Yeah, I mean, the decision-making from that basically comes down to *how* you want to make green good number. You can swap factories around, you can hold off on military actions to slow down losses, you can cancel creation of new divisions to refund the gear used to make them, you can get really desperate and merge/delete your existing divisions in the field to redistribute their equipment. So many ways to fix your equipment problems, but a significant amount of players - especially those submitting disaster saves to various TH-camrs - just don't even bother realizing there *is* an equipment issue. It's like Feedback said, the screen has a lot of numbers and icons on it, so people get scared and don't even try to understand what is being presented. Some people's saves are like "I'm getting pushed back after Barbarossa and can't figure out why" and you open their inventory and it's like -57k infantry equipment, -24k artillery, -37k medium tanks. They're training like 40 new Medium tank divisions when the 8 they have deployed already have 0 tanks in them. You look at the front lines and there's not even a speck of an orange bar next to single division icon. And it's like "Oh gee. I wonder what could be the problem."
The complicated bit is if you have multiple red numbers, and getting them green costs resources, some of which you have but others you need to trade for (and then it gets intercepted xD)
Yeah the 500 guns in the production tab is the number needed for reinforcement. Specifically that means there is equipment that hasn’t been transported to the units that need it yet. TL;DR that’s a lie ignore it and use the logistics tab because it’s better.
@lukeb1663 it helps me considering i usually read comments to learn how this stuff works too. Hearing another pov basically rather than just hearing the youtuber
Also reduces a lag ever so slight amount if you delete the 500000 different variants of planes and equipment by late game, in particular once you capitulate allies and are continuing the game.
If you have the fuel and the manpower and the planes and you want to enlarge an experienced airwing that is temporarily sitting idle in the back lines, but want to enlarge that airwing without losing a lot of experience levels, old planes could be used for training a temporary new airwing, so that it is the old close to useless airplanes that get broken during training, rather than the good modern airplanes. You then merge the newly trained old plane airwing with the experienced airwing that has more modern planes, and then you have a larger airwing that will be able to use either of the two types of airplanes, and that will hopefully preferentially go after the airplane type that you want it to go for. In the No Step Back version of Hearts of Iron 4, there doesn't seem to be a check box multiple choice system for turning on and off various airwing equipment types like there is for an army division template, but there is some sort of default airplane progression system. (Maybe I am missing the supposedly not present airplane type selection boxes and I don't have to create idle airwings just to be able to force a recently capitulated inventory of Interwar Fighters for example to be the airplanes that get broken during training.)
I don't know how anyone can do mid game or late game without logi tab management info. I imagine this is how disaster saves occur... i also can't imagine how people can live without this handsome man in their lives
i mean, early and mid game it may be useful but, late game...chances are you are winning already and as a result, have a giagantic economy to produce just about anything and everything? that's how i see it.
I never watch i always get a country to the stratosfeer. Always produce lots more then i can juse. Also dont produce everything. Some thing you can do way later
There can be an exception to prioritizing reinforcements over upgrades when one's convoy efficiency to a principal combat area is really bad. If one believes that it is a short term situation of just a half year or so, it is usually not good to have all the good newly produced weapons getting sunk until the short term problem of poor convoy efficiency gets fixed after a few to several months. If it is a long term situation and the combat zone is crucial like the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, then doing whatever it takes to get or keep that oil for one's faction might be the thing to do of course, but in a short term situation of really bad convoy efficiency to some low importance combat area where you can get away with giving up some ground for a while, losing good up to date newly manufactured stuff to enemy convoy raiding is usually a bad idea.
@thebluntrealist7180 , the classic extreme cases in Hearts of Iron 4 are Italy and Japan. Italy can get into a naval situation in which most Italian sea convoys get sunk on the way to Africa. In extreme cases, sea convoys on the way from Italy to the island of Sardinia can also get mostly sunk. Japan can get into a situation in which most sea convoys going to the Asian continent or to the islands adjoining the South China Sea will get sunk. Even the United Kingdom can get into such problems, especially now that it is possible to equip large airframe airplanes with 4 torpedo modules. In such cases, if believed to be temporary, rather than setting reinforcements above upgrades, set reinforcements and upgrades to be equal, so that a larger portion of the up to date equipment goes to core territory, in order to be better able to fight sea invasions into core territory. Also, if needed, two war theaters can be given different priorities. If for example you are Japan and have conquered the Aleutian Islands, an island chain with zero resources such as oil and steel and chromium, you can give your Aleutian war theater low priority, thus encouraging your more modern equipment to go elsewhere. Defend most that which is most worth defending, rather than some no resource island chain or some region like northern Africa that has few resources. Often what is most worth defending is core territory and oil lands and steel regions. Northern Africa of course can be the key to conquering both the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, but if you can conquer neither location, fairly often northern Africa is often not worthwhile sending your best equipment there in those severe naval inferiorty situations when that equipment is usually going to get sunk on the way to Africa.
@ 9:20 - You can also make tank templates with specific icons. Then you can select those specific "icon" tanks for divisions. Its the same thing for ships.
@@Shadow.24772 The "Equipment Tag" is not available on the Tank Designer when I deselected the No Step Back DLC. The Equipment Tag is available under the Division Designer but the options are all grayed out.
@@galilelollel9658 you should use the market and try to sell things. Eventually stuff is too old and no one will buy it but that takes a while. If something sits for 6 months just delete it. Don't delete equipment for the tiny fraction of a percent performance improvement. Do it because unless you're desperate inferior equipment is inferior and it just makes things more manageable. You'll probably get as much of a performance improvement just deleting the random types that you only have 12 of or something
6:00 Those numbers usually go down (esp if you're at peace, or if you have 'boring' frontlines). The reason is that your factory output efficiency slowly ticks up. This makes a _massive_ difference if you _just_ switched over production *and* did so with a lot of factories. Example: Once I unlock Modern Tanks, I 'train' new divisions to know how much equipment I'll need, and how many factories I need to balance that out. This can take ~500 days according to the tooltip. But it actually only costs 250-350 days, because the production efficiency ticks up over time. (this is when I used 20 divisions of 40 widths, with Modern Tanks and Modern SPGs - and I don't train new divisions, but just change over my Medium Tank divisions once I have the equipment I need) Using the 'days of shortages' is a GREAT way to redistribute your factories! If everything takes roughly equal time to fix, then you're not wasting any factories on stuff that you'll have enough of soon anyways. This is also why Dispersed Industry is *so much* better than Concentrated! You get a 40%(?) efficiency boost _from the start_ (when switching over factories from guns to planes, or whatever). It takes about a year for Concentrated to catch up - so if you switch _any_ factory _again_ within a year, Dispersed is better. (and I personally switch things around fairly often, because I research a lot or make improved variants - and Concentrated's benefit of having additional... shoelaces is meaningless when you don't have enough boots, if you catch my drift)
The one thing to keep an eye on/be careful of is that you're not balancing production on the number of days, and meanwhile are grinding _one_ of your things to dust. Like, by doing something stupid, such as designing low-reliability tanks and attacking in mountains while there's heavy snow or mud, lol.
