Hearts Of Iron IV and Its Mods - HOI4 and mods discussion thread, all modding community drama should be contained in the TNO thread

[Semiprofessional Sperg]

Hearts of Iron IV Discussion Thread

All Drama and discussion of weird parts of the community should (as of now) be posted in the TNO thread...

Hearts of Iron IV (commonly abbreviated to HOI4 or just HOI) is a grand strategy game from Swedish developers Paradox interactive dealing with a period between 1936 and roughly 1945 (I.E. It's a World War 2 sim).

In traditional Paradox style, the game is augmented with a series of overpriced DLCs. But, it also has an massive and active (perhaps too active and too massive) modding community, which has churned out a metric shit ton of questionable content since 2016.

The game really entered the eyes of KF due to the discussion of a specific shitshow and phonebooking of a tranny mod team in early 2021. The thread discussing the drama eventually became clogged with a series of shitakes from HOI4 players, usually concerning the quality of a mod.

Hence, this thread was created to discuss "broader shit" about HOI4 and its mods, stuff which isn't exactly drama or lolcowish in nature.

All discussion of community drama and the cowish elements of the community should be kept in the TNO thread, and all discussion of paradox studio's other games should be in its own thread

Threads:
TNO and the HOI4 modding community:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/r-tnomod-and-the-reddit-hoi4-modding-community.80516/
Paradox Studio thread:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/paradox-studio-thread.8431/

Thanks, @Gone Ham

 

[Foxxo]

All Paradox games in between CK2 & CK3 are shit.

 

[RedPrince358]

All Paradox games in between CK2 & CK3 are shit.

Absolute Fact.

 

[ChechenHeroes]

only good hoi game is DH

 

[Semiprofessional Sperg]

only good hoi game is DH

Ive actually never played Darkest Hour, is there a way to get it easily (for a price which may or may not be $0)

 

[A_Callow_Youth]

[Obligatory "pony mod best mod" post]

 

[Montalbane]

Victoria 2 is godly and some of the mod for it are absolute perfection.
Darkest hour is great fun and HoI3 is a decent OCD simulator.
HoI4 is casual garbage only enjoyed by autists and pedos AKA trannies.

Mashallah

 

[Foxxo]

Oh shoot, now I feel I was excessively mean to a new person...

...CK2 has its problems too, it's one of those games that had a solid-ish foundation that they broke in half while adding DLC. The combat system takes a ton of flak for "special troops" being lazily-coded to the point where the most effective units in that time (Horse Archers) are straight-up worthless.

I played a lot of EU4, but after purchasing DLC only for Paradox to add the DLC functions to the base game, in addition to making the map more complex and ruining certain mechanics in an effort to make their game harder for the autists, I've had trouble playing it ever again. CK2 was a lot more fun as a catalog of colorful flags and crests, anyway, though I do like some of EU4's a lot better.

I have CK3, but the UI is utterly abysmal for anyone who doesn't have a Jumbotron monitor.

I haven't played Stellaris or HOI4, but from what I've heard of them, their AI is disgustingly bad due to the game having more stuff than it can handle.

For heads-up, I have never completed a Paradox game in my life. The furthest I've gotten is 150 years into EU4 & a little over a century into CK2.

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

HOI4 is a piece of shit game. The more I play it the more I hate it. The only "good" paradox game is VIC2, and that game is not even finished

 

[Stoneheart]

I haven't played Stellaris or HOI4, but from what I've heard of them, their AI is disgustingly bad due to the game having more stuff than it can handle.

Stellaris works alot better than HOI4. they also really care for that game for some reasons.

 

[Foxxo]

Stellaris works alot better than HOI4. they also really care for that game for some reasons.

Every time Stellaris is 75% off, I check the Steam reviews, and the Steam reviews say it's a complete piece of work. I feel like Gabe is messing with me.

 

[Stoneheart]

Every time Stellaris is 75% off, I check the Steam reviews, and the Steam reviews say it's a complete piece of work.

they pretty much remade the game twice since launch, old reviews and people who are pissed over the changes are not helping the rating.

 

[Solid Snek]

I like HoI4, but PDX are always finding ways to fuck it up and make it worse. For example: the American civil war update, which broke the USA and made it too much of a gamey grind to go fash as an American, and all the bullshit NAV bomber mechanics, which made navies useless and made the optimal naval war strategy to be simply sitting in port for months until your land-based aircraft swept the seas clean.

I don't know anything about the HoI4 modding scene, however. The only mod I've got is a swastika re-enabler; are there any good ones?

For heads-up, I have never completed a Paradox game in my life. The furthest I've gotten is 150 years into EU4 & a little over a century into CK2

I made it to 1800 once in EUIV, but it was fairly dull after 1680 and I didn't have the heart to finish the last 30 or whatever years. CK2 and 3 I don't think I've ever gone beyond 1100, although I generally start at the earliest date, so that's at least three centuries for me.

 

[Corpun]

I have CK3, but the UI is utterly abysmal for anyone who doesn't have a Jumbotron monitor.

