Hearts of Iron IV – Beginners Guide

Basic Guide for New Players

Choose a Beginner-Friendly Nation

Select a nation with straightforward gameplay mechanics for your first playthrough. Nations like Germany, Italy, or the United States offer a good balance of complexity and simplicity.

Enable Tutorial: Hearts of Iron IV offers an in-game tutorial that covers basic gameplay mechanics. Enable it to familiarize yourself with the game’s interface and controls.

Combat

Hearts of Iron IV has a pretty generic combat system, but it has some important features that you should be aware of. For example, encirclement. You click on a division, then click on another tile. This will move your division to attack said tile. When you attack an enemy division, a battle begins. If you win the battle, the enemy division is NOT destroyed and retreats to another tile. If you lose the battle, your division retreats a tile.

A battle can also end in a stalemate, resulting in neither side retreating. If a division is completely surrounded, and has no tile to retreat to, the division is ENCIRCLED and dies. During a large military operation, such as a German invasion of Russia, 20 battles may be occurring across the frontline at once. You push through Russia by winning battle after battle and making the Russians retreat.

But this is an area where you want to encircle. If you keep fighting the full Russian army near Moscow, you lose. If you can encircle large amounts of enemy divisions and kill them then pushing becomes far easier.

Statistics

Each division has a template. If you want to edit these templates, you need to understand the statistics. The main statistics we want to modify are Organization, Soft Attack, Hard Attack, Max Speed, Hardness, Armor, HP, Piercing, Trickleback, Recovery Rate, Supply Usage, Reliability, Defense

• Organization: How long a division can attack or defend before giving up or retreating. The more infantry or motorized in a division, the higher organization. The more ordnance or armor in a division, the less organization.
• Hardness: Affects whether or not a division is mainly damaged by Soft or Hard attack. The more armor in a division, the higher the hardness and more damage it takes from Hard Attack. The less armor in a division, the lower the hardness and more damage it takes from Soft Attack.
• Soft Attack: The Soft Attack value in a battle. Alot of soft attack is provided by Artillery and certain Tank Designs. Has priority over hard attack in battles against divisions with less than 50% hardness.
• Hard Attack: The Hard Attack value in battle. A Lot of hard attack is provided by Infantry, Anti Tank, and certain types of Tank Designs. 
• Max Speed: The fastest a division can go. Having one battalion in the division slower than the other battalions brings down the Max Speed to the slowest battalion. Divisions will not always travel at Max Speed, depending on the supply and their organization/strength max speed may be lowered.
• Armor/Piercing: This paragraph includes two statistics. Piercing, and Armor. If a division’s piercing is lower than the other division’s armor, it halves all damage. Armor is provided by Tanks and Mechanized. Piercing is provided by pretty much everything but mainly Anti-Tank and Tanks. Infantry also have good piercing if the Anti-Tank research bubbles have been completed in the Infantry Equipment tree.
• HP: HP defines how much damage a division takes and how quickly you lose men and manpower. The higher HP a division has, the harder it is to kill. A division with 200 HP takes twice as long to destroy as a division with 100 HP. If a division ever reaches 0 HP, which occurs when the division strength and equipment have been reduced to 0%, the division deletes. HP and Strength restore if equipment and supply can be given to the division on the frontline.
• Trickleback: When a division loses any amount of HP, the percentage that is the trickleback returns to the manpower pool. If a division’s trickleback is 10%, and the division loses 100 men in a battle, 10 manpower returns to the manpower pool. One of the only ways to increase trickleback is field hospitals.
• Recovery Rate: How quickly a division recovers after a battle. Mainly increased by Mass Assault doctrine, right side. The base recovery rate of a division is usually 0.20 – 0.25 but can be brought up to 0.80 or so. This makes it so after a battle the division recovers very quickly. Beating Soviets with maxed out Mass Assault right side is very difficult because of this.
• Supply Usage: The amount of supply a division needs to use to be at full supply. Increased by things like logistics companies. Very useful in low supply and infrastructure regions. Pretty much required for fighting in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Siberia.
• Reliability: Hard to increase this, but support companies like maintenance companies help. Reliability is how often equipment is lost to attrition and low supply. Still important in max supply regions but far less useful than in high attrition regions. Useful if your using tanks to fight in mountains (Not recommended)
• Defense: Brought up by some tank designs and infantry battalions. In reality a defensive template is just entirely infantry and an engineering company for entrenchment.

Production

Production is influenced by a few things. Factory output, production efficiency gain, production efficiency cap, and production efficiency retention. When you have one factory producing infantry equipment, the production efficiency increases slowly, indicated by the little green bar above the icon for the equipment, next to the + and – factory buttons.

If the production efficiency reaches the cap, then that is the multiplier for output. For example, if the cap is 20%, and production efficiency has reached 20%, the equipment gets +20% output. Cap can be increased by research.

Every time you add a new factory to a production, the efficiency goes down a notch and you need to wait for it to rise again for that +20%. Production efficiency retention is gained by the dispersed industry research. This is useful because when you add a new factory to a production line, the efficiency goes down less. The machine tools line allows for improved production efficiency.

Infantry

Depending on your nation, Infantry shouldn’t be used for primary pushing. Infantry is primarily for defense, as it has the highest defense factor in the game. You should NEVER use a template with only infantry battalions to push. If you are, the template should have at least two artillery battalions.

