Hearts Of Iron 4 Army Guide
Hearts of Iron 4 is a complicated game, but hopefully you’re starting to learn the ropes. Our basic tips can help you out with the interface, and check out our motivational lecture on how you really ought to put in the time and energy to learn the game properly. That’s all well and good, but let’s get to the nitty-gritty: unit production and management. Check out these tips for help managing and creating your perfect World War II army.
Entering The Field: Land, Sea And Air
Different types of units enter the field in different ways. For land units: in the building screen you're only building their equipment. You still need to train the soldiers to actually use the equipment, which you can do in the deployment screen. Ships, however, are automatically deployed from the building screen (and you can choose the location in a small icon that should start ticked to ‘auto’). Once built, planes appear in your hangar, which has no size limits. They're useless there, so get them to the front by clicking on the insignia on the map of one of your airfields. You can also deploy directly to the decks of your aircraft carriers. Either way, once you transfer the planes to airfields or carriers, they can be assigned to missions.
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Using Support Positions
Hearts of Iron IV. All Discussions. Such an army might suffice for Poland and France, but will get rekt by Greece, and those damn Romanians!!! Jun 15, 2016 @ 8:47pm Originally posted by Skippah: All depends on terrain and who you're fighting. If for instance you're at '39-41 and trying to invade USSR, I'd strongly suggest. Hearts of Iron IV. Yet, you will get in one shot the proposed HOI 4 setup and the historical setup together, so you can basically copy it and also learn a bit about the real units too. On the homepage, you can find the proper high resolution screenshots of these layouts see the link on screen and in the description. Due to their elite status, each nation is able to build a limited amount of elite units, with a minimum of 6 brigades and a maximum of 4% of total infantry brigades. Rangers (USA) This elite infantry unit is reserved for the United States of America.
Researching support positions can give your army a major edge as you improve your medics, mechanics and other behind-the-front-lines forces. However, to actually reap the rewards of these developments, you have to edit the composition of your divisions in the deployment screen. You can choose the makeup of each division and add the support positions to the vanilla infantry divisions. It will take more training before divisions with heavy support units can enter the field, but they can give you a significant edge.
Division Training
Divisions train at roughly the same speed—you can train ten divisions at once at the same speed as just one. The only limitations: you need the hardware (tanks, guns, etc.) for the units or the training will stall out, and you need sufficient manpower. Training naturally scales up with how quickly you can manufacture weapons, which will usually be the limiting factor early on.
Using Armies Effectively
The best way to manage your troops is with armies. The tutorial shows you how to make them, but that’s about it. Don’t just lump a bunch of random troops into a giant army for each front and go at it. You want to be a little more nuanced when you form your armies. For instance, to fight a campaign on a large front, you might want a very large infantry army. These can deploy to a large section of the front and will spread out and defend it. Then, you can add smaller specialized armies to individual sections of the same front by holding right-click and drawing the section using the front line selection tool. This gives you more tactical options, like having the infantry army push forward everywhere as your tanks try to crack through the line in the south. Pulling units from one army to another isn’t the easiest thing to do in the interface, so be careful and form them right in the first place to save yourself some time.
The Front
We included this tip in our basic tips article too, but if you’re messing it up, it’ll fix a lot of your problems at one go. When you're drawing your battle plan, you aren’t drawing the path where your armies should move. Instead, you’re drawing the new front line, rather than the line of movement. Your armies will automatically advance based on the front line you draw. Battle plans can have multiple steps, too: just draw further front lines and your armies will push forward to those after getting to the first ones.
Any other big Hearts of Iron IV unit tips you want to throw into the mix?
Hearts of Iron IV is an intricate and complicated game, with a huge number of mechanics to wrap your head around. It’s a hard game to learn, but it’s immensely rewarding. All of us are in the same boat, learning together since the game’s recent launch, but here are a few basic tips to help beginners and new players get up to speed. These focus mostly on the interface; also check out our unit tips guide.
Menus
Let’s start with a real basic one that isn’t necessarily obvious: some of the national focus screens and research screens can scroll to the right. It’s a little more noticeable for the research screens, but you may have a lot more national focus options than you think. That’s the trouble of such a complicated interface: It’s easy to miss things.
Diplomacy Basics
Hearts of Iron IV is a war game, of course, but it isn’t all about war. Diplomacy plays a huge role, and there are a bunch of actions you can take even before war breaks out—this is especially relevant if you start in 1936 instead of 1939. You can offer lend-lease programs to your allies even if you’re not involved in the war yet to help keep them afloat. Of course, you’ll need a lot of excess production for this to be viable, but hey, that’s why it’s a United States thing.
But that’s just the beginning. The real fun comes in the intrigue, like meddling in other countries’ politics… and supporting particular political parties. Pushing for particular parties to win can help make Hearts of Iron IV diverge dramatically from world history (communists in Britain? Maybe you can make it happen!), and is definitely worth playing around with.
Civilian Factories
The Hearts of Iron IV tutorial loves to tell you to build civilian factories , even before military factories, but it doesn’t do a great job of explaining what civilian factories actually do. Here’s the lowdown: they increase the number of structures you can build at once (and, to some degree, the speed in which you build them). So they accelerate your overall production rate down the line. They’re an investment, but they’re worth it in the long run. Try building lots of civilian factories at first, then start splashing in military factories when your production has some flexibility.
Battle Plans
This one’s a little obvious… unless you’re messing it up, in which case you’re probably really frustrated. When you're drawing your battle plan, don’t think that’s the path your armies will actually move along. It isn’t. You aren’t drawing the armies’ movement path, but the new front they’re going to advance toward. The arrows, representing your forces’ paths toward those positions, will autopopulate based on the front line you draw. You can even make battle plans with multiple steps: just draw further front lines and your units will push forward after getting to the first ones.
These are just the basics, but Hearts of Iron IV isn’t always as intuitive as we would like. Sometimes starting at the beginning makes sense. Also check out our big slew of tips about preparing your units and armies, and other Hearts of Iron IV tips.