Have you ever looked at a map and experienced an almost carnal rush of admiration? Then you've come to the right grand strategy PC videogame preview, for Hearts of Iron 4 has an excellent world map that depicts not only the movement of troops, but the vast logistical networks that support them. Enough games have tackled the close, tactical tit-for-tat of ground combat, this is a game about the industry, business and politics of war.
The division template system is one of the key mechanics of Hearts of Iron IV. A division is 1 basic unit depicted on the map during gameplay. The composition of each division is specified by its division template. Division templates can be created and modified by the player using spending army experience. The composition of your division can make or break a battle. Other Hearts of Iron IV Guides:
Where and How to Edit Division TemplatesYou can edit division templates by going to: Recruit & Deploy -> Then click 'Edit' on the desired division. Each division has a division template. Here is an example of a 7 Infantry - 2 Artilery division template: Reset -> Reset the edits you've made but haven't saved. Duplicate -> Create another division template just like this one without spending army experience, useful if you want to make a new division template while still keeping this one. The 3 Arrows -> Red is for backup units, they are the last to receive quality equipment, white is for normal units, and yellow is for elite units, they are the first to receive quality equipement (new weapons or of you're lacking equipment they will be the first one to be filled). You can manually choose which divisions you consider to be elite, normal or backup. This is how a division looks like:
The Stats Screen and Base StatsBase Stats, Combat Stats are Equipment Cost located on the right side of the division template. These are the stats for the 7 Infantry - 2 Artilery division from above. The stats may change based on your national ideas or completed researches. Universally speaking, higher values are better except for Weight, Supply Use and Combat Width. I. Base StatsMax Speed -> The base maximum speed a unit can go, this value is usually lower due to terrain and infrastructure modifiers, however certain things increase this such as engineers. HP (Hitpoints) -> How much damage your unit can take during combat. Infantry and variants have a lot of this because they are many, while armor has very little. Organization -> This is very important. It's your unit's ability to sustain combat. It is important to keep it in the back of your head, but not make it dictate your unit composition. Provided primarily by infantry and motorized or mechanized. It's usually between 25 and 60. Recovery Rate -> How fast your units will regain organization. Recovery is as important as organization. However, since most units that provide recovery also provide organization, these values usually balance each other out. It's usually between 0.30 and 0.44. Reconnaissance -> High reconnaissance increases the chances of a unit to pick a combat tactic that better counters the enemy's chosen tactic. It is only affected by 2 things: whether you have support battalions & whether you have Shock&Awe research of the Superior Firepower doctrine or Infiltration in Depth of the Grand Battleplan doctrine. Both of these doctrines are at or near the very end of their trees, thus your recon value is usually equal to your recon batallion's level with values between 1 and 7 with an absolute maximum of 8. Suppression -> Whether you're albe to keep the revolts in an occupied territory in check. Suppression has very few things that affect it, cavalry is good for suppression, providing 2 per cavalry while most other units provide 1 and the Military Police provides a 10% modifier to the unit value. In combat it doesn't offer anything and is pretty neglectable. Weight -> How many convoys it takes to ship your unit. Only important for countries that have to ship their units by sea. Very closely related to Supply Use, but then without any actual meaning. Supply Use -> How much supply use your units use (press F4 in game to see the supply lines), which directly translates to how many units you can have in any given province. As a general rule: Infantry uses very little supply, tanks use a lot of supply, Logistics Company support company is indispensible. Reliability -> Affected only by the Maintenance Battalion, Reliability is a modifier to the base reliability of a vehicle (such as the effect of a tank designer). This applies to vehicles only. As far as I can tell it affects mostly during attrition, and doesn't appear to have the same combat effects as reliability does for ships. Trickleback & Exp.Loss -> Trickleback is how many casualties are returned to your manpower pool and exp.loss is how much experience is lost when these casualties are replaced by fresh men. They only change with the use of a Field Hospital battalion. This makes the Field Hospital support company extremely important