how the frick do i learn the combat in HOI4? i understand everything else in the game but ive no clue how to fight wars at all
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how the frick do i learn the combat in HOI4?
how the frick do i learn the combat in HOI4? i understand everything else in the game but ive no clue how to fight wars at all
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if you understand everything else about the game but can't fight wars then you know nothing about the game, the wars are the easiest part. start by building a lot of civilian factories for the first two years (more if you're the US or USSR) and then move onto military factories, don't overproduce guns, actually build a respectable amount of planes so that you don't fight under red air, give your unit designs some artillery (a bigger soft attack stat shreds infantry) and you've won, my favourite for this is motorised-artillery 6/5s (6 mot, 5mot-art), they're somewhat cost effective for their level of soft attack and a full army of them just walks over infantry. build your units properly, be sure to produce the correct amounts (most common noob mistake is making way too many guns and wasting factories that could be used elsewhere), get air, and you've won. navy is a meme btw, spam submarines from the start and you can get naval supremacy anywhere.
play germany or italy, germany is op and basically the tutorial country. for doctrines, the best for air is battlefield support, some might disagree because it takes a while to get to the agility bonus, but if you get a lot of air XP its undoubtedly the best. for war doctrines, the only ones actually worth it are mobile warfare or superior firepower, grand battleplan is for holding, it gives a lot of bonuses to entrenchment, and mass assault is useless to anyone but the 2 Chinas and the USSR if you can't be bothered to build supply, the eastern front is a supply nightmare, I've managed to win with no supply upgrades and mass assault as the soviets so I know it works at least, but I don't recommend it as a strategy. mobile warfare is for things like mot and tanks, and superior firepower is my favourite for its great soft attack bonuses. don't forget to stay up to date on your infantry equipment tech, and I always research the new artillery a bit ahead of time, but that's a matter of personal choice
but like, how exactly does combat work? im used in other paradox games you put a lot of units into a stack and then you move it into an enemy stack and combat starts
hearts of iron makes no sense to me, how does that part work? why do people put 1 unit on each tile?
>tfw it's not bait, it's just regular GoY$ player
how did this post look like bait to you? hearts of iron combat and units in general are very different to other paradox games
either this is bad bait or you are just fricking moronic
its not, im just moronic i guess
i for example use battle plans cuz all guides say to do so, i do but when i use them with a simple offensive line i get dumpstered and even if i win its usually because i outnumber them and take heavy losses
Maybe it’s bait but whatever.
You have organization and strength on every division. Strength is the amount of supplies the unit has in terms of equipment and manpower, Organization can be considered the "HP" of the unit, it replenishes automatically after battle if not undersupplied and if it falls to 1.0 in a battle the unit will disengage from the combat.
You want to drain the organization of your enemies faster than you lose your own in battle.
Organization can be regained anywhere as long as the total units on a province don’t exceed the supply capacity of the province, but for strength you need a connection to the rest of your empire and of course, you know, the resources the unit requires
I can’t tell you why a simple offensive line didn’t work for you that’s too general. Maybe you had your army on a too aggressive approach that drained your strength too rapidly, maybe you simply had too few/weak units, maybe your mismanagement in the earlygame left you with too few military factories to support your divisions, but in general the caveman rule is if you see the majority of arrows being red, you should probably not carry out the attack unless you know what you’re doing.
Tldr: play the tutorial.
>i for example use battle plans cuz all guides say to do so
Don't do that
>i for example use battle plans
>cuz all guides say to do so
Feel trolled
> i do but when i use them with a simple offensive line i get dumpstered and even if i win its usually because i outnumber them and take heavy losses
Which is precisely why you should be using plans at all. They are for AI. And the reason why AI is so fricking incompetent is because it relies on not only battle plans, but AI-made ones.
You need to use battleplans is some fashion if you don’t want to fry your brain trying to micromanage the entire eastern front for 16 real hours. If you just put every army on the frontline and draw to the urals then sure it won’t work, unless you have an overwhelming force anyway. Just use battleplans correctly, if you have anything above 100 divisions you mentally need to use battleplans
>You need to use battleplans is some fashion
Literally the only thing you need the for are naval invasions
>if you don’t want to fry your brain trying to micromanage the entire eastern front for 16 real hours
You realise there is HoI 1, 2 and 3 where you do exactly that... right? And the reason why GoY$ Black folk are such a laughstock is that they can't manage against the weakest AI in the series by far on manual, while struggling on auto.
