you can keep using your IC without wasting too much MP. Also remember that demobilizing costs you manpower! When you demobilize, only a part (I think 70% by default) of your men will go back into your MP pool. So, if you can take down two or three countries quickly after each other, don't demobilize in between.

Also, the expansions are definitely worth installing. I played some vanilla lately and parts of it are just outright bugged.

 

[Pro_Consul]

you can have 255 subunits of any type per theatre hq

Minor correction: you can have 255 ground units subordinate to a single theater HQ. There is no limit to the number of naval or air units which can report to any particular level of HQ.

 

[koerake1]

So, the story is starting with that Soviets attacked me unexpectedly. I didn't have much force on their border so quickly had to bring my men from france to the front.
Sometime ago i rage quited and left from the game. Playing as Germany and in war with Soviets. So i pushed them behind the big river, then i was defending and reorganising. Took some months and now i attacked again, but looks like the river is defending Soviets pretty well and my attacks are failing. What should i do?

 

[Opanashc]

you can have 255 subunits of any type per theatre hq

You can have an infinite number of units attached to theater HQ. All lower HQ's are limited to 5 subordinate HQs or divisions attached to them directly.

 

[unmerged(110255)]

1. Every once in a while I'll give a seemingly valid order to my TAC bombers (target area within range, strength and org high or even full, even got INT or MTR doing air superiority) but they won't do anything. Right now I'm trying to do strat bombing on London (playing as Germany) and I'll I'm getting is "resting". Not after a couple of runs, I mean all the time. Then I switch to another order, like log strikes, and they take off seemingly within the hour, so it's not like they couldn't reach London or anything (not to mention that the order wouldn't have shown up in the first place if range was an issue). What am I missing here?

EDIT: I've seen some similar, perhaps related weird behavior when targeting a whole region for strat bombing, where my TAC would sometimes do bombing missions against a province without industry or resource production. Even in the mission window the defending side was empty.

2. It's early 1941 and I have been influencing (both via diplo and espionage, using the "support our party order") the US since 1936 or 1937. The German-American Bund got voted into power in 1940, but they didn't lift the embargo levied against me during the Roosevelt administration and now they're even sinking my convoys despite us not being at war. What, if anything, can I do to deescalate the situation, so to speak?

EDIT: Probably should have mentioned I'm playing TFH.

 

[Pro_Consul]

1. Every once in a while I'll give a seemingly valid order to my TAC bombers (target area within range, strength and org high or even full, even got INT or MTR doing air superiority) but they won't do anything. Right now I'm trying to do strat bombing on London (playing as Germany) and I'll I'm getting is "resting". Not after a couple of runs, I mean all the time. Then I switch to another order, like log strikes, and they take off seemingly within the hour, so it's not like they couldn't reach London or anything (not to mention that the order wouldn't have shown up in the first place if range was an issue). What am I missing here?

Just a guess, but it could be the stance for the order that was the problem. If, when giving them the strat bomb order, you had the stance set to Passive or Defensive, then when giving them the log strike order it was set to Defensive or Aggressive, respectively, that could account for it. Each stance tells the unit what org and strength levels it must have as a minimum in order to fly sorties; if the current org and/or strength fall below the minimum set, the unit will just sit there "resting" until they have recovered enough to get back above the stance's requirements.

2. It's early 1941 and I have been influencing (both via diplo and espionage, using the "support our party order") the US since 1936 or 1937. The German-American Bund got voted into power in 1940, but they didn't lift the embargo levied against me during the Roosevelt administration and now they're even sinking my convoys despite us not being at war. What, if anything, can I do to deescalate the situation, so to speak?

Keep pulling USA into your corner of the diplo triangle through the influence order on the diplomacy screen. Their ideological alignment with you should already be moving them toward you, but the influence will speed it up. In addition, raising threat on Canada and the UK with your spies should also help, by increasing the diplo factor associated with threat, which pushes nations apart on the triangle.

Things that could be getting in your way:

1. If Japan is in the Axis, you are likely doomed. They will still attack USA which will make it impossible to get them to de-escalate their anti-Axis policies.

2. Your own threat. If you followed the historical event chain up to and incuding "Danzig or War", then your threat may already be too high to ever get USA close enough to your corner of the diplo triangle. A German player who wants to get USA aligned with or into the Axis should usually only follow that chain up as far as the First Vienna and then stop, leaving it to the Allies to be the ones who start the war and take the threat hit for doing so.

 

[Charles Reeps]

1. Every once in a while I'll give a seemingly valid order to my TAC bombers (target area within range, strength and org high or even full, even got INT or MTR doing air superiority) but they won't do anything. Right now I'm trying to do strat bombing on London (playing as Germany) and I'll I'm getting is "resting". Not after a couple of runs, I mean all the time. Then I switch to another order, like log strikes, and they take off seemingly within the hour, so it's not like they couldn't reach London or anything (not to mention that the order wouldn't have shown up in the first place if range was an issue). What am I missing here?

2. It's early 1941 and I have been influencing (both via diplo and espionage, using the "support our party order") the US since 1936 or 1937. The German-American Bund got voted into power in 1940, but they didn't lift the embargo levied against me during the Roosevelt administration and now they're even sinking my convoys despite us not being at war. What, if anything, can I do to deescalate the situation, so to speak?

