Discuss the news about the upcoming DLC: Arms Against Tyranny or any other stuff you want from the vanilla game.I'll start by asking, which Italian East Africa is better? Fascist or Neutral? Both have Prince Amadeo as leader but with different traits.
The last dlc was a pure negative. Nothing good came from it.
>>1534304Here are the traits for more context and comparison. The one above is the neutral trait.>>1534308Oh absolutely, is a shame since I had some hopes for Finland.
>>1534308Stealing fleets from Peace conference so you dont have to wait to annex puppet + civ reparations in peace conference were good>>1534304Top one obviously. You'll take less garrison damage in the long run when you build that compliance quicker.As for AAT-I'm glad Finland will finally have continuation war mechanic- and I'm looking forward to guessing whether this new DLC makes the war easier for Axis or Allies +Comintern. Axis gets a better Finland that actually joins the war, Germany specifically is gonna get a bonus from controlling Denmark, and Narvik in Norway. They will be starting with 2 more civs then before AAT but at the same time they're losing a bunch of steel.Not looking forward to Norway and its mechanics though- the guy who designed it seems to be a fucking clown. Monarchist Norway with no option for the Monarch to go in charge? State-improvement decisions that grant unrealistic Militia?? Norway's biggest contribution- the merchant navy just seems to be buttons you press to again improve certain states. very lame.
>>1534308I like the ethiopia tree
>>1534322True but its bundled into the new system which is awful. It leads to even more bodergore than before, ai fighting over land you need, and ending the peacedeal not being able to annex everything. Id rather just have the old system than the bidding system. >>1534360If you enjoy it then thats great. I dont though, its just more a nusance to exist for other countries. I hate that it can get italy stuck into a permanent war just because you did not pull your entire army over day 1
pre-ordered it the other other day. Just can't say no to a free song.
>>1534308What the other anon said: the two new features of peace conference were good. Everything was pure dogshit and Ethiopia turning into a major by focuses alone (ha ha, pun!) by 1940 was just plain retarded
>>1534308The best three things that came out fron BBA were the revamped peace conference additions (the fleet taking, the factory war reparations and resource privileges), the new italian focus tree and Bella Ciao.I'm not much of a fan of the balance of power mechanics and the swiss focus tree, but they're not that bad once you learn how to exploit them.The ethiopian focus tree is pure bullshit, in historical you're locked from expanding your lands unless you go to exile, which locks the rest of your focus tree, and you're at the mercy of rgn if you want to get either somalian lands or Palestine. The alternative focuses are bad too: The Emperor Stays requires you to hold all ethiopian cores to peace out with Italy (and either Eritrea or Somalia for extra land), its final expansion choices are locked between each other; the fascist route is boring since its a fascist Poland reichkomissariat but worse; the stalinist path is awful while the only reward of going anarcho-communist are getting rid of your penalties faster and getting a fifth research slot, which is the only way Ethiopia can get all research slots by the way.
>>1535769>the stalinist path is awfuli mean, it gives you 10k inf eq. that's pretty cool
I like the new peace conference, but had issues with it, mainly taking fleet in 1vs1 and the Transylvania achievement.
>>1534308There were some good things but all of it was added to the base game. You are essentially paying money to make the game worse
>>1536082The soviet help is a nice thing that actually improves Ethiopia, being a puppet is what sucks.
>>1536209Yeah. I guess that's the balancing element? It makes the war much easier to win, but at the cost of eventually becoming Stalin's puppet
>>1534762>Free
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/developer-diary-alt-history-sweden.1597472/
>>1536405Now this is a focus tree I can look forward to
>>1536405>dev purposefully avoiding questions on whether Sweden will have a Comintern path or notStalinbros i don't feel so good
>>1536507Well considering every communist country with the stalinism ideology gets a -50 negative opinion to and from Sweden when the 4th International event pops up, I guess Sweden will go full "Fuck the Comintern" in the communist branch.
fucking commies
>>1534304Release date when?
>>1536605I don't get it, give me a brief summary of Wallenberg.
>>1536718Rich kid, Swedish "diplomat", jew lover, proud "one-sixteenth jew", psuedo shabbos goy, worked against the nazis and hungarians by taking in jews and declaring areas Swedish territory. Thankfully the Soviets disappeared him, so calling PDX commies for adding him is kind of weird.."Righteous Among the Nations" is also litterally a jewish title for goyim that did it for free during the Holoholo get dolloh.
>>1536745Well it's interesting to see the soviets did something good for once.
Is it better to strengthen the Blackshirts/get the Blackshirt Assault company support or to dissolve them and get Piéche as field marshall plus some carabinieri units and a trait that increases military factory building speed?
The guy that came up with Operation Gladio Harry Sporborg of Hambro Bank, which was owned by the Hambro family and their overlords the Swedish Wallenberg family
>Stockholms Enskilda Bank was managed by the Wallenberg family who, thanks to the bank, built a unique position in Swedish business. During World War II, the Wallenberg bank was accused of collaborating with Nazi Germany, putting the bank on blockade by the U.S. Government.humu humu
>>1536910Lifted in 1947. The Dulles brothers helped the Wallenbergs. Dulles brothers were friends of the family.
In June 1956, Stockholm Enskilda Bank celebrated its 100th anniversary. Guests invited to the celebration included not only local politicians and businessmen, but also European and American bankers, business partners and friends. Olaf Hambro and Harry Sporborg of Hambros Bank, which the Wallenberg were owners of, Hugh Kindersley II of Lazard Brothers, Henry Sturgis Morgan of Morgan Stanley, Howard C. Shepherd of First National City Bank of New York (now part of Citibank), Director of J. & W. Seligman & Co. , the three French banks Morgan & Cie, Banque Paris et des Pays Ba, Credit Lyon, Swiss Bank Corporation and Süddeutsche Bank. The company embarked on a four-day rail trip through central Sweden, including a boat trip on the Gota Canal, a visit to the Saab aerospace factory in Linköping and the ASEA (ABB) factory in Västerås, as well as a visit to the steelworks in Stra Koppalberg. was included. Construction of a power station at Domnalbet and Trengslet on the Österdal river. We then visited the towns of Mora and Falun in the province of Dalarna, followed by a visit to the SKF steelworks in Hoforth, and after a tour of Uppsala, we returned to Stockholm on the evening of 7 June. The 100th anniversary party was held in Stockholm. City Hall.Sporborg not only envisaged the Gladio network. He was also responsible for putting Thatcher in power.Charles Hambro, a friend of the Wallenbergs, who married Dorothy Mackay, Marcus Wallenberg's first wfe, was the one who helped build Robert Maxwell's newspaper empire.It has also come to surface that Wallenbergs were the main backers of George Soros Quantum Fund. Soros... Budapest 1944... Black markets... adopted by a person Soros refers to as his "mentor"...Raoul Wallenbergs... Budapest 44/45... black markets... disappears...Soros ends up in London, starts his QF and gets funding from a o the Wallenbergs.
>>1536924Three first paragraphs were translated using Google Translator. Source: Marcus Wallenberg Jr. - How to Manage One's £https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTv_Vb2lvTU
>>1534308The plane designer was neat, it was good to finally be able to make fighter-bomber planes. Italy focus tree was needed and actually well done. Switzerland and Ethiopia were pointless though.
>>1537657Why fighter bombers? Against AI, I usually just spam large clumsy tac bombers 2med bomb bay + 2 small bomb bay + max heavy machine guns, and sealed fuel tanks. Seem to do the trick. As to fighters, I don't know which is better, higher agility and only heavy machine guns, or peak damage with lower agility due to cannons.Still I think the whole air designer was unnecessary, and kind of ruined the game, with all the messed up icons, and wrong images for planes. As in it's definitely fucked up by default, as even the trailer for the new equipment sales mechanics had the wrong icon to the german early close air support planes. The game is being messed with by people who don't care about historical tech, and won't even bother to check for the correct avaible icons and 3d models. Devs were so focused on adding ahistorical focus trees just to include blacks into the game, that they did not even spend time to assign correct avaible plane icons and models, and a years or so have passed since release, and they did not fixed it in patches, nor will they with the new mods. Now they create a bunch of fake commie paths, while undermining existing monarchs, and adding/praising jew puppet Wallenberg. Paradox are a bunch of commies, and jews and if normal government would be put in charge every single one of their employees, shareholders and investors would be killed.
>>1537725*for tac bombers meant max defensive turrets, with them I always upgrade to defensive cannons when become avaible
>>1537725>Why fighter bombers?If you are a minor or trying to do some early game cheese you can get good production efficiency by only producing one type of plane. Obviously if you're a major you are better off specializing. Messed up icons for the AI is annoying but I just tag switch and fix it for them.
>>1536605>Spend past 20 years telling people "no holocaust in the games">Add "Righteous among the nations"Top fucking kekAt least the bonus fits to his achievements, sans that 5% stability. Slash the stability, rename the trait and the guy is ok.>>1536745Careful with all that edge, or you gonna hurt yourself
>>1537657>The plane designer was neatIt literally rendered air combat broken in five different ways, along with making AI incapable of fielding any sort of airforce, sort of like earlier versions of 4 made AI unable to make tank divisions.
>>1537725Agility = survival = higher K:D ration = better plane in all situationsHigher damage = more kills = better plane when having huge industry
>>1537725Also>and a years or so have passed since release, and they did not fixed it in patchesAnon, DpD bugs took them FOUR YEARS to fix. We have BfB bugs (in a blatantly pointless DLC that serves no real purpose other than saturating Turkish market) that aren't addressed to this day. La Resistance has half of the espionage mechanics running on spaghetti, and the other half doesn't work at all (with having fucking placeholder for Linguist trait, as it does nothing at all) ever since release, with nobody bothering to fix it. And you think they will even consider fixing historical match-up, when they can't be arsed to fix gameplay errors that take maybe a minute a piece to fix on your own by editing files? HoI4 support and design is in free-fall since 2018. WoT was the last DLC that was both useful and functional (MtG reintroduced fuel, but ruined naval combat, while NSB added half-assed logistics and castrated Soviet AI)
It has been a while. What's the modern meta when it comes to formations?
>>1537752Fighter bombers are not agile whilst still carrying the bomb. They only become agile after dropping the bomb.
>>1537797>Figher BombersWhy calling a shit-tier plane something that it is not? It's neither a fighter, nor a bomber. And it fails as a combo of both.In other words: you are making a horribly bad fighter for the sake of being even shittier CAS
All I'm looking at for this DLC is the weapon trade. Once it is implemented, I'm just going to copy-paste related files and stay with NSB final patch. The same I did with the files and script that allow to ask for ships in peace conference from BBA.Fuck those DLCs and their shit-tier content, we are literally back to Mare Nostrum-tier bullshit, where entire DLC is useless and making your game worse, BUT it also introduces ONE useful feature.
>>1537818>I'm just going to copy-paste related filesThat is actually an excellent idea. "Build your own game" focus tree and feature selector, can you make a guide? I known some things are super easy to mod in the game, due to them being in text files, but did not know about being able to skip features.
>>1537823It's literally making sure you've got all the related files if you are lazy, or writing/copy-pasting related scripts into the files.Example: BBA finally fixed the infamous "so you want economy or manpower" choice from Canadian tree. I am not going to instal BBA just to remove the "mutually exclusive" line of script from Canadian focus tree, so I simply slashed that, since it is kosher nowadays.Other than that, not being retarded and having basic grasp of English is all you really need to file-edit all PDX games.
>>1537815Because that's what it was called irl. A fighter bomber is not really a dedicated thing, it's a modification of existing fighters to carry bombs after: a) you already achieved air superiority b) you need the speed advantage over your existing bombers.Curtiss P-40, Bell P-39, Seversky P-47, NAA P-51, Hawker Hurricane, Fiat CR.32 and 42, Focke-Wulf Fw 190 were all designed as fighters, they were at one point in time used and designated as fighter-bombers.Meanwhile I'm struggling to think of a single plane designed from the ground-up as this hybrid.
>>1537839I'm not talking about IRL. I'm talking about vidya known as HoI4, where fighter bombers are retardedly useless bullshit. There is literally no point building them in-game, due to the way how the game works.In other words: you are making the standard HoI mistake, which is larping real-life, rather than playing the game>b-butBut what? Game rules as they are do not and will not correspond to real-life situations. It's really that simple. You are like the people who bitch and moan about carriers being useless, because historically, they were oh so important. Guess what? It's a fucking game. The one where Ethiopia can have more industry and resources than a major, global power by 1940, without even leaving its own borders. The one where German economy can actually carry German victory and lack of resources is a non-feature. The one where Stalin purges himsef as a marshal. The one where China has warlord cliquest that have been subdued, but doesn't have the actual disloyal ones.And you are larping unit design, failing to realise the ruleset of the game doesn't accomodate for it. What next? Building subs without having MtG, because subs should be good at hunting convoys, never mind how useless that hunt is without fuel in the game?
>>1537873I have never played Hoi4.
>>1537876... then the fuck are you doing in discussion about HoI4's airplane designer, going in a thread about HoI4? Are you by chance retarded?
>>1537881I was on the prowl for robbieposts and I saw someone being retarded on a topic I'm knowledgeable about. I find it real humorous to engage with wargame players using real world information on the subject, because they all live in their little meta worlds.
>>1537883>Yes, I am not only retarded, but also terminally bored armchair expert! Please gib (You)sHere. Shame to watch a man struggle so much for any semblance of human interaction.
>>1537883Some /d/rone please help: what's the name of the fetish when people are turned on when being spit on? No, not general humiliation, spitting specifically
>>1537897Who are you quoting?>>1537901Spitplay?
Explain your average hoi4 player:>above average intelligence>social recluse, by choice>ability of foresightOther common attributes?
>>1537902Might be it. So off to /d/ you go, where your fetish can be properly catered for. Or just buy a bag of lemons and hire a hooker for an hour. No point making yourself look like an idiot if no salivia is going to land on your face and you're left with unfulfilment.
>>1537904Bizarre projection, honestly.
>>1537903>Can't actually strategise, requires AI support>Can't do encirclements in THE encirclement game>Meta brain-rot, either SP or MP
>>1537905>BizarreSaid the guy who came to a gaming board into gameplay discussion to flaunt around his "expert" knowledge to get people riled up against him
>>1537907I said I came into this thread on the prowl for robbieposts.And really all this disgust from your side is very strange considering you play Goy$ in your spare time.
>>1537657Its really just better to make one or the other though. Also its been pretty buggy since.
>>1537751>along with making AI incapable of fielding any sort of airforceThe AI was never able to field an airforce to begin with anyways. You're jut trading one player advantage for another,
>>1537751>>1537968I think the ai can make a better airforce than it used to but thats not saying much
>>1537969Before BBA you would use the focus tree to rush fighter twos and build them en masse before the war started. It was always extremely easy to win the air war in the game. Now you just go about it in a different way.
>>1537972Id say the air war is not difficult to win now but its harder. It just means you actually need to pay some attention to it as opposed to being braindead. Although i did have a game where germany only produced interwar fighters for some reason and made so many cheap fighters I could never get superiority. They lost so much manpower and planes (like 20-50 to 1) but they were making several hundred a day.
How do lend-lease work? How does the game decide the order of arrival of stuff? If I send 100,000 rifles, 1,000 artillery pieces, 500 tanks, and 200 planes what will arrive first and at rate? How much should I send at once?
>>1538016it's split up evenly I think. It gets delivered pretty quickly so the order in which you send it shouldn't matter.
>>1537908GoY$ is the only game on the market right now that allows me to play a Warlord Era>inb4 Rise of the White SunIt's a horrible mess that's almost entirely scenario-based. I want entire China, in free-for-all, with actual combat and management, not broken UI that prevents me from clicking the right tile.It's funny when you think about it: HoI4 is the only HoI that has the exact level of granularity needed, despite being shit otherwise, but if bunch of autists spend enough time on it, it actually works for that one fucking purpose: making China great and non-communist again
>>1538904>GoY$ is the only game on the market right now that allows me to play a Warlord EraThere's Darkest Hour and hoi3, both of which are better than hoi4.>making China great and non-communist againWhat are your thoughts on USA completely cutting aid to Guomindang after WW2 to let them get steamrolled by Mao?
>>1538928>There's Darkest HourNo Warlord Era mod>hoi3As a pure wargame, which is boring as all fuck. And the mod was abandoned without being finished, so it's pretty much Northern Expedition: The Unfinished Mod>What are your thoughts on USA completely cutting aid to Guomindang after WW2 to let them get steamrolled by Mao?A result is not a cause. As in - US abandoning KMT is the result of much earlier, mutual fuck-ups. The actual big beef against Yanks is that they've send someone as incompetent as Stilwell and then took for granted everything he said. I mean I guess it's only fitting to send your most incompetent general to a country famous for its incompetent military leaders, but come the fuck on! Yanks had at least the common decency to treat the potato as their unsinkable aircraft carrier, so there is that. Would be way funnier if they decided to use Hainan for the exact same purpose.
>>1538928>>1538932>What are your thoughts on USA completely cutting aid to GuomindangIndifference. It's what the other anon said: that was pretty much the aftermath, not the cause of collapse. Factors to consider:- abysmal US policies under Roosevelt administration- very, very, VERY poor communication, going both ways- Chiang being barely in control after Wuhan- both sides doing their very best to (unintentionally) ruin the economy by either printing money or providing specie for the central government- hand-picking Stilwell to the job, especially when having Chennault already there- the whole fucking Burma expedition- the whole fucking aftermath of Ichi-go- the never resolved NRA logistics issues, only bloating over the years- the whole fucking Manchuria (and thus Korea) disaster- the way how Japanese surrender was (mis)handled on the continent- the state of NRA by spring 1945- Wedemeyer being denied his simple and cost-efficient plan of shipping German surplus, which would cost peanuts (pun!) compared with the minuscule, but direct US production and shipping of tiny-ass batches of guns and hardware- Truman's administration abysmal handling of the situation in general- Stalin opening the spigot of Japanese surplus to Mao, just for the hell of it- Truman's administration idiotic plan to support the NRA (sending staff officers rather than low echelon & NCOs)- Truman's administration enforced "peace talks", in some bizarre idea that GMT and Communists are just like Republicans and Democrats and gonna simply share the governmentSo when the US cut further support, it was already a lost cause anyway. If you look at it back, Ichi-go was the last time something could be done, and that assuming Wedemayer would be taken serious by his own top brass, while Stilwell wouldn't fuck things over just out of spite when being recalled from the postThe real turning point was Burma, really - last time when the whole situation was salvageable in any realistic way
Sometimes I wish they reworked Japan and Germany focus trees, but after seeing the pitiful decisions taken in some recent focuses I'm worried they'll fuck it up badly
>>1540017why not just install one of the 6 million national focus mods?