I've been living on the Logistics tab in my current Czech game, worrying about limited equipment production. I use the estimates of days to fulfill shortages to balance production. I add factories to things that have longer shortages. Also, trolling allies for Lend Lease by recruiting lots of extra divisions (thanks Dave for that tip from another video).
Didn't know you could do equipment priority per theatre, I usually just split them into main army and garrison to keep the bottom of the screen a little clearer.
Thanks a lot. I used the same infantry template for ALL my infantry.. So the ones holding the frontline for 5 years without combat, was taken equipment from my attacking divisions..
The only thing I have ever used the logistics screen for is to see how many days until production is full on multiple things to detrime where to assign mils. For some reason I've never really clicked around in it, and there was multiple useful things I learned in this video. Cool.
The select equipment is especially useful if you have for example 2 types of heavy tanks. One for your heavy tank divisions, which has some speed and is overall more expensive, and one for your infantry divisions, which is slow and more cost effective.
In my opinion, I am not scared by making different divisions.Sometimes I do make some divisions for specific tasks, but most of the time the reason why I dont get specialised divisions is due to the fact they are expensive(or at least the ones I usually design)
@@ironCondor623 Yeah I completely agree,normally I just do infantry with tanks or motorised.Surprisingly I still manage to achieve success alot of times without air, but it is preferable.
super new to hoi4, coming from ck2. it was a good feeling in my brain when i realized i wasnt supposed to just to splooge out a bunch of units at once but create an actual sustainable dripfeed to produce an army.
changing the template on the battlefield is possible just fill the stock up before changing template and make sure the logistiks keeps running smoothly :D
Also switching 1/2 or 1/4 the number of divisions helps buffer the org/logistics hit across the line and reduce the chance of getting attacked. No need to switch everyone at the same time, the button for halving selection of divisions is right there lol
Thx, I actually learned something new. Didn't know I can select the equipment that goes into my divisions. Now I can have faster and more expensive flame tanks in my tank divisions.
You can also save on the industrial cost of training by using the equipment feature of the template system, in combination with being able to make a duplicate training template of almost any pre-existing template - at zero Military Experience cost. The basic idea is that it is often better to be breaking old equipment while in training than to be breaking the new more expensive stuff. Suppose for example you are playing as the United Kingdom and you have created a template called Colonial 1937, based mostly on the game start Colonial template, and then you used the duplicate template feature to create an identical training template called Colonial 1937 TR, with the "TR" at the end representing "training". You set the equipment on the "TR" version to be able to use Basic Infantry Equipment but not to be able to use Infantry Weapons 1, meaning that your trainees will only be breaking the cheap stuff. When training is complete, you then change templates on the newly raised division to the normal field version, Colonial 1937 without the TR on the end, that is allowed to use any Infantry Weapon type. The same idea of using cheap old stuff for training can be also in theory be used for things like towed anti-air and towed artillery, but using cheap old equipment for training is in practice often a good idea only for Infantry Equipment. Basic Infantry Equipment is good enough for suppression units, at least in the current version of Hearts of Iron 4. Also, Basic Infantry Equipment yields the cheapest per factory-day Defense stat and the cheapest per resource-day Defense stat of any class of Infantry Equipment in the game. As such, with most countries one, or maybe two in the case of a large recruitable population country like China, Basic Infantry Equipment factories should be running for a large part of the game, even while several more factories are making more advanced types of Infantry Equipment. If a division graduates from training but no better infantry weapons are available, Basic Infantry Equipment will be good enough until something more advanced becomes available.
Although deficits are bad, creating a fake one can be used to your advantage. Even if you have enough equipment, you can over recruit (or make large airwings) and countries that are allied/have a high opinion of you will send you equipment via convoys or land border. A good way to get “free” equipment without expending resources or even an entire production line.
Thats why I have 4 templates 1-Frontline, usually cheap template, infantry to hold the linem nothing fancy 2-Garnison, even cheaper to hold potential landings. With some fortifications a 10w + shovel can hold almost anything, but doom droops of marines + naval bombardment. 3-Armored. Tanks to be clear. If im lucky in the game , I ran 4 to 6 heavies and 16 to 18 medium tanks 20w, 8 tanks + 2 motorized inf. Those are to pierce and create encirclements. Heavies make a hole, meds rush in. 4-Motorised, or even mechanized, if im reallllllllly well in the game. Those are basically a support to armored division. They consolidate brakes, so you dont get encircled yourself and lose an expensive tank divisions. And if the break is very good, they help to push the advantage into enemy rare, as usually they are much faster than medium tanks. Used to mix heavies and light tanks...meh. 1 unit with AT slaps you, and you lose them too much. At the end they will be more expensive than mediums. So early game camp army is like 72 frontline divisions(shovel + recon + art - all classic), 16 to 32 backline reserves , about 32 garrison to fill up hostile nations borders , 2-3 heavies with 8 to 10 mediums and 18 to 24 motorized. I dont use art in main corps of the template, only as a support, so I can save on prod capacity and get my heavies ready. Later on, you multiply those numbers by 2-3-4-5. Recently I ended up Europe liberation with 12*24 frontliners, 72 reserve, 8 heavies and 24 mediums + 36 mechanized. When you can have 2 tank strike groups, you have lot of surprise possibilities, especially in multiplayer, as only veteran players keep second line of reserve , usually with AT, to respond to tank rotations. Newcomers get stomp by those.
