Hearts of Iron IV

1,500+ hours on this game and I know I've wasted my life on it.

Shit game, too many DLCs. It's not good for anymore than 150 hours without at least 3 DLC.

Classic Paradox ... yet I continue to play their games for hours every single day. I hate my life.

This game isnt very complex. It largely gives the illusion of depth, when in reality the core gameplay loop is very repetitive and simple. However, to the extent that there is complexity (and some of it is quite good - like logistics and production), Paradox have not provided an AI that can match up to that complexity. As complexity goes up, so does the resources put in to make the AI challenging in a fair way. Paradox has put absolutely zero effort into that with this game. The AI is so bad it is laughable, and makes the game utterly unplayable in single player.

Beyond interaction with the AI in war, there isn't much HOI4 offers. The economy is laughably simplified. Technology is just clicking a button every few months. National focuses are a horrible design choice that reveal all the information to you, rather than making decisions without knowing the consequences.

So, really, I think this is one of the worst paradox games. The AI lets it down very hard.

A WW2 sandbox simulator that suffers similarly to EU4 (really all current-gen paradox games) in being wide and shallow, yet is somehow even moreso. That combined with the standard paradox DLC-fest propping up a lackluster base game, makes an ultimately lackluster experience, and hence have not sunk anywhere near as many hours into this than EU4.

Big up the modding community/workshop however, lots of good free content that also circumvents the need for the raft of DLC, just a shame it has to be attached to something agressively average.

I wanna give some comments on this game as a HOI veteran who somewhat recently got into this game, using all DLCs up to Hearts of Iron IV: No Step Back.

I think that many of the changes compared to the previous games are very reasonable and improve the game. The trade and resource system, the production and recruitment of units, the lend-lease system and others are straight up improvements and much nicer to use.

The more drastic and controversial changes in my view are the national focus system and the battle plan system. National focuses kind of replace and enhance the events system from the previous games. You have a large tree of focuses that you can choose from and they each take 1 or 2 months to complete. A large part of your geopolitical and military strategy is decided via these; so for example if you want to annex Austria as Germany there are certain focuses you have to do. What's good about this system is that it allows a lot of freedom and you can make mildly or even completely ahistorical choices. What I don't like so much is that the focuses are often unbalanced - ranging from almost useless to overpowered, but still take the same amount of valuable time to complete.

The battle plan system I have the strongest mixed feelings about. How it works is that you assign your units to frontlines (or part of them) and give them battle plans, e.g. attack and capture provinces up to a line that you draw, that they then act out automatically. First thing I don't like is that this is absolutely not optional. Assigning your units to an attack order gives them a bonus that builds up over time. Second thing is that it's mostly useless on the offense. Unless you have a big advantage over your enemy, using the auto-attack is worse than micromanaging your units and will probably fail. Third thing is that when you start to conquer provinces, the frontline extends automatically and your units are automatically spread out along the new front. In theory this should reduce micromanaging, but in practice it leads to your units suddenly redeploying all over the place so that you have to micromanage drawing the front lines all the time. This is probably what annoys me the most.

Another general issue is that the game is - after many years of DLCs and patches - very much feature bloated. There are so many submenus and tiny features that are really hard to keep track of. Many of them have little impact (besides role playing) and just make it that you have to scroll more through the menus when you are trying to find the important things. As an example, you can design your own tanks! That's a really cool feature...the first time you use it. Soon you realize that in the end you're just changing numbers in a spreadsheet and that there's no point in not using an optimal design.

There are lots of other minor issues, but overall this game is a bit hard to judge. As a pure wargame it leaves things to be desired, but as a WW2 geopolitics simulator there is nothing else like it.

It took me a while to really put my finger on what was wrong with HOI4 but ultimately the game is an aimless map painter with sandbox elements that pretends to be "grand strategy game" with little depth held back by Paradox's even worse DLC policy.

Now, if you're looking for an interactive WWII and pre-war sandbox with political customization and a very dedicated modding community, HOI4 is the game for you. The issue is that, fundamentally, HOI4 doesn't do anything else well. If you're looking for a serious simulation of WWII's military theaters check out Grigsby's War in the East and don't buy HOI4 because the game looses its depth after the game's initial political and military build-up has occurred and its military gameplay is riddled with unbalanced and unimmersive factors. If you're looking for a classic grand strategy experience, Paradox has other more cohesive and well-rounded empire-building games like Europa Universalis IV and even Victoria II that are simply more replayable. Even compared to other Hearts of Iron games, the scope and depth of the game is hollow and makes HOI4 feel like a dumbed-down version of previous Hearts of Iron games.

Coupled with Paradox's absurd DLC policy, which essentially locks every country outside of western Europe and the US and greatly reduces the game's already little military depth, and the relatively annoying community, HOI4 is just smoke and mirrors and doesn't really achieve anything. Hopefully someday Paradox can recuperate some of the more interesting gameplay features of the previous iterations of the Hearts of Iron series and produce a genuine grand strategy game that captures the wartime period.