for nations with a low manpower pool. Combat Stats and Equipment CostII. Combat StatsSoft Attack -> A unit's ability to deal damage. As a general rule: Infantry has very low soft attack, tanks have pretty low soft attack, artillery and SPG units have insanely high soft attacks. Most people, and especially the AI, build an army consisting 90-100% of infantry, infantry is very soft and thus soft attack is one of the very most important stats you look at. Hard Attack -> A unit's ability to deal hard damage to tanks and mechanized units. Tanks and Anti-Tank guns have high hard attack. Air Attack -> A unit's ability to shoot at planes. Support AA (Support battalion) is more cost-effective than line-AA for air-attack purposes. Support AA or Line-AA is the most cost-effective (production-wise) AA when you take the researches for this. Defense -> A unit's ability to not break under attack. Absorbing damage that would otherwise have gone to a unit's organization. This value is provided primarily by Infantry and derivatives. For armored units, this alone makes motorized or mechanized indispensible as without it your units are simply unable to defend. Breakthrough -> A unit's ability to break the enemy units under attack. Breakthrough is less relevant than defense for the typical player as you want to hold the ground that you take, having enemies bleed off their organization on the attack and counter-attacking to maintain momentum in a push. It's usually around 150. Armor -> A unit's ability to resist the enemy's piercing. When the enemy cannot pierce, you take 50% less damage, 50% less organization loss and you deal 50% more organization loss to the units you are facing, this bonus is applied to your entire division. Thus, armor alone can make a unit work, even if on paper it seems hopelessly outclassed. Armor values are one of the things that develop extremely quickly between armored vehicles. Not very useful unless you have enough of it. Piercing -> All piercing does is deny the enemy the bonuses armor could provide him. Units with the highest piercing are tank destroyers followed by regular tanks. Although infantry anti-tank provides good piercing to all infantry units it will prove insufficient if you are facing a clever enemy in multiplayer, as the piercing bonus is based on a percentage value and will have a limited impact on actual stats. Initiative -> The reinforce rate and planning speed. It is affected only by the signal company, and seems to have very little tangible impact on battles other than the planning bonuses. Entrenchment -> Affected only by the Engineer Company support battalion, Entrenchment affects how much and how fast a unit gets entrenched. Very similar to Recon, Reliability and Initiative, there are very few things that affect this value, and it is universal regardless of which line units you employ. While Field Marshalls with 'Defensive Doctrine” affect maximum entrenchment it is not represented in this stat. Combat Width -> How much space the unit takes on the battlefield. A typical fight has 80 combat width, thus you could fit 8 units of 10, 4 units of 20, 2 units of 40 or 1 unit of 80. Each combat width range is representative of an approach to the game. When you make many units of 10 combat width, you increase the density of support battalions on the field, effectively increasing your entire army's effectiveness at no additional cost of combat width. The 40 combat width aims to get the most out of its line units. The 20 combat width is the balanced method. If you get a Field Marshall with Offensive Doctrine, which reduces the combat width of all units under his command by 10%, you can create units of 11, 22 and 44 combat width respectively and have them all act as if they are 10, 20 and 40 combat width. III. Equipment CostManpower -> How many people your division employs. More men in the division means more men on the battlefield and bigger casualty numbers. Typically you want to keep this number as low as possible, but at no point should this be your main aim as it is hard to impossible to balance out. As a general rule, line-artillery units and armor take 500 men per unit in your division, infantry takes 1000 and motorized & mechanized take 1200. Training Time -> There are two versions of training time, 120 and 180. 