this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Just got Hearts of Iron IV, I know we have more than a few players here, any good tips/tricks/guides to make it less daunting for a beginner? (hexbear.net)
submitted 12 hours ago by wolfinthewoods@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
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I just grabbed HoI IV just recently, but am kind of daunted by the game so far, I tried the in game tutorial briefly, but it didn't give me a good idea on what the hell I was doing, I felt like I was reading gibberish. I did download the Hearts of Iron IV 2025-2026 beginner guide video on youtube, but haven't had the time to watch it just yet, and am aware of the wiki too. I'm wondering what current players feel like the best resources for a beginner to get into the game are? I appreciate any help and look forward to tackling the game and it making sense because it looks and sounds awesome ;)

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[–] daniyeg@hexbear.net 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

my general advice (which works well in single player against AI) is to memorize some division and equipment templates and use them while you're learning the rest of the game. search the country you're playing to see what they are good at, and produce that type of division based on this guide which also has good explanations about the combat system. also always remember: land > air > sea, and negative modifiers hurt more than positive modifiers help.

bonus tips: it's safe to ignore naval combat. most naval tech is garbage but research submarines (especially snorkels when the time comes). make task forces with 10 submarines in them and do convoy raiding. don't use ships for actually fighting, instead use cheap naval bombers to kill enemy ships (AI can never figure out good anti air). after you've sunk most of the enemy fleet, use your pre existing fleet for gaining naval dominance for naval invasions, and if you don't have a pre existing fleet your country is not a naval country so just ignore it.

for air, your troops are always number one priority, therefore first priority must be maintaining air superiority with fighters for the buff (and not having your planes shot down) and then CAS to damage the enemy. tactical bombers are not worth it in my opinion compared to CAS and strategic bombers are too expensive for large deployments.

if you have any specific questions i would be happy to answer.

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 9 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

The short answer is that it depends on what dlc you have. Some of them are rolled into the base game, but off the top of my head tank design and some officer features are from No Step Back, spies and intelligence agencies are from La Resistance, plane design is from By Blood Alone, customizable design companies are from Arms Against Tyranny, and Special Projects are from Gotterdamerung. i own the first two, and i wouldn’t recommend the newest dlcs. If you are on steam, i would highly recommend the Old World Blues and Kaiserreich mods. Hoi4 has some fun mechanics for military and economy, but the writing and the focus trees are kinda mid. Old World Blues is a total game overhaul based on all the west coast and midwest Fallout games, released or planned. Kaiserreich is a very long running (multiple hearts of iron editions) alt-history mod about ‘what if the Central Powers won WW1?’ It has almost the same mechanics and technologies as the base game, but it has much better writing (and a lot of commies ;3). Also the beginner’s guide from the devs is probably not very good, i would recommend Bitt3rSteel. i am 90% sure he isn’t a Nazi. This Steam guide is also good for designs, especially if you have dlcs.

The really long answerThere’s a lot of interlocking systems that have timers (e.g. time to research a type of artillery, time to build that artillery, time to construct factories, time to train units, time to do foci, etc). The job of the player is to determine when war will be coming, offensive or defensive, and plan their timers around that. What does that mean? If you have a focus that gives you a pile of factories, you will get more economic benefit if you take it earlier. If you are starting a war very quickly, you might want a pile of guns, manpower, or a buff to combat. Taking something like a 15% buff to unit organization will only benefit you when you are at war, but taking something like a 5% buff to production efficiency capacity will benefit you the whole game. Every choice you make is basically trading between economic, military, and political buffs or decisions, and the order in which that happens is up to you. Certain things also have requirements from other countries or the state of the world.

Economy abridged: infrastructure determines construction speed and some aspects of supply, the number of civilian factories and your trade and economic policies determine how much “construction power” is added to the queue every day, the number of military factories and resource availability determine how much equipment is produced every day, and dockyards work similarly. This can all be abstracted as ‘IC’ or Industrial Cost. If you are a big spreadsheet person, some people define their army divisions in terms of equipment needed and calculate their economy in advance. Civilian factories are the currency for trading resources. You can also do things like build fuel reserves and import a bunch of oil before you know there’s going to be war.