Planning is UTTERLY useless. It's literally a tool for AI. So are battleplans. It genuinely takes to be incompetent to draw those moronic lines, rather than actually command your troops and then insist it's easier/faster/better/whatever.
Good choice. GoY$ is a terrible game
>It genuinely takes to be incompetent to draw those moronic lines, rather than actually command your troops and then insist it's easier/faster/better/whatever.
It literally is all of those things. You don't need to micromanage your units 90% of the time to win wars if you just draw some arrows instead. As you said, the AI sucks, so you don't need to powergame.
>GoY$ Black person in action
But more seriously:
I would pay good money to see bunch of GoY$ players being set to play BIce or HPP. This would be some highly entertaining shitshow. Hell, let it even be vanilla, but only once they get their teeth kicked in by AI in either of those two mods.
It will never stop being funny how incredibly incompetent GoY$ playerbase is.
You're not "incompetent" if you're playing the game as it's supposed to be played. You yourself said that the AI sucks, so use some logic. Do you or do you not need to micro individual units all the time?
Answer: You don't have to micro much to win against the AI. You're actually the incompetent one if you need to do that to win. There's no reason not to use the arrows and shit. Just getting a meta infantry template probably does half the work against whatever the AI builds, I haven't played in a while though.
I've played HOI games since 2. Well, since the first one really, but I was too young and moronic to understand what kind of a game I was playing. Doesn't BlackIce add a huge amount of shit in the game? Does the AI actually have a clue about how to use that effectively, or is it just mostly autism flavor for the player?
So if you agree that the AI is stupid, what’s the point in saying you’re incompetent for using frontlines and not micromanaging? Being elitist about this is stupid as frick, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, either the AI sucks and you’re fine with battleplans and save tons of time, or the AI is competent enough and you need to micromanage.
Because if you use battle plan, you are giving command of your army to the same incompetent AI, you dumb moron. Meaning the side with more and/or better troops wins, by sheer numerical superiority.
>Being elitist
Have you tried not being moronic, so you don't have to pretend everyone else is just snobbish about not having sub-normal IQ?
A player can draw arrows better than the AI can, and can choose where and who to attack and what armies with better than the AI. Using the arrows is not the same thing as going into spectate mode, which is basically what you're saying. Your arguments are literally moronic.
You can still outplay the dumb AI with the system the game is designed to be played with. If you think you can only beat the AI with numerical and qualitative superiority by using the frontline system, you're just bad and don't understand the game. No wonder you have to micromanage everything.
It's funny how your claims of superiority in this shitty videogame only served to reveal how bad you are at it.
If I wanted to manually advance every single goddamn infantry division into Russia I'd play War In the East. The standard for attacking in multiplayer is to, as someone else said, create a static line of infantry then manually micro tanks, occasionally giving orders to relevant infantry. Hell, USSR often does manually place all of its defending infantry, but if you're trying to D-Day on speed 3 you aren't going to manually spread your infantry out from the beachhead and there's no enjoyable gameplay to be gained from forcing the player to do so.
If you hate the game so much just don't play it you fricking idiot. Don’t comment on stuff you know nothing about, you obviously have no interest in this game.
I just imagine the most moronic image of you actually sending every single unit on every province actually believing that you’re playing better than some moron using the dumbass battleplans. Just frick off
What made you think I'm playing it? I'm doing a standard check each major update, then I'm just mocking its playerbase. The one that is still filtered by something as dumb as GoY$, but in the same time ultra-butthurt about own inability to play it.
If you plan to play every war by commanding every single unit yourself you either aren’t playing that much or are playing smaller nations and not on max game speed.