I believe this is the most important tab to watch throughout the game. It blows me away when I see a Russian player with millions of manpower in the field with a fighting strength of 50-70%, or even less in some cases. Appreciate your videos!
I knew about most of this but I never clocked that you could destroy equipment. Don't know why I never noticed but this is a game changer. Late game, after a few capitulations especially, I find the create air wing menu horrendous to navigate. What with all the captured and acquired aircraft and there seeming to be no logic in the order they're organised. Being able to just get rid of equipment I don't want is going to be a lifesaver.
There should be some basic airplane type sorting or filtering options: for example fighter airplanes versus bomber airplanes within which can be refined separations such as close air support bombers versus naval bombers. There could also be optional sorting or filtering of small versus medium versus large airframes, and optional sorting or filtering by nominal technology year such as 1936 versus 1940. The naval menu offers ways to filter by ship hull types, submarine versus destroyer for example, so at the least the air menu should be able to do the same, naval bomber versus scout plane for example. People complain all the time about Hearts of Iron 4 often having only mediocre user interface, and the airplane listing screen in Hearts of Iron 4 is still one such example of still having only mediocre user interface.
The most frustrating thing is they've already solved the same problem with the logistics screen itself, it would be trivial to group airplanes by type in the screen to make new air wings.
you can also control the distribution of tanks by tagging them, for example you want to have a SPG in your infantry division (for whatever reason) but you don't want to suply them with your nice and fast SPGs for your tank division, you can design a slower and cheaper SPG, give it a different tag than your regular SPG and select that tag in the division design for your infantry, now (as far as I understand the tagging mechanic) your infantry will only receive the newly designed SPG, I don't really use this mechanic since I don't want to divide my mils over to many production lines, but I think it's a nice feature none the less
This is a guide I needed the most as a new player. I forgot to build artillery in the beginning my game so now I’m waiting to get new factories to (hopefully?) start making some because I have massive deficits in them and other things the more I train more divisions. I know I need resources but idk how much I need without destroying my factories but then again i guess that’s what they’re for.
9:30 What if you would build the cheapest infantry equipment for your garrisons, since it's cheaper and the suppression will stay the same, and the up to date guns for your actual divisions? I think you could squeeze some production cost, but it would be more difficult to balance out the factories
@@yslandrei As far as I know the quality of the guns don't matter for garrisons. The only things that matter as far as I know are: hardness and resistance levels. Having enough equipment keeps the latter in check. Checked the wiki: With high enough values of resistance strength, Garrison will start to receive damage in the form of losses to both manpower and equipment. Both types of damage will be scaled by the hardness of the division template used by the garrison, so higher hardness will reduce losses significantly. If you have enough production to easily keep your front lines supplied, then a tank with design that has a low as possible production cost might be worth investing in. The heavier the tank class the more hardness and production cost. So the more production you have left the higher weight class you can get. These tanks will have a high initial cost, but due to low equipment loses it will be easy to maintain. This is something you only really need to do if manpower is an issue for you. If you have enough manpower and a lot fo production you might as well not care about garrisons.
@@yslandrei Yeah it really depends on the situation you are in. I had a game (before NSB) where I didn't asign 400 mil factories at the year 1950. At that time I was producing med1 for garrisons, but could as well have made super heavies. It isn't really worth to use a research slot for it. Just use whatever you already have researched. Super heavies in NSB have 100% hardness. I'm not sure if that would mean they don't get any damage at all. If so that can be nice, but at that point you probably already finished your campaign anyway. Interwar is indeed a great first step into this cheap and a very high hardness increase compared to cav.
personally i like to standardize my infantry into 3 types for simplicity. i use defense, pushing and garrison. when fighting the ai, even on elite, that's all you need.
The figures in the logistics tab (or, anywhere else for that matter) are accurate for the current in-game day. While the game keeps time by the in-game hour, everything is updated once every in-game day. Troops move by the day, stockpiles are updated by the day, things get built by the day, research and focuses are completed by the day. Everything happens by the day. So, the figures you see in any given window is accurate for the current day and will only be of use to you RIGHT NOW. If you are playing on 4 speed, that could be around 5 seconds or so.
10:30 that's interesting, I'm the opposite (well, almost). For me the most fun is after I have only just figured out the mechanics I have to work with and how they function, and I am just starting to figure out how to integrate them.That process of having all the tools and just starting to learn how to use them is the best for me. Not knowing the tools themselves is of course frustrating, but when I get the hang of a game I get a little sad using the same strategies over and over, and I find myself missing the days when I was trying a new strategy for everything all the time. Part of what I love about this game, always a new mechanic to refine knowledge of and make strategies more efficient (though I prefer to learn them myself) and always new countries to try out. Though I gravitate towards countries like Japan that require a great deal of most mechanics.
I used to not know thar you could have more than 15 factories on equipment, so for example, very late game I would have maybe 30 different production lines of guns. I was so devastated and relieved when I found out you could have 150.
I still like having a lot of lines, because then I can switch over 15 factories to something else. Sometimes, that saves you a _lot_ of efficiency bonus :)
I always use the logistics screen to send my allies tanks and armoured car models not in my divisions (Germany gets quite a few AC from the western campaign that I just give to my puppet or Romania
I wonder if it would be a good mechanic to be able to set divisions to auto-deploy when they either didn't have enough equip or manpower, with doctrines letting you deploy at earlier points but with resulting performance hits. For example as a base you can set a division tp autodeploy at 90% equipment, keeping the hp and org of all the infantry but suffering in firepower. Imo human wave could then play into china and desperate ussr tactics of flooding the battlefield with underequipped units to slow down the german advance
Amazing I feel like I've watched all your videos! Between you and HammoTime you taught me how to play this game! Thank you. When I realised why my troops got wrecked in one of my games when I updated my template on a division that made up like 70% of my army... Well learning!!
Maybe I'm not understanding some of the gameplay logic here, but I don't really get the strategic wisdom of destroying old equipment. If some battle goes badly and a bunch of divisions get wiped out, it's better to still have a stockpile of even old equipment than none at all. Or with airplanes, even just using some old planes somewhere can be a good fakeout to get an enemy to deploy his limited forces to a region you don't care about. You can't do that if you destroy old stuff.
I usually just like to lend lease all the poop equipment to my weak puppets and let the AI do it all. I had Austria Hungary creep up on me on autonomy from near annexed to satellite after dumping all my tier 1 and 2 planes and guns on them early game.
