Thulean Archives

Hearts of Iron 4. It's one of those games I really want to like, but I don't. And you wanna know why? Well, let's find out. I'm talking about a Vanilla Hearts of Iron 4 here. In no particular order. I'm going to talk a little bit about my problems with that game. First of all, the scripted nature of it. Sure, you can play it non historically, and if you do, it's just a complete mess and random nonsense. Nothing makes sense. But even if you play it historically, it doesn't really make sense. For example, I play as Norway. I support, you know, the quisling regime, take over power there. But I'd rather not enter the war right now because, you know, it's kind of weak. I don't want to have Britain spamming me with amphibious invasions. So what happens? So Germany sees that the NS party in Norway gets the power. I've allowed them free use of my harbors. I want to align, I want to join them later on, but right now I'm a little bit too weak. Well, of course Germany is going to invade in me, because that's how what the script says. Germany is invading National Socialist Norway. So unless you join the war immediately as Norway and get crushed by the Brits like this, you get invaded by Germany. And let us talk a little bit about those amphibious landings by the Brits or elsewhere in the game? They are spamming you with amphibious landings. And they're all complete failures because they attack at stupid places. And if they do succeed, they get a bit of land with no harbour, no way to support their units. And then they get crushed.^[1] And every time they try amphibious landing, and they fail, the units return to sea. That doesn't make any sense. No, if your amphibious landing fails, your units are destroyed. Finished. But not in Hearts of Iron 4, right? In order to destroy these amphibious assaults, you have to let them in and then destroy them on land. Which makes no sense whatsoever. And speaking of minor nations, every single minor nation in that game has twice as many divisions as they had historically. Why? The Netherlands had 10 divisions in the game. When the war starts, at least 20. Annoying. And then we have the topic of support guns. Or support units rather. For example, assault guns. The stug. Historically, it was the best tank killer of the entire war. But in this game it's not. It's almost completely useless. Unless you configure it in a way so that it is good against tanks, but then it's useless against infantry. But it wasn't. It was excellent against both. Why? Why not have the same capabilities in the game? That's what they did. And of course, if you have AAA units, they are completely useless against tanks. 20mm guns, Against BT7? Nah, doesn't work at all. Right. Who made this game? Historically, they sawed up those light Russian tanks like this with their AA units. You had trucks with 20 millimeter guns on them. They just remove them from the map, so to speak. But all combat in this game is broken. I had 10 German divisions attack one single Polish infantry division. I had heavy tanks and everything.^[2] No, takes like 3 weeks, nothing happens. And then the organization is broken and I can't do anything. What? So 10 German, including heavy tank divisions? Nah. Cannot take one single Polish division in the open terrain. Because. Why? Because reasons. Because of course, the mechanics of the game are broken with their width and all this BS. And the political death is like a. That of a puddle. There's nothing. And if you let the AI control the front lines, they will have, you know, you have units, you entrenched, they spend some time to build defences. Another AI decides "nah, I want to move this down here", and then one of the units that were there is moving up there so that you have no one entrenched anywhere. Because that makes sense, right? And of course we have the populations in the game, they are completely static. You can nuke Paris, you can nuke all the cities on the map and nothing will happen. The populations exactly the same everywhere. And of course, if you want to build industry, you can do that pretty much infinitely. There's no limit. You can build so many industries in that game and just keep doing it, which makes no sense. And don't you start a war with Yugoslavia, because when the battle ends, the map is going to look like absolute garbage with, you know, "Italy has this part", "German has one area there", and "Hungary has gone a little bit too far". Ah, what is that? The bizarre territorial division. Stop it. And this is just the, like, the scratching on the surface of that game. Like I said, I really want to like it, but it's just annoying and just doesn't make any sense. I detest that game. And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I don't play Hearts of Iron 4, it sucks. I wanted it to be a good game, but it's absolutely terrible. Okay, let's be honest here. I'm not really that excited about this, but for the fun of it.

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1. By the Germans... not the Norwegians.
2. Yup. With air support etc.