Hearts of Iron 4

Soldato
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As another aside, I bagged History Repeated Itself (win the USA civil war, again) and Underpaid, Undersexed and Under Eisenhower (as USA take over allies and have 50 expeditionary forces from GB). They were both straightforward, though again through the purpose of chasing an achievement I have actually found out how to send and request expeditionary forces and another game mechanic.
 
Man of Honour
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Cracking updates but I so feel your pain. That is the main reason I just don’t bother with them. I like to micro, and spending hours upon hours fine tuning for it to go absurdly wrong in one click is just too much. I haven’t got 5,000 hours in game for nothing..

Happy to help anyone so ask away.
 
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Just to add, I also love the graphical mods. They improve the immersion exponentially. For example I’ve all the uniform mods, which basically reskins the original files with accurate representations. It’s heaps better. I’ve also an aircraft skin mod which is stunning, and a man the guns ship mod. They’re only graphical but they’re not Ironman compatible. You should check them out in the workshop. Take a break from Ironman
 
Soldato
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On reflection this morning, I actually don't think its as bad as I first thought.if I can capture the USA back and make them fascist again, then it really doesn't matter how much territory I lose provided I can protect my homeland and invade Portuguese Angola. I will need to be smart but all is not lost yet I don't think.
 
Man of Honour
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Try a game as the UK. It is a totally different experience, compared to the others. The main difference is the fact you start off in a weak position. You've plenty of divisions and a huge navy but little manpower and nowhere near enough equipment. It takes a while to build up and it's a challenge.

he biggest draw at the start is the fact you can request your commonwealth divisions. So you have 35 odd British divisions scattered all over the world, and a further 30 odd from Commonwealth countries. You can group and train these together and utilise them as a backup. For me, I move all my British forces into Africa, and focus the best I have there until I've dealt with Africa, then the med, then Italy. The Commonwealth contigency is in France, as a backup to the French. France is always a ridiculous game played as the AI. They capitulate within days due to losing Paris. For whatever reason they've one of the strongest starting armies but they can't defend their lines. I guess the AI tries to defend all fronts at once.

Britain is probably the best nation in the game to play. You have to play defensively to begin with due to the German superpower stomping on everyone. But that is a lot of fun against the relentless AI.
 
Associate
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Youtube is a really good place to start. There are literally a tonne of guides for every nation out there. I am really enjoying a channel by Bitt3rSteel, he has some really amazing achievement guides.

I actually really learnt a lot by chasing achievements - it forced me to do lots of different things and learn lots of different tactics and game features that I wouldn't ordinarily have tried had I had just played off my own back. @philstanbridge is also a great source of knowledge! :D

Unfortunately the real answer is just a bit of perseverance, to be honest with you. But its well worth it in the end (except for tonight, tonight I just want to die - see my previous post).

Reddit is pretty good too, but I mostly use Youtube. There are loads out there, FeedBackGaming, Bitt3rSteel, Dankus Memecus, Dustin796, Taureor, ThatJamesGuy01 and TommyKay.

TommyKay is quite brash in his style, but I am now experiencing a little bit of how he felt when he was going for all the HOI4 achievements. Basically a broken man.
thanks appreciate it ;)
 
Soldato
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Just completed Putting the Raid on the Medway to Shame....

Easy, but a bit of a grind to be honest with you. As Netherlands and with limited power I just turned fascist and conquered Belgium with the axis. Focussed massively on fighters and got fighter 3's fairly early and eventually wore GBs fighter stash down from 10000 odd to nil. Then produced naval bombers to just constantly raid the UK and surrounding waters. It was also amazing at protecting from US invasions into northern France which helped massively as I didn't need to micro defend with my land forces whilst concentrating on the air war.

I participated in virtually no ground wars and concentrated entirely on air wars against their navy and inflicted over 1 million casualties on them in just defeating their airforce and navy.

Spain eventually got involved and invaded mainland GB and capitulated them leaving just 2 capital ships left somewhere in the world.