120 is for infantry and 180 for tanks. This is a time listed in days, but since Armor = 180, Infantry = 120, you just have to take this value as it is. Equipment numbers -> All the individual numbers of vehicles and other equipment you would require to produce this division template. It is here that you can make a good estimate of how to distribute your overall production. IV. Additional StatsHearts Of Iron 4 Supply Lines FreeHardness (the bar below the division template) -> The ratio of damage you take. If your unit has 43% hardness you take 57% soft attack and 43% hard attack. For example, if you are being attacked by a unit with 1000 soft attack and 200 hard attack, you will receive (1000 * 0.57) + (200 * 0.43) = 656 damage. Estimated Production Cost -> The minimum and maximum estimated production cost of a unit. These values represent the overall production cost in industrial capacity of your unit, and do not represent the material requirements of each division. Naturally a lower cost is better. Infantry Divisions20 width 7/2 divisions -> 7 infantry and 2 artillery battalions. Good starter division, but is completely outclassed by 40 width divisions in almost every situation. Still good in low supply areas like Africa or Asia. 20 width 6/2/1 divisions -> 6 infantry, 2 artillery and 1 Light Tank Destroyer of year at least 1936. The goal being to provide an armor bonus against the majority of AI and maybe even player builds while providing piercing to beat up any armor that may be encountered along the way. This does not work with the 1934 Light Tank Destroyer version. The 40 width divisions outclass 20 width divisions because of how criticals are calculated. The 40 width divisions do more damage at the expense of having half the organization of 20 divisions because they have the same, but it's only 1 division instead of 2 divisions, however they deal 4-5 times more damage, so the tradeoff for using 20's is barely worth it. This generally leads to faster fights if both of you are fighting with 40's. 20's on the other hand might not do so much damage but will hold the line for longer. This in turn makes your enemy take more attrition damage so don't underestimate 20's defensive power, especially in wide theaters. Most people like to have a line of 20's as the front and then a smaller army of 40's to do the pushing. 40 width 14/4 divisions -> 14 infantry and 4 artillery battalions. This is preferable to the above division, especially if you're fighting in Europe. 40 width 13/4/2 divisions BROKEN/OP: 40 width 13/2/1 divisions 'Space Marines' -> 13 infantry, 2 artillery and 1 Heavy Tank Destroyer battalion. These are usually banned in multiplayer games as they are completely game breaking. The AI basically never builds enough AT to counter the extra armor you have on these infantry divisions. Tank Divisions20 width 6/4 division -> 6 medium tank and 4 motorized battalions. Maintenance companies are good on your armored divisions to reduce attrition losses. 40 width 15/5 division -> 15 medium tank and 5 motorized battalions. Higher production cost, but these divisions are nearly unstoppable. Probably banned in most MP games, and will destroy anything they face in singleplayer. Ending TipsMaintenance companies & Attrition -> Attrition is mostly caused by terrain not supply. So if you are fighting in the jungle, desert or mountains you will suffer a lot of attrition. Maintenance companies will reduce attrition taken. You can also just accept the losses taken. AA divisions & Strategic Bombers -> No division AA only protect the divisions they are in and not the province or anything else. They reduce the defense and speed penalty from enemy air superiority. They will also shoot down close air support engaged. But they have to be engaged inside combat. Breakthrough & Defense -> Breakthrough is identical to defense in function. When you are on the offensive you use breakthrough when on the defense you use defense. These just reduce damage taken. There is a limit as every defense can only reduce 1 point of enemy attack. Mechanized & Heavy Tanks -> Mechanized are a defensive upgrade for tanks with a secondary role of AT. Hardness greatly reduce damage infantry/mediums can do, defense helps protect from counter attack, and HP reduces losses. The higher the tech and more tanks the better these are. Heavy tanks provide armor, and AT mostly at the cost of speed. You only need 1 heavy tank to get the majority of armor at the cost of speed. Hearts Of Iron 4 Supply Lines Between Workshops40 width & 20 width -> 40 width is stronger in most situations. It's less flexible but stronger in combat.
Hearts of Iron 4, like its predecessors, is set during World War 2, and runs on an advanced version of Crusader King 2's Clausewitz engine. Time trickles away at a gradual pace, but can be paused to issue complex orders. You take charge of the military infrastructure of a nation of your choice, and manage their war effort by tweaking interlocking layers of research, production, politics and, of course, troop movement.
Air sweepersAir sweepers help in clearing your skies. Giant bomb clash of clans. Air sweepers are highly effective against LavaLoon attacks. TrapsTraps are always at the end. They can ruin a perfectly done LavaLoon attack.
You want to build a tank in Hearts of Iron 4. You've researched the production processes you need to assemble some famous German armour: the Panzer IV. You choose how many factories to assign to the task, but production lines for new technology are inefficient—a dozen facilities may only produce three tanks a week. Over time, they'll become faster and more useful, but there's a teething period that makes any switch to upgraded tech painful.
