Let's Play Hearts of Iron 4 Byzantine Empire | HOI4 Gameplay Episode 12: Venice & Budapest

9 thoughts on “Let's Play Hearts of Iron 4 Byzantine Empire | HOI4 Gameplay Episode 12: Venice & Budapest”

1. Will you ever play eaw mod also great video as always

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2. Hi Praetorian, long time lurker but I want to message to say I really enjoy your calm, methodical content and look forward to seeing you make more great stuff!

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3. I admire that you can handle such a situation. Open fronts stress me out to no end. I probably would have tried to churn out a flow of 2 cavs just to fill out the front line doing more harm then good.

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4. How far away are you from getting cores on Yugoslavia? You must be getting really close, now. 👍

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5. The point of flame tanks is the bonuses they give you for attack into terrain/forts and you usually jack up the armor on them to give your troops an armor Stat to reduce the damage taken from soft attack.

   They generally don't need to do anything. Also reliabililty is an average value of all equipment in the division, so making super reliable tanks when the rest of the equipment is 80% usually isn't really needed.

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6. 👍👍s'up…👀..thanks.

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7. 🙂👍

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8. Good series. Praetorian have to be honest those flame tanks are not good/cost effective the way they are designed. You want them for ARMOR and MAINLY for the great bonuses they will give the entire division when attacking (Urban, Fort, Jungle, etc). But they have to be cost effective, i.e cheap! You can lower the speed. On the flipside you need to jack the armor way up. A good rule of thumb is that if you can raise the armor of the entire division to 5+ it's a good thing as enemy infantry has a hard time piercing it. Also want them cheap, so bogie suspension, cheap turret, etc. Add skirts. Also don't worry about reliability when adding to a division, as it's based on the whole division, not the tanks themselves..

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9. Adding modules on flamethrowers isn't worth it unless your industrial production is high enough to spend IC on minor stat increases.
   So if you feel your country's IC is low, just add a flamethrower turret and that's all, don't even add a radio. Flamethrowers are like engineers, you primarily add them for the terrain modifiers.
   Though, saying that, you need very few flamethrowers per division (15) and if you only give them to specific, offensive units you can very easily make them a bit more expensive and still have plenty in stock.

   As for reliability, there's a cap on the usefulness.
   The formula which calculates the losses of a specific piece of equipment due to attrition contains the factor MAX(1,FLOOR(N*0.1*(1-R))) with N being the number of the specific equipment a division uses and R being the reliability.
   Because of the MAX, this factor can never be smaller than 1, creating a cap on the usefulness of R because there's a hard minimum loss of equipment
   Because of the FLOOR (rounding down), R works with thresholds.
   From this we can derive the value above which R becomes useless in terms of equipment losses due to attrition: 1 = N*0.1*(1-R) (ignoring the FLOOR for now, just keep in mind it's there)
   This gives R = 1 – 10/N
   If we then correct for the fact that there's a FLOOR in the formula, we have to use 2 > N*0.1*(1-R) as the threshold for which the result still gets rounded down to a 1, this gives R > 1 – 20/N
   Let's use flamethrowers as an example, but you can do the same for any piece of equipment for which you can influence its R.
   For flamethrowers N = 15, so it becomes R > 1 – 20/15 = -0.3333, i.e. as long as R is greater than -33% its equipment loss due to attrition will be the minimum number. Yes, that's right, a negative number, for flamethrowers you will always have the minimum losses. (mind you, this minimum can be a high value relative to N if N is small!)
   Let's use another example, a tank division which uses 5 medium tank brigades, this gives N = 250 for the medium tanks. Thus, to get minimum attrition losses you need R > 1 – 20/250 = 0.92. Thus you need R to be MORE than 92% to get the minimum attrition losses, and if the tank's R is equal to 92% you'll twice the minimum losses because FLOOR(2) = 2.
   One important thing to note is that equipment variants of the same type are actually seen by the game as different types, so if you have a division which use both domestic and foreign equipment, you'll actually lose more equipment due to attrition because it calculates the losses for each variant separately, and because there's a minimum loss for each calculation.

   Equipment losses due to fighting don't depend on R, but on the amount of HP lost in combat relative to the division's HP. E.g, if the division has 150 HP and loses 30 HP, it will lose 1/5th of all of the types of equipment it has. With N = 15 for flamethrowers that means losing 3.
   There's also equipment recovery after combat, but that s weird and it adds the various R of various equipment together and I think it's bugged because it's possible to recover more equipment than what you lose, resulting in capturing enemy equipment even though you don't use maintenance support groups and your capture chance is 0%

   If garrisons are getting too big, you can try switching to a different occupation law which requires fewer troops and equipment, such as Local Police Force.
   BBA and its following patches changed a lot of the numbers of these laws.
   And speaking of garrisons, is your garrison division template configured to not use the latest tier of infantry weapons? It would be a waste if your good guns were used for that.
   And are garrisons prioritized to get equipment? If not, that can spiral out of control. When garrisons don't have their equipment the resistance target of a province goes up, which causes the current resistance to go up, which means you need more garrisons, and thus you need more equipment, which means your garrison deficit grows, and so the vicious circle continues

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