>>1540039I would but I'm a little bit too brainlet when it comes to HOI4
>>1540054HOI4 mods*
>>1540017War in Pacific is shit in general, the island hopping part is shit both for Japs and USA. It’s also one thing I’m never expecting to get fixed, because it’s such an unique part of the war and making it good would require massive improvements to naval combat, which is not happening.Hell, now that Finland is getting a focus tree and all historically interesting nations finally get one, it really, really would be time to focus on custodian team stuff and fix shit like equipment designers and the atrocious state of war in Pacific. We don’t need more alt-history power fantasies, we need balance fixes to make the designers work in more interesting ways than just spamming one or two obvious best models (plane designer is especially shit) and fixing embarrassing bugs like carrier plane foolery, Linguist, rocket sites etc.
>>1540017They should rework the TfV trees too. None of them are fun.
>>1537750>edgeThe phrase is inseparable from jewish supremacism. It's like a /pol/tard calling a black person "righteous among the niggers."
>>1536745There is no higher honor than being known as righteous among the nations.
>>1540054>>1540055Anon, you literally just have to click subscribe and then click the enable button on the launcher, and I'm pretty sure the launcher does the second part automatically.
>>1540602>Implying NZL tree isn't pure joy of game-breakers and bullshit superpowers
More canadian generals thanksWhy are there only 2 i don't understand
>>1540039What are some good, historical friendly, ones?
>>1542171>goodNone>historical friendlyalso noneYet they are still superior to the ever-bloated garbage officially peddled by PDX
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/developer-diary-denmark-alt-history.1598212/
anyone can compare the kings so far?why danish and swedish were aggresive compared to the norwegian one?
Norway is not a real country
>>1542576norway's king was staunchly democratic irl so why couldn't they give him a oath like italy(iirc he got into power over a referendum to keep him) while the other 2 are more 'monarchy' monarchs if you get what i mean
I do not care for the wacky alt history shit at all, I would much rather they put more effort into fleshing out what happened in reality.I can understand stuff like the leftists winning the Spanish Civil War, the Kodoha faction having a successful coup in Japan, Hitler being assassinated by the bomb in the bunker, even a Trotskyist uprising within the USSR (there should be a reason why you have to purge people, even if it's pretty unrealistic).What I don't understand is why they keep focusing on stuff like:>dude what if a communist revolution overthrew Hitler>dude what if Bulgaria conquered half of Europe>dude what if Portugal merged with Brazil under a monarchyWho exactly is getting excited for a communist Sweden path? I will still pirate these DLCs, but I'm probably never going to interact with 95% of the new content for the countries being reworked.
>>1543111>Who exactly is getting excited for a communist Sweden path?Using logic, everyone who plays Hoi4. It's the defining feature of Hoi4 and anyone else, who isn't into this stuff, never switched from Hoi3 and Darkest Hour.
>>1537876>>1537883Based.
What is the division count, where the game really starts to lag? E.g. I made 1500 2width garrison divisions (which is not even enough to guard the rails and coast), and game lags immensly, even at slowest speed, while the only war running is me warring against the Swiss (extremely rough terrain modifiers make progres even slower). Over 2 real life hours and only progressed one ingame month. Game even delays while I set orders.
>>1534304Is there even a reason to make motorized divisions when I can just shit out 7-2 infantry arty with support companies and just pwn everything?
>>1544205Speed only. Good for encirclement, and manuver warfare, where you only attack weak spots, and just move your troops into empty fields without fighting. Basicly utilising AI being dumb, and shuffling troops, once you are in, you can quickly move in a several tiles unchallanged, and with the constant shuffling done by AI you get new spots opening up for you everywhere. Otherwise motirzed is just a filler to give you tank divisions org, when you don't have all doctrines for them yet, and temporary standin while you can make a full mechanised division (which have the same purpose as motorized, just have fighting bonus).
>>1544237im usually lazy so I just use all my trucks for supply and nothing else lol
>>1544205Motorized have a lot of breakthrough for Infantry and are relatively cheap since all they need over regular infantry are trucks that you'll be mass-producing anyways and trucks only really tax your rubber, which becomes a moot resource once you win air superiority. They are definitely cost-effective, especially if your country controls a good natural source of Rubber.They're also good filler to provide Organization/width to tank divisions since they won't slow them down at all.And on the map, fully motorized divisions are the fastest in the game, making them great to follow your tank divisions into a breakthrough. They're ideal for encircling, capping empty tiles once you've pushed behind their lines, rushing supply points and running down retreating units. Their speed is so high they can score overruns reliably against retreating infantry and turn small breakthroughs into routs before you've even closed the cauldron. Plus their Breakthrough is high enough on their own that they can reposition and pressure or break weak spots on the line even without tank support, especially when the AI is moving to respond to a main push somewhere else. You can quickly turn a single breakthrough into multiple encirclements with a few good Motirized units.I swear by Motorized personally. They would be less attractive if they were more expensive but the fact that they only draw on your surplus trucks all game, which only cost 1steel/rubber anyways just makes them so economical for the value they provide. Just be aware they aren't a replacement for your 7-2 trench-stuffers and they can get fucked over in low-supply regions because of their fuel upkeep.
>>1537657>Italy focus tree was needed and actually well doneI still think the non fascist paths are kind of lame. Then again, I guess that neither one really allows for much options. Only really interesting thing would be the potential of a early war to spread communism/democracy in the Balkans.
>>1544093It does not seem to be a hardware issue, but code, game only uses around half of avaible resources, or less. I keep the game on in the background, can easily browse, watch movies, have not tried running a second game yet, but it's getting boring. Slowly grinding down swiss troops at the Gotthard Pass, in 1940 late winter, 1941 early winter, only attacking from the north. Plenty of swiss troops to shuffle into the spot, so grinding in this speed is extremely long, but does not require any attention, so I'll see if the game unbreaks itself one this war is won. Interesting playthrough:>Germany>aid Italy in Ethiophia>aid Nationalist in spanish civil war>take Poland early>start French Civil War, UK joins into it>invite France into my faction>take bunch of minor countries, while waiting for naval invasions to start>naval invasion finally starts, quickly take out UK>in peace treaty get most of the Empire, but their british navy is lost, due to France start bidding in other provinces while they did not even have all their cores yet, I end up taking their empire too instead of navy, since they challanged my bids>realise I could have taken Alsaice in peace treaty, if I start the French civil war elsewhere, so decide to just conquer all of France too, and get a couple of other minor nations as well>aid Japan finishing up in China, than join their faction>take over faction>invite Italy>accidentally time carving up Greece while Italy declares on them, and this turns Greece into my puppet>see Italy justifying on swiss, so I bypass a bunch of focuses, and declare on them early through focus>game lags to a haltSomewhere around this time I deployed 1500 2width garrison divisions, but I only noticed the lag after the war have started. So it's either those, or my unusual choices making the game calculating some loop or something for strategy, though doubt the latter, due to game decisions are yes or no commands, that can be deleted without breaking the game.
>>1544288>but I only noticed the lag after the war have started.Pathing.
>>1544254>I still think the non fascist paths are kind of lame.playing non-historicalThere's your problem.
>>1544205Speed is the king of this game. Remember: it's a WW2 simulator, so overruns and encirclements are all in vogue. And unlike... pretty much everything mobile, Mot are cheap as fuck, while MtG provided them with dedicated artillery that's just as fast as they are. They also gained additiona function due to the way how NSB supply system works, as you can rush to enemy depo and take it while still having your own supply grace period.So the bottom line is simple: if you are stupid enough to just march to the frontine without any kind of encirclements, then you will have no use out of mobile.The real question is: why retards try to pretend Mech are viable in this game in any fucking form, beyond maybe researching the tier 1 to give Mot some extra hardness?
>>1544205Honestly? No. The only reason to build tank divisions and motorized divisions is for purely roleplay or min-max purposes. There are very few situations or objectives that require anything other than an infantry block with some artillery and anti-air. The AI only builds very poor infantry blocks which simply die to 'more artillery', and the few tank divisions it does field are badly researched and designed, so the support AA is enough to pierce them. Manpower is abundant in this game as well so even though you will take higher losses it is not an issue 99% of the time. There is not enough incentive in the game to even min-max really, it just feels like a waste of mental effort with how easy the game is quite frankly.The core combat mechanics / balancing of HOI4 is too simple and too forgiving, including other stats like org regeneration rate and how quickly units re-strength and re-supply, so there is very little practical incentive to do other than mass infantry + ART + AA and battleplan, with fighters and CAS in the air too if you can afford it.I wish it weren't so, but it is.
>>1544344>The real question is: why retards try to pretend Mech are viable in this game in any fucking form, beyond maybe researching the tier 1 to give Mot some extra hardness?Mech is used in multiplayer because the multiplayer meta is to make as many extremely heavy tank divisions as possible, and the extra hardness and armor stats on tank divisions with Mechanized instead of Motorized is what determines who wins tank engagements.There is zero practical reason to ever make mechanized in a single player vs AI game.
>>1544358In Hearts of Iron 3 at least when you play as Germany you have to worry about your manpower like Germany did IRL, so building nothing but infantry blocks and smashing into the Soviets may *Gasp* not be a good strategy and cause you to *Gasp* not win Barbarossa. It is not this way in HOI4.
>>1544360>he doesn't know about Hitler's secret cloning facilities under Brandenburgpssh...
>>1537796>land40 widths reign supreme, 14/4s for infantry divisions, and armored divisions should feature as many tanks as possible without letting org dip below 32.>airTurn your fighters into flying bricks stacked with as many guns as humanly possible>navyI have no fucking clue
>>1544359>What are post-LA TDs that have a field day against that meta2020 calleld, they want their MP meta back. Meanwhile retards are meming Mech since day 1 and never stopped doping so.>>1544372It's 41 now. So you can throw in extra AT/AA just to make it even more broken.
>>1537796Since anon didn't have naval:CA in pre-BBA, BC in post-BBA, with cheap-ass torpedo boats. Essentially Jeune École
>>1544360>Giving a single fuck about German manpower in hoi3Jesus fucking Christ just how fucking inept are you?Honestly if you fail as Germany in hoi3 in any start date then you are a monster retard. You can play on very hard and it makes no difference. You can invade Russia with the 1936 start German army, building nothing else and you can still easily win. You can start as Germany 1944, bring no reinforcement over from the west, again on very hard mode, and still beat Russia without too much fuss. Thats how fucking dumb hoi3 AI is, but you are obviously dumber. Your brain must have been damaged while you were still in the womb. Tell your mother to lack off the crack next time her pimp get her pregnant then maybe your younger brother or sister can show you how its done.
>>1544344Mech has a niche padding org and width on tank divisions while preserving their armour and hardness.
>>1544488It has still dog-shit stats (and prod cost) until you get the final model. And the fina model is so late, the war is already over by then.
>>1544383>Honestly if you fail as Germany in hoi3 in any start date then you are a monster retardNta, but D-Day is a pretty tough starting date. Eastern Front is already in full collapse and even if you will defend against the landing, Alllies will just make another, on a weekly basis. Not impossibe, but pretty tough.
>>1544383Wow anon you must be really good at the game. Capitulating the USSR with nothing but the 1-1-36 German army building no additional units? That is impressive. Since it is so easy I expect it would take you no time at all to quickly record yourself doing so?
>>1543039>(iirc he got into power over a referendum to keep him)Not to keep him, to adopt/apoint him, he was a Danish prince with a British wife (a big boon) before that, but yeah, Haakon VII was extremely democratic oriented, he appointed a Labour cabinet when Labour was pretty much communists that wanted to depose him, saying; "I am also the king of the communists".
anyone else excited for the weapons trade mechanic to be in millennium dawn? i swear im like the only guy alive that would love an automation type game except your a state defense company or something
>>1538928All DH offers is the final encirclement and then effortlless warlord integration. If you play your cards even remoetely well, Japan won't even go Marco Polo on you, because the AI is programmed to leave China alone in case of it not being all fucked up, while human-controlled Japan can genuinely struggle against China due to variety of factors. If you somehow didn't kill commies during long march, you are fucking retarded.Meanwhile, neither vanilla nor modded HoI3 offers anything even scratching the surface of warlord era.
>>1544538Nta, but your incompetence is no way to gauge others. HoI3 vanilla manpower is a joke, just like in HoI2. It wasn't until mods (and DH) that manpower even became a consideration. You can throw at AI pretty much whatever, because you will never run out of manpower. I think the only time I did was when doing world conquest as Japan and having extra garrison forces in China (that was back when you could have 100% suppression, making it worthwhile for extreme garrison duty)
>>1542576>Danish king Tried to disband the government after they refused to annex parts of Germany after WW1, almost caused a civil war and got cuckolded into a strictly ceremonial role>Swedish king Allegedly had Nazi sympathies.Threatened to abdicate if the government didn't grant Germany transit rights. >Norwegian kingRefused to take the throne unless legitimized by a plebiscite, was granted executive powers but never used them without parliament approval, risked his own life by rejecting the 1940 German ultimatum because he knew the Norwegian people didn't support it.tl;dr Danish and Swedish kings meddled in politics while the Norwegian king didn't. Still it's kind of a stretch to say they were willing to become royal dictators just because they occasionally meddled, but it is HOI4 after all.
Imagine how much the game would slow down if they added ammo as a separate item you had to produce, ha ha.
>>1544783You just get construction from selling weapons. You can't stockpile wealth in the game, at least not in the vanilla. One useful aspect for sales would be getting rid of captured tanks that would slow your divisions, or planes with unusual fitting, that does no get used by your airwings. Other than this, just buy whatever you don't have enough of. What will be interesting is which AI country will be willing to sell, and what.
>>1545281... it doesn't?One of the first mod was to add supplies to requirements of making and fieding units and it worked perfectly fine.But hey, zoomers gonna zoom
>>1545594>What will be interesting is which AI country will be willing to sell, and what.I can already see the AI struggling with the mechanics, on BOTH ends. From the top of my head>US buying guns from everyone, everywhere, at any quantity, because it has no military industry at the start and AI wants to field bilion divisions>Central and South America buying German guns, making Germany underequipped and the stockpile just growing in the Latin America>Czech AI being rewritten to sell everything not nailed to the ground, just to build more factories in Sudetenland for Germany>Any kind of non-warring minor bidding each other for guns they can't make, then by 1938 all of them selling their guns in miniscule quantities due to overproduction vs their non-existing manpower>Soviets folding like wet paper due to selling their guns to Republican Spain and Bulgaria
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3031838557 First time ever seeing Christchurch in the HOI4 workshop
>>1545634but german ai will then have even more ic to build more factories to make more guns, more or less making them still have a massive stockpile to burn through during barbOverall I think Germany has just gotten even more powerful with this expansion. When the resource rework was announced in historical Sweden dev diary, I was like "ok this makes sense, this is fair. Wayyy less Steel for Germany and France- but Germany starts with 2 extra civs now. But then the Ahistorical Sweden dev diary dropped and they gave germany alot of the iron back. So with AAT Germany starts with 2 more civs, still has good steel, gets bonus civs every 6 months for controlling Narvik, has a focus that gives them rights to a swedish state's resources (which is valuable tungsten!!) and Germany loses nothing doing it, and they get a new national spirit helping them with supply and attrition for occupying DenmarkON TOP OF ALL THAT they'll have a new ally, Finland (which doesn't do continuation war on new patch) and one that will most likely be stronger then generic focus tree Finland.
If I'm going to play a jobber nation like France, Greece or Ethiopia, is it best to turn off historical AI? I'm worried that just by holding out and not giving the Axis an easy conquest during the prewar phase, I'll turn actual WW2 into a boring autopilot where the Allies win without any real help because the Axis were fucked over by not getting their quick early victories.Or does turning historical focuses off just make things even worse?
>>1537873I hate the air system almost as much as I hate the navy system.
>>1544205Heavy infantry tanks are good late game/breaking through defensive fortified positions. light armor is nice for rushing victory points or getting a quick encirclement.
>>1546636No, the whole game goes to shit if you go a-historical. Also, Ethiopia isn't that important for the Axis in singleplayer.
>try one of the chinese warlords for a change of paceOh wow this is awful. It's like they forgot these things were even playable.
>>1546636Ahistorical always leads to some monarch blob uniting all of Eurasia by 1940. Current patch Axis consistently jobs so hard that even if you're a shitter you should still leave it historical
>>1537873Fighter-bombers weren't that great IRL, either. It was just cope, because Westerners didn't build dedicated CAS, so they would just put rocket rails on their fighters. I can't find the source again, but I swear I read that forcing fighters to support ground troops, really hurt their morale, too. Fucking prop jockeys.
>>1546636Holding as France is kinda fun actually, Germany will never declare war to the soviets, you will spend your time trying to take Italy or whatever, they will actually have the units to fight against your pushes
>>1546956>forcing fighters to support ground troops, really hurt their moraleDo you remember why?
I just had an idea relating to ethiop forever war. Could player Italy abuse it, by starting to fill all of the Mediterranean with mines?, and get docking rights in other countries too, to fill even more space with mines, and build only minelayers for navy, until all the seas and oceans are mined? 4 year worth of minelaying, before WW2 starts, could be abused feature.
>>1546956You can literally just do that ingame. Rocket Rails don't hurt agility so the end result is a fighter that's only losing a little bit of air attack but can now inflict CAS stat penalties. When you have air superiority you can go ahead and do it because you don't need the perfect optimal fighter to cost effectively challenge the trickle of air opposition coming off of their factories, meanwhile it lets you put CAS cover literally everywhere while your dedicated CAS planes focus the most important battles.I do this a lot because 90% of the time WW2 is just an air war for the first few months or so, then you win the air war and just rule the skies the rest of the war.>>1547103It sounds neat but mines are mainly useful for (naval supremacy and) their huge movement speed penalty, which gives your fleet an advantage patrolling, detecting and fighting mined waters. It's a good idea to mine up the mediterranean/suez to prepare for a confrontation with the british but like mining up the british isles isn't going to actually help you at all unless you've already won navy and you're setting up to invade the island.
>>1537883who the fuck is robbie?
>>1546047Germany has main character syndrome in vanilla HOI4
>>1547108Italy can put together large enough doomstack of ships to just invade the UK (Scotland) at any point. Just park your ships in Germany pre-war.
Italy is so disgustingly broken. I play as Germany, took Yugoslavia for myself via focus. Italy attacks for Dalmatia, they get curb stomped, as they have half the troops compared to me, and split into several fronts due to Albania, Zara, and their colonies. I'm few days from capitulating them, and they kick in a civil war, without the ability to say no I get a puppet, who steals southern Italy, and half the italian navy. All of this expansion is broken.