Army abridged: technically there are optimized meta divisions for every single terrain and combat width, and you can look those up. That really only matters in competitive games between humans. Basically, infantry holds the line and armor pushes. Infantry divisions are bricks of HP, organization, and soft attack that resist the enemy in place. Line infantry is usually 10 or 20 width with at least engineer companies and support artillery. Port garrison infantry is 10 width with engineers. Assault infantry, if you really have to, is 20 or 40 width with line artillery and any breakthrough you can get. Line artillery has been kinda bad for like five years. Paratroopers are a waste of time unless you can get air dominance and want to try to insta cap a country by landing on every city. Unless you need to naval invade something early, Marines are best with amphibious tanks and amtracs. Mountaineers are infantry+, and you should use them instead of assault infantry (if you have to). Armored divisions are broadly bricks of armor, breakthrough, and soft attack that rapidly beat the enemy. The balance is that tanks alone have poor organization, so you add motorized or mechanized or cavalry. The slowest battalion sets the division speed. Anything less than 20 width is waste of industry. Light tanks are a tool for an early war, especially an early offensive war. They are quickly outclassed by mediums. Heavies are slow and the AI isn’t very good at piercing armor, so they aren’t really worth the cost. Things like self propelled anti air or artillery are really only good as an expensive unit for infantry. Adding armor reduces damage taken, more or less. Basically you want at least 30 organization and as much armor and breakthrough as you can get. A 7/8 split of tanks and whatever else makes a decent 30 width unit. You want logistics, maintenance, and engineer companies with them. Motorized divisions are not very good, but they can be used to exploit armored breakthroughs and some countries start with the units. Mechanized divisions are incredibly expensive infantry, but if you can afford them it’s fun. The strategy is something you’ll have to develop for yourself, but remember that you can pause! Pause literally whenever you want, especially when you are at war. Things like river lines, forts, and mountains are easier to hold/ harder to attack. The most effective way to inflict casualties is encirclements, which can be as small as one division pocketed by two tanks going to either side of it. The most effective ways to experience casualties are to try to mass push with infantry or to have one unit extend deep into the enemy for an encirclement. The question of who is encircling who can flip very quickly. Support companies are really fun for customizing your play style, and the only bad choice is military police on a front line unit.

Air abridged: air is probably the most important feature of combat in Hoi4. This could potentially be traced to a broad Western overemphasis on the role of the USA in the European Theatre of WW2, but that’s besides the point. Luckily it’s not that complicated, cause you just want your air zone to turn green, which gives your units buffs. You’re going to want to build a pile of fighters, and the key to victory is destroying your enemy’s pile of fighters. You only need a few hundred bombers, but you might need thousands of fighters. Also, if you are a tiny country with like 10 military factories, just build AA for your units instead of planes. You should never have fighters engage unless the numbers are relatively equal. There’s a degree to which you can make up for numbers with more advanced planes, but not much. If your fighters have been beaten down to the point that the enemy has twice as many as you, ground them and wait to build more. They will be shot down if you send 500 fighters against 1000. CAS are frankly the best bombers, and they can hit railroads, trucks, and enemy units. Tactical bombers are more expensive and less good, but they have a jack of all trades thing. Strategic bombers are mostly ineffective unless you are the USA and you start building them in 1938 so you can blot out the sun. Naval bombers are really good at killing submarines, convoys, and other coastal ships. Air superiority and some type of bombing are the only two air missions that matter. Interception is for intercepting a lot of enemy CAS or bombers, which shouldn’t happen if you have enough fighters. Basically, achieve air superiority with your fighters (‘green air’), and then place bombers on areas of crucial combat or where the enemy has logistically overextended (you can bomb their supply trains and trucks).

Navy abridged: famously no one cares about navy in hoi4. You can win most everything without ever really thinking about it. That said, the basic rules are submarines are good, never mix subs with anything else, and have at least 4 screens for every capital ship in a fleet (the ones with a diamond next to it). The AI either doesn’t research or doesn’t effectively build destroyers or cruisers with sonar or depth charges. As such, about 100 Submarine 3s set to always engage can destroy every single surface ship in the Atlantic in a year or two, as long as you have fuel. You can also build naval bombers and win naval battles the easy way (picking them apart for weeks before smashing the bleeding remnants).

Sorry if this is like incomprehensibly long, i have a lot of hours in the game

[–] alexei_1917@hexbear.net 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

I've heard Kaiserreich (and Kaiserredux to a much greater extent) called "the syndie mod" because there's so many commie paths and in a lot of campaigns there will be some syndicalists popping up somewhere just because there's so many left paths and many of them are based on real life syndies.

