Rindis.com

This is the fourth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Hearts of Iron IV. See the previous reviews here:
Hearts of Iron IV: Heart of Production
Together For Victory: Commonwealth of Iron
Death or Dishonor: Heart of Eastern Europe
After two country packs, the head Hearts of Iron developer put together a list of features they were looking at for improvements and changes for future patches, before announcing HoI IV’s first major expansion on November 15, 2017. Waking the Tiger was released with patch 1.5 on March 8, 2028. It, and the two earlier county packs, Together for Victory and Death or Dishonor, were incorporated into the base game as of March 14, 2024.

Ununified Support

National unity was broken up into stability and war support for this patch. Unity had been introduced in HoI III, to force countries to capitulate after the major sections were occupied, but now they wanted to add some nuance.

Stability represents a country’s internal processes, so strong party support adds to it, and at high values it grants industrial output and political power (the currency that lets you reform the government and work through the focus tree).

War support limits conscription and production laws, so a country with low war support can’t institute the higher levels of these laws. Fascist nations generally start with high support, but aggressive actions will cause high support in their victims, so they can put themselves in a bad position.

All of this came with new events and other options hooked into the new system. It’s a good idea, though it hasn’t interfered with me enough to give me a good idea of how it changes things.

Decisions

The biggest change for the patch was that a new top button was added for a decisions screen (or side bar). The primary goal was to allow more time-sensitive actions than the focus trees could allow, and add more flexibility to the game.

Even a country with no targeted content can expect to have a propaganda section, used to drum up support when world tension is already high. There’s also a good number of general political actions that can be used to steer away from particular factions, increase support, and a few other trade-offs.

Many parts of the world have further resources available by taking a decision to “develop” them. This generally requires some level of excavation or construction technology, and takes time as well as civilian factories to complete.

There are of course, lots of more specific decisions for the big countries, revolving around various historical options. Some focus tree events will trigger new decisions (for other powers), and some independent events have been moved to decisions, mostly so they are not things that must be dealt with that instant, bogging down a busy multiplayer game.

Overall, it’s definitely a good addition to the game, and opens up a lot of flexibility on how to handle things. My main problem with it is just being used to not handling things that way.

Revisions

The new focus trees from the previous two country packs had as part of their options some true alternate history bits to send each country towards the other factions. This had proved much more popular than originally thought, so Paradox added these kinds of options to Germany and Japan at this point.

Germany’s full tree has not changed since (that I can see) but the major political branch is only available with Waking the Tiger. This has elements of the army start a civil war to throw Hitler out, and Germany can either go democratic or constitutional monarchy (unaligned) from there.

There’s still a lot of choices within that tree, and it can even get a sixth research slot. There is no branch of the focus tree that gives a communist government (there are still other ways to do it), though there is a part of the army branch that can give a full alliance with the USSR and disband the Axis in favor of the “Berlin-Moscow” faction.

Japan got a redone tree with the political parts also hidden in the expansion (more understandable, but Germany should have been free to start with). There’s the historical fascist branch, an unaligned branch, and a democratic branch. The last causes a civil war, and forces Manchukuo independent, and in control of Korea.

The Communist branch is even worse, with a civil war that sees most of the generals and the Japanese navy go over to Manchukuo. But all ideologies are available, and Japan is capable of starting a faction in any branch, though some are simply to take the place of a major faction abandoned by someone else’s abandoned historical route.

Past that are the usual paths to boost research, get the fifth research slot, and other effects. However, Japan does have three unique units available. Army expansion leads to bicycle infantry, which has slightly better speeds in some terrain, and better suppression (of insurgents). The naval branch has torpedo cruisers (an alternate light cruiser type to represent Oi and Kitakami, who were outfitted with a very large number of torpedo tubes). The air branch allows for kamikazes.

Additionally, Japan gets an extra national spirit with Waking the Tiger: Interservice Rivalry. This starts balanced, but there are decisions to swing it towards the army or navy, which change dockyard and military factory production, and the decisions themselves have good effects.

Personally, I find the wilder political options too unbelievable to be a fan. Apparently, I’m a minority, but I’d like a middle ground with some options, just not as ahistorical as these often get. I’d also have thought it’d be a good idea to keep the full German tree available to everyone (they are the most popular power to play), and just put the full Japanese tree in the (thematically appropriate) expansion.

China

China is struggling with a civil war through this period, and is broken up into two ‘name brand’ nations: (Nationalist) China, and Communist China, which each get their own focus tree, and a number of warlord states, which all share a general tree for them.

Nationalist China gets five new national spirits with the expansion, three of which severely limit China’s military. Army corruption makes all units half as effective, and take longer to train. This can be earned off with the army reform focus, followed by a series of decisions, which all cost army experience, so it won’t happen until deep into a shooting war. Incompetent officers reduces the new command power currency to nearly nothing, and can be bought off after the army reform.