>>1547423Shitaly turning into a net liability makes Germs more fun in single player but for some reason the AI will just completely break character during historical focuses now. Britain will sometimes not elect Churchill, Communist China will join the Allies and Italy will join the fucking Comintern because of its stupid forever war
>>1547457I think the italian civil war is an intentional feature to screw with Germany, so germans can't take the italian navy in full, since the peace treaty changes. Italy was never a reliable ally, even in this game, and taking them out myself was a common thing I did even before the expansion, and taking their navy now makes it more tempting, but they always end up in civil war before I could take them. This playthrough was the first they attacked me themself, and they still ended up doing a civil war, it's bullshit. Stupid balance of power larp minigame should have no place in the game, neither should most other minigames. Forever war should not be in the game either. Other thing that sucks is that fascist countries I turn with spy feature, that I attack anyways, just did not want allies to guarantee on them, sometimes end up joining the japanese faction. There should be limitations on joining non-player factions while in war.
>>1547472It exists because it happened in history. They were just lazy and made it so that it triggers whenever Italy is losing a war rather than when they're being liberated by the allies.
1
>>1547670Yeah, you can easily ignite by taking Rome and other major cities like Naples, Venice or Syracuse.Good thing you can remove the civil war event by putting the Democrazia Cristiana party in power.
What happens if you take out Japan before Pearl Harbour? Does the US just never join the allies?
>>1547791they would declare on Vichy
>>1547121>Germany has main character syndrome in HOI4ftfy
God it's so miserable fighting earlygame wars as any minor that doesn't start with basic shit like artillery, trucks etc. researched>no soft attack so battles take forever>no vehicles to create breakthroughs so you're stuck on a slow infantry grind>no fast-movers to encircle so you're purely grinding bodies for ground>no engineers so you're crippled by basically any terrain>no supply range or logistic support so as soon as you take any ground you're immediately stalled by bad supply>no air support>after the unreasonable time necessary to research any of these things, you don't actually have the production to build them anyways>by the time you've conquered a decent industrial base you're hemmed in by a giant axis blob eating all the real estate in europe or asia, or you just flat out run out of viable expansions that don't start as members of the allies.
>>1547902It makes sense. But the game is kind of schizophrenic when it comes to turning minors into superpowers with focuses while other minors don't get similar treatment just because.
>>1546636Historical AI is actually helpful because it lets you target certain years for your strategy. France is also really easy to not die as on historical, as is czechoslovakia.
>basic earlygame expansion war against a non-aligned minor>they're 5% away from capitulation, literally one more territory to go>they change government to communist>join the comitern>The USSR, who I have a NAP with, joins the war instantly>minor capitulates 2 days later and I'm now stuck in a forever war with all of central asia in 1937Why does it even work this way? What's the point of diplomacy if any minor at any time can just force you into a war with a completely unrelated superpower in a single day with no warning?
>>1547927Historically accurate
>>1547927Bro your collab goverment?
>>1547935Fucking Poland.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/developer-diary-modding.1598797
>one game>Italy trapped in forever war with Ethiopia>Japan steamrolls China and conquers the whole mainland so fast that they're knocking on french/british colonies in the pacific before Poland falls>next game>Ethiopia capitulates in 1937>China holds Japan back after giving some initial ground and then actually starts pushing them back and steadily wins the ground war over the course of the gameWhat determines how some of these things play out? Is it just battlefield RNG or is it due to other nations randomly offering volunteers/lendlease?
>>1548043Mostly rng. Italy always seem to fail in Ethiophia (as in not finishing that in less than 2 focuses, 140 days), without player help, it's not even certain win with player help. Also player help matters a lot for Japan too, because AI just grinds troops into the enemy, instead of just advancing on the coast rapidly, and push through the holes of chinese defense with little resistance. All it takes is a few mountaineer volunteers to Japan, and than their AI can reliably win China before attacking anyone else.As to decision making, there are weights, whether or not AI should do something, and certain things weights in on how big chance is in the rng for something to happen, or not. There are settings of things AI would never do on historical. E.g. Poland always refuses "Danzig or war".
>>1547905Yeah, it would help it if they were at least consistent. It makes no sense that you get miseryfests like Canada which will suck giga hard unless you do exploit-ish things, and then nations like Bulgaria have powerfantasymax-tier focus trees.
>>1548253It's pretty simple, some countries have to be shit or else they throw off the axis/ally balance and screw up the scripted historical sim. Canada is positioned like a Major, has basically unlimited time to build up and is virtually unassailable until the war's already over. If their island had resources or decent production they would become the ally's bank. If they could play like a major on their own, then they could just use their major economy to conquer the US, double their size and become the Northern Reich. Either way trivializes the campaign, but also makes it so that just by existing under AI control, they warp the way the war plays out.Whereas jobbers like Bulgaria and Ethiopia exist entirely for the ahistorical play. Normally they're just irrelevant or die too early to matter and they can gatekeep the balance-shifting stuff behind focuses the historical AI won't touch so they don't affect how the war plays out. Everybody knows you only pick a minor like Greece or Ethiopia to cheese a victory against a major in what's supposed to be a one-sided early war, and then snowball into an ahistorical empire. They can deliver that pretty easily by just gatekeeping the AI from the powerful focuses until it would already be dead, but for something like Canada there's no way to make it not weak as fuck but also not game-warping unless they just made them into a major and rebalanced the rest of the allies around it.I agree the way that all of the commonwealth nations are designed is fucking miserable to play and there are a tonne of other minors they just totally whiffed on, but I acknowledge there's a nontrivial design challenge there.
How do I select just one of these armies? Is the only way to deselect all but one?
Speaking of Bulgaria, I hate their achievements and Yugoslavia, the new peace deal is making their Transylvania one extremely unfun
>>1548253That has to do with when the focuses were added. Canada and all the commonwealth trees were added in together for victory, the first dlc, and they're all geared towards supporting what hoi4 was at first, a ww2 game where things progressed in one specific direction and the majors ran the show. Since then hoi4 has completely changed into a meme generator but the commonwealth focuses remained the same. A lot of older trees need a rework.
There really should be a way to know what is your core and what isn't during peace deals
>>1548253it's just timing>canada came out when paradox pretended to care about realism so everyone sucked hard like irl>bulgaria came out when they realised people had more fun with althist so gave them powerfantasy balkanmaxxing larp trees as well as a shitty historical one
>>1539472Can you recommend me some books about this subject? I'm interested in learning more, and I don't know ANYTHING about the pre-war and war period of the chinese theater. Don't know shit about the Burma Expedition, Ichi-go nor the Manchurian Disaster.
>>1544093>which is not even enough to guard the rails and coastwhat the fuck???what are you doing anon???
>>1547028They wanted to dogfight. Not actually do anything useful for the troops on the ground.
>>1547028Fighters are built to fly at high altitudes and engage enemy aircraft. To keep them light and agile, they had much less armour than other air frames. They avoided anti-air fire by being really high up where they're hard to hit.CAS forces you low to the ground, where AA is at its most effective. That made it extremely dangerous for a lightly-armoured frame on predictable strafing/diving runs, and unlike dogfighting, being a better pilot wasn't going to magically save you from a flak cannon shot.
Maybe someone can help me out hereI had an army with 18 divisions in itOn one section of the front, I had 4 individual divisions of infantry holding 4 adjacent tiles. Nearby, I had an armored group attempting to break through the front. To keep the AI from reinforcing the breach, I had these 4 divisions each attack over the front line to fix the enemy in place.I looked away for a minute and when I looked back, they were gone. Not like, retreated or repositioned. Gone from the game. That army now lists 15 divisions in it instead of 18. They were in good supply, at 100% strength when they attacked and were absolutely not encircled. I didn't lose any ground in the process, they just seemingly vanished into thin air while they were attacking.Any clue what happened? I only know of divisions being removed during encirclements or overruns.
Okay lets go back to the official roadmap from 2022. Cutting out all the stuff I remember us getting in the last 2 DLCs, what's coming up in the next DLC, and what's obvious, what remains are: >Wunderwaffen projects>More differences between sub-ideologies and government forms>Make defensive warfare more fun>Adding mechanics to limit the size of your standing army, particularly post-war etc>Great Power Diplomacy>More Economic Decision Making>Immersive/Roleplay Elements>Battleplanner improvements>Advisors/internal politics improvements>Ideological distinctions>Multiplayer & social layer improvements & supportWe can gather these into 2 broad conceptual groups. Group 1: Wunderwaffen + economic decision makingGroup 2: Greater power diplomacy, RP elements, internal politics updates, ideological distinctions + government forms.
>>1548505Forgot to post the right pic because it took so long to write all this. This leads me to believe that we have at least 2 more DLC in the future. One will be focused on Industry maybe 'The Home Front' will be the title. It will focus on updating the industrial side of the game, which will tie into wunderwaffen like the stratobomber, super heavy tanks, assault rifles, nuclear weapons, and rocketry. It will be interesting to see an updated industrial system where implementing more advanced tech really taxes your industrial capacity. Assault rifles are thought of as a common sense tech advancement, but there are a million other 'war-changing' technologies that never went anywhere. Implementing assault rifles was very expensive for an already strained industry in the reich, will be interesting to see how that plays out in a new system, just as one example. The second will be focused on politics, with some diplomacy thrown in. Maybe it will be named after the Yalta conference or something idk. I don't know if I can even speculate on what's in there. Maybe it will give you a more fluid political side of the game. So in newer countries where the internal affairs are controlled mainly via rigid mini games, they could add features that 'web' with other game mechanics to affect the popularity of certain parties/ideologies. Maybe the particular flavor of your government's ideology will effect which policies you can pick. So a liberal democratic government in the UK will favor free trade policies and oppose conscription, while a conservative democratic government will support conscription and protectionism (I don't actually know what those parties supported back then. In the new system you would have to commit to a certain sub-ideology to choose your 'policy groups' in the future. Making politics/ideology a more meaningful factor. Idk, just throwing out ideas of what they might do.
>>1548497I have no idea, anon. I'm sorry for your loss.
Big fan of this achievement
Canada should unironically be able to core new France and the 13th colonies
>>1548497who are you playing and how's your supply?in places like xinjiang supply is literally paper-thinor maybe it's a spirit lowering org or something
>>1547970Some of the additions here are actually great for modders
>>1548552They should really just bite the bullet and give all of the commonwealth countries the option to either break off and become a regional power, or challenge the UK amd usurp them as the heart of the Empire.They all need something to do between 1936 and 1940 that isn't just becoming fascist/communist with no industry
>>1548505I wouldn't expect too much of the government stuff because actually increasing the granularity here would mean completely breaking a lot of the old focus trees they apparently still refuse to go back to update, since a lot of that currently is not only handled by focuses, but also consumes like 2/3rds of the trees of most notable minors.Hell, they put off making special forces doctrines instead of research for ages despite it being the most obvious solution by far, just because it would mean changing the specops-related focuses to provide a doctrine discount instead of a research boost.
>use focus to bypass justifying wargoals and just join an ongoing war immediately for a surprise attack>flood into an undefended border>misclick somewhere and eat a bunch of unnecessary supply penalties so things go slower than they should, low-org enemy divisions begin streaming in via strategic deployment right as I reach the railroad hubs>reload out of curiosity, do it correctly this time>reach enemy railroads before any units can be redeployed>but this time there are fresh, full org divisions on the railways that weren't there before>curious>reload again with console commands to deactivate fow>those divisions literally just spawn in, with equipment their owner doesn't even have yet (1940s gear in 1938) Not that it particularly mattered since I was cheesing anyways but I'm surprised at just how shamelessly the AI cheats sometimes.
They should expand the postwar conference to give you more ways to betray your allies after the war. When two countries make competing claims on territory in the conference, the one who loses the claim should automatically get a wargoal to take it by force. You should also get choices like providing refuge for the defeated regime, taking scientists/engineers etc.Right now I think most people's attitudes is that the game is over as soon as the allies or axis win, but the game's tech tree extends into the 1950s and the game is absolutely set up for there to be an Ally vs Comintern vs Wildcard threeway showdown after WW2--it just doesn't do enough to make this showdown worth playing.
>>1548750Most people don't play into the lategame in any paradox game. I have like 2,000 hours in ck2/ck3 combined, 600 in eu4, 800 in hoi4, and 100 in vic 3. I've only completed 1 full campaign in eu4, and I've never made it to 1950 in hoi4, only to the end of ww2.
>>1548755Yeah there's a reason for this. Endgame bloat has always been a design challenge in grand strategy games. Either you've painted the map so hard that there's nowhere left to go after 1 major war, or the game's complexity and management compounds and becomes so inefficient and tedious that you just take forever to accomplish anything and it becomes too much work lurching the behemoth forward with few meaningful decisions behind all the maintenance-clicking.HOI4, or at least its engine, offers enough efficiency and streamlining to make the second issue surmoutnable, and that's a big part of why the majors with a tonne of territory and stuff to manage (ie USSR, Germany), or multiple hotly contested fronts (US, UK) can still be fun.I think the issue is more the latter. Once you join a faction and win as them you're just stapled to it forever, and your faction will always come out of WW2 the dominant one. There's no point in fighting the USSR/allies afterwards since they'll just be a weaker enemy than the axis was. Those are the main two issues--a lack of political agency while bound to a faction even after the war, and an uninteresting postwar balance of power.I think the peace conference is the best way to address these. The claim system lets you basically redraw the borders of the world entirely, and the 'take ships' option demonstrates a proof-of-concept for how dividing the loser's national assets can be used to establish a new, more competitive balance of power. Expanding on these concepts with an eye specifically on making the postwar period worth playing could do a lot with relatively little actual designwork.I mean, in an ideal fantasy world they could just add an optional "Cold War" start date scenario that begins right after the peace conference and extend the focus/tech trees accordingly, then allow the 1936 scenario to progress naturally into the coldwar--but I'm not holding my breath for that DLC.
Need some advice, pic related.I'm playing commie China because I wanted the option to stay out of the sino-japanese war for a little while and prepare before joining in. I conquered all of the northern warlords and built up about as much as I could before joining the war so I'm pretty much in about a good a position as I could possibly be industrially, 17 mil factories. I can't really build more because most of my civs are dedicated to importing resources.Things went well initially as you can see. My goal was to try and cut off their main force from Manchuria and then take the ports in hope of starving the bulk of their army out, but I ran out of momentum around the river and couldn't break through.Here's the problem: my armies aren't trading favourably into Japan's, mainly because of their air superiority. I'm running a deficit on infantry equipment on the defensive even with the entrenchment bonus. I've got most of my factories dedicated to keeping all their equipment supplied, but of course the deficit deepens as things progress and fighting strength is slowly sapped. The coast is exactly 1 tile out of supply range because the AI's hub was positioned terribly, which I didn't realize until I was already committed. It makes that corner impractical to defend (50% stat penalties) and means it's pretty much impossible to drive towards the ports, my actual objective, without first breaking the city further south across the river.I have one 30 width motorized group I got for free from a focus which got me this far, but it takes 2 civilian factories importing oil just to keep it active and it alone isn't enough to salvage the situation. It only has 200 soft attack and now the defending japanese infantry divisions have over 700 defense. I don't have enough spare industry to try and put together an air wing or tank division, but I wouldn't have the oil to run it even if I did. I can't attack but if I sit here I'll just bleed out.
>>1548830Also, in the north I was hoping to catch Mengkukuo offguard and force it to capitulate quickly. I have their capital, which is keeping the entire north supplied, but Japan found 30 divisions somewhere and stuffed them into the area, stacking 5+ on each tile and with the bad terrain there's no chance of me breaking that. I took all the supply hubs in the region during my initial push but apparently all their troops are just fine living off the desert and suffer no supply penalty whatsoever. This is at best a stalemate, I have less than half the AI's forces here just camping mountains and trading favourably (I took the airport so they have no air support here) but tying up all those units isn't really accomplishing anything since Japan just keeps pulling more out of its ass. If they do end up taking the capital back as my equipment grinds down, then I'll have to fall all the way back to the river/mountains because of supply issues and give up several captured mil factories in the process, only worsening my deficit.About half of my army is my own, mostly just simple infantry/artillery with engineer and AA companies. The other half is an expedition donated by the various warlords, entirely composed of 12-width infantry with no support companies or artillery using basic equipment. They are nearly worthless even just to hold the front and I've just got them as cannon fodder. Japan's armies are mostly 21 width infantry/artillery with engineers as well but they also have a few tank divisions floating around, but also obviously with half as many tech slots and 1/10 of their factories I'm only going to fall further behind them on the battlefield as time goes on.AI China is nearly worthless and can't be left to hold ground anywhere. Even with me holding most of Japan's forces on my border (27 along the river, 10 in Beijing, 30 to the north), they're still losing steadily in the south so something has to change.
>>1548854>>1548830You should've disbanded the motorized and used it for supply. You needed specifically 25-width Mountaineers to take mountain tiles, with artillery and aa. And try to grind Adaptable on a general.
>>1548879You will also need Intel to cope with lack of Air.
>>1548830Play 8ywor mod.
>>1548879Been a while since I saw anyone giving such horrible advice
>>1548830Seems to me you are yet another retard who has no idea how supplies works on even most basic level. Why the fuck are you even pushing into the fucking roadless desert, you dumb faggot? It's like you are special kind of stupid. Your goal was to let Japs waste effort and troops, invading your worthless Inner Mongolia, and then simply close the sack and bleed them out. Instead, you are pushing into territory with no infra and no rails to capture, while probably also not building even a border depo and 3-4 lvls of rail>but it takes 2 civilian factories importing oil just to keep it active and it alone isn't enough to salvage the situationIf you took East Turkiestan, why are you importing oil? And if you didn't, why are you lying about taking northern warlords?
>>1548854>Also, in the north I was hoping to catch Mengkukuo offguard and force it to capitulate quicklyFor what fucking purpose?>stacking 5+ on each tile and with the bad terrain there's no chance of me breaking thatAnd you, like a big stupid shit you are, didn't let them invade your equally worthless and also unsupplied at all territoriy, instead keeping them cozy within the reach of Nip Rail & Co.>tying up all those units isn't really accomplishing anythingJesus fuck, you really are one dense faggot>Japan's armies are mostly 21 width infantry/artillery with engineers as well but they also have a few tank divisions floating around, but also obviously with half as many tech slots and 1/10 of their factories I'm only going to fall further behind them on the battlefield as time goes onIf only you could use the horrible state of infrastructure in China for your advantage, wiping out clean bigger and larger pockets that lose momentum during their offensives into your territories... Oh, right, I forgot. That would require at least two brain cells to rub togetherSeriously mate, never play countries that rely on understanding basic gameplay mechanics. Go back to playing Germany, it's more up to your speed.
>>1548919Don't be so mean to people, even if they're big dumbies.
