Hearts of Iron IV

Its a massive grand strategy game with tons of different ways to play. I suggest watching a video on how to play first just so you know what your getting into but after you play a little bit its easy.
-Polska po zwycięstwo!

I feel like this game significantly stunted my social growth in high school

Takes a billion hours to dig into, not worth it for me if i don't see results in the first fiftyish hours

also tons of micro and clicking for me... not fun doesn't feel like you do anything as anyone

the game without dlcs in dogs*** and whenever i go to pdx launcher i can only see ck3 dlcs expensive example: goterdamerung 15 dollars hell no but the game is easy the time is soo slow lack of mod updates i coud reach 1948 in 6 hours but the rest is good

In many war games it feels like you can simply roll up on someone/country and begin fighting. Paradox Interactive in all their games, but especially this one, have a 'casus belli'/war goal rule where it not only delays wars so you can set the pace of combat but stop other AI from immediately destroying you. Along with the choice (mostly just the major countries) to rewrite history and can actually see how different the war would've been. So far my favorite alt history choice has been bringing back Napoleon for France and rebuilding the French Empire, as well as the option to oppose Hitler giving the chance for Germany to be anything but fascist.
Overall, if you enjoy history and have the patience to sit though a game as you stumble around to figure out every detail then definitely look into this one. Even myself, with 215 hrs, have yet to master the game but it's still enjoyable by myself or with friends.

This game is probably one of the most boring strategy games I've ever played, not only does it take forever for anything to get done in the game it also has mechanics that are very difficult to learn and understand. I have played this game for more than 500 hours and I still have no clue how the navy works. Another problem to be mentioned is that 90% of the either good or new content is locked behind a paywall, sure when a new expansion comes out the country of focus gets a revamped historical focus tree but that only goes so far. I don't really care about the money I wasted on this game, but I do care about the time I wasted

This game is honestly great, its amazing. But my problem with it is that it is quite good at crashing at the slightest incovnience. I am tired of this.

This game is the greatest thing to happen to me, after playing it not only did women line up on the door for me, i was given money for doing nothing but playing this game, do download it

I don't know what it is. The grand strategy, the mods, the history or the satisfaction of victory in the long game. The mod support and updates from paradox have been pretty insane. Definitely a bit of a learning curve, but is worth it once you get the basics. if mods are your taste, there's a bit for everyone, realism, challenges, time expansions, alternate history, etc.

One of the most comprehensive historical games about grand strategy in world war two ever conceived, and better yet, its executed perfectly. The game has many aspects that make for an accurate representation of the second world war. It can be played many ways and that's what makes it amazing.

If it was about doing the same thing over and over then it wouldn't be as successful as it is. The unlimited replayability that this game possesses is just phenomenal.

My only concern about this game would be that it is incredibly concise. As someone who has played for over 1000 hours I feel like i've only just finished the tutorial and I'm constantly learning things.

Despite this minor thing though the game is just too much fun. Navally invading the germans in 1941 as Britain only to blitz to Berlin with some specially designed tanks is something I enjoy and can only be found here

Hands down one of the best RTS games out there, takes awhile to learn but once you figure out to play you will want to play nonstop for hours. Would say this is the best game out there right now if you like RTS. I also think all the DLCs are worth it, they can cost a pretty penny but it adds a lot!

Amazing game, best one on the market. I love playing multiplayer, and its very fun. Hard to learn but very fun later on. Still a lot of room for improvement, but best on the market

After many hours which brought their victories as much as defeats and after learning the base and intermediate mechanics as much as microing the templates and learning about combat penalties and so on, I must in the end post a negative review for this game.

Why and how?!

I rarely post reviews but this time I felt compelled to, because I am not just an ordinary HoI player but the one that played the series since the first installment in earlier days through the 2nd and 3rd one with the accompanying DLCs up till now with the final one.

In this latest installment none of the mechanics from previous times got easier, but they have gone (mostly) in-depth and more complex, while some other were gotten rid of completely (currency / money mechanic from HoI 3 for example). The one I liked the most so far comes from La Resistance DLC which brings the spy and subversion mechanics into this game.

I find it to be a nice and wonderful suggestion from devs when it comes to supporting modding community and keeping it alive by providing free (!) modding courses for the interested, truly rare to see in action elsewhere nowadays!

