Inspired by the generosity and intelligence of our glorious chairman Gianni Infantino, I have added hydration breaks to Hearts of Iron IV - between 1937 and 1942, the game will randomly stop to allow for a hydration break, and will definitely not be used for showing advertisements.

Hi all! wall of text incoming:

In this sub I have always argued on why you should always invest in the Air force when playing as the Soviet Union, this post is pretty much a summary of my various arguments for it.

let me preface by saying that you can play HOWEVER you want, and the game is easy enough for pretty much any approach to be viable. But it is also the case that some ways are simply better than others.

in the case of the Soviet Air force I have regularly seen "advice" to "Abandon the Air" to focus entirely on your Infantry army and Tanks. While this is understandable advice for new players, so that they can focus on smaller parts of the game, I would say it has led to many players to never trying to make a Red Air force and therefore missing out on how much good Air power makes the game more fun.

Now, there are two main arguments I have seen against investing in the Air force, the first, and the easier to rebuke is the: "Horrible Soviet Air force debuffs"

Wow! so many Red numbers

Now let's go through these scary red numbers one by one:

1. Air wing experience loss when killed: if you simply make good designs, you will never lose enough planes for this to matter.
2. Ace generation chance: aces are good to have, but not having any doesn't hurt you at all.
3. Air wing training experience gain: Planes have a very fast training time, and even then you can take a spirit of the air force to completely negate this.
4. Air Accidents Chance: perhaps the only one that actually does something, however, once again you can negate this a lot by training only during the day, a spirit of the air force, and a chief of Air force. (and simply outproducing it of course)
5. Night Operations Penalty: everyone gets a night penalty, you simply have a worse one, and as long as you dominate during the day, it won't matter.
6. Bad weather penalty: Again, everyone has a penalty during bad weather, and if you dominate in normal weather, this won't hurt you. Plus, storms never last long.
7. Air wing mission experience gain: straight up a buff.

So as you can see, none of these debuffs target the actual important stats for an Air war (those being Range, Air Attack and Air Defense) and therefore do NOT stop your Air force from dominating the skies.

The second argument that I have seen, is that you simply do not have enough of an industry to focus on All three of Tanks, Infantry and Planes.

Quite honestly this is a bit of a Skill Issue. The USSR gets one, if not the most powerful industry in game, if you manage your industry properly, you can easily have 150 mills by Barbarossa. Here's my industry from a quick and casual game I did a little bit ago:

My Civilian Industry by the beginning of the War

My Military Industry

The Air Situation at the beginning

To be clear I messed up a lot during this game (it's been a while since I played pure vanilla), I civ greeded, and also tried to be entirely self sufficient for rubber, which also meant a slower rate of mil construction. and even then I don't think this Red Army is lacking in any department.

I forgot to take more screenshots, but Zhukov here has 11 divisions of 30 width mediums, and the Temporary Infantry gun deficit is due to another 100 divisions being in training.

The Status of the Air war after a couple of months - Ukraine

The Status of the Air war after a couple of months - Belarus

The Status of the Air war after a couple of months - The Baltics

and there you have it, in just a few month, the Hitlerite Air force has been decimated, I never put more than 30 mils on fighters, and at this point I had done none of the Air Focuses.

anyways, if you did read this far, thanks for taking your time, sorry for the long post, I just really suck at summarizing. and if I have gotten anything wrong or could Improve anything, please tell me!

TLDR; Fighters good.

some extra screenshots from this playthrough, including Zhukov vs Rommel (I also got the Achievement!) stockpiles, final borders.

Political Situation at war start

tank production by the end of 42'

my peak plane production

infantry equipment done and dusted

stockpile situation

more stockpile!

Air war by the end of 42'

ZHUKOV VS ROMMEL

Final borders (Thanks Britain for the Bordergore!)

Final Tank Template

Final Infantry Template

Final Mountaineer Template

Its my first time playing the USSR, and i want to know before playing, what are the benefits you think with them as leader?

(Not touching the Royalist/Fascist ones cause that is another story)

I've always ran out of manpower when playing as Nazi German. It always happened when i won a war against Poland. Usually i got 1 marschall with 5 general with 24 division (3-3-3) infantry, plus 24 extra division to protect west side. My garrison template always 4 cavalry with MP.

