Hearts of Iron IV Combat Guide

hello and welcome to the hearts of iron 4 combat guide I'm going to try to keep things as simple as possible especially if you're a beginner but first I want to talk about the most important thing in combat in Hearts of Iron 4 whoever runs out of organization first loses the battle and there are a lot of things that contribute to that there are also two types of Divisions you want to make your offensive divisions and your defensive divisions your offensive divisions are going to attack while your defensive units are going to hold the line and whatnot I'm going to be showing you how to make a good offensive and defensive division in this video but first i'm going to talk about some other things terrain is very important when it comes to Hearts of Iron IV so I have two units here I have this German unit which is inside a forest I have this other unit which is inside of a Plains province and I'm going to attack into the forest here and you're going to see that I'm probably going to lose because I think these divisions are about the same yeah they are as you can see I have the red bubble here which means that I'm losing that means that my organization is running out faster than the German unit and if we see here we are getting this terrain which is giving us minus 15 attack and minus 15 breakthrough not to mention I'm also on the attack and this unit this infantry unit is not really a very good offensive Division and I'll explain why that's the case later the Germans have lots of defense and that's mainly because of experience and trench pit in country by the way both of these units have the same experience so we can ignore that the difference in this battle is that the German unit is inside of a forest and it is on the defensive infantry divisions are good at defending they're not good at attacking this time we're both going to be in planes and it should be a little bit more even this time although I think the Germans are still going to win but right now we do have this green bubble and as you can see we're no longer taking any debuffs from Terrain because this time we are both fighting in the planes unlike beforehand where France was fighting against this Forest here rivers and mountains are really hard to try to attack into when you are defending one of the best places to defend are behind Rivers because of the fact that if you try to attack across a river you get a massive debuff to your units you want to make sure that if you have to attack over a river then you have some pretty good units on the other side because it's hard to attack across Rivers same thing with mountains mountains are really hard to attack into as well so mountains and rivers are your best friend if you're trying to defend if you are trying to attack planes are your best bet now that we've talked about terrain I want to talk about Supply your supply is the is probably one of the most important things that you need to take care of in this game if you don't know if you do not have good Supply your units will take massive debuffs they will be taking attrition they will be losing equipment they will have low organization and low HP what I'm trying to tell you is make sure that you have Supply now that we have terrain and supply and sort of the basics out of the way I want to talk about how we can work on our divisions and how we can make good attacking divisions defensively you just want to have high organization defense and HP infantry are the best defense so if you want to defend or hold the line just make infantry units as for attacking it's a little bit different there are a few ways that we can go about creating and attacking division so let's take a look at this Infantry Division here right now this infantry division is pretty good defense offensively as for using it as offense this is pretty bad there are a few ways in which we can make offensive units but one of the easiest ways is just to add artillery and the reason why is because artillery gives you soft attack the downside artillery is that it takes up more Supply use it's heavier it has lower reliabilities so you're more likely to lose equipment and it lowers your organization which means you can't fight as long I would prefer to keep offensive units above 40 organization that being said though what artillery does is it adds higher soft attack and higher heart attack it also increases our defense and our breakthrough and also our piercing which is good because when we are attacking we want to have high attack and high breakthrough breakthrough is essentially how many attacks we can avoid while we are attacking it's essentially your defense on offense so that's why it's pretty important to have lots of breakthrough soft attack is well how much damage you do or how many times you attack units that are soft so basically infantry artillery and motorized so I'm going to add two artillery battalions to this division here which should give it a bit more push when it comes to breakthrough installs I'm just going to go ahead and change this inventory division real quick so first I'm going to show you the difference between the division that has artillery and the division that doesn't so here's the division that has artillery and I'm going to show you what happens with this so we're winning right now I don't know if we're going to win we probably won't we're not but our soft attack is higher and our breakthrough is higher which means that we are going to last longer than say a regular Infantry Division so me lost but let's say that I go ahead and remove these artillery and bring back just a regular Infantry Division this time our attack is much lower and we don't have as much breakthrough so we're going to lose even faster than we did last time so this time I've created an even stronger offensive Division and you should see the difference unlike the first two times with the weaker divisions we are winning and we're not doing that bad and that's mainly because of the fact that our breakthrough and our soft attack is a lot higher than it was previously