I love this game although it does have issues. My main gripe is how the National Focus works. It does not react to actual situation. In one of my playthroughs i played as democratic Poland. I managed to beat the Reich. In 1940 it became German Republic and it joined the Allies. The USA though used it's NF to attack the Germans (thinking it is still the Reich). So now it's all of the Allies vs USA. A bit stupid IMHO.

From day-one certain purchase to six years on, but I finally bought this game in the Steam Summer sale. I'll ease in to it but expect a thread

I bought the starter edition for like $21 which includes several expansions. I might have bought the ultimate or whatever edition, but I'm paying for music and that won't do. I'll add the other expansions while skipping the fluff, should the game prove well suited to me, or I to it.

Looking at the starter pack, I'd recommend picking up La Resistance (adds espionage with a bunch of possibilities) and Man The Guns (naval improvements, ship design, alternate history possibilities for US and Britain and a few others). At least I found them enjoyable. I keep looking at this one in my library, and thinking about starting up a new campaign. But do I remember how to play it though.....

Hey JC, thanks man. That's helpful. I'm one of the few EU IV players to embrace the maritime and naval side of the game, so maybe I'll like it in HOI4 as well. I'll pick that one up.

Not sure how I'll kick this off. I played the tutorial as Italy for a half hour and got a cursory feel for how things work, but that's just the surface of a game like this.

I'm thinking about making my first proper go Brazil.

I think I did that as well - Brazil as a starter. IIRC there wasn't really much going on in SA so I didn't spend much time there.
I found the USSR campaign to be very approachable as my first full blown attempt at the game. I also found a video playthrough and more or less
followed their lead. Some random things wind up happening that make your playthrough different but there was enough similarity I was able to use it as a guide
to help get a handle on the game.

I reasoned Brazil is a good early choice as it seems South America is your personal playground. USA guarantees all of these nations but only against attack from overseas. Overseas guarantees, I like it. I'm not sure what the goal is here, like overall objective? Is there a winning condition? Or is it more like EU IV, sandbox with no end goal aside from those conjured up by the player?

I fired it up and played through day one haha. Didn't even advance the date yet. I have to see every option, button and menu, and start to decipher them. How do you trade? What research path makes sense early on? How should I allocate my production? How do I recruit, and assign to larger formations? Do I even want to? How do generals work? How can I see opinions of me? Standard Paradox fare, and I'm at the stage where I know little and must learn the mechanics, and what is possible (or not).

There are 150 achievements in HOI4. Of course achievement hunting was a favorite pastime of mine in EU IV, but here they are quite specific, and unique to nations, and it will be harder to pile them up. Minor point, but something I like to pursue in Paradox games. As such my first run is ironman, but that's the proper way to play games like this isn't it? No mulligans, take it as it comes.

Comparisons to other Paradox games are natural, and for me especially EU IV with so much time in that title. I'm hoping that experience lends itself to getting up to speed with Hearts of Iron. It's all in the tooltips

Yes, Brazil is a good start. Just make sure you don't declare war on somebody that's guaranteed by anybody but the US. You can pretty much do as you want.

To trade, depending on your export policy it's mostly automated for exports. To import a resource you need go to the trade window, click on the resource you need and find a friendly or neutral country that has a supply of that resource. You'll trade 1 civ factory for every 8 of that resource you import.

It's a sandbox like EU4, particularly when running a minor nation like Brazil. Just do what you want. There's no win condition.

You can almost never go wrong with computing and industry techs. The computing reduces research time for every other tech. Industry lets you build more industries as well as increasing production caps.
Dispersed vs Concentrated, dispersed is better if you plan on being strategic bombed or if you're going to keep changing production lines as it keeps part of the production efficiency when you switch. Concentrated increased the efficiency cap, so if you're gonna have some production runs that keep going and wont change it can be a plus. That's at the expense of being more vulnerable to strategic bombing.
And if you don't have access to oil, you may need the synthetic refining tree. Shouldn't be a problem in South America though.

Yeah, Brazil seems in a good position at the start, relatively safe in world affairs, but in the best position regarding local affairs. Take over South America, and then hitch your wagon to whichever side you want. But it's probably true that I have to forge an ideological path before that.

Thanks for the info wormfood. I was asking those questions rhetorically, but I appreciate your insight. Any other tips, or obvious choices or courses would be good too.

When you guys played Brazil, assuming wormfood has, did you hitch your wagon to the allies or axis or neither?

I've tried to side with the Axis, Allies, Comintern, and just make my own South American Faction. If playing with historical AI, it's usually easier to side with the Allies as they are closer to you and generally just steamroll you if you side with the Axis and aren't quite prepared for that...sometimes even if you are prepared for that. Maybe that's just me though.

If you do decide to get in on the whole world war thing as a small country like that, it helps to focus on one small part of the war. Just focus on subs and mines and try to cutoff the shipping and supplies of your enemies. Or, focus on aircraft and try to hold the airwar on particular front for your faction. Or, if you really just want to autopilot it, send your manpower and weapons to your allies and let them handle the fighting. Or, maybe you're fighting Germany and their subs are causing complete havoc, so build some good anti sub destroyers and aircraft and hunt them down. Your just a minor part of the faction, so find something they're not doing well and help them out there.

