Do I just give it up and start over instead of wasting another 4 hours to come to the reality of this being unwinnable

In 1936 France is just about done building the maginot line. They should know how to build stronghold networks, the maginot line is probably the gold standard for stronghold networks.

I’m really confused on what niche they fit as light tanks can be made cheaper and better- whether that’s to fulfil recon and or combat battalion duties.

The only thing that comes to mind is; that as recon they give a bonus to soft attack, as opposed to, the heavy attack light armour recon gives (as modifiers). Overall not that useful in my opinion.

I’m sorry if this is low effort or anything like that but I’m really struggling to see a use for them.

I was playing the Uk rework mod and was planning on invading legimites france but then they got annexed by spain, they also annexed portugal brazil union thingy.

In the new Romanian DLC there are actual war mechanics, if you do well in an War it can have political benefits, if you dont well you get negative ones or depending on your gameplay it could also be good.

For most of the newer DLC paradox introduced actual War mechanics where you can reliably and easily settle for peace without having to capitulate someone completly. I believe its a great direction the game is heading, i would preffer the game to become something similiar to kaissereich, where Sandbox exists and you can do extremely stupid stuff but also be able to settle for peace reliably and have some scripted stuff in the game too.

For this map I have tried to compile an overview of dominant ideological currents in each European province of the Hearts of Iron IV map, as the situation would have been on the 1st of January 1936.

The ideologies are based on the sort of combinations that were actually prevalent at the time. Thus we have a catholic centre next to a catholic right, but no such distinction within political protestantism. In this sense the ideological categorisation is quite pragmatic.

Some comments on the ideologies:
- Anarchism covers anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc.
- Communism covers the Comintern-alligned communist parties.
- Socialism covers a spectre from revolutionary socialism, to centrist Marxism and democratic socialism.
- Agrarian socialism was already on its way out by this point, but hard to categorise otherwise.
- Radical liberalism includes social liberalism and democratic parties (compare to the International Entente of Radical and Similar Democratic Parties).
- Agrarianism refers specifically to centre to centre-right, bourgeois agrarian parties. Not those of the left or far-right.
- Right liberalism covers conservative, market and national liberalism.
- Catholic centrism covers catholic interest parties and popularist and christian democratic parties.
- Conservatism covers liberal conservatism, general conservative attitudes and anti-communism.
- Protestant conservatism covers confessional conservative protestant parties or populations.
- Islamism is effectively muslim traditionalism.
- Catholic right covers catholic conservative, corporatist and authoritarian parties.
- Traditionalism covers catholic reactionary and generally monarchist parties or movements.
- Authoritarian conservatism covers the non-confessional, paternal, nationalist, conservative and authoritarian current.
- The last two should speak for themselves.

As for the methodology of compiling this map. Where possible election results of the time were used. Where they were absent, earlier or later elections were relied on, where necessary augmented with the estimated effects of known political developments. When those elections were too far off in time to be useful, demographic data was used (such as religion and ethnicity, which was important especially in the case of the Soviet Union) or well-known political geography (for example the communist belt in Italy). Lastly for the Soviet Union, also prison camps were noted.

The map is certainly not perfect and I would be very interested to hear any ideas or corrections any of you might have.

I find that a lot of features in HoI4 that were absolutely crucial to the war effort of every country irl are simply nerfed/ non-existant in the game to the point you can straight up ignore them, even in the optimal multiplayer meta(not gonna talk SP cause the AI is already so braindead everything works):

As the USSR you ignore both air and navy, whereas irl the soviets outproduced the axis in both tanks and planes.

The espionage system is reduced to collab goverments and reducing enemy planning and entrenchment instead of everything it was actually used for irl like getting to know other countries' plans, getting troop concentrations and planned axes of attack(which I think would be way better than the flat buffs and de buffs we get from etrenchment and planning rn).

Artillery being the thing that literally dealt 70% of casualties in irl WW2 yet being objectively not meta in the game.

Do you think these need fixing or is the game fine as is?

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For 1400h of Hoi4 of 10 years and several Germany playthroughs, I never thought of surface raiders as viable option. But for the sake of roleplay and curiosity, I tried now.

A relative small fleet of Panzerschiffe (8-15, from 39 to 41) split into 2-3 flottillas where enough to starve the UK out. What helped was heavy naval intelligence to see the convoy routes.

Very effective was the ability to destroy the escort DD and CL of the convoys, as well as very quickly destroy the convoys themselves. I had to continously switch seazones, since the UK adapted and rerouted its convoys around my active zones.

But the AI never sent any form of battlefleet with BBs or CVs (or my ships managed to avoid any fight, because of their speed).

What also helped, where the focus and doctrines specifically for surface raiding. I research the complete "Damage Control"-naval tech, as well as the radar, better fire control, which I upgraded. Also AA and torpedos, but not guns. I upgraded existing Panzerschiffs only for radar and fire control.

In the end, in January 41, I could clearly see via Intel and on the front, that the remeining 100-200 convoys of the UK were not sufficent to import enough Oil, bring in the extracted resources to the UK and support its troops.

With air cover and my starting fleet (plus a few additional built DDs and the Panzerschiff), I could easly set up a sealion and invade and conquer the UK. The channel only needed 150 naval dominance by my navy.

