Help an old HOI2/DH player get into HOI4

[bERt0r]

I've given it about five hours.

But it's ostensibly a wargame. And as a wargame, I'd like to have some actual control on the war, apart from drawing fancy lines for my generals.

I have it in my library anyway, I'll revisit in a year.

The battleplanner is a useful tool but letting it wage your war for you is not advised. The battleplan will not make focal attacks, it is even too stupid to deploy mountaineers in mountains or hills and it does not coordinate attacks properly. It will send your tank armies attacking into swamps or mountains over rivers against fortified positions. What it does good is spreading out your divisions across your frontline in a balanced way. I wouldn't expect any offensive or defensive capabilities of it, it will make a line not hold it.

 

[Herbert West]

What it does good is spreading out your divisions across your frontline in a balanced way. I wouldn't expect any offensive or defensive capabilities of it, it will make a line not hold it.

So what's the bloomin point?
If the game had an OOB system (which is missing why, exactly?), arranging 200+ divisions is relatively easy. So if the planner does nothing useful, why is it in there?

 

[Armacalic]

So what's the bloomin point?
If the game had an OOB system (which is missing why, exactly?), arranging 200+ divisions is relatively easy. So if the planner does nothing useful, why is it in there?

Did you miss what was just said? The front line tool will attempt to keep the front staffed, it's not entirely coherent and makes mistakes, you're also not supposed to simply draw one single battleplan and tell all your armies to move from the Maginot to Moscow. You use different armies with their own battle plans to focus on terrain they specialize.

(Also, a sort of OOB system IS being introduced next DLC.)

The battleplanner also has various other types of functions, garrison plans with which the AI will use the army it has been given to garrison ports, cities, airfields, coastlines, and revolting regions, and even attack relatively disorganized attacks on enemy occupied territory in the region the army was assigned to garrison, by itself. If you've checked the game you could have just toyed 10 minutes with the battleplanner and seen all of this.

It's also mostly optional barring naval invasions and paradrops. If you really have a problem with it, you could ignore it for the most part.

 

[Dan1109]

Its useful, but in the most simple description, it puts your troops under full AI control, with you only defining the front and path for that front to go. There are 3 levels of aggressiveness, but there will certainly be times when you wish it would not attack, but it will. Getting it to do EXACTLY what you want can range from slight PITA to impossible. When impossible, the need for manual control is needed. Taking control of divisions in one province on a front several provinces wide is a PITA as well, because you would need to re-assign those divisions to a different general (so you can keep the BP going for the other divisions on the line), because battle plans are assigned per general (or not at all, per general). Further, the original general will not take your manually placed troops into consideration, as if they are "invisible" and will move troops to your spot to "fill the gap".

Its all WIP. The upcoming patch brings the true first Chain of Command we will have in HOI4, where field marshalls can command generals. Each general has its own battle plan, and the FM has a higher order BP which the idea is that this is a secondary plan to be followed once the generals have no plans, or something like that. Its supposed to improve things. We don't have the full details yet, but looks very promising, including to make the AI better as its area of responsibility is now more refined.

The BP problems, some of which I just outlined, are only detrimental to experienced players in high difficulty situations versus extreme AI difficulty (where they are very tech advanced, and have many more divisions than you, just like in HOI3 to give you a challenge). Just like in HOI3, where you have AI control for theaters....you NEVER used it though because it was so so bad. Well, in HOI4, we have battle plans. Its a much better system than HOI3 theater auto-control, because you define the high level plan, and the AI executes. The AI however can foul things up at times, and certain situations can use hand management...if you want to be as efficient as possible....which as you know from HOI3, isn't necessary at all times, to beat the AI.

Ah, damn....just realized you are coming from HOI2, not HOI3...

In final, the BP can take a LOT of time to get used to. But when you are not concerned about being as efficient as possible (you certainly will still be much more efficient than the AI), it is a godsend compared to manual control of each and every single division (which is still easily done in HOI4 if you want).