There's an option at the start for historical AI, try playing with that both on and off. You can get some very, very different outcomes in global events with that off.

In the old days, before the whole espionage thing, you could spend political points to cause other countries to drift to your ideology. So, for example, you could rush Axis and turn Great Britian fascist fairly early. It was kinda bonkers and broken. You can't do that now and with the civilian factory requirements it's tough to get that going with a small starting country. In some ways I miss that since you could greatly alter the world playing as a minor country

If you get tired of the ww2 part of it, there's the Road to '56 mod that adds more research trees as well as focuses bringing the game into early cold war stuff. Old World Blues is a mod that changes everything to the Fallout universe right after the great war....only what's covered in the games though, so it's mostly the US with bits of Canada and Mexico. They're expanding it though.
Kaissereich is an alternate reality where Germany won WW1 and it starts in the 30's. It's a very different world.
There's also a few that change the start and end dates to either cover WW1 or start at 1910 or so and lets you play through to the end of WW2.

I didn’t spend munch time with Brazil, just enough to play with a few of the game mechanics/menus/etc. I dropped it and went on my USSR run that I wrote up in the Let’s Play thread.

I've managed to play HOI4 for 2.5 hours now and still haven't made it past day two. Gotta love it

Each new thing requires learning about it. Like division templates, or military doctrine, production lines. Do I want to form corps or armies? Should I be building new ships in the first week? All of this is rhetorical once again as I'm just describing each new hurdle that comes along, forcing me to seek answers, learn the mechanics. I've played thousands of hours of Paradox grand strat games, so I think I understand it on a macro level. I could just plow ahead and learn as I go, but that won't do lol.

Lots to learn. I need to spend the next week on the Paradox boards.

Your post touched a bit on why HOI4 didn't do it for me. It's just simply way too much micro-management for my tastes.

Yeah, you've mentioned that before, and I get it. Paradox's formula doesn't work for everyone, although I think it's awesome. The micro is a draw, and how interwoven and interlocking these micro mechanics are is highly appealing to me. Obviously I'm speaking more on experience (EU IV. CK, Victoria, etc) but I have no reason to expect that Hearts of Iron isn't also like this. Well, clearly it is based on how slowly I've proceeded here haha. But that's OK. In games like this it's natural as rain to do a short primer run, then start over with what you've learned, as JC did. But I still want to know as much as possible before that point comes.

As a student of this history, and with plenty of experience in this sort of game, I think it will come fairly quickly, even if the nuance takes time. It's amazing how much of Europa Universalis is intuition, as you learn to read the tea leaves or how to decipher which way the winds are blowing. You learn how to see it, and how to prepare, react and execute. That takes hundreds of hours to reach that level of understanding I think. So I've a ways to go.

I said I would dive in to the Paradox boards and this is the first thing I've seen

Hearts of Iron Strategy Guide

I was a massive Paradox fan boy, then I wasn't entirely due to their DLC policy (pricing and version conflicts), but I have to hand it to them here. in providing this guide and not sticking a ten dollar price tag on it.

Glad you're still plugging away at it, DB! Can't wait to read a Let's Play from you - you really do those nicely!
Know that even if I don't respond I'm still reading your stuff!

I will write an AAR-style thread probably, it's what I do haha. But I'm not finding it compelling yet and my start has been drawn-out. Still learning about the various mechanics. It's way too obtuse for me at the mo, and I can't bring myself to proceed with so much unknown. I don't deal well with games like this when I feel I should have done something different along the way. That feeling nags and swells until I can't stand it any more and I start over. So I'm in the information phase and I updated my profile at the Paradox boards to include all the new stuff I've bought haha. I'm sinisalo over there.

I will write an AAR-style thread probably, it's what I do haha. But I'm not finding it compelling yet and my start has been drawn-out. Still learning about the various mechanics. It's way too obtuse for me at the mo, and I can't bring myself to proceed with so much unknown. I don't deal well with games like this when I feel I should have done something different along the way. That feeling nags and swells until I can't stand it any more and I start over. So I'm in the information phase and I updated my profile at the Paradox boards to include all the new stuff I've bought haha. I'm sinisalo over there.

Sounds good - actually sounds great in stereo

Well I'm gonna dip my toe back into the water on this one.
I've started working through a tutorial series to to get a handle on the changes and review the overall the mechanics etc. It's pretty thorough, though he does tend to blather on a bit.
He's running it with all the DLC off, so anyone who's got the game can follow along. Once I give it a good going through and feel a little more up to speed I'll start a real run and do some DBond-style AAR's.

subscribed

I often say that I write the sort of posts I myself want to see at SimHQ so looking forward to it.

Yes, subscribed to this as well... tried to get into it before but other games cropped up and drew me away from it.
I've had the game for over a year now and done very little with it, so I hope this tutorial series will draw me in