Any player that wants to keep their sanity uses frontlines. This might surprise you but I want to play on max game speed, not just click on thousands of provinces every five minutes
this "1 unit" is composed of battalions. battalions have a lot of men in it so think of it like, 500 units per each slot, as in eu4.
heres a standard composition:
frontline basic - 7 infantry and 2 artillery with enginner support, artillery support and anti-air support.
dont have enough factories to build these? then experiment but the rule is - keep the combat width 10 or 20 and organization above 30
pushers - use tanks. put as many tanks as you can but keep the org above 30.
defenders - just 5 infantry with engineer and artillery support. put them on the coast to defend from naval invasion.
as for economy. be aware of how many equipment you have. you can check the logistics tab. if your unit has no equipment its like hes standing naked on the battlefield. thats where your military factories come in. always build military factories in mid and late game.
this is all just in general but you will learn while playing (after 100+ hours). i recommend playing germany for first times.
the homosexuals who tell you to not play are moronic because they finished the game a million times and its not fun anymore to them
thanks anon, this is really useful and exactly the explanation i needed to get into it
also how do i make sure the AI uses divisions for what they are meant to be? or do i only use the AI for frontline forming and nothing more?
If you draw a frontline and execute an attack they will push with all units based on how aggressive you want the attack to be.
You can do something like put tank divisions into a separate army on one or a few provinces and set them on a spearhead attack to penetrate the enemy line. That’s usually very effective.
Idk what you mean exactly by what they are meant to be, but yeah you usually have the AI form a frontline and see if a general assault works and if not you micromanage to break through some provinces here and there. Look for weakpoints and have a breakthrough force on standby in stalemates.
i mean how do i make sure the AI knows x division is meant for defending and x division is meant for attacking, but seeing as you say to split into 2 armies i get it now
Yep. Per commands you can only attack with one army whole or not essentially. There are a few more things to it but that’s what it boils down to.
an army with 'area defense' or whatsitcalled will position the division automatically where ever you marked it with. an army with a frontline will stand on the frontline.
>dont have enough factories to build these? then experiment but the rule is - keep the combat width 10 or 20 and organization above 30
No Step Back changed the way combat width works, for infantry pretty much any width between 10-30 is fine and for tanks you can either go with a similar width to infantry or go for 40-42 width. For infantry you probably want to keep organization above 50, for tanks keeping it above 30 is good.
>then experiment but the rule is - keep the combat width 10 or 20 and organization above 30
>pushers - use tanks. put as many tanks as you can but keep the org above 30.
Completely obsolete information width got reworked long ago man
shit
rework also means that strict combat width for divisions no longer seems to be necessary, before change 20 or 40 was mandatory, but now many more options are viable
My go to generic inf unit that seems to work well is 21w 9 inf/1 line arty. + support aa/art/eng Just a solid line of dudes there to hold shit. Then some form of either offensive inf w/ more arty or armor/motor/mech for doing big maneuvers to kill shit.
I like either 9/3 motorizes/motorized artillery for cheap nations, or 9/6 tanks/motorized(or mech) for big armor. Honestly tanks seem worse than they were when I last played the game when the china dlc came out tho, fuel stockpiles and the supply system really seem to limit the depth of penetration you can get with them, and they are completely and utterly useless w/ low supply because it effects their armor, speed, breatkrhough, etc. to the point where it seems like you are better off just spamming infantry most of the time
The main problem right now for singleplayer is that it's too expensive to produce tanks with designs that are worth fielding, and if you have the production for it you're still better off putting it into enough fighters to get air superiority and then the rest into CAS, either for support or logistics bombing. Even pure infantry armies will break through the AI if you have air superiority and lots of CAS. Perhaps the air rework in the next expansion will fix this somewhat, since aircraft are getting a designer too they'll probably be prohibitively expensive to produce for any useful designs like ships and tanks.
yeah i don't actually have nsb/man the guns so i don't know firsthand how the designer plays, I was just speaking more generally in terms of supply usage/combat effectiveness w/ the old base models of tanks
Didn't logistics bombing get nerfed into the ground? Even if it does work, most AI troops will stay in supply because of state supply.
I think it's been nerfed since launch but not into the ground, my general strategy is to use logistics bombing when there isn't any fighting and switch to CAS when there is (or just leave CAS on both missions).
>Come on, mate. You know exactly what will happen instead
That's what I was saying, they'll fix it by making all of it expensive and barely worth producing. Then like roach destroyers and IW flame tanks we'll probably see a meta of making the cheapest fighters and CAS possible.