For example, as Germany, you should only be using one infantry army or so to attack France, as all your pushing is going to be done with Motorized and Tanks in that blitz. A good mix for hitting France through Netherlands is 16 Motorized Divisions on a template of 8/3 (8 Motorized, 3 motorized artillery) and 4 Tank Divisions on a template of 4/4/2 (4 Tanks, 4 Motorized, 2 Motorized Artillery). You want to always be at 12 max speed when blitzing.

Tanks

Can be used for defense, although it depends on the design. Purely soft attack tanks should be used for breaking a hole in enemy cohesion, then flooding motorized into the hole you made and blitzing the target with no resistance. Very useful if paired with left or right side of Mobile Warfare doctrine. A good medium tank design is One Radio, Two Heavy Machine Guns, Medium Howitzer, 3 Man Turret, Wet Ammunition Storage, Christie Suspension, and max engine.

Don’t worry about armor. It’s also fine if a 1938 tank doesn’t go 12 speed, you should aim for around 9 at least, even if this means researching Engine II. A good tank template for punching holes and flooding a blitz through the hole is 4 Tanks, 4 motorized, 2 motorized artillery.

For invasion of Russia as Germany, having a solid 24 of those is very useful for pushing objectives. If you use the non-aggression pact correctly, you can blitz very well through Russia before Russian forces arrive from other borders.

Motorized / Mechanized

Motorized and Mechanized can be used as what I call “Blitzgrenadiers”. These divisions go 12 km/h and blitz through holes that Tank Divisions punch. Very useful for spearheading to Moscow, Stalingrad, and Leningrad in 180 days in order to fulfill Fuhrer Directive 21.

A good template for Blitzgrenadiers is 8 Motorized/Mechanized, and 2-4 Motorized Artillery depending on your stockpile. I highly encourage Signal, Logistics, and Maintenance companies as well.

Ordnance

Ordnance includes Artillery, Anti-Tank, and Anti-Air, including SP Armor. Artillery is used to bring up the soft attack of an infantry division and make the infantry division an offensive division. Artillery can also be motorized and placed in Armor and Motor divisions.

Anti-Tank is used to increase the hard attack and piercing of a division. Pretty much useless in single player but as France it isn’t a bad idea to place it in your defensive divisions as a support company. Anti-Air reduces damage from CAS on a division.

Not useful unless it’s a support company. SP armor is a tank that has been given anti air, howitzer, or cannon as its main gun and has been selected as an SP tank. If you’re a complete try hard you can have SP artillery in your armor div.

Special Forces

Special forces include Mountaineers, Marines, and Paratroopers. Mountaineers are incredibly useful in mountains and receive about +40% attack, defense, and movement in mountains. Marines are used to naval invade objects, and get huge amphibious buffs.

You can also add amphibious tanks and amtrac battalions to your amphibious divisions. Pioneers are also very useful, as well as marine commandos which can be obtained through the marine doctrine tree.

Template Designing

Template designing has a few basic rules. Keep organization relatively high, don’t bring combat width too high. The higher the combat width, the less divisions can fit in a  battle effectively. If the width of a tile is 80, and you have three 40 width divisions, only two can fit in the battle and the other division is put in battle reserve and does not actively participate. This is why flooding a small area with divisions isn’t always effective and putting strong specialized divisions in said spaces is a smart idea.

Land Doctrines

There are four land doctrines. Mobile Warfare, Superior Firepower, Grand Battleplan, Mass Assault. Mobile Warfare is good for a nation like Germany, as your entire army should be centered around Armor and Motorized, and blitzing holes in enemy cohesion. Both sides of the Mobile Warfare doctrine are good, but the right side is preferred if you’re using high amounts of tanks when blitzing Russia. Left side is preferred if you’re using high amounts of motorized to blitz Russia.

Bonus: How to Beat Germany

Germany gets several significant buffs. They get a huge boost to their economy, numerous free cores, several ahead of time research bonuses, the General Staff trait where boosts planning speed and org, and so on. They’re not easy to defeat, they are designed to be the big bad boss of the game.

To defeat them you need to beat them first. This can be hard if they’re at full power, so do your best to shave off their advantages.

First, they’re heavily limited by rubber and oil. This is key, you NEED to win the airwar against them if you want to have any real chance at pushing them back quickly. Focus on fighters and eventually work in other planes (namely CAS) so that you can bomb them better.

Navy isn’t too hard, spam subs and surround them. Throw on a few destroyers to hunt their own subs.

Army is another tricky part. I’d suggest 18 width inf with eng, arty, and AA support. Build up medium tanks and make a handful of divisions. You don’t need a lot, but you do need several powerful (wide) divisions.

Where you attack them depends on who you’re playing. Historical is pretty close to what you want to do for a reason. If you’re playing the USA/Allies, try taking North Africa first. Use your more powerful navy to prevent them from resupplying. Once you control northern Africa, you can naval invade into parts of Italy or southern France. Doing naval invasions is much easier in-game than IRL. You can eaaily split Italy in half with two invasions.

Once you’ve got them distracted, you can go for an invasion from the north and push in. Start in France where you have air cover from Britian, then upgrade airfields as you push east.

If playing the USSR, focus on first blunting their attack and building up for the counter push. I would suggest focusing on the south first, taking out Romania will deny them access to oil, letting you win the air war far more easily. Upgrade infrastructure and railways as needed when you start pushing back. Remember to clear your army and airforce debuffs as quickly as you can.