>>1548919>yet another retard who has no idea how supplies worksIt was going to take 2 years to build a border supply in the north so I rushed their capital supply hub and built my rail lines to it instead. I'm completely supplied in the north as long as I continue to hold that. The route was virtually undefended, which let me push that far for free. There are no supply issues to the north. The issue is that I'm outnumbered 3-1 by armies that didn't exist until I got there, so I can't take the last tile necessary to capitulate the puppet state. This issue is also that these units have no supplies because I took all the rail in the area, but are pulling infinite supplies out of their ass because they bugged out.In the center landbridge it's heartland china with high level rails and lots of infrastructure. There's only a supply problem at the coast, which is 1 tile out of range from the liberated supply hub. I'm pushing south of that deeper into highly developed heartland china to cut off their coastal supply.>>1548924>BUT WHY NOT JUST LET THEM WALK THROUGH YOUBecause I start with 3 civ/mil factories. 90% of my production was captured, which also means all of it is IN those worthless, unsupplied desert shitholes. I can't afford to give ground or I lose the production that's sustaining my fight, and there's no point in trying to draw the northern forces into a supply crunch because they are sitting on 0 supply deserts with no infrastructure and still perfectly supplied.>for what purposeFactories. I need factories. I need factories. I need factories. You armchair niggers never understand this. Minors need factories to produce equipment to arm troops who fight wars. Yeah if I afk for 7 years Japan will lose the war on their own, but I'll still be fucking nowhere. There were a half dozen undefended factories in the north and I took them. That's not the issue.
>>1548926No mercy for the stupid
>>1548931>so I rushed their capital supply hub and built my rail lines to it insteadEnjoy losing the game, thenThe rest is pretty much meaningless at this point. If you hooked up to Nip rail, you are dead, plain and simple.>I conquered worthless land for the sake of worthless factories, that I can't defend, because I'm in poorly supplied territory without getting rid of bulk of enemy army first.I will draw you a short comics for this, you dumb faggot, because you are beyond fucking retarded and I'm afraid trying to explain this with words is bound to fail
>>1548935>that I can't defendI'm defending them just fine>in poorly supplied territoryI'm supplied just fineIs this cope because you misread the map and sperged out? You're just making stuff up now.
>>1548931If by any means this is impossible or too hard for you to pull, you should go to a doctor and get your papers right. People with sub-normal IQ are qualified for disability pension.
>>1548936It's you, not me having a fucking problem with dealing with Japan as... pretty much any Chinese nation. Ok, I guess as Yunnan, this might be a problem, even if you go for independent and carve out road all the way to commie borders
>>1548936>Has a stalemate>One that requires outside help>I-i'm defending just f-fineWhat the anon have said: back to playing Germany with you. I knew that reintroducing even most rudimentary supply system is going to buttfuck majority of GoY$ players, and you are yet another example of a clueless faggot who is trying to defend every inch of his country and pick a fight against enemy ten times his strength, completely disregarding own assets in the process
>>1548939This one works also for KMT and Ma clique. If you know what you are doing/communists have been defeated, then it works with Yan, too. However, as Yan, its easier to just sign a non-aggression, while first taking Beijing from Nationalists via limited conflict and simply watch the situation till '39 or so.
>Turkey and Bulgaria achievementsWhy is this region cursed?
>>1549037bulgaria isn't bad just kinda rngturkey's cheevos range from boring (one nation under ataturk) to nightmarish (hardly anything sevres)
>>1549041The rng is pretty bad, I'm pretty much only missing balkans countries, we are putting back the band together is also making me want to kill myself
>>1548939Once again, this is cute until you realize that conceding this territory concedes all but 5 of your factories, all on the vague hope that you'll be able to push through that unsupplied territory on 5 mils after giving it up, before running out of supplies, to bottle it up and then hold the bottle closed despite now being as unsupplied against the numerically superior enemy trying desperately to reopen the bottle. Probably a cute trick when you're playing main China and have spare factories to burn and enough starting civs to actually build things before war breaks out, but that's not the situation here.>>1548940I think you may have misunderstood. I posted that to start a conversation about HOI4 in the dead HOI4 thread and hear some insight. I found my breakthrough to the south already, less than a month after that screenshot and wiped about a dozen divisions after cutting their salient from the coast, Now I'm just pushing towards those ports from the well-supplied south.Unfortunately, they dropped a naval invasion on Shanghai right as I was making my move and created an escape route for the southern half of the salient. Otherwise I would've gotten the whole army there. I probably also should've taken the airstrip to shut off their CAS as I moved in but I smelled blood and hoped I could boil the kettle before Shanghai fell. Still, the situation is pretty comfortable now. My goal was always to trap as many japanese units in China as possible and destroy them there, so I could have an easier time claiming the factories in Manchuria and Korea for myself after and that's pretty much exactly what's happening now.
>>1549055Why are you helping the nationalists?
>>1549057There isn't a particularly strategic reason. I wanted to fight the sino-japanese war from the chinese side but winning as the KMT felt too straightforward so I picked a warlord. I suppose Japan is probably a bigger threat and it's easier to deal with them when I have allies but really I just wanted to fight this war for the sake of it.
>>1549057>why aren't you allowing japan to steamroll all of china as a chinese country
>>1549173Why not? The more Japaneses there are in western China the least there are in Manchuria and eastern China
>>1534360most of the cool stuff ethiopia can do is either too much of a time sink or intentionally impossible. Unifying all of africa as a communist Ethiopia should have been hard, but possible. Instead you're stuck fucking around with the lame resistance mechanic, and then when you try and integrate them the allies say "nah" and you wasted all that time and PP for nothing. It would have been a really fun challenge and honestly not even that OP because Africa is gimped for factories and resources.
>>1549180The AI always prioritizes the player. If you open a second front with China, they'll abandon their front with Japan, throw all their shitty divisions on your front and stall you while Japan eats their whole country uncontested and wins everything. Same if you try to backdoor Japan, only China doesn't apply enough pressure to actually punish them so they just throw a hundred divisions down your throat for free.If you're playing big China you can just fortify your border hard in the years leading up to the war, accumulate an arms stockpile and just wait them out, or give some ground strategically to draw them out of supply zones and starve them. But when you're a smaller China and don't have access to big China's industry, your best bet is to work with big China, try to cut the bulk of Japan's forces off from the coast and just annihilate them. Those hundred or so battalions big china fields makes it so much easier to create a major encirclement, and since Japan's so reliant on coastal access there are countless places where you can cut them off and just trap 20 units as long as you have the bodies to man the front.Plus, and this is the biggest one: As a warlord you can literally just pay an influence cost to annex big china at any time. No war necessary. The only downside is that when done this way, their armies just disappear. But you can use them to beat the japanese and then take over before the peace conference and take it all for yourself.
>>1549055>until you realize that conceding this territory concedes all but 5 of your factories1) Why did you build factories in Inner Mongolia2) Why do you think you NEED those factories, where all that matters is sufficient supply of small arms and having at least first tier company?So what's cute is the fact you are playing tiny-ass minor as if you were playing a regional power on verge of becoming a major. And it's obviously isn't working at all, since you are both forced to barely keep the frontline staffed, can't exactly push any further and are also completely outnumbered, as extra factories or not, you just don't have the numbers to pull this>posted that to start a conversation about HOI4By making yourself looking incompetent and also posting a genuine problem you are having? Wow anon, I appriciate the dedication, but here is a clue: making yourself look like a moron "as a joke" is no different from being a moron.Keep losing the war, while refusing help that you've asked for, but don't act surprised or trying to sound smug and haughty, while obviously having no clue how to use the in-game systems for your advantage.>>1549057Because he's an idiot, as he showed itt so far>>1549252>Being so fucking wrong>Purposefully soSo you wanted to revive a dead thread (why?), or are just so full of yourself you crave for all those (You)s acting like a brainless idiot with no clue on how to play this game other than "draw an arrow and let AI push forward"?
>>1549257*first tier MAIN
>>1549252I don't know what to tell you I've done it multiple times as commie China, you wait until they've pushed into main China then you push Manchuria and Korea hard, then you go down the coast to cut what is left of Japan out of supplies, kick them out of the mainland, white peace, then betray main china
>>1549154If you want challenge in China, pick Yan then and DON'T sign a non-aggression pact. Otherwise, there is just no fucking way Nips are going to possess any sort of challenge to you for a myriad of reasons, and with NSB, Japan is pretty much on a suicide watch.Alternatively: play as Nationalists against human-controlled Japan. It doesn't even require a competent player or some meta-faggot opposing you, the sole fact it's not an AI will be challenging enough by itself. For extra hurdle, get also someone to play Manchukuo
>>1549259Wait to be informed that it's cute, anon. We are in a bait discussion here, and anon isn't trying to achieve anything than farm (You)s. And certainly not to win a war against Japan.
>>1549259To re-rail (pun intended) this thread into something useful:Is there any real point expanding US railroads, particularly the transcontinental line(s) and thus cut down number of convoys operating just your country (and stop having the standard "supplies to Pacific theatre are hauled from Baltimore directly" problem), or it's a trap option to not build infrastructure directly before the Giant Wakes decision?
>>1549263Do as much infra first, the pre-war convoys are misleading anyway. If you "rush" The Giant Wakes by late '37 (either by the time Republican Spain falls or Japan declare on China and you have attache), you will be able to go from the starting 80% (and about 60 when you get to The Giant Wakes) to 20% of toaster requirements, unleashing such fuck-huge number of factories, expanding few crucial lines will be possible even in the midst of cranking up mils. And since you've spend your time building infra, it's going to be much faster, too. Always do infra first as the US, it's one of the few things you aren't penalised from Great Depression and your isolationist policy, while it helps with everything else and provides huge surplus of resources for both export and your industry once you start making huge quantities of everything.Speaking of export: you want your trade to be maximum export. US and USSR are the two countries that can afford setting the export to the max and still have huge surplus, while gaining two dozens of extra civs before the war even starts, and then keep getting more and more.
If you want a challenge as blue china then play 8YWOR mod.
>>1549263Also, rail lines that you should get to 5 are the one to Boston and the one to Norfolk. Everything else is a gimmick, but if you plan as much as looking toward Europe, you will need maxed out capacity to send fuck-huge convoys. For Japan under AI, you don't need anything, and for human-controlled Japan, the Transcontinental Rail 2: Electric Boogaloo is a must, or else you will be constantly starved off supplies due to subs raiding your lines around Mexican shore. Try to build line at least toward Colorado and then link to California, but preferably, you want to expand both that AND the line to Chicago, then through the Northwest all the way to Seattle. Otherwise, the convoys will still auto-generate due to considering the single rail trunk overloaded and will try to compensate. Make sure all your ports are hooked up to rail and have at least lvl 2 connections, but that applies to... pretty much any country.
>>1549266Stop pushing your horrible, half-baked tankie mod.
>>1549269He wanted a challenge as china, he got a mod that gives him that challenge.What's your recommendation?
Are cheapass torpedo destroyers worth it and a good proxy of torpedo boats or is it better to go with cheapass suicidal submarines?
>>1549281I don't think expensive destroyers are worth it, they suffer too many losses. If you're going only torpedoes, subs are better.
>>1549281I haven't kept up to date with naval meta but last I heard, torps were still overnerfed and kind of really lacking damage against capital ships. I mean I guess they technically let your screen contribute damage past the 1st line, but I think in practice you usually just bypass the enemy screen with aircraft and heavy batteries anyways so the battle is won well before the screen drops. Torps aren't strong enough on their own to make it efficient to bring more light batteries just to clear the screen faster to let torps through.
>>1549400>>1549281Dunno what the REAL naval meta is (which is also going to be different from the multiplayer naval meta), but I find that trying to get better battleships as soon as possible does have results. I should try out some meme builds sometime to see how things go.REMEMBER TO SET YOUR STRIKE FLEET TO 'NEVER RETREAT' at least against the AI. Just remember to also get them to repair now and then.
>>1549400Torpedo ships might be worth trying with Japan as they have a focus that gives torpedo screen penetration, and have access to torpedo cruisers, which will survive to be repaired instead of burning through IC with decked out destroyers.Haven't tried it myself, but it could be viable if you lean into it, research all the torpedo techs and spec your admirals for them.
>>1549257>Why did you build factories in Inner MongoliaI didn't. I captured them.>Why do you think you NEED those factories, where all that matters is sufficient supply of small armsUhhhhhhhhhIs this a serious question? Where do you think small arms come from.> what's cute is the fact you are playing tiny-ass minor as if you were playing a regional power on verge of becoming a major.Damn I must be really fucking cute, then. Pic related is the aftermath, but in total they lost roughly a million manpower here, almost half of the total deployed--and I managed to catch all those fucks that escaped south the first time. Now I can focus my forces on their undermanned lines in Beijing and work my way towards Manchuria. Fortunately, I have a way to circumvent the river in good supply since I held the north. And what do you know, it didn't cost me any factories.Like look buddy, I get that you were trying to 'help' in your own way, but you're really stuck on this "what you're trying is literally impossible you're doomed to fail unless you retreat back through mongolia" thing and that's just not reflecting reality. I'm not posting these screenshots to brag about my epic hoi4 micro but to illustrate that my plan to destroy half of the japanese army who were in a vulnerable position with exposed supply lines worked and I was not in fact as hopelessly outmatched as you think. Do you understand? I started this discussion when my initial thrust stalled and I paused to rethink my approach to the coast. I didn't expect an autistic tirade about not playing meekly enough. By the time you came along accusing me of careening towards certain doom I was already back on track, but you've just been doubling down ever since and I have no clue why you're even so pissy to begin with.
>Agent has been capturedKill yourself desu, no I'm not jokingTake the pill, why are you not using it?
>>1549265Actually extending this question: when do I generally want to focus on infrastructure vs civ factories during the prewar buildup? I feel like it's hard to tell at what point civ factories break even or become more efficient. Do I always want to max infrastructure in a region, then build up the factories there, then move on to the next region and repeat? Or if a region starts with 4/5 infrastructure should I just skip straight to filling its building slots.And as a second question: I noticed when playing Canada that certain regions which start with no resources gained resource production once I developed enough infrastructure there. Is there a way to know ahead of time which regions will eventually gain resources from development, like a map of it available somewhere?
>>1548830play defence until japan moves loads of divisions off the frontline when they go invade the rest of asia
>>1549273>8YWOR>ChallengePick one>What's your recommendation?BICE as NationalistsBICE as any other Chinese faction if you are masochistic
>>1549281The cheaper the destroyer, the better. You want to have 1 cheapest torpedo tube (you genuinely don't need more or better), the cheapest light gun you can mount (unfortunately you can't ignore those) and the best engine you can put on it. It can be even tier 1 hull, doesn't fucking matter.>>1549284Subs are too slow for anything even resembling naval combat. Enemy would retreat non-stop from you. Not to mention speed is STILL the best defense, so super-fast destroyers with pretty much nothing beyond a single torpedo tube are the best thing you can get>>1549474>when do I generally want to focus on infrastructure vs civ factories during the prewar buildupAs the US or in general?Because the reason why you should be cranking infra as the US is because pretty much everything else is penalised for you, and you already have fuck-huge civ pool, just can't use it for first 18 or so months. Otherwise, you have more burning concerns as everyone else and/or already decent infra.>which start with no resources gained resource production once I developed enough infrastructure thereWrong observation. What really is happening is various focuses (and I think some decisions, too) provide Canada with resources. Some even require from you to first build infra and THEN qualify for the focus that provides you with resources. But either way, just building infra itself increases amount of resources the provice is producing, rather than creating resources from thin air.Also>Playing GoY$>Having useful features and proper UIPick one.
>>1549281>>1549561One more thing: keep in mind that the exploit with switching around naval designers still works. If your country can afford the flip, you want to build your destroyers using coastal designer and then do the cheapest refit imaginable to turn it into a raider designer (or if you have any country-specific designer for destroyers)
I want to play a minor, stay out of WW2 and form a colonial naval empire conquering every unaligned power I can reach. What's the best choice for a starting country, both in terms of position and ability to actually build up a navy?
>>1549556>recommendation>Blacked ICEI accept your concession.
>>1549697>GoY$ gets filteredMany such cases
>>1549685Portugal, with or without their own focuses. But with focuses it's almost laughably broken.
>>1549728Looks perfect, thanks!
>white peaceO-oh. I thought I was going to have to go all the way to Tokyo. Well that's the war done. Finished a few months ahead of Pearl Harbour, too.Next up is annexing the nationalists via power struggle and building up an air force in preparation to confront Japan properly.What's the best way to invade Japan? I know I can push for air superiority and then sink their whole fleet with naval bombers to set up an amphibious landing, but ideally I'd like to capture as much of the Japanese navy intact as possible so I can use it later.
>>1549561>As the US or in general?In general. I was under the assumption that infrastructure level modified the build speed in that region, so up to a certain point it's more efficient to develop infrastructure than civilian factories and that you tend to want to centralize everything into a few highly developed regions.Or is that wrong?
>>1549561> It can be even tier 1 hull, doesn't fucking matter.Go for the 1936 DD hull at least, it has 60% more HP for a minor increase in IC and no extra resources.>Subs are too slow for anything even resembling naval combat.I'm not advocating an all torpedo strat, but if its a choice between only DD or SS I think the subs will be more combat effective. Destroyers will unavoidably suffer heavy losses. Subs don't need to be fast, the enemy fleet will come to you if they're set to raiding and sustained combat wouldn't favor either builds though, as torpedoes have a long cooldown, firing one volley then disengaging would be ideal.The problem is neither are good at killing screens, and screens draw most of the torpedo fire and have very low chance of being hit. Good cruisers with lots of light attack combined with cheap torpedo destroyers is far more effective, as you can steadily whittle down their screening fleet over multiple engagements until their capital ships are exposed to torpedoes.
Redpill me on the netherlands.
>>1549798That's correct. In the early game you just want to focus on civs in your high infrastructure provinces, once those are full build infrastructure in areas with lots of empty build slots and/or resources. There's a guide out there that shows the net IC benefit of infrastructure based on level and empty building slots if you want to know the exact thresholds for when infrastructure isn't worth laying down.
>>1549756Just give them the UK special and glider paradrop their ports
What's the current meta for fighters?
>>1549882Metafaggotry exists solely to optimize all the fun out of a game. I will never complain about RNG ever again.