The nerf was done in the classic PDX style: first hot fix nerfed it to the ground, second hot-fix restored it almost back to original values. Besides, it's less about values and more about the fact AI doesn't produce trains and can't really replace them once the small handful it has is killed and the decision-spawned join the graveyard, but new decision can't be made for next 180 days.
As for meta: it's heading straight into HoI1 territory, where building everything else than leg infantry and token mobile force of trucks was just pointless waste of time and IC (both on research and production). Airforce? Will be useless. Tanks? Already rendered not worth it. Naval? What are you, a sailor fruitcake? It's just leg infantry en masse, and in truly shitty designed divisions, with some minimal support of trucks (which at this rate will be removed from the tech tree and just given to everyone as default) and nothing else.
It already went out, you are just a moron that's using the wrong doctrine. I mean what sort of a dumb c**t uses Grand Battle Plan?
Air force will probably still be good just because of the way air superiority works, it's a % bonus to land units. I think what's going to especially keep it useful is that if you can equip all your available manpower with basic infantry equipment and have factories to spare, you may as well make an air force. It might be less feasible to make an air force for smaller countries though than it already is.
>It already went out, you are just a moron that's using the wrong doctrine. I mean what sort of a dumb c**t uses Grand Battle Plan?
what
IIRC GBP gets an army spirit that makes adding/removing infantry from a division free. It gets some good army spirits in general.
Don't worry, planes are already slated to the same rework as tanks and navy, so they are going to frick that up, too
>Perhaps the air rework in the next expansion will fix this somewhat
Come on, mate. You know exactly what will happen instead
It didn't. The AI doesn't understand how supplies works to this day, and logistic runs along with train-hunting are super-effective.
>in other paradox games you put a lot of units into a stack and then you move it into an enemy stack and combat starts
hearts of iron makes no sense to me, how does that part work? why do people put 1 unit on each tile?
Imagine if WW1 and 2 were fought with like 20 million soldiers per side on a single small area lol. Even just logistically, that wouldn't work. War had long moved on from pitched battles where both sides concentrated all their forces in a single battle. Instead you had massive amounts of troops on frontlines spanning entire countries.
>but like, how exactly does combat work?
It doesn't.
Paradrones just follow meta guides and constantly pause the game to deal with red arrows.
Just look it up. You won't figure it out on your own because it makes literally no sense.
>why do people put 1 unit on each tile?
combat width is a measure of the size of the tile, you can't just cram 20 million men into a 5km area. The more Battalions you put into a Division, the greater their width is. If you attack a tile from multiple directions, the width grows obviously since the fighting front is wider.
Combat basically works with 5 stats. Organization, Strength, Attack, Defense, and Breakthrough.
Organization is their "health" before they break and run away
Strength is the actual number of soldiers and equipment
Attack determines damage to strength
Breakthrough determines damage to organization
Defense determines resistance to attack and breakthrough
Everything else - entrenchment, terrain, supply, forts, weather, tactics, etc applies modifiers to the above stats and function basically exactly like how you think they do. Units without supplies (food, equipment, etc) can't function well. Automotives/planes without fuel can't move very much or not at all. Air support (CAS, Tac bombers) help troops on the ground engaged in combat by damaging enemy strength and organization.
Though Hoi4 is very "gamey" and less realistic, pretty much everything is fairly intuitive on a decent level. Attacking a beach? Build marines. Want a defense line in a mountain range? Build forts and mountaineers. Looking for a good place to start a big tank offensive? Look for wide open plains, there aren't many terrain penalties there. Thinking about what to attack specifically? Well, a good option is to take and hold the enemy's supply hubs. Just want to kill the enemy? Slowly push forward on the sides to create a massive bulge uwu and then quickly close it with fast divisions like tanks.
What's good for attack? Armor and mech/motorized since they're powerful and fast enough to exploit gaps. What's good for defense? Dug in infantry with Artillery. Radar stations, spies, scout planes, and recon companies are good for getting intel advantages so you know what they have and your general gets advantages too.