This is actually not estimate. This is basically daily change of equipment compared to "yesterday". You can see this while deploying big chunk of divisions (for a moment it will show absurd loss of guns). Also days required to fill stock are (I guess) based only on your daily production, so it can show numbers like "10 days left" when you are actually losing equipment daily.
I played literally three playthroughs, one I lost in 42, the other two I didn't play after 43... I made different divisions and logistics screen was pretty intuitive....
yeah creating a heavy def temp, attacking, and rifles works so well for me (these are all different temps by the way) like attack inf would be 9 inf 1 art support art L tank rec, def would be 12 inf 1 at 1 arty moto rec engi and rifles just 9 inf because i started this my push into russia have been easier and able to have troops capable of defending while others are attacking rifles just fill gaps ngl or to use russian tactics meat into the grinder until it stops working
Already knew all of that but is there a way to prioritize old equipment for garrisons, but in case if there isn’t enough old equipment that it would use newer?
It would be really useful if we could sell our old weapons, not just the license. This feature, the weapon market would be awesome. (for the weapons you would get pp or some % in production or something like that)
Or recycle bigger equipment. Like old tanks if broken down slightly reduce the production cost or reduce the need for resources until they're all gone. Have another button like the refitting button on the production page.
@@DefaultProphet You never needed to remember the number. Hovering over the picture(?) showed how many you had in your inventory. You still had to type it though, and remove the 1 first...
I dont use manual equipment selection in templates, because I had quite a lot of problems with it. Specifically, when I researched new stuff or made new variants of something and template had different settings (for example, division was using inf equ, but I told it to not use the newest ones and then researched even newer inf equ - it would uncheck all foreign equ on its own, even if using said equ was allowed, and I would have to manually select everything that I wanted again). Instead, I use template priority, equipment priority in recruitment tab, and different tank "symbols" for specific cases. Only thing I dont use is theatre priority, because I just dont use them at all. I tried, but I much prefer having everything visible at once. Rarely I just make some dedicated colonial theatre and thats it
I bet - that @feedbackgamingIRL haven`t noticed, that the Symbols on the Intel map of the countries do not relate to the description ! Now, I wanna have a lolly, quick ! ;-D
Does a negative surplus just mean you are in debt? It wouldn't make sense because you can't just make a piece of equipment out of nothing and add it to your debt. My theory is that it's just equipment that is missing from your divisions.
Can anybody explain this... (UK) I built a load of gladiators at the start then researched hurricanes and upgraded their engine for more agility. Then started producing the upgraded hurricanes, but my stockpiles kept showing an increase in only the gladiator production. Was this a glitch?
What's so complicated about it? Red number bad, produce more equipment so it becomes good green number.
Yeah, I mean, the decision-making from that basically comes down to *how* you want to make green good number.
You can swap factories around, you can hold off on military actions to slow down losses, you can cancel creation of new divisions to refund the gear used to make them, you can get really desperate and merge/delete your existing divisions in the field to redistribute their equipment. So many ways to fix your equipment problems, but a significant amount of players - especially those submitting disaster saves to various TH-camrs - just don't even bother realizing there *is* an equipment issue. It's like Feedback said, the screen has a lot of numbers and icons on it, so people get scared and don't even try to understand what is being presented.
Some people's saves are like "I'm getting pushed back after Barbarossa and can't figure out why" and you open their inventory and it's like -57k infantry equipment, -24k artillery, -37k medium tanks. They're training like 40 new Medium tank divisions when the 8 they have deployed already have 0 tanks in them. You look at the front lines and there's not even a speck of an orange bar next to single division icon. And it's like "Oh gee. I wonder what could be the problem."
Wow, such alfa
The complicated bit is if you have multiple red numbers, and getting them green costs resources, some of which you have but others you need to trade for
(and then it gets intercepted xD)
I was thinking the exact same.
Basic HOI lojik is always best lojik
I love when the production tab tells me I'm like -500 guns so i increase production, look at the logistics tab and i have like a 140,000 guns
Yeah the 500 guns in the production tab is the number needed for reinforcement. Specifically that means there is equipment that hasn’t been transported to the units that need it yet.
TL;DR that’s a lie ignore it and use the logistics tab because it’s better.
@@lukeb1663 i know, that was 9 months ago
@@Litterbugtaylor I completely forgot about when this comment was posted. I’m glad you didn’t have to wait 9 months for this lol
@@lukeb1663 7 months later:
@lukeb1663 it helps me considering i usually read comments to learn how this stuff works too. Hearing another pov basically rather than just hearing the youtuber
Yes, cleaning up the old planes while in late game does indeed help manage your air wings, as an example
Also reduces a lag ever so slight amount if you delete the 500000 different variants of planes and equipment by late game, in particular once you capitulate allies and are continuing the game.
I usually just send all my outdated planes to an AI, which means they’re still able to be used but you yourself don’t have to deal with it.
shame that it is a DLC locked feature
Usually i keep them in case i get into a kinda hard war.
If you have the fuel and the manpower and the planes and you want to enlarge an experienced airwing that is temporarily sitting idle in the back lines, but want to enlarge that airwing without losing a lot of experience levels, old planes could be used for training a temporary new airwing, so that it is the old close to useless airplanes that get broken during training, rather than the good modern airplanes. You then merge the newly trained old plane airwing with the experienced airwing that has more modern planes, and then you have a larger airwing that will be able to use either of the two types of airplanes, and that will hopefully preferentially go after the airplane type that you want it to go for.
In the No Step Back version of Hearts of Iron 4, there doesn't seem to be a check box multiple choice system for turning on and off various airwing equipment types like there is for an army division template, but there is some sort of default airplane progression system. (Maybe I am missing the supposedly not present airplane type selection boxes and I don't have to create idle airwings just to be able to force a recently capitulated inventory of Interwar Fighters for example to be the airplanes that get broken during training.)
I don't know how anyone can do mid game or late game without logi tab management info. I imagine this is how disaster saves occur... i also can't imagine how people can live without this handsome man in their lives
i'm addicted to clicking that tab, I don't get how someone can be not using it
even early game its useful for optimizing your industry for basic infantry equipment and fighters online in time for the war
i mean, early and mid game it may be useful but, late game...chances are you are winning already and as a result, have a giagantic economy to produce just about anything and everything? that's how i see it.