>>1549798Depends on bunch of factors, but the only real point of expanding infra is when:>Your high infra states are already packed full/will be in less than a year>You have no states with lvl 4 or 5 infra left>You have bunch of states with loads of empty slots that are either infra 2 or 3 and there is more than 10 factories to be build in total>You have AT LEAST 25 civs for use to make it all worth the hassleOtherwise, building infra is a waste of time: either you don't need it (you will barely benefit the bonus due to the sheer size of your industry), there are other priorities (an extra factory week later is better than no factory for next 4 months due to building infra and then factory) or you simply don't have enough room in the first place, so it doesn't matter in the long run.US is a special case, because you start the game with two oceans to protect you and the biggest fleet in the game, while being penalised with everything else. So building infra is sensible, as it allows you to then catch-up the first 18-24 months you've wasted under debuffs, while increasing your resource pool from "bloated" to "superbloated". Nobody else is in such position in the whole game and you are almost always better off building factories directly
>>1549809SS are LESS combat effective, because everything and their dog can escape them. Subs are simply too slow for deployment. >losesSubs are going to get even bigger, and that assuming enemy won't just evade and disengage them.>the enemy fleet will come toOnly when in clear advantage, when they will send your entire fleet to the bottom, while you won't be able to hit them, since your entire attack is via hot-dogs.>The problem is neither are good at killing screens,It's a feature, not a bug. Next thing, you gonna bitch that vanilla infantry is terrible against tanks.>Good cruisers with lots of light attack combined with cheap torpedo destroyers is far more effectiveGee, I wonder why the hell did I suggest using cheapest possible destroyers...>>1550004>Without BBA+2 reliability, fighter designer, get as many aces as you can and make one 200 plane wing and as many as you fancy 10 plane wings (staff those with any aces you will ever get via the 200 plane wing)>With BBAIgnore airforce entirely, build '40 AA for your land forces instead>>1550012>Knowing game rules is metafaggotryThe absolute state of GoY$ and modern PDX playerbase. I guess that's the real reason why pre-GoY$ games filter you so hard: they require understanding how the game operates to not be obliterated, whereas in GoY$ the same kind of knowledge allows to simply steamroll everything on your path.
>>1549809Subs are good for what they are build for: convoy raiding. But that assumes you are playing either against UK or Japan and, if trying to play "historical", against US if you are Japan (the AI will lose staggering amount of convoys to reinforce its island bases, forcing it to build more convoys rather than real ships). Otherwise, convoy raiding is pretty much useless, because magic transport overland is a thing and there are only two nations in the entire game that can't use it.
>>15492631) Max-out rail to Baltimore, it's your biggest chokepoint2) Expand Washington's port facilities to AT LEAST 6, preferably max-outThis alone will be faster, cheaper and more efficient than any other action. What >>1549268 said is true, but runs under the assumption that you want to spread your shipping, rather than simply directly sending from capital. YMMV on how effective each move is, as it solely depends where exactly you plan to land in Europe and who controls the North Sea. The game unfortunately repeats the mistake of HoI1 and 2, where all supplies come from capital, and in case of the US, it's a total clusterfuck as a result.
>>1549811Very easy to cheese and hold against germany, also has solid batavia gameplay if you want to let germany win just so the game doesn't stop when they fail to take you out of europe.
>>1550004Light frame, stack as many heavy mgs as possible. Rush 1940 frame and engines ASAP. Agility is king for dogfighting.
What's the right way to conpose fleets right now? Do I want to fill my second line with battleships, battle cruisers or heavy cruisers? Do I want to focus on heavy attack and bypass the screening line, or light attack to wipe the screen fast?
>>1550135They all work, just depends on what you want to play with. If you're building capital ships early, go with BC's and aim for a speed of around ~28 knots. Late game fast battleships have better stats and can hit the same speed as your earlier BC's. If you're getting carriers, pair them with heavy cruisers to save on resources.Don't skip light attack. Research dual purpose secondary batteries and put as many on as you can. The first level costs -2% speed, while upgraded versions are -3%. I usually stick with the first level to maintain a certain speed.Light cruisers with lots of light attack are handy too. 2 CL + 6-8 DD is great for convoy raiding, they shred escorts and when the strike fleet shows up they'll kill a bunch of screens while retreating, and if your strike fleet reinforces they'll contribute to your screening efficiency.
>>1550135Don't forget to make dedicated spotting ships. Ideally you want one per sea zone. I always research sonar and seaplane catapults and get the Flexible Contracts spirit early so I can refit obsolete cruisers as spotting vessels. Replace the firecontrol with sonar so you have room to add radar later. Set them to never engage and you'll never have to replace them.
>>1550124Are cannons worth adding or are they only helpful against heavily armored planes like strat bombers? What about armored plates on fighters?
>>1550185For fighters, you just want to max out air attack and agility. Armour plates increase air defense but hurt agility so the net improvement to survivability is minimal for the cost increase. You add armour to planes that can't benefit from agility because of their mission type, like bombers and CAS. But don't add it to naval bombers, because AA ignores armour and for the most part naval fighters are only ever fighting ships.Cannons also hurt agility and their net result is making you worse at air superiority over machineguns. They're only worthwhile against strat bombers specifically, where you set them to the intercept mission and just have them guard your core against bombing incursions.The issue, of course, is that you need a lot of a given plane to counter an enemy air incursion, and if you need to mass air it's probably better to mass the plane that can win air superiority AND kill bombers. Strat bombing isn't very effective since factories autorepair and as long as you have any air/AA to contest it at all, the bombing faction trades down on industrial output replacing lost bombers compared to the output they cost you by bombing your factories. I wouldn't really ever consider a specialized anti-bomber interceptor necessary. If just mass air superiority fighters you can punish your opponent for building anything else, and if you've won air then you don't need to worry about defending against air anymore. If you lose air, then the enemy will have air escorts and just kill your interceptors anyways--but there are far more cost-effective ways to leverage an air/industry advantage than a massive strat bombing campaign.
>>1550193Just to review:In the current state of game balance>Strategic BombersAre underpowered and not cost effective. You need an overwhelming industry advantage and to go down their doctrine tree to even make them usable. Typically you'll never really want to build these, but if you do it for the memes then do the night bombing side of the tree and set their mission to night-only. It doubles their cost-effectiveness>Tac bombersAlso underpowered. There's barely any difference between a CAS plane and a tac bomber in practice and a dedicated CAS plane can do basically everything a bomber can except strategic bombing, but tac bombers are actually terrible at strat bombing so it's moot>CASKing. CAS is the most cost-effective way to win land battles. It's so good, that you're better off building fighters to win air sup and then CAS instead of building tank divisions. Always go for CAS unless you're utterly outmatched in the skies (ie you're a minor with no starting airforce against a major with 2k planes)>Naval bombersBetter at killing ships than ships. Put half of them to patrol and half to naval strike for max effectiveness. They rule the pacific, where it's hard for the enemy to put fighters in range of your island airports. They also rule the english channel. If you're contesting sea that's within range of an airfield you can use (ie english channel, china seas) always build naval bombers over ships. Only build ships to control regions your naval bombers can't reach. Airfields are unsinkable aircraft carriers.
>>1550201NTA but are nukes still worth using?
>>1550118>Sign non-aggression with Germany>Belgium is just too narrow for them now>Western Front 2: Electric Boogaloo commencesAnd all I'm doing in the meantime is sipping tea and sinking IJN
>>1550184Or you could just build 3d6 scouting planes and get it over with faster, easier and at longer ranges.Even refitting old vessels is a monstrous waste of effort and dockyards that aren't shitting more DDs, because they are busy adding bullshit features to an old-ass ship that has third the range of tier 1 plane
>>1550124>>1550185>>1550193>>1550201>There are people who use BBA>There are people who use BBA plane designer>There are people who wasted money and/or bandwidth to get BBA
>>1550383They would have to rewrite half the game just to make them not worth dropping like candy.
>>1550434I wish you could toggle individual features like in ck2. I despise all the designers but want the focus trees and other features the dlc's add.
>>1550201The one instance where I use tac bombers is in china or anywhere with limited airports where range is a big deal.
>>1550453Literally the only semi-good thing of that entire DLC is option to aks for ships during peace conference (but somehow managing to make the conference itself even worse in the process)>>1550457Build more airports, rather than horribly useless planes
>The green default early BBA planeI hate it so much
>>1550472Does disabling BBA let you go back to the old peace conference?
>>1550485No.The final patch to NSB is where the game development ended. It's easier to mod tiny few things useful from BBA (Canadian focus tree no longer having retarded exclusive choice etc) than any other way around. Same with the incoming DLC - the only thing remotely interesting about it is weapon trading and if they won't bork it (doubt), it will be worth file-swapping.
>>1550193>>1550201Cheers, thanks for the details.
>>1548830>Here's the problem: my armies aren't trading favourably into Japan's, mainly because of their air superiority.Post NSB you really need to have air be a part of every country's play through. AA is just not enough anymore. Logistic strikes and ground attack is just too good. If you have the plane designer you can make planes that will trade favorably with anything Japan will build. It's really important that you build interceptors so you can challenge Japanese air superiority. 17 Mils is enough to sustain an air force.
>tfw I'm a Japanese bomber pilot in anon's game
>>1549173That's literally what Mao did IRL. He let the KMT and Japan duke it out while having a wank in the mountains. That's what you are supposed to do as communist China. That's why Communist China is not fun to play in Hoi4
>>1549281Depends on your naval goals. Want to fuck up their convoys/supply without having to fight a pitched battle?Subs of course.Need to protect your trade from subs, and also don't want to fight a superior enemy blue water fleet. Really fast destroyers with sonar + depth charges.Need screens for your capital ships?Cheap destroyers with torpedo.Armored light cruisers are nice too, they are basically invincible.
>>1549811Pretty Boring.I did a Dutch-east indies game and I immediately invaded Japanese-Vietnam when they declared war. British Australian and American troops flooded into the ports I captured and managed to bog down the entire IJA for the whole war in a stalemate in the jungles of southeast Asia. Japan wasn't even able to take the Philippines, was pushed out of China, and America invaded and capitulated the home islands by 1943.
What are the most fun minor nations to play?
>>1550667Ethiopia with the latest DLC. Assertive Manchuria. The rest are more "help your faction leader in WW2" type deal.
>>1550433Refitting a scout cruiser takes less production than making a cheap roach destroyer. >make planes and get it over with faster and easierWhat an absurd statement, it's the complete opposite. You have to dedicate a production line of mils for sea planes. Refitting obsolete starting cruisers into spotters can be done in the first few months and has a one time cost of a few destroyers worth of production.>1/3 the range of a tier 1 planeYou're just being retarded. t1 plane is 500km, early cruiser with -50% coastal designer penalty is 1250km.
>>1542556 Imagine your employees are so retarded they think National Socialsm is right wing
>>1550667Communist Yugoslavia. Hungary-Austria Hungary can be fun if done right.
>>1550649This is really good advice. In the end, I dealt with their their airforce by capturing the airports they were using, but the fights getting there were unnecessarily grueling. Once their air was gone, the difference was like night and day. I think if I had secured Britain's war support for the boosts to air research and production I probably could've developed a competitive airforce before joining the war. I just underestimated how much air would matter until I was neck deep in CAS.Next time I play a minor I think I'll focus way more on air since it seems to go a really long way on pretty slim industry.
>>1550692Have support AA in your divisions too, even t1 AA gives a substantial reduction to enemy air superiority bonus and cas damage.
>>1550652Communist china is pretty fun if you ignore the focus tree and manually justify on your neighbors
>>1550912>not beelining towards "exploit the weak neighbours" from day 1
>>1534304Could they be teasing this DLC any longer? Feels like they've been doing it for a year. What the fuck do they spend all their time doing at Paradox?
>>1550923>>1550912>>1550692>>1550673>>1550659>>1550655>>1550587>>1550485>>1550472>>1550435Explain how HOI4 is fun after already having mastered making the best units and industry to where the game is piss easy
>>1550918There's too much other shit you need at the start. Your early wars move slowly enough that you can afford to manually justify because the justification for your next target will be done in time for your current target to capitulate.Since you have 0 starting research, you take ages to even get basic things like artillery, engineers or trucks. So even with a numerical advantage fighting through the mountains and rivers of Shanxi take almost a year.I can't think of a way for that focus to make sense. Even if "Focus on China" was a 35 day focus (which it absolutely should be) it would still always be faster to manually justify on Shanxi and then manually justify on Xibei afterwards while doing a different focus. Yan'an base area not giving you a military factory is also ridiculous given the standards of modern focus trees.
Feels good launching a well planned surprise attack. One month after Pearl Harbor and the allies don't have a single port in the pacific theater to base a fleet out of.
>>1550940You know, in a singleplayer game you don't always have to play optimally and make the best units. You can fool around and have fun, and in the process the game becomes less easy.
>>1550435The game desperately needs an update on the ”wunderwaffe” side in general. As it is, there’s no reason to skip nukes if you have any expectation that the game will go on long enough to use them and you aren’t bogged down so hard that you can’t spare the resources (MP / Expert AI mod).The general process of acquiring them needs to be redone, and at the same time, I wouldn’t mind it if they also completely redid the rocket techs and rocket sites, perhaps stuff like jet aircraft and superheavy tanks too. Hell, put stuff like proximity fuzes there too.
>>1550958I’m such a casualfag that I generally try to not even look up the optimal metas, and tend to use bit of everything but the most useless shit like armored cars or V1/2 rockets. It’s just more fun that way, because it’s not like AI is hard optimizing either.
>>1550940It's not which is why I don't play it anymore.
>>1550960Part of the issue is that there's a good reason warfare 'cooled' down during the cold war, why major powers raced to build nuclear arsenals while petty dictators fell over themselves to collect every kind of ballistic missile they could get their hands on. Fighting a country with cruise missiles just involves a lot of missiles flying past your army and destroying critical infrastructure, and fighting a nuclear power means they can drop nukes at their discretion.If they limit these techs too hard, then there's no point in going for them, but they can only ever either be broken game-enders that obviate real warfare, or worthless meme techs that do nothing. There's no in-between. It's the same reason pdx deliberately made strat bombing weak despite how big of a deal it was in history--a strategic bombing campaign just bypasses everything except enemy air power and and air battles don't have any of the positioning, supply, logistics etc. gameplay that land battles do. It's purely a battle of industry, oil and tech, bigger country wins. If it was good then there would be essentially no reason for ground-based offensive at all, just enough entrenched infantry to stall a front and everything on bombers to reduce your foe to rubble. But there's not really any gameplay there. Nukes I suppose they made the exception for just because you need someway to break a lategame stalemate in case the player gets stuck in a situation they can't easily get out of and the game starts dragging into the 50s. Personally I never touch them because if the game's gone far enough that I would actually want to bypass properly fighting wars and just drop nukes instead, it means I'm done with the campaign.
>>1550958Expert AI mod. The dynamic bonuses gives the ai a chance to rally so can't just steamroll them without effort, among other things.
>>1550940MP is literally the only reason why I bother with this game. It's not even about "mastering" anything, it's that AI is just brain-dead and also suffers from the standard nu-PDX problem of "AI has no clue how to handle stuff from DLCs".I also think AI should just get pre-definied hardware (ships, tanks and planes), rather than ENDLESSLY toying with the designers and producing either 30 variants of the same shit with incremental improvements that it then tries to all rebuild to the newest model OR just making horrible designs in turn. Sometimes both.
>>1550961>useless shit like armored carsNigger, the fuck you are on? ACs are near-game breaking
>>1551288Are you memeing me, or has Paradox actually changed something about them?
>>1551284The designer shittery is just because it's old code made for a completely different kind of game. They definitely COULD script the designer to follow preset historical designs, but it was easier to just ctrl-v something that already "worked" and forget about it.
>>1551310No idea if anything was changed in them compared to release state (doubt it), but they are cost-and-research-effective tank destroyers that also work as cheapo tanks AND police. They also work great with Mot.
>>1551347The designer being shit is separate issue to the fact they can - and should - simply disable it for the AI. Same with AI designing its new regiments, which are ALWAYS shit.Seriously, go and switch around bunch of cost requirements, so AI can't afford and thus can't apply regiment changes and equipment designers. This simple element suddenly makes bunch of countries capable of defending themselves.
>declare war against a minor, it's not in any faction>it capitulates, take its territory in peace conference>after capitulating, it joins a faction, and the faction-leader invites it into war with me>but nothing happens because it doesn't exist.>fast forward, win war against that faction, at peace conference>the minor I already own and conquered separately is part of the peace conference and the fucking US starts bidding on itGreat, real fucking cool.
>>1551390They cost as much as light tanks and are worse. They're not even more cost effective at garrison duty than light tanks.
>>1551390An inter-war light tank with a machine gun gives you the exact same piercing, hard attack and suppression, with slightly better armor and soft attack as a bonus.>research effectiveThe Great War tank tech gives you all the parts to make the interwar light in pic related, and for just one tech you can upgrade them to the basic light tank chassis that's substantially more survivable. Armored cars on the other hand don't get an upgrade until 1940.>>1551419They're not even the same cost, they're more expensive IC-wise AND they take 2 steel per factory vs 1 for a garbo light tank.
>>1551391I'm sorry I should have been more clear, I meant the way the AI designs things is copy-pasted code. Game "AI" is just a series of modular decisionmaking algorithms pertaining to specific decisions, and the one used for all their designers is just repurposed from an older project. When this kind of thing happens, old issues carry over and new ones are created because the actual decisionmaking isn't what that particular algorithm was built for.
>>1551391Use Expert AI, it gives the AI pre-made meta vehicle designs and division templates
>>1551434Been a long while since I bothered with them, but armored cars can be upgraded via army exp, as the tanks pre designers, and that can make the later models speedy little things. Used to be that late armored cars were the fastest things in game, until the tank designer allowed you to speedmax. As to buffs, mobile doctrine have some for them too.Lately I have been less concerned with speed maxing, but trying to breakthrough max, with buffing the armor stat to max too on light tanks, and have reliability bonus engines, and suspension. You can turn them into as tough as heavy tanks, while costing less to build, and allowing you to use captured equipment as filler, so you can use them sooner. Though I rarely rely on armor, but I usually keep at least one light battallion.
>>1551458That sounds miserable.
>>1551458>try the mod>let's see how Japan handles it>start up as manchukuo>china pushes japan out of the north before I'm prepared to declare>postpone my backstab for another year just to see if they can claw back territory with their naval landings>they just get pushed further into the cornerSo this is the might of bushido
>>1551434The anon you're replying to had outdated information, but Armored Cars have a niche meta use (at least in MP) in North Africa. They have much less fuel and supply use compared to light tanks, which makes them the ideal choice to pad offensive divisions in low-supply areas, and they get natural terrain bonuses in deserts. They're good enough at this one particular thing that mp will often designate a player on each side to produce cars early on and donate to the two players actually fighting it out in North Africa.
>>1551972This is why playing normal China is boring. Aside from having a shit focus tree, they have the advantage in the war and only 'lose' in Vanilla because the AI deliberately makes and uses terrible divisions to give Japan a chance. If the warlords didn't have such awful focus trees, they would always be the way to go.