This simple rule lets Paradox reflect vital differences between each nation's industrial setup. German engineering favoured separate, tailored designs for their war machines, and that hurt their ability to mass produce. If you want to tech up as the Germans in Hearts of Iron, the production system will put you in a similar bind. If you master the tech transition problem, you can tweak new naval and heavy armour designs to boost their resilience, firepower or speed, and apply further buffs through the political system. Senior political figures apply bonuses to their areas of expertise; elect Joe McBoat to a top job and you'll receive bonuses to your naval output.
You've got your tanks, but you've got to get them to your front lines, keep them oiled, and keep their crews fed. Open supply lines are vital. At sea, you can target trade routes to damage enemy supply. On land supply is represented by a heat-map overlay that calculates how well supplied each zone is based on enemy influence in nearby areas, and the proximity of big population centres. Big cities are now capable of supplying themselves, which might seem like a small update, but this allows Hearts of Iron 4 to model prolonged sieges like Stalingrad where encirclement and air superiority won't necessarily guarantee a quick win.
Air dominance is still important, of course. You send bombers on air raid sorties from select home bases, but you'll want to make sure they're well guarded by fighters. If you rob the enemy of their AA capability, you can strike at their production centres with impunity to gain a vital production advantage. You can capitalise on your enemy's production woes with smooth manufacturing processes of your own, which you can accentuate by striking deals with the major tech companies of the time to take advantage of their engine-building and materials expertise.
You defeat nations by taking victory points within their territory, tied to a nation's major cities and landmarks. It's important to pay attention to terrain as you plan attacks. Countries are split into provinces, themselves split into subsectors that contain plains, forests and rivers that affect troop movement. You give your orders by assigning units to a commanding officer, and then drawing their orders onto the map, itself a detailed sketch of the world rendered in muted greens and coffee-stain browns. It's Europe through a moody instagram filter.
These arrows represent combat plans. As you leave them in place, they'll grow in effectiveness to reflect the extra intelligence and planning work being administered by top brass. It's a risk, though. Successful enemy spywork will reveal your movement arrows to the enemy and give them chance to prepare. As you'll see in the screenshot above, weather changes the map significantly, and there are penalties for sending infantry marching through the wilderness during winter in Russia.
Hearts of Iron 4 is shaping up well. It's slick and clever, and while there's not much, visually, to the moment that troops clash, the point of conflict in HoI is an almost incidental result of a vast continent-wide engineering effort. It's a game about careful, detailed state organisation and top-level strategy. You pull arrows across the map with a push of the mouse, painting out your strategy with sweeping gestures that give physical form to the feelings of power and control that drive a good grand strategy game. I hope its systems are balanced enough to prop up that fantasy. We'll find out when it's released early next year.
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Cheat Codes
While playing the game, press ~ to display the console window. Then, type one of the following codes and press [Enter] to activate the corresponding cheat function:
Note: Some examples are 'civilwar fascism POL' for the fascists to start a civil war in Poland, 'civilwar democratic ITA' for the democrats to start a civil war in Italy, and 'civilwar communism AST' for the communists to start a civil war in Australia.
Equipment names
Use one of the following names with the 'add_equipment [amount] [equipment name]' code:
You’ve probably won the Second World War in a video game before. Maybe as a commando, maybe as a pilot. But have you ever won the Second World War the way it was actually won? Because it was won with logistics, and..hey, wait, I promise it’s more exciting than it sounds.
Hearts of Iron IV is a strategy video game, but unless you’re a veteran of Paradox’s special take on the genre, it’s not what you’re used to. Company of Heroes this ain’t. Instead of taking direct control over units and smaller-scale tactics, HoIIV puts you at the very top of the war’s food chain, where you need to look after nearly every aspect of your nation’s strategic management.
This goes way beyond the mere movement of your fleets, armies and air forces. You’re also in charge of diplomacy, research, recruitment and, most importantly, production. Not for a base, not for a region, but for the entire war. Think about the scale of that task: you’re responsible for taking millions of men, building them weapons and equipment, arming them, training them, moving them around the world and then keeping them supplied, reinforced and protected by navies and air forces.
