Hearts of Iron 4 is a complicated game, but hopefully you’re starting to learn the ropes. Our basic tips can help you out with the interface, and check out our motivational lecture on how you really ought to put in the time and energy to learn the game properly. That’s all well and good, but let’s get to the nitty-gritty: unit production and management. Check out these tips for help managing and creating your perfect World War II army.

Hearts of Iron 4 Unit Tips: How To Build A Great Army

Entering The Field: Land, Sea And Air

Different types of units enter the field in different ways. For land units: in the building screen you're only building their equipment. You still need to train the soldiers to actually use the equipment, which you can do in the deployment screen. Ships, however, are automatically deployed from the building screen (and you can choose the location in a small icon that should start ticked to ‘auto’). Once built, planes appear in your hangar, which has no size limits. They're useless there, so get them to the front by clicking on the insignia on the map of one of your airfields. You can also deploy directly to the decks of your aircraft carriers. Either way, once you transfer the planes to airfields or carriers, they can be assigned to missions.

Using Support Positions

Researching support positions can give your army a major edge as you improve your medics, mechanics and other behind-the-front-lines forces. However, to actually reap the rewards of these developments, you have to edit the composition of your divisions in the deployment screen. You can choose the makeup of each division and add the support positions to the vanilla infantry divisions. It will take more training before divisions with heavy support units can enter the field, but they can give you a significant edge.

Division Training

Divisions train at roughly the same speed—you can train ten divisions at once at the same speed as just one. The only limitations: you need the hardware (tanks, guns, etc.) for the units or the training will stall out, and you need sufficient manpower. Training naturally scales up with how quickly you can manufacture weapons, which will usually be the limiting factor early on.

Using Armies Effectively

The best way to manage your troops is with armies. The tutorial shows you how to make them, but that’s about it. Don’t just lump a bunch of random troops into a giant army for each front and go at it. You want to be a little more nuanced when you form your armies. For instance, to fight a campaign on a large front, you might want a very large infantry army. These can deploy to a large section of the front and will spread out and defend it. Then, you can add smaller specialized armies to individual sections of the same front by holding right-click and drawing the section using the front line selection tool. This gives you more tactical options, like having the infantry army push forward everywhere as your tanks try to crack through the line in the south. Pulling units from one army to another isn’t the easiest thing to do in the interface, so be careful and form them right in the first place to save yourself some time.

The Front

We included this tip in our basic tips article too, but if you’re messing it up, it’ll fix a lot of your problems at one go. When you're drawing your battle plan, you aren’t drawing the path where your armies should move. Instead, you’re drawing the new front line, rather than the line of movement. Your armies will automatically advance based on the front line you draw. Battle plans can have multiple steps, too: just draw further front lines and your armies will push forward to those after getting to the first ones.

Any other big Hearts of Iron IV unit tips you want to throw into the mix?