It then turned into a massive pain of moving my naval bombers around the world trying to find them but most of their island ports were out of range. Instead I decided to build some carrier 4's and equip them with naval bombers and just go scouting the Caribbean and far east. Again, after what seemed like ages I eventually found the Royal Sovereign and Queen Elizabeth snuggled in a port in the Leeward islands. As soon as you bomb them a bit they move ports so had to keep switching my attack from the Leeward islands to Suriname - just a single lone aircraft carrier parked just offshore on its own naval bombing!

It was a bit of a slog to be honest, and not as satisfying as some games. But, I did learn a fair bit about air wars and how to win at them. Its been the first time I've really used air XP to upgrade the range and engines and weapons on my planes and it really helped with my fighter 3's. I was shooting them down at rates of greater than 10-1 towards the end. It was also a bit of a click fest in that I was constantly moving my small wings of naval bombers to different targets with my fighters to protect them, in order to try to port strike everywhere. I have also clicked on so many naval victory icons in this in order to see if they moved their main fleet near or their capital ships so I could chase them round. But it was a total mystery for a while where they had hidden their last two capital ships.

I also completely smashed the US navy too, but it was more through the AI being stupid - they must have had split off to repair or something as there was a 2 minute period where I wiped upwards of 30 capital ships just on their own, presumably heading back to ports to repair.

70/132
 
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Soldato
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Completed Monarchy is Back in Fashion today - bringing back the Kaiser and assassinating Mussolini.

Was going to go for Our Island in the Sun (as monarchist Germany, own a Caribbean island). I am going to have to restart that though as I invaded Jamaica and conquered it but didn't get the achievement to fire. So I think I have to actually get the peace conference by defeating GB. I will have to restart as this was more of a test run than anything else, but I reckon I can bag that fairly easily and maybe make some 14/4 divs to naval invade the UK early and claim an island in the peace deal.
 
Soldato
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At the moment, air superiority, naval bombing, then use submarines towards the end. Maybe. Its probably going to be a longer game, as the time you take fighting the civil war to defeat Hitler at the start means you only really get your act together later in 1937.

I've already done an Operation Sealion as fascist Germany, but I can't really remember how I did it.

The other thing I've got in mind is potentially taking the French navy - though I'm not sure if that will work. I tried it with the USA as Canada once - you conquer them, puppet them, building mils in their territory like crazy and then send them convoys to drive down their autonomy, annex them, then you get their navy to play with. That's the theory, anyway, whether it will work against France, I'm not sure.

The only thing I'm not sure about is how the game treats a monarchist Germany - especially what Russia will do on historical mode - I have no idea really. I'm not too bothered in invading Poland or going further east to be honest. In the quick run I did earlier, Romania, Bulgaria and Italy all went monarchist, then Britain chose to dissolve its empire, which I'm a bit baffled by. Why would they do that on historical mode? World tension stayed really low right up into 1941, it was strange.
 
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Man of Honour
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At the moment, air superiority, naval bombing, then use submarines towards the end. Maybe. Its probably going to be a longer game, as the time you take fighting the civil war to defeat Hitler at the start means you only really get your act together later in 1937.

I've already done an Operation Sealion as fascist Germany, but I can't really remember how I did it.

The other thing I've got in mind is potentially taking the French navy - though I'm not sure if that will work. I tried it with the USA as Canada once - you conquer them, puppet them, building mils in their territory like crazy and then send them convoys to drive down their autonomy, annex them, then you get their navy to play with. That's the theory, anyway, whether it will work against France, I'm not sure.

The only thing I'm not sure about is how the game treats a monarchist Germany - especially what Russia will do on historical mode - I have no idea really. I'm not too bothered in invading Poland or going further east to be honest. In the quick run I did earlier, Romania, Bulgaria and Italy all went monarchist, then Britain chose to dissolve its empire, which I'm a bit baffled by. Why would they do that on historical mode? World tension stayed really low right up into 1941, it was strange.

Sealion, or our take on it, as the historical version is impossible in the time frame, requires a two stroke naval invasion. You get one opportunity to land in the north, and one in the south if you have a weaker navy. I tend to focus on Scotland, as geographically the narrower straits make it easier to defend. You send a powerful force north, land and hold the line. Then whilst the Uk sends the majority of its forces north to attack, you land in and around London. You then form a giant pincer and envelope the entire British contingency. That's the way I've managed it a few times. You can't focus on one area, as the UK seems to find millions of divisions out of nowhere.