And that’s just scratching the surface. In HoIIV you can also design your own division templates, deciding how best to mix combat and support units throughout your armies. You can trade goods internationally, balancing the competing needs of your guns & butter economy. You can even knuckle down, take individual armies and draw them little custom battle plans, complete with sweeping arrows and projected front lines.
If that sounds like a lot to squeeze into a single video game, that’s because it is. Hearts of Iron IV is overwhelming in both its depth and, more importantly, its complexity. It’s all well and good to list all the stuff you can and must do in HoIIV, like I just did above, but it’s important to remember that the more a player is able to do, the more buttons and menus are required to allow them to do it. And this game is drowning in them.
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The reality of this is that I’m going to spend much of this review saying nice things about Hearts of Iron IV, but if you’re not willing or able to learn how to tame this game’s interface, then it will all be for naught. And I’m not fucking around here: I hear all the time from people that no matter how highly I recommend Crusader Kings II, it’s just too complicated. Well, this makes CKII look like a Super Mario jaunt.
I understand why this is. Games like Hearts of Iron IV are Paradox’s bread and butter, and the kind of person who wants to spend hours agonising over military supply chains is *points at venn diagram hanging on the wall* often the same kind of person who won’t mind grappling with a deeply abstract and abstruse means of controlling a video game.
But it’s 2016, I’ve been playing these games for years, and I’m getting sick of just waving my hands and repeating that mantra as though it’s just the way things are, and forever will be. Paradox’s strategy games can, and need to do a better job of being more approachable. Not dumber, not simpler, just better organised. Smarter interface design. Better tips. And for the love of God, a functional tutorial. Stellaris had one, so it’s a shame to see HoIIV take a few steps backwards when of all the studio’s recent games it probably needed one the most.
For almost my first week with this game, I felt like I was battling the interface as much as the Nazis. It’s just so wild, and inconsistent in the way it’s structured. Sometimes a left-click will do something, other times a right-click. Things that should be presented the same way between screens and menus are not. Some mouse-hover prompts (and event notifications) are highly useful! Others are not.
So if you’re tempted by the idea of HoIIV, you need to know this. Simply learning this game’s absolute basics, like equipping divisions of infantry with guns and sending them somewhere to fight, is an ordeal. Getting further than that is going to take some serious work.
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But if that sounds like a challenge, and not an obstacle, then oh boy, are you in for one hell of a war.
I played two campaigns in Hearts of Iron IV for this review. My first was as the Americans, and began in 1936. This gave me enough time to get the country ready for war, so by the time the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, we were ready to roll.
I got America’s vast resources into the war as early as I could (isolationism is not fun in this game), with the first expeditionary forces reaching North Africa and Europe in 1940. The North African campaign went much as history’s did, but what happened in France started making me realise that this game, despite its strong roots in world history, was capable of making some big surprises.
Instead of being steamrolled by the Germans, the French (and Danes) held strong. With North Africa wrapped up by early 1941, I shipped my expeditionary force into Southern France, where they helped withstand almost a year of constant, almost First World War-like grind. A shocking 400,000 casualties later (just from my Americans, the French lost millions), the German’s manpower reserves (each nation has a finite pool of combat-ready humans) ran out, and they buckled. Joined by fresh Commonwealth troops from Canada and Australia, the Allies went on the offensive, Berlin falling to French tanks in December 1942.
Peace was brokered, Nazi Germany dismantled and with Japan eerily quiet and content to stay put, I got a little bored and decided to try a different nation in a different starting point. My second campaign, then, was as the British, and began in August 1939. And holy shit was this one a wild ride.
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Again, France held strong against Germany’s initial onslaught, again, America entered the war early, and again, I spent a considerable amount of time in North Africa against the Italians. With Germany defeated early once again (late 1941 this time), I was worried that this game might be selling my wars a few years short.
Nope. Shortly after Berlin’s fall and the end of this game’s first war, Japan attacked. Though they shouldn’t have bothered. Without a two-front war to worry about, American and British troops transferred from Europe and blunted the Japanese offensive almost immediately. Japan itself was invaded in 1942 and surrender came quickly after.