I literally discovered and used this on day one, I was "what's this", I'm surprised honestly.
I never watch i always get a country to the stratosfeer. Always produce lots more then i can juse. Also dont produce everything. Some thing you can do way later
I always set reinforcement above upgrades when at war. Any reinforcements you do de facto upgrade those divisions in combat.
Good point.
Good advice
There can be an exception to prioritizing reinforcements over upgrades when one's convoy efficiency to a principal combat area is really bad.
If one believes that it is a short term situation of just a half year or so, it is usually not good to have all the good newly produced weapons getting sunk until the short term problem of poor convoy efficiency gets fixed after a few to several months. If it is a long term situation and the combat zone is crucial like the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, then doing whatever it takes to get or keep that oil for one's faction might be the thing to do of course, but in a short term situation of really bad convoy efficiency to some low importance combat area where you can get away with giving up some ground for a while, losing good up to date newly manufactured stuff to enemy convoy raiding is usually a bad idea.
I separate overseas division templates so they don't get priority equipment. But except %10 of Divisions.
@thebluntrealist7180 , the classic extreme cases in Hearts of Iron 4 are Italy and Japan.
Italy can get into a naval situation in which most Italian sea convoys get sunk on the way to Africa. In extreme cases, sea convoys on the way from Italy to the island of Sardinia can also get mostly sunk.
Japan can get into a situation in which most sea convoys going to the Asian continent or to the islands adjoining the South China Sea will get sunk.
Even the United Kingdom can get into such problems, especially now that it is possible to equip large airframe airplanes with 4 torpedo modules.
In such cases, if believed to be temporary, rather than setting reinforcements above upgrades, set reinforcements and upgrades to be equal, so that a larger portion of the up to date equipment goes to core territory, in order to be better able to fight sea invasions into core territory.
Also, if needed, two war theaters can be given different priorities. If for example you are Japan and have conquered the Aleutian Islands, an island chain with zero resources such as oil and steel and chromium, you can give your Aleutian war theater low priority, thus encouraging your more modern equipment to go elsewhere.
Defend most that which is most worth defending, rather than some no resource island chain or some region like northern Africa that has few resources. Often what is most worth defending is core territory and oil lands and steel regions.
Northern Africa of course can be the key to conquering both the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, but if you can conquer neither location, fairly often northern Africa is often not worthwhile sending your best equipment there in those severe naval inferiorty situations when that equipment is usually going to get sunk on the way to Africa.
@ 9:20 - You can also make tank templates with specific icons. Then you can select those specific "icon" tanks for divisions. Its the same thing for ships.
is this applicable if one doesnt have No step back though? cuz without the DLC you cant modify tanks in the same way you can boats.
@@Shadow.24772 The "Equipment Tag" is not available on the Tank Designer when I deselected the No Step Back DLC. The Equipment Tag is available under the Division Designer but the options are all grayed out.
The ability to destroy all the old planes late game sounds amazing. I wish I knew this years ago.
Does that speed up the game alot or is the difference not really seeable
@@galilelollel9658 you should use the market and try to sell things. Eventually stuff is too old and no one will buy it but that takes a while. If something sits for 6 months just delete it.
Don't delete equipment for the tiny fraction of a percent performance improvement. Do it because unless you're desperate inferior equipment is inferior and it just makes things more manageable.
You'll probably get as much of a performance improvement just deleting the random types that you only have 12 of or something
6:00 Those numbers usually go down (esp if you're at peace, or if you have 'boring' frontlines).
The reason is that your factory output efficiency slowly ticks up.
This makes a _massive_ difference if you _just_ switched over production *and* did so with a lot of factories.
Example:
Once I unlock Modern Tanks, I 'train' new divisions to know how much equipment I'll need, and how many factories I need to balance that out. This can take ~500 days according to the tooltip. But it actually only costs 250-350 days, because the production efficiency ticks up over time.
(this is when I used 20 divisions of 40 widths, with Modern Tanks and Modern SPGs - and I don't train new divisions, but just change over my Medium Tank divisions once I have the equipment I need)
Using the 'days of shortages' is a GREAT way to redistribute your factories!
If everything takes roughly equal time to fix, then you're not wasting any factories on stuff that you'll have enough of soon anyways.
This is also why Dispersed Industry is *so much* better than Concentrated!
You get a 40%(?) efficiency boost _from the start_ (when switching over factories from guns to planes, or whatever).
It takes about a year for Concentrated to catch up - so if you switch _any_ factory _again_ within a year, Dispersed is better.
(and I personally switch things around fairly often, because I research a lot or make improved variants - and Concentrated's benefit of having additional... shoelaces is meaningless when you don't have enough boots, if you catch my drift)
The one thing to keep an eye on/be careful of is that you're not balancing production on the number of days, and meanwhile are grinding _one_ of your things to dust.
Like, by doing something stupid, such as designing low-reliability tanks and attacking in mountains while there's heavy snow or mud, lol.
I always tried to offload old equipment by lend leasing it.
I had no idea I could just put it all in one massive landfill and set it on fire.
Museums hate him!
Eh, you get more out of it by lendleasing it all as that helps your warscore.
I've been living on the Logistics tab in my current Czech game, worrying about limited equipment production. I use the estimates of days to fulfill shortages to balance production. I add factories to things that have longer shortages. Also, trolling allies for Lend Lease by recruiting lots of extra divisions (thanks Dave for that tip from another video).
Didn't know you could do equipment priority per theatre, I usually just split them into main army and garrison to keep the bottom of the screen a little clearer.
Thanks a lot. I used the same infantry template for ALL my infantry.. So the ones holding the frontline for 5 years without combat, was taken equipment from my attacking divisions..
The only thing I have ever used the logistics screen for is to see how many days until production is full on multiple things to detrime where to assign mils. For some reason I've never really clicked around in it, and there was multiple useful things I learned in this video. Cool.
The select equipment is especially useful if you have for example 2 types of heavy tanks. One for your heavy tank divisions, which has some speed and is overall more expensive, and one for your infantry divisions, which is slow and more cost effective.