 

[hkrommel]

The battleplanner is useful since there are so many provinces that managing something like the Eastern Front would involve tons of micromanagement. Coming from HOI2/DH I understand why you don't think this would be a problem, but provinces in DH are for the most part vastly larger than provinces in HOI4. Personally I use the battleplanner to run the front while I alternate focusing on different key areas with personal orders.

 

[Kaosium]

So what's the bloomin point?
If the game had an OOB system (which is missing why, exactly?), arranging 200+ divisions is relatively easy. So if the planner does nothing useful, why is it in there?

At first I was less than impressed myself and had a helluva time getting the hang of how to operate the mechanism except on the most basic level, but once I got better at it I realized there were some things I really liked about the concept. I've been playing games for most my life where all the units do exactly as I command at all times, but having served in some of those institutions I know it doesn't always work like that, there's a reason acronyms like SNAFU were coined.

Sometimes even the bugs make for some entertainment. Once when playing France back near the original release, when Germany and Italy would try to go through Switzerland if they were denied elsewhere, I rotated a number of now unneeded units from the Italian front to help my new Swiss allies. While they were in transit I noticed one of the units had broken off and was headed southwest towards Spain. Back then there was a bug or something which very occasionally caused one unit to go to a port at some point, upon which time it would return to the front, it was most noticeable when I sent volunteers to Spain or China but I'd never seen it go to another country. For whatever reason it felt the need to go to Barcelona (or Valencia--I forget exactly) before obeying the order to man the new front in Switzerland. I could tell by the unit designation it was definitely one of the units I'd sent to Spain earlier to help with the Spanish Civil War, and as the front in Switzerland was well-manned by the others I just let it continue on its path incorporating its temporary desertion into my roleplay narrative as them wanting to say goodbye to the girlfriends they made back then before they went toe-to-toe with the Germans who they'd not really seen in their previous action on the Italian front.

 

[Sleight of Hand]

Ah yes, the Switzerland bypass, I remember it well.

 

[noobermenschen]

Hey all

I have a total of over a thousand hours sunk into various iterations of HOI2 (probably more than that, but you get the idea), and I bought HOI4 on the current Steam sale.

I played a couple of games with Italy/Germany right up to the war, and sometimes into Case White. I also played through the tutorial, and at least skim-read the beginners guide.

(sidenote: the national focus trees seem somewhat lacklustre in the base game, is this fixed with the DLCs?)

I think I got the hang of the national focus/research aspects, but I have some major questions.

1, Where is the Statistics tab? I'd like to know how many divisions I've got, what air wings I've got, etc. And how much damage I've infilicted, and have taken.
2, Where is the intelligence aspect? Is spying just not in the game yet, or have I missed it?
3, I understand that divisions are now built in a system where you stockpile equipment, and then train your units. What determines how long this training will take? Can I modify that time in any way, apart from forced early deployment? When I have both current and outdated versions of equipment, what gets assigned and how?
4, What supply do units consume? I've had "low on supply" warnings for my armies a couple of times, but there is no dedicated ammo/supply slider like in HOI2. I am confused
5, On a related note, do units really not consume oil during runtime, only during production? Huh?

And the big one: Combat

I have no clue what is going on, how combat is calculated, and I am used to the much finer levels of control on being able to direct individual units, rather than having OKH level control only. Can I trust the AI to handle a front? How does it distritubte troops when I tell it to create a front line? Can I trust that it will use its hard-hitting divisions and commit all troops to a local breakthrough I ordered it to do? What's going on?

I think the game is growing on me, but my lack of understanding the combat aspect, and the apparent lack of feedback (stats tab) makes it not click with me yet.

1) Closest thing to the HoI2 statistics tab is to look at the war icon, which shows war participation and various stats like factories, divisions etc for you and your allies, as well as estimates for your enemies.