and as you can see we won the battle now the reason why we won the battle was because our soft attack and our breakthrough was a lot higher compared to the other two units but that's an infantry division with artillery that's not only the offensive Division and personally even though I've used plenty of inventory divisions with artillery I wouldn't always recommend it in fact there's a much better way of making offensive divisions than infantry with artillery instead we can work on tank divisions when it comes to tank divisions we want to make sure that our armor is pretty high and our breakthrough and we want to make sure our organization is above 40 and plus lots of soft attack so I've created a basic medium tank division that has 43 organization 109 breakthrough 25 armor and 102 soft attack and the reason why we care about our armor is because we don't want our tanks to get pierced we want to make sure that we can attack for as long as possible and the reason why we want High soft attack is so that we do more damage to the enemy the more the higher armor we have the higher breakthrough we have the less damage we take on the attack and the more soft attack we do the more damage we do to soft enemies you can also see down here there's this thing called a hardness we are at 28 hardness which basically means that our unit takes 71 soft attack damage and 28 heart attack and infantry especially this little German division here has really low heart attack which is good for us because that means our tanks aren't going to take that much damage and as long as their armor is high enough we should take reduced damage from heart attack and also piercing so armor also protects us from piercing which these German divisions don't have that much piercing all right so we have this medium tank division here and we're going to attack once again this German infantry and so let's take a look so here we have one enemy division cannot pierce the division's armor and deal 50 of damage the Germans cannot Pierce our tanks and therefore when they're doing 50 percent less damage than they normally would which is really good not to mention our breakthrough is pretty high because of the tanks and our soft attack is pretty high because of our tanks and as a result we are winning because of the fact that we have high breakthrough High soft attack decent organization and our armor is high enough to where the Germans can't do enough damage to us but let's say that our little tank had to cross this river crossing here remember what I said about defense right you want to make sure that if you are defending put your units behind a river because when you're attacking across a river you will take massive debuffs last time it was pretty easy for us to overrun our German friend here but let's see how easy it is this time this time we're not doing very good and the reason why is because of this River Crossing we have where our attack is being decreased by negative 36 percent and our breakthrough is being decreased by 30 percent which results in us doing much lower attack and our breakthrough is a lot lower and since our attack and our breakthrough is a lot lower we aren't doing as well against the Germans so I've spawned in two tank divisions and now you can see one of them is suffering from Supply and I want to show you what that does so we have low Supply we are taking a 55 debuff to our breakthrough and we're taking a 21 debuff to our attack that is a huge debuff just because we don't have enough Supply and that is why you need to make sure that that your supply is really high because as you can tell that's pretty important so let's say that you are a banking an enemy but you're having a hard time well there's another tip that I can give you what you can do is you can attack from multiple directions and what that does is that increases the combat width currently the combat width is 90. the combat width is how many divisions you can have in one battle and if you attack from multiple directions you can technically have more people fighting and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have this second tank division attack and so now our combat width is 135 which increases our combat width which means that we can have more enemies attacking and as a result instead of losing we're actually winning because of the fact that we are attacking from two directions and we have more combat width compared to the Germans there is one more thing I want to talk about and that's Cass you know airplanes because airplanes can give you a pretty big Advantage when you are so I'm going to go ahead and create me some cast here alright so now that I have the cast deployed I'm going to show you how much of a difference it makes when you attack with Cass and without Cass and I'm going to show you a scenario where the terrain is even worse because we have River Crossing and it's Urban over there which isn't good for tanks as you can see a little bit of a struggle and over here you'll see that we have done 54 damage to organization and they've done 33 damage to strength so our planes are doing damage to these divisions here of course it wasn't enough but they still did damage so let's say the terrain was a little bit easier right so instead of having that urban area with the river crossing I now have a river crossing but it's just force and let's see if the cast can help us win here and in fact the cast did help us win let me show you what would happen if we didn't have the cast alright so the cast has been disabled and let's see if we can win once again without Cass we weren't able to win and that's because our air support was doing lots of organization and strength damage to the enemy and so that's why planes are pretty important so make sure that if you're attacking put in some close air support because it makes a big difference in battles

