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Hearts of Iron IV's resource distribution problem (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by Spanish_Commie@lemmygrad.ml to c/paradoxgames@lemmygrad.ml

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Okay, I'm not gonna pretend to be an all-knowing historian but the difference between the resources in the imperial core and the resources everywhere else is so baffling to me. One could argue that the imperial core has all those resources because of the colonies, but the colonies in the game barely have anything. the UK could lose all of their colonies in Africa and still produce a metric ton of steel.

Take a look at Germany:

pic:screenshot of germany with a ton of resources

As you can see Germany has a shit ton of steel and aluminum, two very important resources, and a little bit of oil and chromium.

Now let's check Africa:

pic:the horn of africa with barely any resouces

This is only one part of Africa since resource icons don't appear when you are very far away, but you get the point; Africa barely has resources except for some isolated cases such as the chromium in the southern part and some steel in the north-west.

Maybe I'm wrong, and please tell me if I am, but wasn't the reason the imperial powers colonized half the world to steal their natural resources?

And even gameplay-wise it would make sense to move resources to Africa, since in my opinion Africa is barely worth fighting for. You lose a shit ton of manpower and equipment to attrition in an offensive because there is no supply anywhere, and what do you get? 12 rubber?

I calculated all of the base resources in both Africa and Germany.

Africa has 66 steel, 0 aluminum, 250 chromium, 36 rubber and 1 oil.

Germany has 247 steel, 83 aluminum, 3 chromium, 0 rubber and 2 oil.

Apart of chromium and rubber the difference is abysmal. And remember we are comparing 1 (one) country to an entire continent.

What are your thoughts?

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[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Yeah steel used to be big in Europe and Lenin even talks about it at length in Imperialism. Then it led to a crisis of overproduction and eventually wasn't so big anymore lol

The problem HOI4 runs into is like you said, the rest of the world doesn't have that many interesting resources. You can eventually produce everything domestically with tech. At most Southeast Asia has a lot of rubber.

Tbh these games would make more sense psychologically if we abstracted them completely and put them in like a brand new original fantasy setting. You see Germany and you think it has to be historically accurate, but it's a game first and a simulation second. Some things have to be balanced for gameplay -- the AI needs those resources because it's systematically a worse player than any human with sufficient hours in the game. They also don't want an African tag to start conquering the world, they want to give you a WW2 simulation contained inside a game.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They also don’t want an African tag to start conquering the world, they want to give you a WW2 simulation contained inside a game.

This is main reason why i hate HoI and have mixed feeling about Victoria - PDX games are great as very alternative history sandboxes, and those two games are already very railroaded.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I just play EU4 it's the only one that's worth it once you put the time in.

Well, I had to stop playing cause I didn't do anything else all day but that's another story.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I played EU 1,2,3 and it was great, especially 2, but i don't like 4 for some reason, probably because that shit ruler mana thing used for everything made me feel i actually can't do much in this game.

[–] CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

You have to hoard those points like they're the last drop of oil on the planet and everyone owns three cars. When you have events with a choice that makes you lost points, pick the choice that doesn't. Try to maximise your points as much as possible -- which means yeeting heirs that have less than 9 points (averaged as 3/3/3) and upgrading your advisors to level 5 (which means making a ton of money which I got better at recently).

There's no point taking tech too early (for innovativeness) because the cost goes down by 10% every year on january 1st, and AI seems to wait until that tick before taking theirs early. There's an alert now that tells you you only have so many days until you lose your chance at getting innovativeness, so you can literally wait until the last day of the alert before taking tech for possibly better discounts (spying on tech leader or neighbour bonus for example).

But tbh sometimes I end up with so many points I just take tech 10 years early because I don't know what else to do with it anyway. You can also dev provinces but for military it's not that useful.

Edit: there's also a little-known event you can get if you hire a master of mint and trader as advisors. You'll fire them both and get 200 admin and 200 diplo points. They're supposed to be removed out of the game but it's broken (like almost everything in this game, which is what makes it interesting), and you can manually fire your advisors before clicking the decision and then rehire them. You can get it once per game and ideally you want to get it asap.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml -1 points 2 years ago

It's not that i can't play it, it's just this single feature sapped all the fun from the game.