2) Not much intel. You can go to diplomacy and check "details" to get rough estimates of a country's strength. You can try to coup, which takes political power and a buttload of infantry equipment and starts a civil war in the target country.

3) You should soon get the hang of equipping divisions the way you want (maybe you need to play a full campaign where you are updating equipment several times over the years), I set reinforcement on high, upgrades on medium and new units on low until they are trained. Set your division templates on elite or reserve to have them draw your newest or oldest equipment. Try not to deploy your units green, and train them up to regular once they deploy. Once you set your draft laws to 5, 10 or 20 percent of your population training time gets a lot longer so plan your division training well ahead of time.

4 & 5) Divisions and air wings are supplied by pixie dust, which is a little tough getting used to coming from HoI2. Units are in supply zones, which can be overloaded.

And the big one: Play a while longer, I believe you will grow to enjoy it. I never could get into HoI3, which meant I was a little cautious getting this game, but I am hooked.

I am still trying to figure out how to effectively use the battle planner though, and rarely use it aside from amphibious assaults. One conclusion I have drawn is you need a fairly high unit density to keep your electronic Generals from acting retarded.

 

[Kovax]

Unlike previous HOIs, in HOI4 your units are supplied by the region (a cluster of provinces) where they are located. As long as you don't overload the region with units, they remain in supply regardless of infrastructure or distance between there and your capital. That means, you can send a large army to fight in a developed region on the other side of a desert wasteland, and the near absence of infrastructure between will be no problem. Overstacking the region where your units are located, however, WILL cause problems, so you have to decide which provinces in the region you need to defend and evacuate provinces you don't.

This is drastically different from HOI2 and 3, where supply was calculated along a path between your capital and the units at the front, and infrastructure along the supply chain could be critical to maintain sufficient supply volume to the front, but with little or no consideration for regional supply limits at the front itself. In real life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, with some supply (food, fuel, etc.) able to be drawn from local sources, but others (spare parts, ammo, replacement items) needing to be sent from major military depots or specific manufacturers (all simplified in-game as coming from your capital province).

It's pretty clear that HOI4 took a very different track than the previous iterations of the IP, some for the better and some clearly worse. Hopefully, it will prove to be a learning experience for the devs, and HOI5 ideally SHOULD incorporate the best features of all of its predecessors. The real trick is defining which features are "better" in each version (HOI2, 3, and 4 each have strong and weak points), which comes down to the personal preferences of a widely divergent group of players.

HOI3 had the ability to assign units to AI control at various levels along the chain of command, so you could have a Corps operate under AI control, an Army, an Army group, or the entire Theater. Granted, the AI (which must stand for "Artificial Insanity", as far as I can tell) had a number of distressing bad habits, but by the later expansions it was passably decent at holding a front line and avoiding encirclement. You could set an Army to guard an area of frontage, or to advance on that front, and run another Army or a Corp manually. It was clunky, but in the vast expanses of the Soviet Union (with a FAR larger number of provinces than in HOI2), running everything manually could be a daunting task and a micromanagement nightmare. One learned to use the AI for the "routine" tasks, and do anything more complicated manually. HOI4 seems to have taken that a step beyond, and provides "bonuses" for using AI control and "Battleplans", essentially punishing you for not using the AI and manually running your divisions, by denying the bonuses.

The OOB got to be a major time-sink in HOI3, but was quite useful in finding individual units and controlling groups of units. They removed it in HOI4 (to my dismay), but the resulting wave of complaints seems to have made an impression, and there's talk of bringing it back in some simpler form. I just hope they can bring back most the functionality without the corresponding tedium.

I'm sticking with HOI3 at least until they sort out a few critical issues, if they ever do.

 

[BeauNiddle]

Unlike previous HOIs, in HOI4 your units are supplied by the region (a cluster of provinces) where they are located. As long as you don't overload the region with units, they remain in supply regardless of infrastructure or distance between there and your capital. That means, you can send a large army to fight in a developed region on the other side of a desert wasteland, and the near absence of infrastructure between will be no problem. Overstacking the region where your units are located, however, WILL cause problems, so you have to decide which provinces in the region you need to defend and evacuate provinces you don't.