hello and welcome to the hearts of iron 4 combat guide I&#39;m going to try to keep things as simple as possible especially if you&#39;re a beginner but first I want to talk about the most important thing in combat in Hearts of Iron 4 whoever runs out of organization first loses the battle and there are a lot of things that contribute to that there are also two types of Divisions you want to make your offensive divisions and your defensive divisions your offensive divisions are going to attack while your defensive units are going to hold the line and whatnot I&#39;m going to be showing you how to make a good offensive and defensive division in this video but first i&#39;m going to talk about some other things terrain is very important when it comes to Hearts of Iron IV so I have two units here I have this German unit which is inside a forest I have this other unit which is inside of a Plains province and I&#39;m going to attack into the forest here and you&#39;re going to see that I&#39;m probably going to lose because I think these divisions are about the same yeah they are as you can see I have the red bubble here which means that I&#39;m losing that means that my organization is running out faster than the German unit and if we see here we are getting this terrain which is giving us minus 15 attack and minus 15 breakthrough not to mention I&#39;m also on the attack and this unit this infantry unit is not really a very good offensive Division and I&#39;ll explain why that&#39;s the case later the Germans have lots of defense and that&#39;s mainly because of experience and trench pit in country by the way both of these units have the same experience so we can ignore that the difference in this battle is that the German unit is inside of a forest and it is on the defensive infantry divisions are good at defending they&#39;re not good at attacking this time we&#39;re both going to be in planes and it should be a little bit more even this time although I think the Germans are still going to win but right now we do have this green bubble and as you can see we&#39;re no longer taking any debuffs from Terrain because this time we are both fighting in the planes unlike beforehand where France was fighting against this Forest here rivers and mountains are really hard to try to attack into when you are defending one of the best places to defend are behind Rivers because of the fact that if you try to attack across a river you get a massive debuff to your units you want to make sure that if you have to attack over a river then you have some pretty good units on the other side because it&#39;s hard to attack across Rivers same thing with mountains mountains are really hard to attack into as well so mountains and rivers are your best friend if you&#39;re trying to defend if you are trying to attack planes are your best bet now that we&#39;ve talked about terrain I want to talk about Supply your supply is the is probably one of the most important things that you need to take care of in this game if you don&#39;t know if you do not have good Supply your units will take massive debuffs they will be taking attrition they will be losing equipment they will have low organization and low HP what I&#39;m trying to tell you is make sure that you have Supply now that we have terrain and supply and sort of the basics out of the way I want to talk about how we can work on our divisions and how we can make good attacking divisions defensively you just want to have high organization defense and HP infantry are the best defense so if you want to defend or hold the line just make infantry units as for attacking it&#39;s a little bit different there are a few ways that we can go about creating and attacking division so let&#39;s take a look at this Infantry Division here right now this infantry division is pretty good defense offensively as for using it as offense this is pretty bad there are a few ways in which we can make offensive units but one of the easiest ways is just to add artillery and the reason why is because artillery gives you soft attack the downside artillery is that it takes up more Supply use it&#39;s heavier it has lower reliabilities so you&#39;re more likely to lose equipment and it lowers your organization which means you can&#39;t fight as long I would prefer to keep offensive units above 40 organization that being said though what artillery does is it adds higher soft attack and higher heart attack it also increases our defense and our breakthrough and also our piercing which is good because when we are attacking we want to have high attack and high breakthrough breakthrough is essentially how many attacks we can avoid while we are attacking it&#39;s essentially your defense on offense so that&#39;s why it&#39;s pretty important to have lots of breakthrough soft attack is well how much damage you do or how many times you attack units that are soft so basically infantry artillery and motorized so I&#39;m going to add two artillery battalions to this division here which should give it a bit more push when it comes to breakthrough installs I&#39;m just going to go ahead and change this inventory division real quick so first I&#39;m going to show you the difference between the division that has artillery and the division that doesn&#39;t so here&#39;s the division that has artillery and I&#39;m going to show you what happens with this so we&#39;re winning right now I don&#39;t know if we&#39;re going to win we probably won&#39;t we&#39;re not but our soft attack is higher and our breakthrough is higher which means that we are going to last longer than say a regular Infantry Division so me lost but let&#39;s say that I go ahead and remove these artillery and bring back just a regular Infantry Division this time our attack is much lower and we don&#39;t have as much breakthrough so we&#39;re going to lose even faster than we did last time so this time I&#39;ve created an even stronger offensive Division and you should see the difference unlike the first two times with the weaker divisions we are winning and we&#39;re not doing that bad and that&#39;s mainly because of the fact that our breakthrough and our soft attack is a lot higher than it was previously and as you can see we won the battle now the reason why we