In my opinion, I am not scared by making different divisions.Sometimes I do make some divisions for specific tasks, but most of the time the reason why I dont get specialised divisions is due to the fact they are expensive(or at least the ones I usually design)
and you only really need 2 types of divisions, big infantry and fast trucks/motarts, CAS and bombers do the rest
@@ironCondor623 Yeah I completely agree,normally I just do infantry with tanks or motorised.Surprisingly I still manage to achieve success alot of times without air, but it is preferable.
@@ironCondor623 You forgot a small 12 width division for port garrison.
super new to hoi4, coming from ck2. it was a good feeling in my brain when i realized i wasnt supposed to just to splooge out a bunch of units at once but create an actual sustainable dripfeed to produce an army.
changing the template on the battlefield is possible just fill the stock up before changing template and make sure the logistiks keeps running smoothly :D
Also switching 1/2 or 1/4 the number of divisions helps buffer the org/logistics hit across the line and reduce the chance of getting attacked. No need to switch everyone at the same time, the button for halving selection of divisions is right there lol
wait do people not look at this? This is invaluable when starting/ending large offensives like on the eastern front.
People are sto0pid.
Tbf neither did the top Nazis...
Thx, I actually learned something new. Didn't know I can select the equipment that goes into my divisions. Now I can have faster and more expensive flame tanks in my tank divisions.
You can also save on the industrial cost of training by using the equipment feature of the template system, in combination with being able to make a duplicate training template of almost any pre-existing template - at zero Military Experience cost. The basic idea is that it is often better to be breaking old equipment while in training than to be breaking the new more expensive stuff. Suppose for example you are playing as the United Kingdom and you have created a template called Colonial 1937, based mostly on the game start Colonial template, and then you used the duplicate template feature to create an identical training template called Colonial 1937 TR, with the "TR" at the end representing "training". You set the equipment on the "TR" version to be able to use Basic Infantry Equipment but not to be able to use Infantry Weapons 1, meaning that your trainees will only be breaking the cheap stuff. When training is complete, you then change templates on the newly raised division to the normal field version, Colonial 1937 without the TR on the end, that is allowed to use any Infantry Weapon type.
The same idea of using cheap old stuff for training can be also in theory be used for things like towed anti-air and towed artillery, but using cheap old equipment for training is in practice often a good idea only for Infantry Equipment.
Basic Infantry Equipment is good enough for suppression units, at least in the current version of Hearts of Iron 4. Also, Basic Infantry Equipment yields the cheapest per factory-day Defense stat and the cheapest per resource-day Defense stat of any class of Infantry Equipment in the game. As such, with most countries one, or maybe two in the case of a large recruitable population country like China, Basic Infantry Equipment factories should be running for a large part of the game, even while several more factories are making more advanced types of Infantry Equipment. If a division graduates from training but no better infantry weapons are available, Basic Infantry Equipment will be good enough until something more advanced becomes available.
They should allow you scrap the old equipment and add the materials to your raw materials
Although deficits are bad, creating a fake one can be used to your advantage. Even if you have enough equipment, you can over recruit (or make large airwings) and countries that are allied/have a high opinion of you will send you equipment via convoys or land border. A good way to get “free” equipment without expending resources or even an entire production line.
I love the logistics tab honestly
I don't like changing divisions because it costs Army XP and I'm having to use that for other things now and it is a rare commodity.
Hm perhaps in the beginning but towards mid to late game not that much also you can get it early game by sending volunteers and attachés
I was fortunate to never be confused by the logistics screen. It just makes me anxious when numbers go into the negatives.
Hey, that information near the end about prioritization was super helpful, thanks man. And cleaning out old planes does seem very nice.
Thats why I have 4 templates
1-Frontline, usually cheap template, infantry to hold the linem nothing fancy
2-Garnison, even cheaper to hold potential landings. With some fortifications a 10w + shovel can hold almost anything, but doom droops of marines + naval bombardment.
3-Armored. Tanks to be clear. If im lucky in the game , I ran 4 to 6 heavies and 16 to 18 medium tanks 20w, 8 tanks + 2 motorized inf. Those are to pierce and create encirclements. Heavies make a hole, meds rush in.
4-Motorised, or even mechanized, if im reallllllllly well in the game. Those are basically a support to armored division. They consolidate brakes, so you dont get encircled yourself and lose an expensive tank divisions. And if the break is very good, they help to push the advantage into enemy rare, as usually they are much faster than medium tanks.
Used to mix heavies and light tanks...meh. 1 unit with AT slaps you, and you lose them too much. At the end they will be more expensive than mediums.
So early game camp army is like 72 frontline divisions(shovel + recon + art - all classic), 16 to 32 backline reserves , about 32 garrison to fill up hostile nations borders , 2-3 heavies with 8 to 10 mediums and 18 to 24 motorized.
I dont use art in main corps of the template, only as a support, so I can save on prod capacity and get my heavies ready.
Later on, you multiply those numbers by 2-3-4-5.
Recently I ended up Europe liberation with 12*24 frontliners, 72 reserve, 8 heavies and 24 mediums + 36 mechanized. When you can have 2 tank strike groups, you have lot of surprise possibilities, especially in multiplayer, as only veteran players keep second line of reserve , usually with AT, to respond to tank rotations. Newcomers get stomp by those.
I believe this is the most important tab to watch throughout the game. It blows me away when I see a Russian player with millions of manpower in the field with a fighting strength of 50-70%, or even less in some cases. Appreciate your videos!
I knew about most of this but I never clocked that you could destroy equipment. Don't know why I never noticed but this is a game changer.
Late game, after a few capitulations especially, I find the create air wing menu horrendous to navigate. What with all the captured and acquired aircraft and there seeming to be no logic in the order they're organised. Being able to just get rid of equipment I don't want is going to be a lifesaver.
There should be some basic airplane type sorting or filtering options: for example fighter airplanes versus bomber airplanes within which can be refined separations such as close air support bombers versus naval bombers. There could also be optional sorting or filtering of small versus medium versus large airframes, and optional sorting or filtering by nominal technology year such as 1936 versus 1940. The naval menu offers ways to filter by ship hull types, submarine versus destroyer for example, so at the least the air menu should be able to do the same, naval bomber versus scout plane for example. People complain all the time about Hearts of Iron 4 often having only mediocre user interface, and the airplane listing screen in Hearts of Iron 4 is still one such example of still having only mediocre user interface.