The graphics have gotten a mile ahead while the microing of templates is a wonderful as well as a crucial addition to the overall game. Focus Tree Mechanic is one that deserves the most praise but is being vastly overpowered for some nations (for example, try to lower the stability and war support for late-war China by deploying 6 different spies with strong intel network and you will see what I am talking about).

Airforce mechanics are good but what they lack is being able to promote the ace pilots to military high command.

Raid mechanics are mostly useless (except nuclear of course) but a very good way to max out the experience of your air wing.

The bad stuff comes along with many things which I call "Lazy and incomplete programming".

The first one is / are general FPS / performance issues, at which the size and coolness of your GPU / CPU unit do not matter at all, maybe slightly at some point here and then. The game is made to use only 2 cores of the CPU while my personal one has much more than that gladly waiting to be utilized. Even tho I tried many remedies as setting a high priority task manager setting, lowering graphic settings, disabling real-time antivirus check and such, it didn´t help with the matter that the game becomes unplayable after mid to late-1943. There are mods to limit the spawn of AI divisions in order to tone down the issues but there are absolutely no remedies from the fellow modders to make the game utilize more CPU cores, considering it is strictly developers job and domain. In the end, there are far fewer ways to considerably tweak the performance manually than in, lets say Cities Skylines, which is also a creation of Paradox Entertainment. It is a boomer to actually plan something for 20+ hours in the playthrough but be greeted by such an immersion and game-breaking problem. This is indeed an incomplete side of Paradox programming.

Other things are the infamous bugs. There are some Day 1 La Resistance DLC bugs still persisting (steal blueprint mission gets prepared but on loading the saved game file doesnt want to start).

The one which I hate the most is the victory points bug caused by "negative integer overflow". At the end of the war I got to keep more than 55 000 Victory Points at the Peace Conference and they all, although painted green, were for me as well as my allies negative and therefore not usable, leading to a White Peace being signed and ruining the results of 17 + hours war. Considering it a small change in code I am confident to say that this is indeed the lazy side of programming at Paradox Studios.

The game doesnt have tech trees and experimental projects dedicated post-1950, tho it is possible to play it endlessly after 1950 (game "ends" around 1948 with the table score shown to you). God bless, we have a mod for that too!

Not being able to change the difficulty of AI Behavior but only of the supply grace makes me irritated, but we have Expert AI mod for that uneven situation.

All of this and much more makes one think that the studio is more interested in pumping out DLCs ranging from mid to low-quality with the overpriced (sale) prices on Steam while not resolving core issues in the base game itself for years since its release in 2015, thus still making a buck or two out our own pockets. I swear that Kaiserreich and OWB mod for HoI4 have much more and way better content in them than the base game itself does. It is to conclude that Paradox does have a very greedy side to it as like EA and Activision do for themselves.

Multiplayer is a nice addition but considering the personal opinions of others that play it, it is not properly optimized for such undertaking.

After liberating countries past the Peace Conference my division(s) get exiled on said territories but they are UNABLE to move from it! That makes them stuck and in order not to loose (oftentimes veteran) divisions, one is prompted to use debug window and in case of an Ironman Run, that is a no-go.

There is much more to say and critique, but these are the things that come shooting to my mind right now.

All in all, I am sad that I had to uninstall this raw gem but in the end I want to preserve my temper as much as my health when it comes to such. I will now say goodbye to HoI 4, at least for a long time till it maybe gets fixed.

Thanks for the time taken reading this, fellows!

just a overall fun game, great mechanics great development and it keeps expanding, and if you ever get bored there's thousands of mods. Also great way to learn history

One of the greatest WW2 grand strategy games ever made. DLC is overpriced so wait for a sale.

It's a very fun game, with easily understandable mechanics. I still don't understand how the navy works.

Komplex game, could be interesting, but a lot of the consequences of your actions are not described. Unfortuantly that makes it frustrating to play

-played for the first time as italy
-took too long to figure out how to play
-lost against ethiopia
-got absolutely demolished by yugoslavia and the swiss
-started a new game as germany
-lost to poland.

Nearing 300hrs and honestly I still don't know whats happening but sometimes there's green bubbles with big numbers and then the red rectangle's numbers go down so that's cool. DLC's are a little pricey especially if you want them all, however.

Really good, really fun. Easy to learn, and. Yeah thats it i guess. YAY!!!!