won the battle was because our soft attack and our breakthrough was a lot higher compared to the other two units but that&#39;s an infantry division with artillery that&#39;s not only the offensive Division and personally even though I&#39;ve used plenty of inventory divisions with artillery I wouldn&#39;t always recommend it in fact there&#39;s a much better way of making offensive divisions than infantry with artillery instead we can work on tank divisions when it comes to tank divisions we want to make sure that our armor is pretty high and our breakthrough and we want to make sure our organization is above 40 and plus lots of soft attack so I&#39;ve created a basic medium tank division that has 43 organization 109 breakthrough 25 armor and 102 soft attack and the reason why we care about our armor is because we don&#39;t want our tanks to get pierced we want to make sure that we can attack for as long as possible and the reason why we want High soft attack is so that we do more damage to the enemy the more the higher armor we have the higher breakthrough we have the less damage we take on the attack and the more soft attack we do the more damage we do to soft enemies you can also see down here there&#39;s this thing called a hardness we are at 28 hardness which basically means that our unit takes 71 soft attack damage and 28 heart attack and infantry especially this little German division here has really low heart attack which is good for us because that means our tanks aren&#39;t going to take that much damage and as long as their armor is high enough we should take reduced damage from heart attack and also piercing so armor also protects us from piercing which these German divisions don&#39;t have that much piercing all right so we have this medium tank division here and we&#39;re going to attack once again this German infantry and so let&#39;s take a look so here we have one enemy division cannot pierce the division&#39;s armor and deal 50 of damage the Germans cannot Pierce our tanks and therefore when they&#39;re doing 50 percent less damage than they normally would which is really good not to mention our breakthrough is pretty high because of the tanks and our soft attack is pretty high because of our tanks and as a result we are winning because of the fact that we have high breakthrough High soft attack decent organization and our armor is high enough to where the Germans can&#39;t do enough damage to us but let&#39;s say that our little tank had to cross this river crossing here remember what I said about defense right you want to make sure that if you are defending put your units behind a river because when you&#39;re attacking across a river you will take massive debuffs last time it was pretty easy for us to overrun our German friend here but let&#39;s see how easy it is this time this time we&#39;re not doing very good and the reason why is because of this River Crossing we have where our attack is being decreased by negative 36 percent and our breakthrough is being decreased by 30 percent which results in us doing much lower attack and our breakthrough is a lot lower and since our attack and our breakthrough is a lot lower we aren&#39;t doing as well against the Germans so I&#39;ve spawned in two tank divisions and now you can see one of them is suffering from Supply and I want to show you what that does so we have low Supply we are taking a 55 debuff to our breakthrough and we&#39;re taking a 21 debuff to our attack that is a huge debuff just because we don&#39;t have enough Supply and that is why you need to make sure that that your supply is really high because as you can tell that&#39;s pretty important so let&#39;s say that you are a banking an enemy but you&#39;re having a hard time well there&#39;s another tip that I can give you what you can do is you can attack from multiple directions and what that does is that increases the combat width currently the combat width is 90. the combat width is how many divisions you can have in one battle and if you attack from multiple directions you can technically have more people fighting and so what I&#39;m going to do is I&#39;m going to have this second tank division attack and so now our combat width is 135 which increases our combat width which means that we can have more enemies attacking and as a result instead of losing we&#39;re actually winning because of the fact that we are attacking from two directions and we have more combat width compared to the Germans there is one more thing I want to talk about and that&#39;s Cass you know airplanes because airplanes can give you a pretty big Advantage when you are so I&#39;m going to go ahead and create me some cast here alright so now that I have the cast deployed I&#39;m going to show you how much of a difference it makes when you attack with Cass and without Cass and I&#39;m going to show you a scenario where the terrain is even worse because we have River Crossing and it&#39;s Urban over there which isn&#39;t good for tanks as you can see a little bit of a struggle and over here you&#39;ll see that we have done 54 damage to organization and they&#39;ve done 33 damage to strength so our planes are doing damage to these divisions here of course it wasn&#39;t enough but they still did damage so let&#39;s say the terrain was a little bit easier right so instead of having that urban area with the river crossing I now have a river crossing but it&#39;s just force and let&#39;s see if the cast can help us win here and in fact the cast did help us win let me show you what would happen if we didn&#39;t have the cast alright so the cast has been disabled and let&#39;s see if we can win once again without Cass we weren&#39;t able to win and that&#39;s because our air support was doing lots of organization and strength damage to the enemy and so that&#39;s why planes are pretty important so make sure that if you&#39;re attacking put in some close air support because it makes a big difference in battles

Transcript for:Hearts of Iron IV Combat Guide

Transcript for:
Hearts of Iron IV Combat Guide