>focus research on infantry>only really need to research equipment upgrades, engineering companies, artillery, and a few one-time techs like t1AA, leaving a spare research slots to upgrade industry or other things>focus on air >only need to research down one airframe branch and a handful of one-time techs, most of which are available in 1936 anyways>focus on tanks>can't afford to neglect the above because tanks still need infantry/artillery supporting them (and you need AT gun tech to even unlock better tank guns)>unlike airframes, each tank hull actually has a niche and you're incentivized to at least research two of them>two tiers of light hull are needed to even unlock amphibious drives>on top of 8 absolutely mandatory side techs you upgrade every other year...>focus on navy>there's two entire fucking tech trees>you need to research hulls for destroyers because screens are mandatory>and hulls for carriers because carriers are mandatory>and hulls for either kind of capital ship because capital ships are mandatory>but to be optimal you actually need both>and then subs if you actually want to blockade enemy shipping>to spot enemy ships, you need floatplanes and radar (in a separate tree)>to fight enemy subs after you've spotted them, you need to progress down sonar AND depth charge branches>and your capital ships need armour to be combat effective>now you need to arm your ships>with 3 different battery trees each dedicated to the different ship hulls--and since you need every hull you need every gun too>and then you need damage control and fire control>and fire control is also advanced separately in the engineering tree>oh and anti-air, also in a separate tree>oh and let's not forget, your carriers deal 80% of your fleet's damage so you need to research relevant aircraft techs for them>to actually take advantage of naval supremacy, you need marines, amtracs, amphibious drives and transports.Why are some tech trees like this?
It's now 1945 and I've reached the point in the game where the only meaningful thing left to do is to pick a fight with one of the 3 main factions--but WW2 is still going so no matter who I pick I'm going to get fucked over in the Peace Conference by War Participation.Right now, the USSR is on the verge of capitulating. On the other side, the Allies are beating the Axis handily. Italy is already gone (by Australia's hand no less), the US D-day'd the Balkans and Romania is already gone, with Hungary not far behind. Belgium and the Netherlands never fell and held their position all war, and now they've broken out and are almost to Frankfurt. Vichy France is being pincered by two British landings from Marsaille and Dieppe and on the verge of collapse, and even Switzerland has joined in on the beatdown.If I join up against the Axis, I'm too far from the action to generate any war participation before it's too late. If I attack the USSR there's a good chance that Germany will fall before I can push deep enough to make them capitulate and I'll be stuck alone in a land war over worthless steppe, and if they capitulate Germany will just take everything in the conference and then give it all to the allies when they fall.If I attack the allies I could potentially claim a lot of valuable island territory quickly but I'm outnumbered and surrounded by them, my navy can't match what they have available in the region and sooner or later I would be forced into a defensive battle on more shores against America's navy/air force like 4x the size of mine. But right now most of their land forces are in D-Day and their situation will only improve as the Axis crumbles.Should I play it safe and go after the USSR to claim its ships in the peace conference and bolster my Navy ahead of a showdown with the allies? Or rip off the bandaid and try to take India/SEA in a surprise attack and strengthen my position to weather the allies' storm?
>>1552011>only need 1936 destroyers, which you probably start with>carriers aren't mandatory>pick either carriers or battleships you don't need both>don't need to tech subs if you're making a strong surface fleet>floatplanes is a single cheap tech and you research radar regardless of whether you're making a navy>radar isn't essential for spotters>upgraded sonar is a 60 day tech and t1-2 depth charges are sufficient>only need basic dual-purpose batteries from the destroyer branch, if you're going battleships you can skip cruisers and if you're going carriers you can skip battleships>damage control is good, firecontrol methods isn't necessary>fire control hardware tech isn't linear, you can skip to the final tier if you wait till '40>t1 dual purpose secondaries give ample anti air>marines don't need anything other than artillery and support equipment, upgraded transports is nice thoughThe naval tree has a lot of options, but you're not supposed to pick them all. I'm trying to do a torpedo cruiser fleet as Japan, but my unupgraded starting capital ships have won the naval war before they could be replaced, they all have 30-50 k/a. It does suck for nations that start with no naval heritage, but that's to be expected.
>>1552028I'll also add that my achilles heel right now is oil. Fully mobilized, my fuel consumption is several times higher than what I can support. I'm relying completely on imports from Indonesia to fill my fuel storage. In any prospective war with the allies, I would lose the ability to trade for oil, so I would essentially win or lose on my ability to take Southeast Asia's oil fields within the openings moves of the war, before my stockpiles get low, and then hold it for the entire war because I really have no alternatives.
>>1552028>>1552043Attacking their soviets, while their troops are on the german front is a solid bet to grab land easily. Soviets are always close to being depleted in this game. Though don't take it as a guarantee that you offer relief to germans by attacking the soviets, because if soviet troops start to shuffle and fall back, germans would expand, thus drawing away troops from the allied landings. Either way, in your case it's not a big deal if axis collapse before the soviets, because soviet AI would just grind it's troops into you, until they get depleted again, and you'd have more land to grab, due to whatever they may take in the peace conference.
>>1552011You need to focus your navy, and not everything needs to be statmaxed>going carrier?pair them with heavy cruisers, they don't need a lot of tech cause the air wings will do the work>going battleships/battlecruisers?give them lots of dual purpose secondaries and pair them with chaff destroyers>can't afford carries or battleships but still want to try and contest the seas?focus on cruisers. CA's with lots of secondaries and just enough armor to protect against light attacks still trade favorably with battle fleets.>can't contest the sea?spam submarines and convoys, focus on trade interdiction and torpedo tech
>>1552032>my unupgraded starting capital ships have won the naval war before they could be replacedThis is another big issue.Most naval countries start the war with functionally all the navy they'll ever need. The upgrade going from older to newer hulls is marginal and has far less impact on cost-effectiveness than plane or tank hulls (often, you LOSE cost-effectiveness in the process) despite there being more parallel hull techs and them taking just as long to research.Ships build so slowly that in practical terms the ones you build will only ever contribute marginally to your overall fleet. Nobody starts with enough dockyards to for newly built ships to accumulate to any noteworthy degree before 1939, and dockyards take too long to build for you to hit that critical mass before 1939, because once again ships take a long time to build--even a hundred dockyards are only going to churn out a handful of capital ships before the end of the war. 90% of the fighting will be done by your starting ships, and the ones you add will barely be upgrades over them even with all the tech you put in themI suppose in a technical sense, you can refit your starting ships with better tech, but there's a limit to how much you can actually do because the refit cost snowballs quickly, and relying on refits obviates hull and armour tech entirely.If you pick a navyless major or a minor, then you'll be playing until 1950 to actually get a navy online--or relying completely on captured ships--which once again obviates most naval techs entirely. If you play one with a real starting navy you're still only going to have a dozen starting dockyards to work with at best and that starting navy with a few refits will be your main force for the entire war. And if you start with your main force, why invest in tech at all? At most you'll take the passive buffs, 1939 FCS, and then maybe down the light gun tree for dual purpose batteries. Everything else is too expensive to refit or not worth.
>>1552028Attack the USSR and Allies. Secure the resource rich provinces in eastern Siberia from the Soviets. Try to get as much of the rubber producing Indies with a surprise naval invasion before the allies can exert naval supremacy. Push through India to Iran and Iraq to get oil.
>>1552058>heavy cruisersAfter the nerfs they die too easily to battleships. You need armored BBs in your battle line to screen your carriers or else your battle line will drop too quickly and your carriers will die.>going BBsIf your fleet doesn't have aircraft carriers you're always going to lose naval engagements to a fleet that does. Carriers are the kings of naval combat, and the entire way you build and operate navies revolves around having 4 carriers per strike force and keeping those carriers safe. But the issue is that you're capped at 4 carriers per fleet but there's no cap on the battle line, so after minmaxing your 4 carriers you just want to doomstack the most cost-effective lineshipTechnically speaking, the most optional hull type are Cruisers. CAs are nerfed and strictly worse than BBs now, CLs are redundant because BBs with secondary batteries do it better. If you're a poorfag navy you could take most of your starting cruisers and convert them into carriers and not miss them.This means at the bare minimum you're on the hook for DE hulls, BB hulls, Deck Conversions, Sonar and Depth Charges, Light Batteries (for dual-purpose secondaries), Heavy Batteries, the two passive trees, FCS, all of the basic air tech necessary to make naval bombers, transports and all the relevant amphibious landing tech to make your naval invasions strong enough to secure a port--on top of normal land force research. But as long as you care about navy. That still feels very excessive considering how efficient land and air tech can be by comparison.Or, y'know, just stick to your starting navy, capture ships in the peace conference, never build or research anything and just win by sheer numbers because you know the AI is never going to have enough time to research/build new ships that out-trade the starting ones. This is what the current system incentivizes because the combined research and production costs of fielding better ships is too high for the payoff.
>>1552062Such is the nature of naval warfare. I modded it so you can assign 10 dockards to capital ships so you can actually finish them before the game is over. Naval techs aren't nearly as impactful as plane or tank techs. Sonar, floatplanes, and dual-purpose secondaries (if I start with them) are the only things I rush. Spend fuel drilling for naval xp early, use it for 50% research bonuses on things like damage control, grab the integrated designer spirit for 20% bonus on modules and get the various upgrades you need cheap when the rest of the tech tree is ahead of time.Refitting is a costly affair and takes some forethought and planning to be worthwhile. Engines and armor are never worth refitting, main battery turrets rarely ever. If I refit my starting capital ships, I wait until I have t4 fire control and give them radar and improved secondaries. Trying to turn a nation with no navy into a maritime super power in a few years is unrealistic in game or irl. Its a real struggle for a nation like Portugal where you really need a navy, but start with neither ships nor techs.
The ships you capture cannot be upgraded. Tried it as Japan, by quick annexing thailand, and can't upgrade their one ship that I captured. Also the issue still exist, that if you change the ships categoraisation while in fleet, it shows up in fleet even after being sent to reserve fleet, and from there an other fleet according to it's new categorisation.
>>1550680It would be too much cognitive dissonance for them to handle if they thought otherwise.
>>1552089>Trying to turn a nation with no navy into a maritime super power in a few years is unrealistic in game or irlThat's literally what both Italy and Japan did. Japan went from having a handful of pre-dreadnought battleships in the turn of the century to being one of the largest modern navies in the world during WW2. What takes a lot of time to build up is naval construction infrastructure, but once you have that infrastructure you can produce an entire world-class surface fleet from scratch in a few years. Ships have a pretty limited shelf-life, both because the construction materials wear out and it becomes uneconomical to maintain them, and because technology changes enough to render them obsolete. Every navy is and was constantly modernizing their fleets by replacing their standing navy with newer and more modern ships--none of the major naval powers in WW2 were still using pre-dreadnought ships by the start of the war despite the Dreadnought launching only 30 years before the start of the game's events.Personally, I like the fact that capital ships take a long time to build in game because it means in warfare, killing them actually matters and naval combat isn't immediately reduced to a bare production war like with air. You essentially win the sea war by finding and killing all of your enemy's capital ships, and any time they're damaged and have to withdraw for repairs, you temporarily have the upper hand at sea. That's a good system. Actually fighting the sea war works well enough (let's not speak of island hopping). The issue is mainly that there's this big tech tree and all these ship design systems that are underserved because you're going to build so few ships over the course of the game. What they probably need to do is retool, simplify or otherwise rebalance the naval tree so the cost involved is more in line with the payoff, and probably make ship refitting a more focal part of naval design to actually use those techs.
>>1552100For example:Armour needs to be more cost-effective to refit. In actual history, armour was a common subject of refitting. Ship armour is modular, it's literally made to be easily removed and swapped out, so there's no reason for its refit cost to be abnormally highSame with main batteries. These systems were built modular because the hull was expected to swap out armament throughout its service lifeCruisers should be able to refit into Battlecruisers and vice versa.Refitting to a converted Cruiser/Battleship Carrier hull should probably be cheaper. These carriers really suck so the fact that the conversion cost is half a real carrier is just silly.On top of all that, I'd probably do away with hull research entirely. Having a 1940 and 1944 hull makes no sense, by the time you research them it's already too late to build enough to have any sort of impact. Instead, I would split hulls into just Early/Converted and 1936 variants and following down each hull tree you would just unlock passive upgrades to each hull that unlocks extra gun/module slots. That way, each tier lets you go back and refit more stuff into your existing hulls, rather than needing to build whole new battleships/carriers in 1940 when it's too late.
>>1552083The cruiser nerfs made it so you can't make a CA with one 8" battery to have it in the rear battle line, then stack a bunch of 6" cruiser batteries for huge light attack. I don't think their survivability has been nerfed, they still have enough armor to protect against destroyer guns, and the speed to give them reduced hit chance against heavy guns.Obviously BBs would be preferable, but seeing as you need 1:1 ratio of CV to BB/CA, and you want plenty of CVs to make your carrier techs and carrier plane production lines worth while, it's just not feasible to churn out enough BBs. You'll also sacrifice a lot of speed on your carrier fleet if you use anything but battlecruisers or very modern fast battleships.>If your fleet doesn't have aircraft carriers you're always going to lose naval engagements to a fleet that does.Maybe in multiplayer, definitely not the case in single player.>CLs are redundant because BBs with secondary batteries do it better.If you're building a battleship/cruiser fleet, then yes. Just rely on the secondaries for light attack and forgo cruisers. CLs are still phenomenal convoy raiders though, they shred destroyer escorts and strikeforce screens and always manage to retreat. I always use them if I'm not completely skipping cruisers.>bare minimum you're on the hook forMost of the naval players start with 36 DDs and dual purpose secondaries. Sonar and floatplanes can be done early between industry techs when infantry tech s ahead of time and not immediately needed. Batteries is a 35 day tech for shells + 70 days for the improved battery. FCS is one 90 day tech. The passives get a 50% discount for 50xp and aren't a priority. Nations that the +40 invasion capacity and planning speed are desired tend to have focus tech bonuses.I think naval is one of the better aspects of hoi4, it has far more relevant choices and compromises.
>>1552100The launch of HMS Dreadnought to the 1936 game start is 30 years. Italy and Japan already had naval infrastructure and heritage, dreadnought style ships was just switching to all big gun main batteries instead of the mismatch batteries of pre-dreadnoughts. A nation going from never building blue water ships to naval superpower in 4 years is a completely different story.Ships don't have a limited shelf life because they wear out, its because the cost of refitting them with new machinery, armor, turrets, etc. costs nearly as much as building a new ship. Some of the Iowa class BBs were in service for 50+ years.Personally, I use Expert AI to crank up the enemies dockyard output by 50+% so the naval war isn't completely over after a couple decisive battles.The tech tree is only big because it covers a lot of options and stretches if you play to 1950. I hope they don't simplify it or it will be like land and air where there's just one obvious meta thing to build for every game and every nation.
>>1552114>The cruiser nerfs made it so you can't make a CA with one 8" battery to have it in the rear battle line, then stack a bunch of 6" cruiser batteries for huge light attack. I don't think their survivability has been nerfedAfter the nerf to mixing batteries, heavy cruisers just moved on to using Dual Purpose secondaries to accomplish the same thing. The issue is that the way heavy battery targeting works changed and heavy batteries are now MUCH better at targeting Heavy Cruisers. Against a capital-ship focused battle line, they die too quickly to be effective.For the most part, the cruiser 'meta' changed to using Armoured Light Cruisers in the screening line as your light attack specialists, as they'll still have enough armour to tank Destroyers while being harder for BBs to hit than Heavy Cruisers ad thus living longer, but the issue is that BBs can also just be loaded with secondaries and also crush the screen on their own, and secondaries have enough firepower to penetrate cruiser armour.Plus they gave BB armour a damage reduction bonus vs torpedos, so just mulching the screen and drowning the battle line in cheap destroyer torpedos isn't an auto-win anymore. Instead, the most effective way to build fleets is to focus on breaking the battle line quickly so that you can engage the carriers, bolstering your battle line to buy your carriers time, and just having enough screening and anti-screen firepower to avoid some all-in torpedo cheese.As a result, Heavy Cruisers are dead and BBs with DP secondaries are typically just more IC-efficient than Light Cruisers as part of a strike fleet. And since secondaries are cheap to retrofit, you don't even need to build new ships for it.You're right that CLs can have a niche as convoy raiders, but for that you don't need anything more than some refitted Early hulls... or you could just put your raiding subs at a map chokepoint well out of reach of their DD escorts and avoid the need to counterbuild them entirely.
>>1552110You're talking nonsense. Individual armor plates can be replaced like-for-like in repairs, but refitting a ship to be armored against a bigger caliber gun isn't the same at all. Armor comprises a significant portion of a ships displacement, increasing the thickness by a couple inches changes everything, massively increasing the displacement on the same hull ruins seakeeping and speed. Some ships just refitted with AA and equipment on the deck and superstructure had to have their casemate secondaries plated over because they were already getting flooded out in high seas before that relatively marginal weight lowering the waterline.Main batteries are the same issue. Bigger guns need larger turrets and heavier machinery, the entire barbette needs to be redesigned and replaced, everything is heavier.
>>1552139The air tree is literally perfect>light framesshort range but cost effective within that range. Limited to Fighters, CAS and carrier planes, they make it cost-effective to defend your homeland but not for force projection unless you're pushing into an area dense with usable airfields (ie central europe). They probably just need to make it so that captured airfields need repaired (or create an option to sabotage them as you fall back) so the range limitation is more meaningful during D-Day.>medium framesTrades cost for range. The most cost-effective CAS plane and only a slightly less efficient fighter but radically stronger at force projection and more efficient in large theatres where range is necessary to maintain mission efficiency. Also makes for the best naval bomber and is the smallest size for tac bombers>large frameSpecifically for strategic bombers and other extremely long range craft.You pick your frame based on what you want to focus on, which is based largely on which country you play, who you're fighting and where you're fighting them. You have options but get to efficiently focus down 1 path while also picking up useful and cost-effective ancillary tech along the way.The only issue with air right now is the balance of the actual planes themselves, not the tech trees. Tactical Bombers are underpowered because strategic bombing is underpowered and they're bad at it and because CAS is too good at logistic strikes. Strategic Bombers are useless because strategic bombing is underpowered, and that makes all of the heavy frames weak by extension.But the actual tech tree letting you focus on the theatres you want to fight in and the kind of missions you want to run is perfect. They just need to focus on making all of those missions worthwhile.
>>1552159Air warfare is the worst part of hoi4. There's literally no reason to ever research anything other than light airframes. Fighters, CAS, naval bombers, carrier planes, they're the most cost effective. Medium airframes are categorically worse, and the only point of strat bombers in game are to drop nukes.The gameplay aspect of just parking stacks of planes in an air zone and trading IC means there's absolutely no purpose or enjoyment of playing around with non-meta planes.