Actually that's not exactly true. The path is traced back to your capital and bottlenecks do stop later regions getting as many supplies.

The effect is mitigated by some supplies being produced locally and by adjoining regions also offering supplies.

If the UK or Japan get their ports strategically bombed you will see a lot of their troops getting out of supply.

 

[Sleight of Hand]

Actually that's not exactly true. The path is traced back to your capital and bottlenecks do stop later regions getting as many supplies.

The effect is mitigated by some supplies being produced locally and by adjoining regions also offering supplies.

If the UK or Japan get their ports strategically bombed you will see a lot of their troops getting out of supply.

Indeed, and this is one of the (numerous) benefits of encircling enemy units; if you can create a pocket by cutting off enemy states from adjoining ones, the divisions within the pocket stop receiving supplies.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

1, Where is the Statistics tab? I'd like to know how many divisions I've got, what air wings I've got, etc. And how much damage I've infilicted, and have taken.
2, Where is the intelligence aspect? Is spying just not in the game yet, or have I missed it?
3, I understand that divisions are now built in a system where you stockpile equipment, and then train your units. What determines how long this training will take? Can I modify that time in any way, apart from forced early deployment? When I have both current and outdated versions of equipment, what gets assigned and how?
4, What supply do units consume? I've had "low on supply" warnings for my armies a couple of times, but there is no dedicated ammo/supply slider like in HOI2. I am confused
5, On a related note, do units really not consume oil during runtime, only during production? Huh?

(1) Unit numbers can be found in the upper right menus (hotkeys: O, P, L), equipment is shown in the Logistics tab (I), manpower losses are listed in the war alert in the topbar.
(2) Intelligence is a subtab of the diplomacy tab. Open it by rightclicking on a country, then click on the "Details" button. This will show you a variety of INTEL info, afaik info accuracy it is affected by your encrypt/decrypt ratio.
(3) More stuff in a division = longer training times. On top of that some laws and country modifiers can alter training times. You have no control over training times outside of early deployment. Equipment assignment depends on priority (the little red, yellow or green buttons in the Deploy screen). On top of that you can assign individual Designs in the Division Designer with a priority rating (Reserve, Default, Elite) that will determine distribution for units that have the same equipment assignment priority in the Deploy screen.
(4) Units do not consume supply. Instead they but "weight" on the local supply limit. If you exceed the limit your units will (after a short grace period) start to take attrition damage and suffer a combat penalty (both scaling with the amount of exceeding the limit).
(5) The game sorta assumes that you aquire enough resources to maintain and use the units throughout the game, so in a way you are paying the cost "up front".

And the big one: Combat

I have no clue what is going on, how combat is calculated, and I am used to the much finer levels of control on being able to direct individual units, rather than having OKH level control only. Can I trust the AI to handle a front? How does it distritubte troops when I tell it to create a front line? Can I trust that it will use its hard-hitting divisions and commit all troops to a local breakthrough I ordered it to do? What's going on?

I think the game is growing on me, but my lack of understanding the combat aspect, and the apparent lack of feedback (stats tab) makes it not click with me yet.

You can manually control units down to Division level at any time (even when assigned to AI control via Frontlines / The Battleplanner).
If you want to control on a lower level you can technically create small divisions with only a few battallions (but I'd not recommend this since they tend to take higher losses in combat). I'd recommend to stick with 20-sized divisions (others prefer 40), which is sorta equal to what you had in HOI2.

Personally I do not use the Battleplanner, and overall I wouldn't trust it with anything outside of very limited operations (e.g. attacking one or two specific provinces) unless you have a decent advantage (numbers and/or quality) over your enemy. If you have defeated the GER spearbeads as SOV, it is decent enough to roll over the remains of their army, though.