I refuse to play anymore CK3 until they give us a functional UI customizer and actual content.

HOI4 is a piece of shit game. The more I play it the more I hate it. The only "good" paradox game is VIC2, and that game is not even finished

The sad thing is HOI4 is one of the only games I play a lot of solely due to conversion mods sustaining the game.

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

one of the many things i dont understand about hoi4 is artillery. why does artillery lose organisation when attacking? the month long artillery barrages of ww1 show that it doesnt matter. artillery should lose org when moving, and a lot
what artillery should be dependent are shells. you should have separate production for shells. that would make so you have to store up and plan for offensives. what these changes would mean is that you can concentrate artillery and do super massive barrages like the soviets did, or, if theres a stalemate, have ww1 artillery barrages

 

[Corpun]

one of the many things i dont understand about hoi4 is artillery. why does artillery lose organisation when attacking? the month long artillery barrages of ww1 show that it doesnt matter. artillery should lose org when moving, and a lot
what artillery should be dependent are shells. you should have separate production for shells. that would make so you have to store up and plan for offensives. what these changes would mean is that you can concentrate artillery and do super massive barrages like the soviets did, or, if theres a stalemate, have ww1 artillery barrages

From my very basic understanding of divisions anything non-vehicular is essentially coded for defence in mind, which is why you see HOI "pros" making stupidly OP tank divisions like crazy, which leads to Paradox trying to balance that stuff with fuel.

The problem is Paradox seems to gear the game to multi-player rather than the AI, which led to shit like the UK running out of fuel for it's military.

 

[millais]

One thing I always wondered: what real life variable or characteristic is divisional "combat width" supposed to represent?

 

[Corpun]

One thing I always wondered: what real life variable or characteristic is divisional "combat width" supposed to represent?

No idea, I'm guessing it's just there to help fill a template.

 

[A_Callow_Youth]

One thing I always wondered: what real life variable or characteristic is divisional "combat width" supposed to represent?

No idea, I'm guessing it's just there to help fill a template.

Combat width is the length of frontline being fought over, and the reason why divisions take up a set amount of it is that, simply put, it's a bad fucking idea to jam too many troops into a small area. Commanders start tripping over each others' toes, units get all scrambled up and lost in each others' zones, logistics get strained because you're trying to move too much shit along the road/rail network. You might know these in other games as "stacking penalties". The combat width mechanic prevents these situations from occurring, saving you from inflicting them on yourself and Paradox the trouble of implementing them.

 

[Corpun]

Gonna sperg about the Poland content that's coming, mostly to rant about Paradox's bad alt-history.

It is garbage. Sikorski leading peasants to overthrow the government to a random White Russia General creating a fascist cossack monarchy, it is a burning dumpster fire and symbolic of all that is wrong with Paradox alt-history.

Looking at their three monarchy paths they have

A) Romanian Hohenzollern
B) The claimaint to the Saxon throne
C) Pavel Bermondt

I'm going to go down these ones mostly due to Paradox's very trashy monarchy alt-histories.

Starting with the Romanian Hohenzollerns, or more accurately, Michael of Romania, who is in his minority in 1936 and not even king yet. Apparently there was some talk of giving the Romanian monarchs the Polish crown but by 1936 Romania is already sliding into the German sphere and sending their prince to lead a country they will likely be at odds with is a death wish for any hopes of peaceful relations with Germany. From what the teasers showed, not only does Michael unite both countries into one state, they also absorb Slovakia and Hungary, giving themselves a fucking ugly flag in the process. All of these political focuses will probably be trashy 70 day long ones as well.

The Saxon claimant looks to be a generic form the PLC for memes path, likely with more obscenely long focuses. Not only is this stupid because the claimant is German in an ostensibly anti-German nation, but Friedrich Christian moving into Poland would endanger both his family in Germany and his property. If you didn't know, most German nobles were mostly tacit supporters of the regime, with a small contingent being devout NatSocs. There is no way the Saxon Prince would be permitted to move to Poland if it's government intended to make itself stronger and aggressively expand. Both Germany and the USSR, hell maybe even the Allies, would move to prevent this as they did with Kaiser Karl post-WW2.

Pavel Bermondt is possibly the most random choice and they justified as "Lol he operated in the Baltics and Poland during the Civil War. The thing is he operated against the reds. Again the problem here is this is a one off occurrence, post-war he fucked off to Germany. He did go fascist but did not join the NSDAP, rather made his own irrelevant party for Russian exiles. His path in Russia is quite literally a wacky warlord who can conquer Russia.

I won't go into the other Polish trees as I don't know much on Polish Interwar politics but they read as equally retarded, including shit like a Franco-Polish alliance (Because yeah wynot, that totally won't fuck France over), a Commie tree where the paths are cucking to the USSR or Invading the USSR. Yeah that's it.

Paradox alt-history is, as always, utter garbage, likely a broken mess, and doesn't improve the core focus of HOI4; WW2. They would honestly be better off at leaving this shit to mods but they see the money at Portugal reconquering the colonial empire and shit and act without thinking.