>>1552157Not really sure what to tell you, it's hard to offer counterarguments to a post that just says 'nuh uh'But the fact of the matter is that this happened a lot in the 1st half of the 20th century. Battlecruisers were made by taking existing heavy cruisers and increasing the size of their main armament considerably. Battleships were down-armoured or had their engine blocks replaced (sometimes both) to create fast battleships. Light Cruisers were up-armoured to make Heavy and Armoured Cruisers, and many japanese warships and carriers had their armour replaced after skirmishes demonstrated the effectiveness of torpedos and planes against capital ships. Hell, one of the Yamato-class Battleships came out of the shipyards as a carrier because Midway happened while it was still drydocked.The London Naval Treaty meant ships had a lot of spare displacement compared to what their superstructure and buoyancy could handle, and virtually every ship built between the signing of the treaty and its collapse by every relevant power was built under the assumption that its components would be swapped out for heavier ones at the outbreak of a conflict. Even Aircraft Carriers themselves were an innovation driven by a desire to circumvent the limits of the treaty. Even in normal circumstances, ships are designed to be able to accommodate newer technology in their service life--and often that new technology results in LESS weight, not more. The entire innovation behind Battlecruisers were redesigned artillery cannons that enabled larger calibres to both take up less space and displacement. Warship hulls are incredibly versatile and shipyards are very very good at modifying them. The entire 20th century maritime industry was built around modularity and service efficiency, because the basic hull superstructure was far more expensive and time-consuming to construct than any of its mechanical components and would also last a whole lot longer.
>>1552168>Air warfare is the worst part of hoi4True, but it's kind of also just historical. WW2 air warfare was just about flying sorties from the nearby airfield and trading planes into your enemy over whatever ground you both deemed strategically important. All that mattered were your kill ratio and industrial output. There's really nothing else to do with air. There's no terrain, so it's just about infrastructure, production and how efficient your design is.However>FightersBetween the two, medium airframes are only marginally less efficient (so marginal in fact, that it took months for players to even discover light frames were more efficient) but medium frames have double the range. This matters, because unless there's an airfield every 5 steps, light airframe fighters are never going to be fighting with 100% mission efficiency outside of their home territory due to their limited range. Medium frames are.There's a deeper issue here. Tac bombers can bomb airports and damage them to ruin the efficiency of planes taking off from it, and this SHOULD make it unfavourable to be saddled with close range fighters stuck hugging their airport. But it doesn't work that way because Tac bombing sucks so badly that they can't do their job.>CASWrong. Medium frame CAS is the most efficient. Because there's a limited number of CAS planes that can contribute to combat at a time, you have to trade IC efficiency with relative combat width. Medium frames offer the best compromise and thus the highest impact on combat per IC. You CAN have too much CAS, which is what makes them more interesting than Fighters.>Naval BombersLight Frame naval bombers are unusable outside of the English Channel. Even the Mediterranean is too big for them to cover efficiently. You need medium frames for them to have the range necessary to do their job at more than 50% efficiency. In almost every situation where you need naval bombers, range matters. Unless you're Germany, basically.
>>1552171You're talking out of your ass. None of what you said is true. Battlecruisers were never refitted heavy cruisers, they were essentially battleships that attained higher speeds by sacrificing armor. Fast battleships came about with advancements in machinery that allowed for properly armored battleships to reach BC speed while maintaining armor. Armored cruisers are a concept that predate light/heavy cruisers and no heavy cruiser was merely refitted from a light cruiser. Adding torpedo bulges is different, because they're hollow and the non flooded portions increase the buoyancy, but still have a deleterious affect on speed and maneuverability. Carrier conversions eliminate the weight of the armorment. Yomato and Shinano had the same displacement.The naval treaties meant there was no spare displacement, ships build in accord with them were overspeced with more shit than the hull could reasonably fit. Nations cheated it to degrees, Britain schemed it by claiming the added displacement from the torpedo bulges doesn't count because they're "water storage" units and don't count. Japan is the only country that so blatantly cheated by building obviously oversized ships with their actual armaments sitting in warehouses.Ships were not under normal circumstances designed in anticipation for technological advancements. They were designed to make the most of what was available and often stacked to the limit at the drawing board. Some US standard class battleships were designed to accommodate either triple expansion boilers or the newer turbine propulsion to test and compare the newer technology.
If I'm, for example, playing the UK and I want to build a decent navy (singleplayer), is there a significant difference between building new ships and retrofitting old ones? I'm under the impression that refitting is cheaper, so I thought maybe I'd just re-organize all my old designs to be more effective, instead of the crazy multi-purpose stuff the game gives you to start. Is that dumb?
I don't think I'll ever fully understand navy.
>>1551284>I also think AI should just get pre-definied hardwareSeriously. This can't be that hard to implement, not sure why PDX didn't just go this route. The only designer that actually works well and the AI can use is the ship one, the plane and tank designers just broke the game entirely. AI doesn't know how to make tanks, AI doesn't know how to make planes.
>>1552011fast moving DDs and Cruisers can convoy raid, not as good as subs in Fjords/archipeligos but still decent especially in open ocean. For screening purpose, 1936 destroyers with basic gun and torpedo are sufficient. Cruisers are better anyways, I usually have a few armored light attack LCs in fleets to shred screens. You should be researching radar anyway because provincial radar stations are just so good.
>>1552200Refitting is wishy washyTechnically speaking, refitting has a base cost relative to the hull type, and then an added cost for everything you're actually changing about it. If you're upgrading a module with something in the same category, you pay the difference in their IC plus an efficiency penalty. The penalty is slightly bigger if the thing you're replacing isn't exactly the same (ie swapping a secondary with a multipurpose costs a little more despite being in the same category). This penalty varies but is usually around 12-15% of the IC cost. Main guns are a weird exception and cost a tonne to upgrade, like half of their full costIf you swap a module for something that isn't in its category, you pay the full price of the new module plus the penalty, same as if you fill an empty slot with something.If you swap armour, you pay the full IC cost of the new armour whether it's a refit or not. Never refit armour. I'm not sure exactly how the math for engines work but it also costs a fuckload to refit and is never efficient.So technically speaking you're always trading down on IC by retrofitting instead of building new ships, but since the combat and stat-efficiency of all parts aren't created equal, it can sometimes still be worthwhile if the parts you're retrofitting multiply the value of the things you already paid for. The FCS for example has a huge impact on a ship's combat-effectiveness despite its low IC cost.Since base cost scales up with hull size, it tends to be more cost-effective to retrofit cruisers than battleships/carriersYou don't want to have to retrofit ships repeatedly because you would pay the base cost repeatedly, so try to upgrade all the worthwhile tech at once shortly before the war.Look at upgrading FCS and adding radar to your cruisers. This will typically run you about 780IC and take max dockyards a month to finish, so upgrade secondaries from there at your discretion.
>>1552241Why is it so fucking complicated lmao.I hate Swedes.
>>1552255Because however "neat" the designer is it just doesn't belong in the game. There's a degree of common sense involved with it though. Welding armor onto the hull or ripping out turrets to add new guns is a much more intensive process than erecting a new catapult or adding a sonar system. But it all breaks down when new ships get designed into hyperspecialized roles with min/maxed stats. The designers did the opposite of what they intended and every day I wish someone at paradox would grow a brain and remove them because they just add uneeded bloat.
>>1552201It's not difficult to understand it's just that to engage with it optimally is an entire game unto itself and the effort to payoff is entirely out of wack.
>>1552201All of the actual combat math is needlessly complex and absolutely arcane. I think land combat is the most opaque because of shit like how hardness, armor, penetration, soft/hard attack, width and terrain all interact with how you design your division templates.It's just that land is the most important kind of combat so people who care a lot more already solved the math for me. Navy is far less important and you have far less agency to customize your combat layout because 99% of your ships will either be taken from a peace conference or the ones you start with. Thus there isn't really much point in bothering with minmax math. Why even research battleship tech when you'd build two at most before endgame? Why bother with ship tech at all when the AI is so bad at naval invasions and helpless at convoy raiding?Navy isn't any harder to understand than air or land, it's just kind of pointless. Pdx has to struggle between making shipping and convoys important, and making the AI self-sufficient enough that history doesn't break if it loses a port. That's why half of the oil on the planet is in Texas, but it's also why it's basically pointless to fight the US at sea when you can just land in Mexico/Canada uncontested instead.
>>1552193>Battlecruisers were never refitted heavy cruisers, they were essentially battleships that attained higher speeds by sacrificing armor. Fast battleships came about with advancements in machinery that allowed for properly armored battleships to reach BC speed while maintaining armorThis misconception is a huge pet peeve.Fast Battleships and Battlecruisers are NOT the same. The terms weren't even used by the same navies.It's an example of convergent engineering, not interchangable terms.Fast Battleships are fundamental shift in battleship doctrine--which frankly had not changed since the age of sail. For the first time, navies were realizing that modern weapons were too good at killing ships and it was becoming impractical to armour your capital ships to protect them. The concept of a 'fast' battleship was borne from understanding that more armour wasn't increasing survivability, and reducing it to the levels effective against specific weapons. They also included newer, redesigned engines that were built with acceleration and maneuvering in mind, rather than just strategic mobility as earlier BBs had.The point was that navies understood that a torpedo or bomb would kill your battleship no matter how big it was, but by making it faster and more maneuverable, you could make those unreliable, unguided weapons work a lot harder to hit you.Battlecruiser is specifically a british navy term. Most other navies didn't use it outside of the anglosphere. They came before Fast Battleships only because like usual, the british were a decade ahead of everyone else at sea. They approached the same problem; that battleships were easy targets for modern weapons and armour wasn't helping. Their solution was to redesign existing cruiser hulls to encompass heavier main armament while retaining cruiser speed. The problem and solutions were the same, but the approach to get there was different--hence the different terms.
is italy a good nation to play as a newfag noobtard like me?
>>1552488Lots of people say Germany but I think Italy is the go to first playthrough nation.You start at war so you get to jump in the deep end.You have an industry but not a massive one so you get a decent feel of what most countries that are not Germany, Russia, or the US get to work with.You get to play with all three military branches.You have enough weight to throw around but if you fuck up Germany is there to help bail you out.You're not driving the story with your focuses so you get a feel for how a historical game is generally supposed to progress and get to learn certain timings.
>>1552488I would not recommend it. Focus trees are overly complex, with added minigame and unique leader missions (all of which sucks), you get dropped into war from the getgo, the only one that does not end if you don't finishing in 140days (before second focus finishes), you have a huge navy to manage.Germany is the easiest to play, large industry, lot of pp (power for decisions), large population, good location, many countries around it that you can start a war with, without it turning to WW2 early on, and you can even annex some via focus tree. Noob friendly focus tree. If you don't start war against allies and soviets at once, you'll have a fun time.Japan is close second, if you don't attack americans before finishing China, because war in China is good for practice, where you only have to mass produce rifles, rest is purely optional. Also noob friendly focus tree.Other practice run could be you playing a country that does not get involved in the war historically (via any focuses), and only sending volunteers to whoever you prefer.
>>1552159I have some issues with air design, e.g. you can only have one designer active at once, despite those multiple companies were running at once in real life. Dealing with that as Germany is managable, but anyone without pp boost it cost them too much. Also bullshit that generic designers give better bonuses than some historical designers with Japan.As to air management, I'm on the contrary opinion to you, not only air fields does not need to be sabotaged, but their capacity should be limitless. WW2 planes could take off and land from grassy fields, why limit to 2000 in a region? Only limiting factor should be getting fuel there, having fuel depots, which should need to be constantly filled, does not matter if 20000 planes burn through it in a month, or if 2000 in a year, the limitation should be how much fuel is avaible. Same supply depot system as with land forces, just for aviation fuel. Thus you could move your air wings to wherever you are, if you can bring fuel to them.
>>1552560> generic designers give better bonuses than some historical designers with JapanNone of them do that. They ARE generic designers, just renamed.
>>1552561Japan's issue with air designer is two of them being locked behind focus. But tank designer is only one avaible with 5% reliability bonus only. Their airforce chiefs suck too.
>>1552563>Total Mob given from focuses>forgets to mention the very next focus gives you a 1940 carrier fighter which you can produce at least a year earlier
>>1552566I swear to Christ, if you say you go for the Yamatos, instead, I will hook you in the gabba.
>>1552566I never use carrier fighters, only fill them with naval bombers. Not even sure if they actually use them during combat. For all nations I usually just make 1 doomstack of all fighting ships, but set it to avoid battles, only want naval suppremacy. Use a second fleet for all mining vessels. Also 10 fleet of subs under one command for convoy raiding. And if later my doomstack screens are filled (99), 10 fleets of destroyers for convoy escort, under one command.>>1552569I always go for the Yamatos.
>>1552570Disgusting AI abuser.
>>1552488A few years ago yes but the current clusterfuck of a focus tree combined with the buggy mess that is Ethiopia ended that
>decide to try an ostland game because I've only ever done independent thunder cross before>let's try the support baltic fascism focus to get them, I usually just take the other focus and crush them>it does nothing>literally two decisions that cost 50 pp each and give .15 fascism growth per day for 70 daysWhat a garbage focus. The only good part is it lets you trigger a civil war in poland too but holy fuck that's not worth it for what you give up fron the alternative.
>>1552638The best early civil war to trigger is France, while they are unstable, because it's retard easy to win it, just go for Paris with your volunteers. Alsaice is the best starting point for it (unless you play Germany, and hoping for the rare occurance of UK joining into the civil war, and hoping to take Alsaice for yourself in the peace conference.
>>1552570Carrier fighters were bugged until recently. Now they disrupt enemy carrier planes in combat very effectively. Just having 1 wing of fighters in each carrier cuts the damage output of enemy carriers in half.There's some bug abuse with it too.
>>1552488Germany or France. Honestly the best way to learn is probably by playing a low risk commonwealth minor like Canada--it's just boring.Italy is too complicated now with their weird focus trees and the war in Ethiopia is a miserable slog until you really start to figure out supply and logistics.
>>1552488With BBA? No.Without BBA? Maybe, but Japan is a way, way better learning tool, and unlike Germany, you don't have to end up with a war with all the planet at once
>>1552179>HoI1-3 have zero issues with functional air combat>GoY$ air combat is broken on arrival and then only made worse as the game expands>THIS IS HISTORICALThis is your brain after sustaining PDX-induced damage.
>>1552011It's a literal distraction. The ship designer was introduced solely to drive attention away from how busted and, more importantly, non-essential naval combat is, making retards enthralled with the plethora of options. The fact it broke naval combat even more is a non-concern to anyone, but idiots: PDX doesn't care, and anyone with two brain cells to rub together will tell you that you should never focus on navy in their games, for its a wasted effort and time.
>>1551458>Use the mod that railroads AI super-hardOh wow, now I don't even need to do anything, I already know every move AI will ever try before the game even loads!
>>1551419>They're not even more cost effective at garrison duty than light tanks.If you don't have manpower to spare, they are the best garrison unit.If you do, nothing beats cavalry in this roleThe real job of ACs is to be light tanks for countries that can't afford tanks or tank research, but still need mobile
>>1552032>don't need to tech subs if you're not fighting against UK or JapanFtfy
>>1552698Wrong. Great war light tanks is the best garrison. Costs 2.4 instead of 4, same amount of equipment, manpower and suppression per batallion.
Update: things seem to be going well.I pulled the trigger and launched a surprise attack on the allies while they were still preoccupied with Germany. I consolidated a hold on India's supply hubs before allied reinforcements could arrive by sea so now it's just a steady advance to the coastal cities to capitulate them. The invasion of SEA went great initially and I took the oil I needed, but the Netherlands is bugged and can't capitulate, so I've been forced to waste a lot of time clearing pockets there.This is where the clusterfuck began. The allies betrayed the Comintern, the Axis declared war on me because they were guaranteeing the leftover bit of Japan the AI forgot to take in the peace conference and suddenly my war is rolled into an alt-history WW2 where the allies and Axis are on the same side.But it gets even weirder. Ethiopia won against Italy this game and went down their new focus tree, forming the African Union. They were STILL at war with the Axis, so when the Axis was pulled into my war, WW2 suddenly became an extension of the Italo-Ethiopian war. I joined the African Union for fun, but apparently the USSR took umbrage to that and they backstabbed me--so now the USSR is on both sides of the Italo-Ethiopian World War fighting both for and against the Ally-Axis Alliance. Best of all, the game just sort of forgot that the USSR had been fighting Barbarossa for 4 years and their 99% war participation from 1.5 million land combat damage just disappeared.In europe, things look to have stabilized. The Axis counterattacked, stemmed the bleeding in the Balkans. The northern D-Day landing was killed off and the southern one pushed back so Vichy France is safe again. Liberated Yugoslavia was retaken by the Axis and they're gaining ground in Italy again. During D-Day, Germany's Russian Front had basically collapsed, falling all the way back from the Urals to Minsk, but now they're on the offensive there again and have almost taken Moscow a second time.
>https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/hearts-of-iron-iv/tournaments>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3ep__9CHG8hoi4 esports
>>1552755Do you think if I win a hoi4 tournament I'll finally be worthy of a woman's love?
>>1552179Elaborate on "too much CAS"? Also what is your medium CAS fitting? Also how important is agility with CAS?
>>1552818There's a fixed limit to the number of CAS planes that can contribute to any given combat, and it's based on the current width of that combat. Wider = more planes get to participate.Generally speaking, the number per-width is quite low so typically it's quite easy to have enough CAS planes to have the max contributing to all the combats in a given region. This means that it's actually worthwhile to produce bigger, more expensive CAS planes and fit more stats onto each individual plane contributing to combat. This is why it's a good idea to give your planes both CAS and Logistic Strike missions. They prosecute orders left to right, so every plane that can support ground combat will do so, and all the ones that don't fit will just bomb trucks/trains instead.As for what to actually put on it, it's just standard AT cannon 2, Bomb Bays/locks to fill all the slots. Agility is worthless on CAS because their weapon/mission type murders it anyways. There's no real way to protect CAS from ground-based AA but you can help them vs enemy fighters by increasing air defense.
>>1550969>make strategic bombing realistic>British meta becomes to just put your entire industry on bombers and level Germany>make missiles realistic>American meta becomes to just beeline building a super massive nuclear ICBM stockpile and initiate nuclear holocaust
>>1552877I mean, that would be true to history for the most part.I think we all know better than to expect realism out of HOI4. But it's an interesting question: how do you make stratbombing worthwhile without making it game-ruining?
>>1552933Make them consume an ungodly amount of fuel, even more than they already do.