That's an interesting theory about annexing, I have only seen it work on a much smaller scale. Do you even get to keep their naval units? I know there is a decision to take if you play as the UK to attack the French fleet before it gets into German hands. If it does work you might only receive a percentage of the units? Also, how long does it take to annex them that way?

Britain has a national focus to disband the empire, and I presume as soon as you went Monarchist the historical factor wernt out the window.
 
Soldato
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Not had much time this week, but Crusader Kings done. Was very straightforward (though Crusader Kings 2 will not be). Basically, complete a certain focus (easy) then take Jerusalem - just turn fascist and fight through Africa to kick out the British all the way to Suez, then donate a bit of land to Italy in return for asking for control of Palestine. Job done.

72/132.......only 60 more to go....
 
Soldato
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Been a bit quiet on this front as of late and hardly played.

Picked it up this weekend and have now completed Blitzkrief (with Edward in power conquer Paris) - easy. Then did three of the Greek achievements - This is Madness, Istanbul is Constantinople Again and I Captured the Bosporus but all I got was this Lousy Tshirt. All really straightforward to be honest with you.

Going to try for some French achievements next I reckon, or Italy.

There has been a Dev diary that was released the other day and it looks like railroads and trains are coming to HOI4 with a completely reworked logistics mechanics - we will need to build trains and trucks in order to enable efficient supplies. Looks like bridges over rivers could be a significant battleground too which will make things really interesting. Also getting the Russia focus tree reworked. No Italy confirmation yet sadly though.

HOI4 Dev Diary - Early look at at supply and the coming year | Paradox Interactive Forums (paradoxplaza.com)

76/132
 
Man of Honour
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About time they released some news.. Drip feeding it very slowly.. I think the update will be absolutely epic and they've promised it sometime this year. It was the biggest front in WWII, so it needs some respect. Supply and weather isn't really modelled very well as it stands so playing as Germany isn't really that much of a challenge. Logistics will play a much greater part, which potentially will put an end to the crazy division templates we currently see.
 
Soldato
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Georgia On My Mind completed. First time as playing a fascist USA - had to be a bit canny about winning the civil war but it was easy in the end. Then joined the Axis and invaded Canada and the UK. Was all surprisingly straightforward in the end. Got South Georgia in the UK peace deal, then went to war against the Soviets and had plenty of war score to take Georgia in that peace deal. All that is really left is the House of Kurds and / or turning everybody fascist (again). I may keep this save to do this, as the USA it should be fairly easy to defeat China then carefully go through all the remaining countries to make them all fascist. Just got to watch out for those silly mistakes again though.

77/132
 
Soldato
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New World Order achieved.

Its a helluva lot easier if you just stay out of factions. As fascist USA I joined the axis to defeat some of the big powers (Russia and Japan), then it was just a time consuming slog to conquer all of south America, Portugal and China. The biggest pain was trying to convert the United Mexican States into a fascist country - it was democratic but I accidentally sponsored their admission into the axis, so I had to leave the axis to use operatives to flip them. Eventually they just went to war with me so I defeated them militarily instead.

I was practically done when I saw there was literally a two tile Poland that was unaligned so had to use the operatives to flip it to fascist which was just an AFK no-skill thing and incredibly boring. Glad I got that achievement out of the way.

There's another achievement called One Empire which is basically a world conquest as the UK. I can't imagine how that will be much fun and will be an incredible grind after a while. That won't be fun.

78/132
 
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Soldato
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OK. So.

Talk to me about Spain. I flat out do not get Spain, or what to do, or tips and tricks to win the war with each faction. I barely won the civil war as the republicans and putting Franco in charge - it was touch and go for a while. WW2 had kicked off by the time I'd won it. Its very difficult. Captured Gibraltar but need it in the peace deal, which means defeating the USA. Not sure how lowly Spain, even with help from the axis, will go about invading the USA. Especially now its like 1946. UK, EU, Africa and Asia are down. But I doubt I'd be able to crack the USA to end the war.
 
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