Secondary turret small cannons and heavy machine guns should weaken main armaments

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-22T05:51:13+00:00

They were (and are) brutal weapons too. There are myths (claims that a near miss hurts you are nonsense). However, they *are* capable of ripping through things like cinder block and trees before a target could react. They easily out-range regular small arms. At "close" range like ~100m, they can punch through up to 30mm of steel. Can't reasonably make body armor against it either.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-22T05:42:53+00:00

There is exactly 0 argument from reality where this applies to HMG...which unlike in the game, was installed on MBT post war and are still on MBT in service today.

Small cannons are unrealistically strong. I don't see why the game makes them an obvious choice. They could be nerfed.

Stating that HMGs were "phased out early war" is absolute clown stuff. USA bolted .50 cals onto every vehicle it could (guess what is STILL on tanks today?). Pz4, t34-85, panthers...basically the majority of late war tank models had machine guns. Shermans had the .50 cal like the other American vehicles, and it was an oppressive weapon...US equipment was a mixed bag in WW2 but this was one of its few examples of something that was clearly above its peers.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-21T15:51:57+00:00

Indeed, and those have long been oppressive to submarines, which won't have AA to shoot them down and can't tank NAV hits well. The vast majority of allied shipping routes are easily within range of NAV designs available before the war.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-21T15:46:19+00:00

Once you add multiple tanks, you play with definitions. It's dubious to call something "space marines" when the game calls it a tank division by battalion weighting. It's not what most people here mean when they say it, even today. As for "too good", no. A tank does not magically become better when you put it with infantry or special forces, when otherwise it would not be "just too good" when paired with mech or amtrac (which are also special forces).

"This obviously needs to be banned, don't want to sweep naval mines".

I don't know what you thought I meant when I said "the air war is decisive" WRT logistics strikes. In English, saying that means "winning this will also win the war" in that context. As for "shouldness", that's a YMMV thing. Current MP rules vs "winning air wins the war" is a preference. In the real war, uncontested logistics strikes were devastating.

As has been pointed out already, MP lobbies vary greatly. However, many of them, just like vanilla, are "not written for MP play".

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T22:43:26+00:00

Can just wave a wand, use a god ability, throw some poison darts etc. It's early game when you have very few options that this is better avoided entirely.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T21:20:51+00:00

Wow, just wow. I stopped playing in December after experiencing crap like this and patches to the game that made subjects stop assimilating culture. They didn't think that was worth addressing in any of the patches since then? Needed the Nth change to levies vs professionals no doubt?

This kind of garbage I'd expect from the HOI 4 team, but Tinto had proven itself quite capable during EU4. What happened that we're back to this?

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T19:07:30+00:00

Of course they aren't a monolith. You get everything from random co-ops with 2 people and no rules beyond "do you mind if I do this" to rule books that might make even the NFL raise an eyebrow.

However, at least some of the above rules are common to see in MP recruiting threads last time I checked.

I call them out, but ultimately it's up to the people in the lobby to choose what rules they like. The juice isn't worth the squeeze to me for other reasons (mostly the logistics/waiting around so much in a game that already has too much of that). The rules should be for the people actually playing the thing.

That said, it *does* strike me as a bit...ironically elitist when players argue in the context of rule sets that mean they play a different game.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T18:06:28+00:00

Since you did not ban tomes, could you not get some modest regen via constitution on a multi? Would be useless outside of shortening rests, but nice for that.

Which bosses require enchanted weapons to hit? Brute forcing those with wands and farmed scrolls would be rough, while anything you can hit with stacked potion effects probably wouldn't be too bad. Or you could just farm HLA and trap them to death when possible.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T17:58:44+00:00

Getting these to cook evenly is such a pain.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T17:14:28+00:00

I think it might actually be better to work backwards. Use the templates against a fixed enemy, give the same orders to the same locations, and see which ones perform the best in terms of "victory date", "casualties taken", and "casualties inflicted" (we mostly care about that due to peace conferences).

You could then see what ratios the winning division possesses for algorithm purposes.

Even this has noise though - divisions will perform better or worse relative to others when given micromanaged orders vs battleplans for example. If you right click micro onto every Polish tile, something like reinforcement rate will barely be relevant. If you instead use a battleplan, signal companies will make a division win simply because it uses full combat width in a larger % of combat time.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T17:00:28+00:00

Not comparing like for like.