>>1552934That would still just reduce them to a resource check where you click a button choke a major power to death because you have the stuff for it. Plus the US has like 800 oil sitting in Texas so they could literally just build nothing but strat bombers and end the war from an airstrip.
>>1552933Don't. It already has drawbacks. You cause damage to infrastructure, industry, and the population. That land is weaker and less useful when you now eventually conquer it. Or actually if you conquer it. Imagine Britain actually sitting back and going hard into bomber spam. They devastate Germany, but have far smaller actual army due to dedicating their resources to air. Germany is now weakened, but the one who stands to benefit the most is the USSR. It becomes very easy for them to come in and do the actual conquering.
>>1552497Italy would be good if it weren’t for the new Ethiopia mechanics making for forever war unoess you know what to do, and also the internal balance of power thingy can fuck a new player up pretty hard if they end up losing any territory. Italy used to be my go-to recommendation for new players, but now it’s more medium-tier nation in regards of learning curve.
>>1552714Counter-point: you don't have to research cavalry
>>1552933>Strat bombers are expensive as all hellHoI1-3 had it figured from the start, I'm sure GoY$ willl probably figure it out eventually in a decade or two
>>1552956>hat land is weaker and less useful when you now eventually conquer itIf you are strat-bombing something, you are not trying to conquer it, you dumb shit.
I always thought there should be a loss fatigue mechanic that degrades war support if you take too many losses in too short a time period that would cause roach destroyers and bathtubs to be a suicide meta but it would be really hard to balance and would require a PP and stability/warsupport overhaul.
>>1553156That's literally already a thing. You suffer a war support penalty every time you lose a capital ship. It would be absurd to extend that to destroyers though, because even within the game they literally exist to get shot at and nothing you can customize beyond the hull itself increases their survivability. An obvious issue with the ship customization system is that nothing you can research and give a destroyer makes it better at being a screening ship, and screening is the only reason you build destroyers.
>playing as Japan>fully capitulated India almost a year ago, currently in the middle east fighting for oil>suddenly India just respawns, all of its territory is returned to it and it gains a dozen or so divisions occupying it>no notification or anything, it just happensWhat the hell. I've never seen that before.
>>1553323Did you garrisoned India? Maybe that could be the problem
>>1553324Fully garrisoned, about 9% resistance. But if there was an uprising there also would have been a notification of some kind
>>1553156Not sure how much is the penalty currently for battleship loss, but something like this could be done:-0.1 ws for submarine loss-0.2 ws for destroyer loss-0.3 ws for light cruiser loss-0.4 ws for heavy cruiser loss-0.5 ws for battlecruiser loss-0.6 ws for battleship loss-0.7 ws for carrier loss-0.8 ws for superheavy battleship loss-0.2 ws added to base ship loss penalty for pride of the fleetHave a "we'll build better ones" propaganda decision to reduce war support penalty.I'd unironically consider war support penalty for lost aviation and tanks too (only for the ones you produced yourself). Just make it miniscule, e.g. 0.001 per small plane or light tank, 0.002 for medium plane or medium tank, 0.003 for large plane or heavy tank, 0.004 for modern tank, 0.005 for superheavy tank. People are unhappy when they see their own technology fail, but would not be too bothered with captured or lend lease equipment. Could entertain the idea of penalising war support for lend leasing countries, if their donated tech get destroyed, or get captured after a lost war. Same "we'll build better ones" propaganda descision to reduce war support penalty.
>>1553333Maybe some scaling with technology for navy:-0,1 ws for early submarine loss-0,2 ws for 1936 submarine loss, early destroyer loss-0,3 ws for 1940 submarine loss, 1936 destoryer loss, early light cruiser loss-0,4 ws for 1944 subhumarine loss, 1940 destroyer loss, 1936 light cruiser loss, early heavy cruiser loss-0,5 ws for 1944 destroyer loss, 1940 light cruiser loss, 1936 heavy cruier loss, early battlecruiser loss-0,6 ws for 1944 light cruiser loss, 1940 heavy cruiser loss, 1936 battlecruiser loss, early battleship loss-0,7 ws for 1944 heavy cruiser loss, 1940 battlecruiser loss, 1936 battleship loss, early carrier loss-0,8 ws for 1944 battlecruiser loss, 1940 battleship loss, 1936 carrier loss, superheavy battleship loss-0,9 ws for 1944 battleship loss, 1940 carrier loss-1,0 ws for 1944 carrier loss-0,2 ws added to base ship loss penalty for pride of the fleetPenalty scaling can be adjusted, based on industry cost, and I never did deck conversions, so not sure where to place them, but they should be put to a penalty level higher than their base hull was.
>>1553333>>1553341Add to this maybe war support reward for the one who is destroying those equipment. Just maybe make the reward quarter of what the penalty is (you are less happy for destroying something, than sad for losing something), but you would get reward for destroying lend leased equipment too.
>>1553332That's weird then, maybe it could be a bug. Did India turned into a dominion while you were holding its land? I don't know what else could explain that strnage situation.
What happens to planes on the carrier, when a carrier sunks in the game?
>>1553333Those numbers are a decimal too high, you dumb faggot. If it was used, a regular, singe sea battle, no meta-bulshit involved, would shave off 4-5% of warscore to the loser and 1-2% to the winner. I mean THE WINNER is losing support. How's that in any way sensible to your pea brain?>Ok, so only the loser gets the smackYeah, lose 2 sea battles and your nation totally collapses and the front troops suddenly lose confidence, too. Just like in real life!
>>1553348The wings get moved to closest airfield.
>>15533684-5% war support loss after getting your navy wrecked is realistic. And I offered a penalty mitigation idea, propaganda decision similar to what already avaible for troop losses. Also it matters how you win, you lose war support if you just let the AI on autopilot grind your troops into the enemy on land, and win only via brute force attrition, instead of manually handling your front, and winning with losing less troops. Naval combat should have the same, even if you win, if it costs you large part of your navy, you should get a penalty. Win the smart way, use naval bombers, or meta builds and doomstacks, then your reward would outweight the penalty.Already added my reward idea prior in >>1553345 .
>>1552083Can't tell if this is bait, retardation or you just read on how BBA "fixed" naval combat and jumped to conclusions.Pro-tip: All BBA did was requiring from people to build BCs instead of CAs. Capitals are still usless, cheapo torpedo boats still rule, and all that happened was making CAs losing their edge
>>1553375>reallisticRealistic to what? It's a pure abstract number, you dumb faggot. Plus nobody said anything about getting your fleet wrecked, simply losing a single naval battle, with most of ships still intact.
>>1553390You would only get penalty if your ship is sunk, so there is no penalty without having at least part of your fleet wrecked. People are upset when losing their ships. You said losing a battle would cost 4-5% pentalty worth of ships, that is 20-25 early destroyers, or 13-16 light cruisers, or 10-12 heavy cruisers, or 8-12 battlecruisers, or 6-8 battleships, or 5-7 carriers, or 5-6 superheavies, or mix of these. Yeah, people would be upset, quantifing it to about 4-5% worse outview for the war for several years of naval produciton wasted is realistic, but that can be improved if the sacrafice had meaning, like also taking out enemy ships, or gradually forgotten with propaganda (spending pp).
>>1553045You start with great war tanks unless playing a shithole, in which case sure, you have better things to do with your research and industry.Still, GW LTs is the ideal garrison.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/developer-diary-finland-alt-history.1599415/
>>1553388Reddit.
>>1553583>Cringe icons>Inconsistent translation >No monarchy path >AI generated portraits
>>1553388>BCsI'm guessing you don't actually play navy. On paper BCs give the most naval supremacy per IC but they are strictly less cost effective than BBs across the board. There is still no real use case for ever building BCs.>cheapo torpedo boats still ruleSort of, but how do you clear the screen for your torpedo boats to actually hit anything?THAT was why Heavy Cruisers were meta until the battery fix. They enabled torpedo DD strategies by quickly and cost-effectively clearing the screen.The change meant that there is now no quick way to drop enemy screening efficiency. There's no broken anti-screen ship that you can use to melt screens quickly enough for destroyer torpedos to make up for the fact that they're doing no damage until the screen is partially cleared. This is why the current meta has actually shifted to BBs. Because now the screen holds long enough for heavy guns to generally deal more damage than torpedos to heavy ships over the course of a fight, and they also bring enough light attack to be the main thing clearing the screen. Their combination of firepower and durability is cost effect--they just take ages to build. Plus the torpedo damage resistance exclusive to BBs is a huge increase in their cost-effectiveness against torp-heavy compositions.BCs remain, as ever, just a battleship with worse armour for a 5% IC discount. You could build stripped-down Bathtub BCs just for enough naval supremacy to cheese a naval invasion--and for that they are cost effective--but as actual fighting ships they're always inferior to BBs. Just because your favourite youtuber made a meme video about cheesing sealion with bathtubs doesn't mean that a new meta has been minted in their honor.
>>1553601I don't understand those who have issue invading UK with Germany. Just aim for the scottish highlands, easy to get there with starting navy (plus whatever was half ready at the start). If you can't start up immediately, just wait, eventually sea zone will go green.
>>1553583Getting really tired of these focus trees where the historical branch is a purely linear 4 focus path that exists solely to give the historical AI something to follow, half the fucking tree is just various flavours of bolshevism and research slots are locked behind mutually exclusive ahistorical branches.
>>1553609Generally a big issue with talks about naval meta is context. Navy isn't as important as land or air for most theatres (especially europe) and the theatres where it is important tend to be far away from the main action and typically only something that minors will actually spend a lot of time in, so there's less interest in testing, number-crunching and optimizing.Plus a lot of the monetized content floating around (which, let's be honest, is the overwhelming majority of content anybody sees) is geared specifically towards new players playing Germany in particular, since it's the dedicated beginner start. When you see content creators talk about 'naval meta' they're not talking about the optimal way to compose your fleets to win a decisive battle in the Coral Sea against a peer navy, they're talking about the most optimal way for a european power to get enough naval supremacy around the british isles to invade and capitulate the UK without ever actually fighting their navy. There's the genuinely cheesy way to do it, which as you've said involves just merging all your starting ships together into a strikeforce, parking it safely at port, adding all of british waters to its mission area with no spotters so it exerts supremacy without ever actually going to combat and just waiting for the british AI to do the one thing britain would never actually do and move the channel fleet out of the channel. In fact there are entire channels dedicated to just cheesing the UK as every conceivable minor for the free factories. But since beginners don't like learning cheese first there's this whole market for couching that easy sealion gimmick as a 'naval meta' and pretending that the entire naval domain exists purely to get german or some other inevitably fascist european minor into london with as little effort as possible.
>>1553583>forced civil warmy favorite
>>1553663you can avoid the fascist civil warbut communism is pretty much hated by most Finns
Since there's been a lot of naval discussion this thread I decided to do some digging, a bit of math and some testing.Screening is really, really good at mitigating Torpedo damage. You put torpedoes on your DEs anyways, because the IC cost is trivial for the potential benefit, but generally speaking a pitched strikeforce battle is over before the torpedos have a chance to do any real damage.Received accuracy is based on visibility over speed.This means the difference between a fat, slow battleship and a fast battlecruiser is about 14% hit chance, but in the process you lose 10% torpedo damage reduction, 20% torp crit resist and almost half your actual ship armour and 10% ship hp. Since heavy battery critical hit chance has an exponential bonus based on how much your piercing exceeds the target's armour, the net result is that Battlecruisers are considerably less survivable to all damage than Battleships--except maybe to air. I don't know if the torpedo damage reduction applies to naval bombers but if it does not then BCs would be about 5% more survivable against carrier strike wings.So in actual combat-effectiveness, BCs are a direct downgrade. And while they save some IC, the ratio of IC to combat stats is less efficient than BBs. So, why build them at all? There is one specific reason. A fleet on the map moves as fast as the slowest ship. Carriers easily move at a respectable ~32kn and both BCs and Cruisers can also move at this speed. Battleships would slow a carrier strike group down, while BCs do not. The actual difference in how quickly a fleet traverses the ocean is pretty minor, but it does mean that you can run down a slower fleet to engage, or outrun one that you don't want to fight. However, since most naval powers start with a lot of slow capital ships this only really applies if you're designing and building a specialized strikeforce from scratch. It's kind of niche, but might be handy if you're late to the sea and can't match the majors directly.
>>1553704Incidentally, Heavy Cruiser Medium Batteries increase their visibility despite having comparatively poor stats, which contributes to their very poor survivability on the battle line. As far as I can tell, CA batteries do not get an accuracy bonus against light ships or other cruisers so they're just kind of terrible all around. On paper, you could stack them with light attack and just have the single heavy battery to put them behind the screen, out of reach of torpedoes but they still die too easily to any amount of heavy attack or air power.CLs have 15 visibility, giving them around 15% more evasion than a BC of similar speed, and they can easily pack enough armour to make it impossible for light guns to pen them. Compared to a BB, they'll have around 1/4 the hp but ~30% less received accuracy for ~40% the IC cost. This still makes them on average less survivable to heavy batteries and torps even before factoring armor, but also since they are part of the screen, they do not benefit from screening efficiency. This means a torpedo-heavy screen will potentially deal a lot of damage to CLs. However, they have the highest Light Attack possible by far. Essentially, glass cannons. Some ratio of these are worth having in your screen, especially if you're using torpedo DEs, but just know that in relative IC cost, you're reducing the durability of your screen in exchange for clearing the enemy screen faster.
>>1553663it makes sensecommunism was despised in finland because they already tried a civil war
>>1553583If I'm honest the historical path looks the most interesting for me. It's a shame there's no mention of Germany going monarchist giving new options or unlocking a potential monarchy restorationist path, but it's understandable since republicanism by that time was well rooted in finnish society.For a small country, most of its generals are not half-bad.
>>1553704>>1553718I'm not going to get into Carriers because that's a whole bag of worms, but suffice to say that the common knowledge: that carriers are good and you want exactly 4 in your strike fleet, is good enough.Winning naval combat is pretty straightforward. You want to kill your enemy's carriers as quickly as possible. In order to kill enemy carriers, you need to kill enemy lineships first. To kill lineships with torpedos, you need to kill screens first. To kill them with heavy attack, you can ignore the screen entirely. Currently there is no reliable and cost-effective way to clear the screen quickly enough for massed torpedos to outperform heavy attack. CLs are the closest choice, but their low survivability makes that strategy less efficient.Beyond that, conclusions:In the current version of the game (with all relevant DLC), Battleships are king in terms of cost-effectiveness. They will-outtrade BCs and will hard-counter CAs. Massed torpedos alone are not a good counter to them because of screening and the lack of a good way to clear screens quickly.Light Cruisers are the most cost-effective way to deal light attack damage but their survivability to anything but Light Attack damage is very low for their cost. Build a few to augment your fleet's screen-clearing but be wary that they will die easily to torpedos and naval bombers if targeted so the vast majority of your screen should still be DEs. Even despite their evasion, CLs make easier targets for heavy batteries than other heavy ships.Roach Destroyers with a torpedo tube should be your standard screening ship, mainly because the torpedo is good against light cruisers. Torpedo 2s increase hit chance for only 30 more IC and should be your go-to since torpedos will spend 90% of any naval battle targeting the screen anyways.Never build CAs. Only build BCs if you're building your navy from scratch for carrier speed and need to be able to avoid a stronger navy while still picking fights.
>>1553766>It's a shame there's no mention of Germany going monarchist giving new options or unlocking a potential monarchy restorationist path,it's a secret path
Redpill me on rocketry. It has insane strat bombing numbers. Is it worth it in the late game?
>>1553776Big if true. I admit I do like the secret path mechanics.
>>1553785Long story short, no. The numbers are deceptively high because the individual rockets are single-use.A couple of problems:They are easily intercepted by enemy fighters/AA, so compared to strat bombers they will do less damage as long as the enemy is defending.They consume building slots, and while they don't require military factories to produce, they require a comparable amount of civ factory production. Meaning every rocket site is essentially a mil fac that can only build 1 thing, forever.They have limited range and you can't control where in the province the site is located. T1 rockets will struggle to even reach adjacent provinces while t3 still have much less range than strat bombersThey build exactly 1 per day, which means you need a lot of them to actually outpace autorepair, and it can frequently be difficult to actually build enough overlapping the same target to accomplish this.In any hypothetical use case you would be better off with strat bombers, and even strat bombers aren't particularly good. There's apparently an update to wunderwaffe and lategame tech that's on the roadmap but there's been no news or specifics just yet.
>>1553323Returning to this, I savescummed to try and figure out what is happening. On may 30th 1947, no matter what, the Dominion of India comes back to life and all of its territory is instantly and automatically returned to it.I don't know the significance of that date but I can only assume it's some scripted event that's bugging out because they've already been annexed. There's seemingly no wait to prevent it, meaning whatever triggers it has already happened some point earlier in the playthrough.Thank god for console commands, though. This is why I'll never bother with ironman mode and achievements. Game is too prone to jank.
>>1553583I honestly expected that they’d do something dumber and more grandiose with that, now the only really big dumb thing there is Finland taking territory from Sweden and Norway, but even that is just plain blobbing dumb, not balls to the walls dumb like Trotsky in Norway etc.
>>1553785Only the tier 3 is even remotely useful, because you need fuckton of rockets on one target to make a difference and tiers 1 and 2 have abysmal ranges. And note the wording ”remotely useful”, because the opportunity cost of researching and building those sites is simply too expensive for a facility that automatically pumps shitty kamikaze strat bombers out. And even that sounds better than it actually is.
>>1553949https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_IndiaThis took place in August but maybe the game wants to respawn india so there's a partition to happen a few months later.
What will the international market be useful for? Will it maybe let minor countries boost their economies early game? You could focus on building civs while exporting guns to explode economically. Idk if it would be worthwhile if you're doing an aggressive strategy though. It might be good for democratic/neutral countries.
>>1554136Useful for changing the meta around free market economy probably
>>1554136I imagine it's there to give smaller democracies something to do for the first 3 years beyond setting a build queue and afking.
>>1554136It'll be primarily for boosting military for minors without beeg meaty mil. civs (China) or resources (most countries) and boosting economy for military builders.
I'm new and I've encountered something I don't quite understand. I've tried playing a chinese warlord for the first time. I start the game with all of China proper considered my core territories, even though most of it is occupied by other chinese factions.After conquering one, my resource efficiency in that territory is fixed at somewhere around 80-90%.Since these are core territories, there's no option to change territory management or add garrisons, there's no listed compliance of resistance modifiers. Why am I not getting 100% of the resources and how do I fix it?
>>1554587research extraction tech
>>1534304Would be cool if we didn't get a monarchist path per se, but much like the fascist Latvian path, a path that would would heavily focus on the mythological aspects of Finland. Only this path would be non-aligned.