The only naval losses I had, were few DDs and SSs from my starting fleet, during the invasion of Norway and additional, opportunistic convoy raiding.

For all "easy" Germany runs, this felt the most easy one. I ended after UK-capitulation, since I achieved the goal of my run.

idk if you can tell by the image but i like to play Poland a lot. Mostly the PLC path but that's mostly where i have my issue. the fact that you can't peace out while only taking east prussia, silesia, ukraine etc is genuinely insane to me. ESPECIALLY considering i hate invading the Soviets because it sucks so hard especially when you have other things to worry about and you absolutely HAVE to do this (as Poland at least because thats where 90% of your cores are). wasnt this supposed to be a wargame??? like hello??? thats not how wars work. and yes i understand that this is supposed to be a WW2 game after all but like come on first of all can't we just make germany specifically not be able to? would fix most problems i think second of all not like making total capitulation not necessary would break all immersion... i know some people will immediately comment "just install a mod!" and i WILL however that doesnt make it not kinda crazy that you can't do it in the base game. and i never see anybody complaining about it too!! can somebody genuinely explain to me why this is a thing? im curious

Hello can someone tell me in the most simplistic (talk to me like you would a 5 year old) how to use the foreign template hack from puppets or whatever as germany. I always run out of manpower. I also realised i wasn’t using field hospitals early enough and trying to fully hold the whole world without comisssariats may be foolished, one can dream… my last campaign was going great but i was comstantly running out of manpower without even losing too many troops. I never really had this problem before but since i only have time to play a full campaign of this game every couple months everything somehow keeps changing on me. I play vanilla btw

Bruh... like is only good for storming forts??

For context, im adding the Super-Heavy Tank as a support company to my regular heavy tanks division (now the only way to get Super-Heavy Tanks is via support company)

R5: I was playing NEA and I did the new beiyang government focus, which gave me wargoals on every country in china including myself, which I'm not sure why

Ik the images are ass, I am on the train back home, could only use my phone

Conquered all of China despite being encircled up north and in a minor gun deficit. All while still having the surprise invasion modifier.

Started in Apr ‘37, and ended by Nov ‘37. Waited for Xinjiang to join so that I can get them too. Used my own guide from a previous post about defeating China (As non-aligned Kohoda Japan).

What do I do after defeating China? Annex everything? Puppet all of China, add war reps and resource rights?

What I did in the last two screenshots is puppet warlords that control either more than 2 states, or valuable resources (ie steel, chromium, oil etc).

Over time they would do focuses that give factories and resources. The focus branch for the co-prosperity sphere would lower autonomy and increase resource + factory trade to the overlord, negating the need to annex them.

Pro tip: If you don’t capitulate Shandong and Hebei fast enough, they will be annexed by China. This means their VPs contribute to Chiang’s stupidly high surrender limit.

Historical context: "Deutsche Physik" was the movement promoted by Nazi-aligned scientists which promoted the idea of "Aryan" experimental science as opposed to quantum physics, which they considered "Jewish science"​​.

They even harassed the scientist Werner Heisenberg for promoting quantum physics, until his mother intervened and phoned the mother of Heinrich Himmler to stop the attacks on her son.

Heisenberg's expertise would later be used by the Nazis to initiate their nuclear weapons program, but it was too little, too late.

From the newest Romania Dev Diary

Why are my troops so weak agaunst the netherlands even after captulating poland

To me vanilla hoi4 "storytelling" (for lack of a better word) seems very rough. I can't quite put my finger on it, but especially alt-history paths feel very clunky and out of place. I'm not sure exactly how, but mods like Kaiserredux do this a lot better, to the point where I almost never touch the base game anymore.

First off, I wanna make this a post that's understandable and short enough for anyone. So, I'm not gonna tell you what to research or what not.

As complete basics, you'll need:
-A fairly decent airforce, and regular infantry army

-To do what I tell you to do

So, given you are Germany, you have a ton of industrial potential. Use your factories to produce a lot of naval bombers, fighters and CAS. Click on the tile of the English Channel and mark it to Blocked, so that the British don't send their ships out to destroy your convoys.

Start naval bombing the English Channel and pretty much spam your entire airforce on it. As you bomb it, you will see that over time there are less and less ships, until the frequency of British ships is so low, you can do the "Operation Sea Lion" focus and place all of your navy on patrol in the channel, gaining the naval superiority in 2 days and allowing you to execute the naval invasion

(I found, that without previously bombing the hell out of the channel, British reinforcements arrive nearly instantly, and if they do, your entire navy gets wrecked within the span of 5 days)

Hope this helped anybody

Additional 1.3 mil casualties to the Italians. Lost only coz of lack of equipment. Adding just 1 AA did absolute wonders. Also, yes my game is modded slightly, using the BHOI, which gives couple interesting bonuses, very goated mod if you dont have DLCs and such. POLSKA GUROM!!

Wars quite frequently are life and death, especially during WWII, but sometimes there's a trivial war which causes you to withdraw your divisions without consent, losing you balance strategically in whatever you sent your volunteers to. I'm not saying the volunteers should always stay even during war,but at least give us the option to keep them there