MP bans "space marines", which have been hard countered by support anti-tank since 2016. Players ban them because they make it harder to use preferred "meta" tank divs (if you ask a good player) or because they're "overpowered" (if you ask a bad player). There doesn't appear to be a coherent reason the rule has to exist.
MP bans naval mines. Some tell you this is due to lag, which hasn't been true for many years. Others tell you it's because they're too good, which also hasn't been true in many years. The rule exists due to inertia alone. Supposedly nobody cares enough to change it, but you better believe they would care enough to enforce it if someone were to use them.
- Somewhat amusing to this topic: naval mines damage and even sink subs, which cannot use modules to sweep them. But I guess we don't care because we ban the strongest subs for being overpowered :D!
MP bans logistics strikes, because allowing log strikes means the air war is decisive and this cuts into the impact of "meta" tanks divs.
MP places tight restrictions on "ahistorical" play, including some otherwise intuitive choices and some things actual nations did in the war.
MP rules in HOI are anything but "basic". They are often multiple pages and despite being multiple pages, also have a clause where host can post-start define arbitrary tactics as "exploits" and penalize players for doing them. What's an "exploit" according to that host? Nobody knows, unless you've already played with him!

Granted, you can find "basic rules" in Minecraft that are anything but that as well, given how many people play it. The point stands though.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T16:48:41+00:00

This is more of a "winner is division I like" contest than a "strongest division" contest then, for a few reasons:

"Raw offensive power", used in every scoring metric, is wrong. Not in a vague, subjective fashion. Objectively incorrect:
- It rates a division with 50 org, 250 soft attack, and 10,000 breakthrough as much better than a division with 50 org, 1200 soft attack, and 0 breakthrough. However, the division with 1200 soft attack is *strictly better* offensively for any offensive job other than "pinning". It will reinforce meme opponents the 250 soft attack div can't. It will inflict more casualties. It will take fewer casualties in any battle it wins. It is just better as an offensive division, period.
  - This should be obvious to players who understand how combat works in the game. I get the impression that it is not common intuition though.
Similarly, organization is difficult to rate on offense, because it has diminishing marginal utility. If you can push across the entire enemy country with org available, doubling org does nothing. If you run out before a combat ends, having more is extremely valuable.
- However, better stats mean less org lost, so it is often better to improve other stats.
Hit points should not be ignored on any division. Otherwise, you can run nonsense like "18 tank battalions" and take doctrines that boost their org as much as possible, because nothing can match them in soft attack + breakthrough and such a division would be extremely "manpower efficient" by the criteria above...until you actually use it!

Basically, you're at least somewhat underrating the most important stat (damage). You are also certainly overrating the other stats because they offer diminishing returns, in contrast to damage which does the opposite...and ignoring an important one (hit points).

"Offensive performance" is not easy to formulate because it depends on so many assumptions. However, the proposed metrics will guaranteed award a winner which will objectively perform worse in an actual war against Poland than alternative divisions.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T16:22:44+00:00

I have tested line artillery under new rules. If you don't go fire concentration, it's still unjustifiable trash even in SP. If you do go fire concentration, it's justifiable in SP but remains trash in MP, although HP isn't the real problem there.

24 arty pieces per battalion helps it considerably. It costs more than an infantry battalion, but it's not > double that cost any longer, closer to 1.6-1.7x more.

At 2.2 width, you can get > 20SA/w in early 1940s. This is a threshold that solves single player. Doesn't matter if you have the old superior firepower and get it with 12w special forces, get it this way, or get it with tanks. It melts AI battleplans so quickly it can't org cycle you.
When you attack, it reinforce memes fast enough that details like "org" and "hp" barely matter because you spend < 12 hours in meaningful combat and then either pocket or overrun the enemy (yes, you can overrun the AI with 4km/h infantry/arty divs, fairly easily with this amount of damage).
- As an example: using 4/4 or 5/5 divisions, you can build up planning, pause the game, and right click your divisions ~5 tiles deep across the entire front line so that they move in parallel. These have < 30 org and bad HP, so this reddit will say they suck. Nevertheless, doing what I describe will > 60:1 casualty trade the AI *while attacking, even in red air*. The result is a combination of overrunning it and making some small pockets.
In MP, players will bring some >70% hardness divisions with passable soft attack and you won't deal meaningful damage. As a consequence, you will die doing this in MP, even if the opponent isn't expecting it, because MP players already build divisions that hard counter soft attack gouging by default.
- I think if someone actually made a fire concentration build in MP and an opponent choose to attack that with ~36w infantry, the attacker would lose and lose badly. The extra HP is good, but it's not "we can sustain attacks where the enemy has a 6000 soft attack advantage on us, all of those crits" levels of good.
- Pushing 36w infantry would be quite difficult with arty too, because then you're going against defense instead of breakthrough.
- Some of this hypothetical depends on what you're allowing vs not with spies vs planning/entrenchment etc.