I don't think F4 when I hear logistics. I think ALT+F4
Prioritizing equipment based on theatre is actually quite useful, thanks!
i frequently use the logistics tab to remove the thousands of shitty enemy fighters i've captured that are making it annoying to create new airwings
The most frustrating thing is they've already solved the same problem with the logistics screen itself, it would be trivial to group airplanes by type in the screen to make new air wings.
Red bad green good That's it. You are Sun Tzu
you can also control the distribution of tanks by tagging them, for example you want to have a SPG in your infantry division (for whatever reason) but you don't want to suply them with your nice and fast SPGs for your tank division, you can design a slower and cheaper SPG, give it a different tag than your regular SPG and select that tag in the division design for your infantry, now (as far as I understand the tagging mechanic) your infantry will only receive the newly designed SPG, I don't really use this mechanic since I don't want to divide my mils over to many production lines, but I think it's a nice feature none the less
This is a guide I needed the most as a new player. I forgot to build artillery in the beginning my game so now I’m waiting to get new factories to (hopefully?) start making some because I have massive deficits in them and other things the more I train more divisions. I know I need resources but idk how much I need without destroying my factories but then again i guess that’s what they’re for.
9:30 What if you would build the cheapest infantry equipment for your garrisons, since it's cheaper and the suppression will stay the same, and the up to date guns for your actual divisions? I think you could squeeze some production cost, but it would be more difficult to balance out the factories
You can do that but your garrisons would get more casualties since they've got worst stats
@@ESALTEREGO you're right, i forgot they fight partisans. i would love seeing some of these new testing TH-camrs look into it
@@yslandrei As far as I know the quality of the guns don't matter for garrisons. The only things that matter as far as I know are: hardness and resistance levels. Having enough equipment keeps the latter in check.
Checked the wiki:
With high enough values of resistance strength, Garrison will start to receive damage in the form of losses to both manpower and equipment. Both types of damage will be scaled by the hardness of the division template used by the garrison, so higher hardness will reduce losses significantly.
If you have enough production to easily keep your front lines supplied, then a tank with design that has a low as possible production cost might be worth investing in. The heavier the tank class the more hardness and production cost. So the more production you have left the higher weight class you can get. These tanks will have a high initial cost, but due to low equipment loses it will be easy to maintain. This is something you only really need to do if manpower is an issue for you. If you have enough manpower and a lot fo production you might as well not care about garrisons.
@@Vincrand the interwar tanks have an 80% hardmess while heavy tanks have 95%, so i dont think its worth it investing into heavies, but good argument
@@yslandrei Yeah it really depends on the situation you are in. I had a game (before NSB) where I didn't asign 400 mil factories at the year 1950. At that time I was producing med1 for garrisons, but could as well have made super heavies.
It isn't really worth to use a research slot for it. Just use whatever you already have researched. Super heavies in NSB have 100% hardness. I'm not sure if that would mean they don't get any damage at all. If so that can be nice, but at that point you probably already finished your campaign anyway.
Interwar is indeed a great first step into this cheap and a very high hardness increase compared to cav.
Wait, people don’t use this?! I’d die so quick if I didn’t, I hate when my guns run out invading the Soviets.
Huge video. No one talks about fiddling with divisions like you did
personally i like to standardize my infantry into 3 types for simplicity. i use defense, pushing and garrison. when fighting the ai, even on elite, that's all you need.
"Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics"
The figures in the logistics tab (or, anywhere else for that matter) are accurate for the current in-game day. While the game keeps time by the in-game hour, everything is updated once every in-game day. Troops move by the day, stockpiles are updated by the day, things get built by the day, research and focuses are completed by the day. Everything happens by the day. So, the figures you see in any given window is accurate for the current day and will only be of use to you RIGHT NOW. If you are playing on 4 speed, that could be around 5 seconds or so.
The fact that people dont pay attention to the tab is shocking since i play primarily single player and I have my eye on this more often than not
Thanks!!, I'm a new player trying to learn and this helped a lot
Me who basically only uses 7:2 infantry: hahaha logistics, just build more guns and arty
7/2 are not good anymore. 10 infantry with light tanks recon company/light tanks flamethrower company destroy enemy infantry
@@unpuffo3481 I have little to no DLCs. So I don't think I have flamethrower
10:30 that's interesting, I'm the opposite (well, almost). For me the most fun is after I have only just figured out the mechanics I have to work with and how they function, and I am just starting to figure out how to integrate them.That process of having all the tools and just starting to learn how to use them is the best for me.
Not knowing the tools themselves is of course frustrating, but when I get the hang of a game I get a little sad using the same strategies over and over, and I find myself missing the days when I was trying a new strategy for everything all the time.
Part of what I love about this game, always a new mechanic to refine knowledge of and make strategies more efficient (though I prefer to learn them myself) and always new countries to try out.
Though I gravitate towards countries like Japan that require a great deal of most mechanics.
I used to not know thar you could have more than 15 factories on equipment, so for example, very late game I would have maybe 30 different production lines of guns.
I was so devastated and relieved when I found out you could have 150.
A long time ago that used to be the case. I remember having 30 production lines on guns too
I still like having a lot of lines, because then I can switch over 15 factories to something else.
Sometimes, that saves you a _lot_ of efficiency bonus :)
I felt that 'because they work' regarding 7/2s, I refuse the new meta
I have over 1500 hours in HOI4 and I had no clue you could specify what equipment divisions can get
I always use the logistics screen to send my allies tanks and armoured car models not in my divisions (Germany gets quite a few AC from the western campaign that I just give to my puppet or Romania
I really wish the estimated days would always be shown, and not just on hover. Rather than that weird status bar -- I'm not even sure what it shows.
VERY TRUE
I wonder if it would be a good mechanic to be able to set divisions to auto-deploy when they either didn't have enough equip or manpower, with doctrines letting you deploy at earlier points but with resulting performance hits. For example as a base you can set a division tp autodeploy at 90% equipment, keeping the hp and org of all the infantry but suffering in firepower. Imo human wave could then play into china and desperate ussr tactics of flooding the battlefield with underequipped units to slow down the german advance
Amazing I feel like I've watched all your videos! Between you and HammoTime you taught me how to play this game! Thank you.
When I realised why my troops got wrecked in one of my games when I updated my template on a division that made up like 70% of my army... Well learning!!