Ignoring meta strategies that break the game like destroyers with no weapons and only fast speed, the game is fairly straightforward in that if you think something will work, logically it will. Better roads and railways means better supply transfers. Divisions that match combat width use their full potential without suffering drawbacks. Air superiority is important for attack and defense. Anti tank guns are a cheap counter to enemy tanks. Most of the enemy army is infantry, so soft attack (soft = flesh, hard = steel) is typically more valuable. Deep oceans are better for submarines than shallow reefs. Literally just wing it, you don't need to know every autistic detail.
Don't bother, is a fricking mess and the game is too shallow and limited overall to justify the time and effort.
Just look for the current meta (changes every 3-4 month with every mayor expansion) copy the templates and tank designs, assume inf divisions for defense and mountains, tanks for breaking the line in concentrated spearheads.
Create an encirclement with tanks avoiding mountains and cities, stabilize new front, kill everything encircled, repeat.
That's enough to win world domination campaigns in sp even if you don't understand half of the mechanics of the game, I talk from experience. You can ignore battle plans in sp too, only the lines are necessary.
the doctrines are basically:
Superior Firepower: I have good industry and good manpower so I can throw a bunch of artillery in with my line infantry and obliterate the enemy with more men and more materiel all along the front, with tanks and mech infantry in a supporting role. Example: USA.
Mobile Warfare: I have good industry and kind of bad manpower so I can churn out loads of tanks and mech infantry but can't afford to take tonnes of combat losses. I want to do big encirclements and spearheads and not push with my line infantry. Example: Germany
Mass Assault: I have good manpower and terrible industry so I want to swamp my enemies in infinite waves of poorly equipped infantry with a little bit of artillery and very few tanks or mechanized units. Example: China
Grand Battleplan: I have terrible industry and terrible manpower and if I try to push I will get wiped out and die. I want to scrape together enough line infantry to man my border forts and then dig in as hard as possible and pray. Example: Czechoslovakia
>Grand Battleplan: I have no brain, for I am AI, and I must stack passive bonuses to pretend I know how to fight. No matter my situation I can't use it, but battle plans provide great bonuses, so anything that improves those bonuses is good. Example: Every country under AI
ftfy
Czechoslovakia is a great example of Superior Firepower country: you have great industry for your size and all you need to win is men with artillery, so whatever buffs that is great - and nothing buffs it as much as SF
the problem with Czechoslovakia is that you need to spend too much of your industry on airforce to really churn out the materiel you need to use Superior Firepower. Otherwise you get slaughtered after the luftwaffe CASes the shit out of your front lines. I always found that the best option was to beef up my airforce until it could match the Luftwaffe and then CAS the germans to death while they try to break the border forts.
>the problem with Czechoslovakia is that you need to spend too much of your industry on airforce
... are you fricking moronic, or just moronic?
> Otherwise you get slaughtered after the luftwaffe CASes the shit out of your front lines
Yes, because fricking AA doesn't exist, you absolute moron and it doesn't cut down airplanes 10x more efficiently than interceptors, while requiring 1/5th of the industry and being near-indistructable.
>I always found that the best option was to beef up my airforce until it could match the Luftwaffe and then CAS the germans to death while they try to break the border forts.
Therefore, you have no clue how to play this game, larping real-life logic into mechanics that don't work like that.
not at all the case, czechs have great industry output bonuses, all you need to do to survive as them vs germany is produce aa and get support aa in your divisions w/ superior firepower. Completely wienerblocks cas, and then you can just sit on the sudeten fort line until the ai comes to save you, or the germs get occupied elsewhere enabling a breakout.
Going for big air force with them is a trap, you want some fighters but with zero access to aluminum you are way better off just relying on support aa
There is also third outcome - German AI is so busy losing millions of people storming your borders, it eventually bleeds itself dry, so you can simply push back on your own, as Germans will not have soldiers to fill in their divisions.
And I suggest getting up in times, because you are two major patched behind when it comes to doctrines. Stuff like
>Mass Assault: I want my divisions to be as slim as feasible and to eat as little materiel as possible, while having more soldiers than anyone else
or
>Superior Firepower: I want to design the most broken division without paying any exp for doing so, while also getting bonus to otherwise hard to get traits
or
>Mobile Warfare: I love watching my ground forces obliterated by handful of airplanes, for I am a masochist.