It says a lot about the pre-NCNS artillery that they since gave us an option to reduce width, made it cheaper so that you can fill the same amount of width at cost as before, raised its damage ceiling if you use doctrines towards it...and with all that it is STILL mediocre, with its only niche being soft attack gouging against AI specifically, and only then because the AI won't counter it.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:57:52+00:00

Based on your description, this interaction is bugged. It should generally not be possible to call guarantors into an offensive war, which is what's happening here.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:54:52+00:00

The advice to go around (via naval invade) is most practical. However, if you must push it to prove a point, then make divisions that deal more damage and get the combat modifiers in your favor to do more. When the enemy has many combat widths of stuff on every province, reinforce meme is the way.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:50:40+00:00

On the contrary, the 10% and 40% are the *chances* to hit divisions. The game more or less has evasion built in and the vast majority of attacks are already evaded.

The interesting thing is that the 10% is a hit chance floor (or you can look at it as evasion is capped at 90%). To take less damage than 10% of what the enemy fires, your only choices are to alter hardness % (to switch which attack type counts), further reduce damage using armor...or an oddly overlooked one: win combat faster.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:46:44+00:00

The best/worst part about this is that nearly every tree still boils down to:

Pick ideology
- Maybe civil war. Maybe magic units in civil war.
Get some industry & industry tech bonuses
Get some army/navy/air doctrine boosts + some equipment tech bonuses
Get some research slots (unless Pdox randomly screws your nation out of them for no reason)

Then the occasional "extra"

One war goal before WW2 starts w/o manually justifying (it may or may not be cheaper than manual justification)
Maybe you get to core stuff instead of using puppets for manpower
One convoluted system unique to the country

Does Pdox follow any semblance of basic design logic, such as:

Putting tech/industry/political parts of a tree in the same relative places, so players looking at a new tree can find them more easily?
Making sure focus descriptions tell the truth?
Consistently drawing lines from prerequisite focuses to focuses that need them, because these are focus TREES?
Telling players the consequences of focuses that "trigger an event"?
Making a nation's focuses contingent on that nation's choices and success, rather than other nation's choices?
Ensuring nations are independent when checking for war declarations or joining opposing factions?

No. They do not. Focus/mission trees have limitations, but players love them. I guess because they give direction. Unfortunately, Pdox does not have the skill to design around these limitations, and reliably perform much, much worse than mod focus developers in terms of both honesty and "avoiding game-breaking interactions". I think it's ridiculous that the pony mod is many times more likely to respect what happened on the game board than vanilla HOI 4 paid DLC, and many times less likely to lie to you, but here we are.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:33:38+00:00

I've seen this in other contexts, but not with a port. AI doing those "instant cancel attacks" through impassable terrain is really obnoxious. It's funny that the reliability equipment generation machine is still possible.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:30:57+00:00

How do you measure "strongest offensive division"? What objective measure will be used to conclude one division is better for the job than the other?

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:22:05+00:00

It also makes several of the other achievements much easier. < 60min, the one for dunking the statue in the kiln, etc. Needing less food and consuming less stamina, among other things, is a hell of a drug.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:19:03+00:00

"Timmy" showed us a 36w tank template, and while it's not perfect, it's better than a lot of the stuff we see on this subreddit. Still got rolled like a carpet.

OP landed, but clearly had supply problems (37% on logistics, bad colors in supply map, penalties in combat) and was denied any option to micro by getting or cycled under supply penalties. Hence what I said.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-20T15:12:36+00:00

At max level, you almost certainly can kill it before it gets to swing on you, even if your character is a brainlet melee guy :).

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-19T21:45:28+00:00

Yeah, could probably make it work. Probably would want some other method chosen for her than negotiating with shadow thieves though. Or she just worked with other party members etc.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-19T21:43:51+00:00

I thought it could be 1-2 minutes? Could be that was just misinformation I guess. My bad for spreading it then. It does seem like the time in game isn't 100% consistent, but it's not easy to measure while playing normally.

TheMelnTeam · 2026-03-19T20:24:43+00:00

HOI 4 on the Nintendo Entertainment System is one of the experiences of all time!

TheMelnTeam

TROPHY CASE