Permanently Deleted
Play as Switzerland and see who wins
Haha, enjoy four hours of tutorials on YouTube.
In all seriousness, I had to watch several tutorials and a lot of trial and error. Only in my third or fourth attempt at a failed campaign playing Kaiserriech did I finally manage some basic mastery of the mechanics. Once you work out how something functions and implement it correctly with payoff, it’ll be the best feeling.
The base game is kinda ideologically meh at best and leaves you wanting for loads of DLC to get the most out of it. Kaiserreich is perfectly adequate for a first time player.
I started no less than three failed US civil war campaigns before I started to understand the mechanics, then I played another failed campaign as Union of Britain before I finally nutted up and tried another US civ war run and finally established global socialism. Just keep at it comrade.
step one: abandon the game. it’s so bad. you need 4 dlcs and 5 mods to make it above average of what you’d expect. the community is trash. ever since i got hoi4 my life has been spiraling down and it’s not an exageration.
I spent so much time and MONEY, since it needs a beast of a graphic card to run. I got started on discord through hoi and kaiserreich and i wouldnt be here without it, so how dare they.
if you want intense and at times needless complexity play hoi3, if you want endless possibilities play darkest hour
no i dont want any of this, after a couple of years i realized “yknow what, i dont like grand strategy games, and i certainly wont give more money to paradox”
For real the best way to learn is to play as the Italians. You start off at war with Ethiopia, and you have a few colonies but not too many, you have a decent force but with lots of room for improvement (your “tank” battallions contain exactly one tank and six squadrons of horses lmao), and you can also just ignore the Naval mechanics until after you’ve finished learning how land combat works. There’s this let’s play on YouTube where the guy goes communist as Italy which you can watch for tips.
If you have the DLC I would disable Man the Guns and La Resistance while you get your footing with the game’s primary mechanics, since those two DLC just tend to add a ton of complexity which could distract you from learning the more essential systems.
Second this. Play a game on historical mode (literally just a checkbox when you start a new game) and follow along. Figure out how to set up frontlines, do attack orders, etc.
It will take you a good several games before you really figure out how to use everything at your disposal. Dont worry about winning or losing the war and just focus on doing the best you can. There are a bazillion mods that make hoi4 endlessly replayable but none of them are going to be fun until you get the basics down.
Naval shit is generally super annoying so I’d recommend just focusing on ground forces and air.
Naval shit is generally super annoying
I almost never mess with the stuff from Man the Guns, in fact keeping up with unit upgrades generally requires way too much micromanagement for me to ever want to do it (even if it can be super effective ie making really cheap mine-laying submarines), but the basics of fleet deployment and reinforcement can be automated if you set your fleets up right.
Air combat really bugs me though. I want to tell my planes to fly missions within their fuel range, but the way the skies are divvied up into “air zones” is really counter-intuitive. Plus there’s the boring micromanagement demanded of you if you want to use carriers, moving your fleet and the reassigning air orders every single time.
Just invade Berlin
