The Appeal of Hearts Of Iron 4?

[icedt729]

HOI is the only Paradox game where I genuinely enjoy warfare, because of the many layers that influence the outcome of conflicts. I particularly enjoy playing smaller, weaker countries and having them punch above their weight by specializing and picking their fights carefully.

The game also makes it easy to try out alternate histories in single player- when starting a new game, you can adjust the relative strength of the most important countries and also select which historical or alt-history path each country with its own tree takes. It's a lot of fun to fool around with these settings and see how the war plays out with different combinations of powers on each side.

 

[Cavalry]

Even playing the same country multiple time is fun. Each time I try different ideas: template, doctrines, tactics... And when the long games complete we have a new patch to try again!

And I often play slow, pause, go research on the web, then return to game.

 

[The Colonel]

Fortunately, the AI is not competent at all aspects of the game so your chances of winning are still good even if you chose to ignore some mechanics of the game. In other words, you don't have to be competent in all parts of the game to win but the AI is good enough to beat you if mess up on the important stuff.

Just wanna second the latter half of this. The AI's not a genius, but the last patch made it significantly better at avoiding the worst player exploits *and* pressuring your intelligently across the board. Major countries actually build up significant airforces and will bomb the shit out of you if you don't have a plan to deal with it, and the AI does a lot less pointlessly throwing itself at your lines and a lot more sensible attacks. The difference isn't felt much when you're a good player who usually fights the AI at an advantage, but for new players or when you're playing noticeably weak starts, I very much felt the difference after the patch dropped when I first tried out Poland holding off the Germans and Soviets.