Which is when things got interesting. While the Western Allies had been busy with the Axis powers across two wars, the Soviet Union and Communist China had teamed up with plans for global domination, and when the Soviets invaded democratic Poland and Turkey, the world was back at war for the third time in a decade. And this time, it really was a war to end all wars.
Allied and Soviet forces clashed everywhere. The French were up against it leading European forces in Germany, Italy and Scandinavia. British armies were hanging on throughout the Middle East, India and Central Asia. American and Japanese troops were fighting in Korea and China.
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This war was not a short sprint. It dragged on for five years of slaughter and stalemate, until French and British armies smashed the Soviet lines in Germany and pushed on all the way to Moscow. Even then, Stalin’s surrender only came after I’d dropped the world’s first two atomic bombs on Kursk and Stalingrad.
Those are two pretty different experiences, both from each other and how the actual war turned out. Which is key to a game like this: you want the ability to simulate the circumstances around the Second World War, but nobody wants to simply retread the thing over and over.
And that was me coming at the war quite conservatively. There are so many other ways things can go down: nations can flip politically (a communist France would align with Russia instead of Britain, for example), and depending on whether you begin the game in 1936 or 1939 you could be looking at a very different world at the war’s commencement than the history books record.
That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about the game. On the surface it feels very limiting, considering other Paradox games let you live out whole historical eras, but in practice there’s a surprising amount of flexibility and, well, surprise in the ways each war can play out differently (though you can select a pre-game option that makes things pan out historically).
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The thing I dug the most, though, was that for all the game’s kinks and inconsistencies, once I’d wrangled the interface and learned how to do everything, I felt empowered. I was more in command than in any other purely military strategy game I had ever played. Let the Captains and Colonels handle the small-scale stuff. I was looking down at the war from the very top, and as boring as logistics and research may sound, it was a blast.
There’s something weirdly satisfying about seeing your little armies victorious not because you clicked your mouse faster than the AI, but because your multi-faceted approach to designing and equipping a force of millions was a sound one. A slow death by manufacturing is more gratifying than a quick one with bullets.
For what it’s worth—and I’m not an expert on these matters in real life—the nuts and bolts of most of the game’s building and planning systems seemed to work. Being so deep I obviously couldn’t pick through every corner of every faction’s possible outcomes, but the ebb and flow of wars and supply of armies seemed fine.
What was annoying, though, is the game’s AI, which at launch is a little wonky. Given Paradox’s existing record of constantly patching and updating their games for years, it’s not something I’m too concerned about, but if you’re looking at playing the game in the immediate future then you need to know that some aspects of AI behaviour, especially diplomatic behaviour like when to declare war, is a little mad.
Two examples from my campaigns: Colombia allying with Japan and sending troops to the Japanese mainland..just as my British armies laid siege to Tokyo. Window 7 service pack 1. That was weird. There were also loads of instances of smaller nations like Hungary and Finland going crazy with their declarations of war.
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You’ll also find some problems with the way allies behave, too. The game lacks the means to properly coordinate a war effort with your friends and colleagues, so you’re left to watch/hope that they do the right thing. Sometimes they do! Sometimes they just wander around the battlefield. This is obviously more of a problem if you’re playing as the Allies (especially a smaller nation). Hopefully a future update adds the ability to properly discuss and formulate cooperative battle plans.
Oh, and the game has an odd tendency to stick too strongly to the way a war begins, rather than what it becomes. So despite my big fracas against the Soviets pulling in most of the planet, the USA sat it out, because the obscure initial cause of the war—an invasion of a democratic Polish state—didn’t match with its foreign policy, even though everything that came after surely did.
In case it’s not clear by now, I’ve tailored this review for newcomers to the series, folks who may have been drawn to Paradox’s games through the recent success/exposure of games like Crusader Kings II and Stellaris. If you’ve got experience with Hearts of Iron III, I guess all I can say is that as much as I bitched about the interface up top, you’ll find this a lot easier to get around, especially when it comes to production.
For everyone else, Hearts of Iron IV is an incredibly rewarding strategy experience, letting you roll your sleeves up and re-fight the Second World War in a way that few other series have ever even attempted, let alone pulled off.
Just know that to reap those rewards, you’re going to need to put in some work, and put up with a few quirks while you’re at it.
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