The only thing I dont get is naval invasions cause whenever I launch them my guys either get repelled or they win then get immediately surrounded by enemy units and wiped.
There's not much to understand. Target several provinces next to ports (with overwhelming force), and then attack the ports from land. The empty provinces probably won't be defended. You need enough guys to take the port city or cities fast enough, and then you can quickly ferry in more men without waiting for the naval invasion planning time (and get supplied obviously).
If you assign any significant amount of men to a single naval invasion and tell them to land across 10 provinces, you always run the risk of them just fricking ignoring you and landing 20 divisions in one shitty spot far from any port. To mitigate this, you create an individual naval invasion for every division.
Now the funny thing is that even if the aforementioned AI moronation wasn't a problem and they all spread out appropriately all the time, you would still always want to use these one-division invasions. The reason? Naval invasion preparation time is based on how many divisions are assigned to it. So that 20 division naval invasion takes 120 days to prepare. The 20 one division invasions of the same area? 7 days.
Just like in real life, have twenty different generals plan naval invasions independent of each other and they'll do it really quickly and without any conflicting logistical problems. It just works. D-Day would've happened in '42 if the Allies learned to delegate.
In HOI4 if you move divisions to different generals you just lose some planning bonus and organization or something which doesn't matter shit. It really is a dumb system.
But that’s just not how the real world works, it would be utopian if two dozen generals planning their own separate naval invasion could perfectly work in unison. This would be an organizational nightmare in real life, the game just does so much automatically, that in real life would require a teamwork akin to a hivemind.
yes, I was being sarcastic. It's obviously not analogous to real life at all.
When you do a naval invasion, the troops attacking get a big penalty to their attack, for regular infantry it's like 75%. Marine battalions reduce this penalty to almost nothing, so if possible invading with marine divisions that are just marines or marines + artillery usually makes pushing the coast defense divisions off the port easy. You can also impose a naval bombardment penalty on the enemy by putting ships with heavy attack (i.e. battleships) in the sea zone next to the province being attacked, or on naval invasion support. Air superiority and CAS of course also will help your troops in their invasion battle.
Once you land you need a port to get supplies to your troops. The most conservative thing is to just have your troops attack port tiles so they will either win the battle and take a port, or retreat. A riskier strategy is to have troops land on the usually unguarded non-port tiles next to ports and attack the port tile - the landed troops will have full organization and no naval invasion penalty, but will run out of supply eventually and if you don't take the port they will have no way to retreat.
Once you've landed, you want to secure a port and then try to take some land while the enemy is moving troops to respond. Your invasion should be backed up by troops ready to convoy into the secured port and reinforce your invasion troops. You may also want to prioritize taking an airfield if your ground-based planes can't reach the airzone that you're invading.
use marine divisions, only marines 10w or 20w, with artillery and anti-air as support (others are optional). go only for ports because otherwise youre risking that your troops get surrounded with no supply.
around like, 5 divisions would be enough.
why? when crossing a river or naval invading, normal troops get a huge penalty because they cant go over water so easily. marines though, dont get the penalty.
dont even bother, trust me
if your aim is to learn it for SP, AI is moronic and 99% of your expertise will go to waste
if you want to learn it for MP, it's all cookie clicker figured out meta bullshit and you won't need said understanding to begin with
but hey, even if you disregard what I'm saying now I guarantee that few months down the line you'll remember this sage advice
what the actual frick
you know after reading this thread im gonna reconsider trying this game and do something else with my life
1. Park your divisions in hills, mountains
2. Work up the entrenchment modifier
3. Watch as the AI attacks your positions like a moron and loses org
4. When their org is low enough, counterattack
5. Win the game
You make an army of infantry that does nothing but hold the line and fill in gaps. You create a second army of tanks and trucks that you manually control to breakthrough enemy lines and either encircle or capture victory points or cut off logistics.
Every single hoi4 strategy is a variation of this.
did they finally make tanks not useless again.
I don't know I just use special forces + flame tanks and recon.
hoi4 is the only good paradox game
i fricking hate having to pay experience to design divisions that shit feature needs to go