This game is seriously awesome, with tons of memorable moments and some fantastic mods. If you're all about strategy and WWII, you'll be hooked for hours. Just don't expect a super-fast-paced game, 'cause this one's all about tactics and planning.

i played as germany, invited more than half of europe into my faction, killed the soviets, and then poland took all my land

10/10 would play again

Yes, good game so far. Takes me me longer to learn it cause i'm older and other stuff with my head. Had to find a video to tell me what I was missing about naval invasion. If you don't have navel superiority and don't escort the flotilla they won't even start, ships won't even be allocated to carry the troops. I haven't played any games in awhile, need to cause they keep me sharper, well this game is hard enough to help that a lot.

Been playing this game for 2 years, now I no longer can talk to women only know how to get sino-japanese war within 4 months. Just started to understand how navy works. If you are radical socialist or fascist, I would totally recommend this game, and I am extremely racist. 10/10

Well, it's an amazingly detailed game. Popular with overly serious armchair generals. I am not that serious. It's horrendously complicated that requires a lot of time and dedication to get the hang of. I had to play it for a few hours to know this. I asked for a refund, and Steam gave me the middle finger. You need to decide within 2 hours if this game is for you which is hard to do with such an epic game. It is a beautifully made game, but it's mechanics are a bit beyond me, and require a level of effort that makes it a job. If you like spending hours fluffing around not really understanding the mechanics despite hours of tutorials, you will probably like this game. Commenters welcome who can recommend good tutorials that take less than an hour. Alas, I will just add it to my pile of shame.

i am not able to play on ubuntu 24,
.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Hearts of Iron IV/hoi4: error while loading shared libraries: libOpenGL.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So much wasted potential here. The game can be entertaining at times but poor design decisions and bugs that have persisted for literal years. This will be my last Paradox title as the quality is not what it once ways. I'm tired of giving them second chances. They simply don't live up to expectations. They also treat their customers like crap. Mods make it somewhat bearable, but it's still quite underwhelming.

I absolutely love Hoi4, but I HATE that instead of updates for the game we get up to 30-40$ of dlc for Usually one major two minor nations this was fine when there was only maybe 3 Dlc but now over 100$ for a game that costs 60$. I just want updates that aren't paid Dlc and even a minor rework to past Dlc (COMMONWEALTH). I know that there are more than enough mods but I just want to download a mod for a game I already spent over 20$ on.
P.s Also why did you have to take over half the Dlc I bought, I get it new players more content but I spent money on those Dlc. :(

Yes, its a mess, yes it has problems, yes it has all the issues of a modern Paradox game.

However it still offers the best, most comprehensive WW2 Strategy experience. Once you get a hang of the, admittedly somewhat bloated, mechanics and stop getting bent over by the supply system, you're in for years of replayability and a studio that does not stop supporting their games.

Fun things to try include:
-Ousting Stalin in the 2nd Russian Civil War
-Bumrushing the Allies as H-man in 1936
-Reuniting China as one of the many warlords,
-Holding out against Fascism AND Communism as Poland
-Putting yet another Napoleon on the throne of France and get revanche on Belgium
-Reforming the Austrohungarian Empire


Don't let hardcore gamers that are salty about wasting their lives on this game keep you from wasting yours. Its fun

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☑ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☑ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

> Almost 1.5k hours in this Microsoft Excel ahh game
> I still do not understand a thing about the naval system

10/10, highly recommend

The game itself is fine. But the monetization of features that should be in the base game by Paradox is horrendous. Even during sales the DLC are still expensive. Once paradox actually learns how to not make every small feature a whole full priced DLC, I will change my review. But knowing Paradox, my review will never change.

Educational and really well thought strategy game. Personally for me educational on the first place. Really low how deep devs go into even alternative historical trees which motivates you to even look it up and read about it. Cool game!

P.S.
Pls make supply hub cheaper. The only pain in my arse. Like what are they building - a city? Why it is so expensive? Should not be more than civ factory.

imagine being on heroin hydrocodone oxycodone morphine diazepam alprazolam clonazepam lorazepam methamphetamine and crack cocaine all at once then jumping off the golden gate bridge

This game has stolen 700 hours of my life
and it will continue to do so because I can't stop

If you're thinking of getting the game
Be prepared to waste a couple hours of your life learning the game
Be prepared to spend a small fortune to unlock most of the content (or just download mods)

Oh and if you wanna use Navy
just grab your fleet, click a type of naval mission, click on a region or two and hope for the best

this game boils down to the most entertaning experience. The community is really nice and helpful and there is just SO much customizable stuff to make the game just how you want it, also columbia is noice