Why am i always ran out manpower with these?

I have just finished my first conquest of the US and England as fascist Australia. But something that I noticed early on in the run was that when I was taking land in the Pacific it was under my name or Japans. I figured this had to do with who had claims on what.

In Africa it seemed like it was practically random who would get the territory, sometimes me sometimes Italy, sometimes the Reich (often it would shift from Australia to Italy). This sort of matched my expectations since I didn't have claims in Africa.

But in the US, despite my troops being the only forces that landed and took the whole eastern seaboard before allies came, the land all went to Vichy France?

So is it claims based or something else? The UK went to Italy for some reason.

I'm not talking about the peace deal itself but during the game.

In anticipation of the upcoming USA rework I thought I'd share a small project I've had for a while now. My goal was to take historical warship construction dates and match them with a representative ship design to calculate how many dockyards are needed to match historical construction efforts. The resulting graph is pictured below.

https://preview.redd.it/pqdtubowuabh1.png?width=1400&format=png&auto=webp&s=0355f88e69cd3f26dab590ebdd4fe2f0e0f832ad

Here is a second chart that breaks down demand by ship type.

https://preview.redd.it/my8sszh5vabh1.png?width=1400&format=png&auto=webp&s=623fa4c558727913b89715ca27a6bc3861737463

The methods I used were far from perfect but I believe they create a good low-end estimate of naval production.

The key takeaways I gathered from the results are:

1. This probably isn't possible in-game.
2. Destroyer escorts and Escort carriers make up the lion's share of peak demand. This can mostly be contributed the their high cost relative to the number produced. Narrow construction windows don't help either.

It cannot be stressed enough how rough of and estimate this is (more on that below). I might add to this in the future if I have the free time. Feel free to leave suggestions.

Important Notes:

Start of the Game: (Paradox pls fix)

• USA starts the game 3 dockyards short of what it needs to complete currently constructing ships on time.
• 6 submarines, 25 destroyers, and 7 light cruisers that should be at some stage of construction are missing.
• All destroyers under construction when the game starts (Porter and Mahan class) have been bastardized and incorrectly use the Farragut class template.

Ship Designer:

• It is sometimes impossible to create a ship design that accurately portrays the capabilities and economic burden of the namesake class. (Ex. Multiple destroyer designs were experimented with in the pre-war years. You cannot sufficiently show the differences in capabilities between the classes with the limitations of the early destroyer hull.)
• In mid to late 2023 carriers were given the option to mount cruiser armor in the ship designer, but base speed was not increased to compensate. Creating an "accurate" design is an impossible balancing act. Accurate air group, accurate top speed, accurate armor. You can only pick two.
• An accurate Iowa design is also not possible. Any such design must include heavy guns IV (1943 tech), have a top speed of 33 knots, and be ready to start building by mid 1940. The advanced battleship hull can just barely reach this speed with the help of a MIO perk. Historically Iowa was very similar to South Dakota but with greater length and more powerful machinery to push up the speed. This came at the cost of increased displacement which is not modeled in game.
• Good luck getting Heavy guns III and DP secondaries III in time to build North Carolina. Historically NC's design was revised while under construction to accommodate the 16" guns, but the under-construction-refit penalty in game is so severe it isn't a practical strategy.

Omitted Construction:

• Axillaries, minesweepers, minelayers, and seaplane tenders are not included in this estimate.
• Ships that were not completed, or could have been built had the war continued are not included.
• Ships built for other countries were likewise not included.

It is worth noting that some ships cannot be built according to their historical timetable because there are limits to how many dockyards can be assigned to a single ship.

Having recently completed a stent at Fort Benning one of America's longest standing Military Installations I got the idea for this feature.

Permanent Military Installations would be buildings used to give bounces to units raised in the same tile as the installation such as shorter training time, soft/attack, movement, and environmental bounces based on the environment of the installations location. A version of this for the Air Force and Navy like a Top Gun type school.

Installation management could be handled in the training in a similar manner to research facilities. Enhanced Marksmanship training for soft attack, AT weapons training for hard attack and penetration, small unit tactics for organization, etc.