1. Made a bug report about this one. Got some questions from podcat, so it is known. A fix has never been done.

2. If you get the German-American Bund into power via election the USA still follows the standard script, which means America chooses "The Undeclared War" option, thus you can do nothing about this. Since Japan is scripted not to attack a fascist USA you shouldn't have to worry about the USA going to war, but the USA can still get into the Allies. This means fascist Germany will be at war with fascist America.

For future reference you need to coup the USA before the Bund is elected. This will prevent this problem.

 

[Charles Reeps]

Pro_Consul types much faster. How did you get that "wall" typed before my smaller response was finished

 

[unmerged(110255)]

Just a guess, but it could be the stance for the order that was the problem.

Completely forgot to mention that. I didn't touch the stance and later checked that it defaulted to aggressive anyway. Even if the game used different org thresholds for different bombing orders (like more org required for strat than for log or airbase) it still wouldn't explain why those of my TAC groups that had full org and strength sat around doing nothing. It's also not like they hadn't bombed London before (the industry there got rebuilt to around 5 or 6 before I placed this order). So far the only explanation for this I'm seeing is that it's bugged.

1. Made a bug report about this one. Got some questions from podcat, so it is known. A fix has never been done.

For once I'm not glad to be proven right. With all due respect to the devs, but between the crashes I'm barely managing to work around and things like this the game has been a huge disappointment from a technical standpoint.

2. If you get the German-American Bund into power via election the USA still follows the standard script, which means America chooses "The Undeclared War" option, thus you can do nothing about this.

Makes you wonder if this is another bug or political commentary by the devs. Maybe this is their way of telling us what they think of democracy.

 

[Pro_Consul]

Pro_Consul types much faster. How did you get that "wall" typed before my smaller response was finished

What can I say? I am a multi-talented, dude. You should see how fast I can make a 4-pack of Guiness disappear. :ninja:

 

[Charles Reeps]

You should reqister your game. This not only helps us help you, but it also gives you access to the Tech Support forum so you can get help with the crashes. FYI I have only experienced one CTD in over two years and that was last week. It was probably related to my screwing around with files to test things.

 

[Charles Reeps]

What can I say? I am a multi-talented, dude. You should see how fast I can make a 4-pack of Guiness disappear. :ninja:

:laugh:

 

[unmerged(110255)]

You should reqister your game.

I already had it registered, just didn't display it in my profile. I guess it wouldn't hurt to turn that feature on now to avoid getting this sort of advice in the future.

I haven't had a crash in two days of playing the game. I consider that progress. And judging by the litany of crash reports on the tech support subforum I wouldn't consider your experience to be in any way typical.

 

[Pro_Consul]

For once I'm not glad to be proven right. With all due respect to the devs, but between the crashes I'm barely managing to work around and things like this the game has been a huge disappointment from a technical standpoint.

If you are having crash problems that is something else. You should check the sticky thread in the tech support forum for Podcat's LAA executable. I play this game a LOT, and it never crashes. And I do mean never.

Makes you wonder if this is another bug or political commentary by the devs. Maybe this is their way of telling us what they think of democracy.

From a realism standpoint it makes sense. Bund or no Bund, much of the private industry of the US was bound up with commerce with Britain, and this at a time when they were still trying to recover from the Great Depression. So as exceedingly large amounts of that commerce ended up on the bottom of the Atlantic, it would still have forced the hand of whatever party was in power to take some kind of steps, lest their bonanza of exports dry up and plunge them back deeper into the Great Depression.

Edit: Ack! Counter-emu'd!

 

[shierholzer]

You should see how fast I can make a 4-pack of Guiness disappear. :ninja:

With REAL beer it's going to be much faster though.

Pro_Consul types much faster. How did you get that "wall" typed before my smaller response was finished

Maybe he's got Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking - or just tons of practice. Good secretaries can literally type that in two minutes.

Makes you wonder if this is another bug or political commentary by the devs.

That's just how this game works. Keep in mind that this game is almost five years old - and primarily about war. While you can go slightly ahistorical without modding the files, really ahistorical stuff like a peaceful Germany or nazi Yanks will produce strange results. ((Nobody can cover any and all ahistorical scenarios anyways. Political landscape changes are a thing of decades and centuries, and the Bund had no significant RL chance to win nation wide elections. Same for a peaceloving Germany - a country who's just suffered a defeat considered as humiliating by the majority of its population / upper class is extremly unlikely to go down the neutrality route anytime soon (noteable exception: Switzerland).))

1. Made a bug report about this one. Got some questions from podcat, so it is known. A fix has never been done.

With podcats team working on HoI4, uncritical bugs like this one will never be fixed - especially in a game five years old.

And judging by the litany of crash reports on the tech support subforum I wouldn't consider your experience to be in any way typical.

Most of them are loadscreen crashes with specific reasons and solutions. These guys are just too lazy to RTFM. A (still significant) minority experience ingame crashes - about half of them is solved by podcat's LAA executable, the rest is caused by various reasons, including old computers, viruses, personal stupidness and dying computers.

 

[unmerged(110255)]

old computers, viruses, personal stupidness and dying computers.

Except none of that applies here (maybe stupidity does, but not in contexts that would be relevant to running this game). Don't pretend that this game wasn't ridiculously - though characteristically for this company - problematic upon release, and that this has improved significantly.

I still consider it a brilliant game though. I wouldn't be suffering through this BS if I didn't.