Maybe I'm not understanding some of the gameplay logic here, but I don't really get the strategic wisdom of destroying old equipment. If some battle goes badly and a bunch of divisions get wiped out, it's better to still have a stockpile of even old equipment than none at all. Or with airplanes, even just using some old planes somewhere can be a good fakeout to get an enemy to deploy his limited forces to a region you don't care about. You can't do that if you destroy old stuff.
I always use the logistics tab, had no idea some people didn't understand it
rly good and informative video that helped a lot and explained quite a few things that ive strugled with and was hard to find info on.
If I destroy old equipment, will I recover the steel, chromium, aluminum or tungsten used in their creation?
I usually just like to lend lease all the poop equipment to my weak puppets and let the AI do it all. I had Austria Hungary creep up on me on autonomy from near annexed to satellite after dumping all my tier 1 and 2 planes and guns on them early game.
this tab is practically my favorite
Sensodyne describes the pain of sensitivities as their ad when anyone who wants sensodyne would obviously already know the feeling
Make a tier list about meta that you have tried
Send your old equipment to your puppets.
No reason to destroy it.
Benen a while since i played but i remember it being a pain to send each type individually and having to type in the numbers.
@@NietzscheanMan there's a button to send the max amount available without typing the exact number
Damn it. I guess I am in the 1 out of 10 who watched hoping for a tip, but finding out I am already using it. :(
This is actually not estimate. This is basically daily change of equipment compared to "yesterday". You can see this while deploying big chunk of divisions (for a moment it will show absurd loss of guns). Also days required to fill stock are (I guess) based only on your daily production, so it can show numbers like "10 days left" when you are actually losing equipment daily.
I played literally three playthroughs, one I lost in 42, the other two I didn't play after 43... I made different divisions and logistics screen was pretty intuitive....
You're doing the Lord's work Dave 👍
yeah creating a heavy def temp, attacking, and rifles works so well for me (these are all different temps by the way) like attack inf would be 9 inf 1 art support art L tank rec, def would be 12 inf 1 at 1 arty moto rec engi and rifles just 9 inf because i started this my push into russia have been easier and able to have troops capable of defending while others are attacking rifles just fill gaps ngl or to use russian tactics meat into the grinder until it stops working
Please do a run as India on the main channel. Please
Conclusion: Sheeple don't read and refuse to learn the basics even after years of playing.
People did not know this??? I have known this for as long as I can remember
OMG Gyros 4 all is OP!, that's instant capitulation
I use it to get rid of the shit planes I capture that make the list too long when your making new air wings
what i struggle with is where to put specific divisions, so i have an army of infantry but then what else etc
Great outro music
What I do is just put the non-fighting divisions on lower supply priority.
but i don't even understand the division designer
You should do a Byzantium playthrough. It would be awesome to see your strats for that.
Hey feedback, thanks man for helping explain this game. Definitely made it easier to learn. Many thanks 🙏🏼.
Glad to hear it!
Already knew all of that but is there a way to prioritize old equipment for garrisons, but in case if there isn’t enough old equipment that it would use newer?
It would be really useful if we could sell our old weapons, not just the license. This feature, the weapon market would be awesome. (for the weapons you would get pp or some % in production or something like that)
Or recycle bigger equipment. Like old tanks if broken down slightly reduce the production cost or reduce the need for resources until they're all gone. Have another button like the refitting button on the production page.
Instead of deleting them I just send them as lend lease most of the time
I tried that, but the clicking takes forever
Deleting is easier and makes no difference to the outcome of my wars anyways, lol
@@MrNicoJac It’s easier now that you can just send your whole stock with a click instead of remembering the number
@@DefaultProphet
You never needed to remember the number.
Hovering over the picture(?) showed how many you had in your inventory.
You still had to type it though, and remove the 1 first...
@@MrNicoJac well that would have been useful info a bunch of patches ago haha
I dont use manual equipment selection in templates, because I had quite a lot of problems with it. Specifically, when I researched new stuff or made new variants of something and template had different settings (for example, division was using inf equ, but I told it to not use the newest ones and then researched even newer inf equ - it would uncheck all foreign equ on its own, even if using said equ was allowed, and I would have to manually select everything that I wanted again). Instead, I use template priority, equipment priority in recruitment tab, and different tank "symbols" for specific cases. Only thing I dont use is theatre priority, because I just dont use them at all. I tried, but I much prefer having everything visible at once. Rarely I just make some dedicated colonial theatre and thats it
I always spam capture equipment then convert it all to my far more advanced equipment 😂
Remember to destroy GUNS when you have -1,2M of them to bring back green numbers!
Thank you for the video sir
I don't care about equipment I'll delete all foreign equipment and equipment I don't plan on using just so my logistics screen looks nicer
In single player ofc in multiplayer I'll keep anything and everything.
I'm pretty sure this was one of the first things I learned.
I bet - that @feedbackgamingIRL haven`t noticed, that the Symbols on the Intel map of the countries do not relate to the description ! Now, I wanna have a lolly, quick ! ;-D
I use this every time when i want upgrade my divisions
daily reminder to BUILD TRANSPORT PLANES
Wait, this is like the first thing we all learned? Click bait?
"I know this so everyone else should too" GALAXY BRAIN
new about this since 100 hours on the game lol, i have 3000 now
wh- I have less than 350 hours on hoi and cant make it past 1939. I knew all of this already.
Does a negative surplus just mean you are in debt? It wouldn't make sense because you can't just make a piece of equipment out of nothing and add it to your debt. My theory is that it's just equipment that is missing from your divisions.
Can anybody explain this...
(UK)
I built a load of gladiators at the start then researched hurricanes and upgraded their engine for more agility.
Then started producing the upgraded hurricanes, but my stockpiles kept showing an increase in only the gladiator production.
Was this a glitch?
I came to admire the logistics screen as Communist China.
As someone who likes playing minors: an excess in store? What is this heresy?
Watching this baking a cake
You want your lost equipment back?
Stop. The damn. Attack.
Simple :)
At 2:19 there is a delete button, I don't have this button. The only DLC I use is MtG, so it must come with a DLC, which DLC is it?
Waking The Tiger or Death Before Dishonour. One of the early DLC's.
There's no way people didn't know about this
Maybe some people didn't use it, but it's not complicated