There is also low inflation, and a number of focuses will raise or lower that. One of the goals of the Chinese government is to introduce a welfare state, which will raise stability and war support, but will generally increase inflation. Naturally, it is harder to reduce it, though it can be done.

Communist China is currently on the losing end of the civil war, and with the expansion has four national spirits that only have negative effects. There’s multiple routes to getting rid of them, but they’re also far from the only problem. Non-violent solutions to the civil war are included, but have their own, quite high, costs (generally in political power, but also possibly in infantry equipment).

The international section of both focus trees are the same, and deal with inviting various Western powers into the country to help out (including possibly collaborating with Japan, but the historical parts deal with things like the Burma Road).

A new behind-the-scenes feature is that the shared focus tree above is really ‘shared’ at the coding level. The warlords’ focus tree has a branch to support the Nationalists, which will then swap out their focus tree for the main Chinese one, and a branch that does the same for the Communists. And then there’s a branch that puts them into opposition to both, side with Japan, and proclaim themselves as the true Chinese government.

Finally, there is a concept of political support points, to shift who is in charge of China as a whole. This becomes important a little into the game, once actual political maneuvering is underway. Basically, each province contributes some points to showing who has legitimacy. Part of the Communist abilities is to undermine this and get provinces they don’t control supporting them.

Also, Manchukuo (Manchuria under Japan) gets its own focus tree, with a copy of the general Chinese foreign investment branch. The other part of the tree splits between staying obedient to Japan, and going independent to reclaim China and expel Japan on its own. The ruler of Manchukuo is actually the heir to the Qing Dynasty, so it can form the Chinese Empire under the right conditions.

Overall, the expansion really does a good job with China, and gives it mechanics that make it operate in a much more realistic way. The biggest problem is the political support points are under-explained, and often just not visible, even though they’re extremely important.

Resources

There are two basic reworks of resources as part of the patch. First, the amount of resources from an area is dependent on the infrastructure there, so building infrastructure in your resource-rich states now grants more resources. They also redid the interface to show this and better show the current infrastructure while building more.

Synthetic oil production was also redone. It used to be every level of the technology allowed another refinery per state. Now, the first level always lets you build up to three, and there are two branches under it.

Each technology in one branch adds one oil production to every synthetic oil refinery, and the other branch adds one rubber production. This means you can now concentrate on the resource that is causing all the trouble. (Or take both, if you’re short on both.) It’s a very nice change, and makes the refineries even more useful.

Enhanced Command

The patch introduced some unit hierarchy. Army groups became collections of armies, and field marshals can be promoted from generals to lead them. The general idea is you can now do planning at this level, and let the system assign frontages to each army, and so on. You can even work out plans at both levels, and once an army plan is done, it’ll default to the army group plan. And if you skip the army group level of command, the field marshal in charge will still provide bonuses to everything under him.

It is a far cry from the full chain of command from HoI III, and personally I’d like to have corps as an optional container to order several divisions at once. But, it is a good enhancement to the existing army system, and there are places where it’s very handy.

They also reworked the basic leader stats. They still have an overall skill level, but this is now generally for determining when/how they level up, which grants three points in four skills, attack, defense, logistics, and planning (for generals, admirals use maneuvering and coordination in place of the last two). So, now some leaders are much better at defense than attack, for instance.

Some of the trait system was reworked to go with all this. There’s a bunch of mini-trees of traits, which can be earned by experience, but you now have to go in and confirm them. Overall, I like the changes, but I don’t care for how the traits are now organized, nor the need to micro-manage.

Conclusion

For some, this expansion is a bit disappointing, as it can definitely feel like a country pack writ large. There are some important overall changes here, but they’re mostly on the patch side. Possibly the most valuable patch feature is one I haven’t mentioned, where you can attach air units directly to armies. The air unit will then follow it around, reducing micromanagement of air assets.

That said, there is a lot of content in the expansion; I’m surprised they generally just mention China and Japan for the focus trees, when there’s four different Chinese focus trees. More general content is a bit low, however, with the field marshals being the main standout.

At one point, I’d have probably given this a limited recommendation. Japan and China is an important part of WWII to flesh out, and if you want a proper global war game, that needs to be in the mix, and I think they did a good job with it. That said, if you’re the type to avoid naval warfare, you’re probably also avoiding Asia, and may not notice.

But now, it, Together for Victory, and Death or Dishonor are part of the base game. The stated reason is so they know the features from those expansions are available to everyone for building off of. I can only speculate which ones they have in mind, but the expanded German focus tree is a possibility. I suspect the enhanced puppet types from the first two are also part of the reason.