I have played this game for a few hours, and I would just like to say that it is both a great game and a complete waste of time. The game was great many years ago when there wasn’t all of this bloat and useless mechanics. The developers have made so many updates and DLCs for the game that should have been in the game to start with. Many of these DLCs were just focus trees that were mediocre at best with maybe one or two useless mechanics, and they cost 20$. There are hundreds of mods on the workshop that are free and 100x better than these DLCs that are just focus trees. The game is more tailored to singleplayer with multiplayer basically not even thought of. These DLCs for the most part are not even usable or balanced for multiplayer. The vast majority of my time is playing on mods that are based off of Road to 56 which almost completely rewrite the game because vanilla is so boring and lacks content. The multiplayer community for the most part is very toxic and in the last couple years hackers have run rampant. There is no firewall or defense against them and if a fix or update comes a new version is out the next day. There are some plus sides to the game though. I have learned the world map, countries, city names, and their locations way too well. There is endless replay factor with hundreds of great mods for all different tastes in gameplay. It’s also fun to watch them numbers go up. Green bubble and dopamine go brrrr. When it comes to new players starting it has a decent learning curve. There are guides but it still can be complicated especially for navy. I recommend to play singleplayer for a while and be able to beat the AI in a decent amount of time and learn the metas for everything. All I got to say in the end is that waiting in lobby sim for 3 hours to get a game going, start, get 20 minutes in, a major leaves for no reason, game ends, time wasted, repeat.

10/10 Just figured out navy

Not a fan of where the game headed. I like to play minor nations and the last expansion just made it that much more difficult to play them (more nerfs to forts). Some nations like France have been neglected for years now or just have obsurd focus trees like the Swiss one. I'll still play the game but I think I am done buying dlc from Paradox.

Most updates make your previous modded and unmodded saves unplayable. I have been 30 hours into a Millennium Dawn play through just for the game to update and make all that progress disappear. It was rare for that to happen in the past but it now happens with even tiny updates. I'm over this.

This game is very cool, the only problem is that it’s difficult for starters

I can’t win the german civil war

Game is great
+even greater with mods
+even greater if you understand navy (i still cant sail to American soil)
-i am now obsessed
-i need professional help to understand the navy

Great game, will take away hunderds of hours of your "life" but worth it!
after playing for 700 hours i still dont know how navy works, so theres always something new to learn!

Been wanting to play this game for years, finally gets around to playing it, computer breaks a week after I began. After months of saving up finally getting a new PC to play with my friends. After 30 hours I still have no idea what I'm doing, but who cares? 10/10 willing to suffer on the Eastern Front for my fellow maidenless bros.

Obviously, one of the best strategic games on Steam. I love it and I recommend it to grand strategists or people who just love strategic games. HOI4 is pretty complicated at the start, but it gets easier the longer you play.

Fantastic game. I highly recommend this game to all who like strategy or ww2 era games. Only downside is needing to buy all the DLC for all the focus trees and paths, but this game is one of the few that I actually shell money out on DLC for as I have such a fun time playing this game as I have over 600 hours. Small nations and major nations are both fun to play in their own way and require finesse in winning. Yet somehow I am still terrible at this game after 600 hours.

for those with ADHD or Autism (or both). hoi is a game that i cannot recommend enough. while the historical game is always fun and entertaining. the true passion lies within its alternative history. each path of each country draws upon key historical events which tell a story that while unlikely is nothing less than improbable. it is clear they have placed so much time and love into the storys and mechanics. with almost 900 hours in the game ive barely scratched the surface of the games Replayability.

the community further ensures that you will never get bored. with key mods that grant the player a completely new game. A community in which the developers actually showcase and show their unconditional support towards (sorry rockstar).

while the game has its negitives. with DLC prices being higher than average and base game without DLC missing the key mechanics that make it the joy it is today. if you can get over the harsh learning curve and even gain just a base understanding of each key role (army/navy/airforce/politics) i can guarantee you a game that even after 882 hours you'll still feel like you have so much to learn and so much more fun to be had

(its funnier to play with friends)

It's fun to just screw around and just paint the map without actually knowing what you are even doing. The modding scene is what makes this game really fun.

Game bad without mods that fix things, mods require DLCs.
I don't care about extra stuff from all the DLCs, I just want to play base game without bad AI.

It's a great WW2 game. Love the idea of exploring alternative history on every playthrough.

CAS is broken navy system is ass and the ai is retarded
It's okay