Truth be told, I just want okay left paths and a political system that isn't dogshit and makes the different alignments all really unique... I feel like vanilla can have an effect where the alignments make no sense and sometimes the politically good paths are just mechanically trash and only good for roleplay and making it harder for yourself. Vanilla HOI4 tends to make fascism mechanically the best ideology by a vast margin especially if you want to be constantly at war or aren't good at managing your civilians, and it's... I don't like what it does to the HOI4 player community and I don't like what it does to me when I play it. But then, I'm not a big war game fan and I really only like later timeline Paradox games to play as communist nations (and I like CK because it's funny and it lampshades monarchism, not because I actually enjoy the whole dynastic thing or the breeding program meta), there's a lot of vanguardist success fantasy value in HOI4 but there's a reason I like Vicky more despite the challenges of a time period where you have to invent dialectical materialism before you can even begin to set a revolution in motion.

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[–] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 1 points 10 hours ago

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

[–] Alaskaball@hexbear.net 6 points 9 hours ago

I've always just dived in head-first and learned the hard way. Usually the easiest way to learn is chosing one of the non-aligned minor power countries and playing around while letting the major powers do the brunt of the work. Hell even starting off as America is usually good practice because it's darn near uninvadable and you have plenty of years to play around with building up, setting up divisions, sending volunteers or arms, etc. And nominally just being able to take it easy while learning.

And of course being willing to take losing games to their conclusion so you can get to experience the crunch of desperately trying to stave off defeat.

Of course things probably changed quite a bit since I played, but the key fundamentals I remember is try to time building your industry in peacetime while gearing up for war, i.e estimating you have roughly 3-4 years of peace meaning building civ factories for a year or two then building military factories in the remaining time while regearing you current mil factories to building the basic infantry gear to get your divisions fully supplied while training new divisions with the surplus, and only really spending time building stuff like tanks or planes exclusively if you have the surplus factories to do so.

[–] LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins@hexbear.net 7 points 10 hours ago

My advice for paradox games in general is to just play and learn as you go. They seem daunting but it's just because there's so many buttons to press and tooltips and mechanics but it's too much to just learn all at once so IMO it's best to just dive in and figure shit out even if it means being 5 hours in before you go OH WAIT, THAT'S HOW THAT WORKS? about something and then re start with the knowledge of how to do better next time

[–] CarmineCatboy2@hexbear.net 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

I haven't played HoI4 but one thing I can tell you is this: the learning curve of a PDX game might seem daunting but most of it is about learning to parse information. As in, there's a 10 different things on your screen at any time, but they don't all matter equally all the time. Don't be afraid to experiment and enjoy finding out something you didn't do would have been really useful 5-50-150 in-game years ago.

[–] worlds_okayest_mech_pilot@hexbear.net 2 points 8 hours ago

Very good point. It's also extra true in HOI4 imo because a playthrough is almost always divided into pre-war and wartime phases, where the useful game speed goes from 5 to about 2-3, and construction/focuses take a backseat in favor of troop management and such.

[–] worlds_okayest_mech_pilot@hexbear.net 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

I might have time to type out some longer advice later but right now some quick tips off the top of my head:

-Build only civilian factories until about mid 1938, then switch to only building military factories. Build in the highest infrastructure places first because they have the fastest construction.

-Dispersed industry tech tends to be slightly better than concentrated industry tech.

-You can probably ignore navy completely for a lot of nations (note: I haven't played the latest dlc which changed navy so it might be more important now idk)

-Until you're comfortable with modifying armor designs, medium tanks are the best bang for your buck. Generally for casual play, light tanks are a bit too light, and heavies take too long to build.

-Try to always have each division's organization stat above 30 at the minimum. For tank divisions, this means a good balance between motorized/mechanized infantry and the actual tanks. (I.E. your tanks need meat shield support)

-Air is very important. Even if you don't want a large, diverse airforce, have some factories cranking out endless light fighters and maybe light CAS (that's all you need). Stick as many heavy machine guns on the fighters as you can as long as it's not too heavy to fly.

-Focus tree advice is way too specialized per nation to really give general tips, but you probably want focuses that first: 1. Remove critical nation debuffs 2. Give PP 3. Upgrade construction/factory speed.

-Engineer support companies are cheap and simple, but always effective and useful.

Note that I haven't played the latest DLC and I'm not even great at the game, so my advice could be a bit iffy. But as long as you're not playing multiplayer these should all still be decent tips I think.