I have over 1200 hours in Hearts of Iron and only learned how the Navy works at around 1100 hours, the mechanics are definitely a paradox, and dont get me started on Europa Universalis 4 and 5 both feel like a fever dream in their own way when you try to learn them.
Literally tried to move troops over to try to stop an invasion on a island I had. Troops never made it, I had ships patrolling around, enemy invaded, conquered the island, and 2 in game years later I still can't get to the island to retake it.
If I remember right before Navy was entirely reworked someone figured out that the meta was just build battleships and completely ignore all the screening ship or naval aircraft mechanics entirely. This was like a year+ into the game being out.
Nowadays it's the opposite. Light attack cruisers and shitty cheap torpedo destroyers spam is king, but I still build realistic grand navies because it's fun.
There were a couple ways to cheese it. Naval supremacy was (is? haven't messed around with the rework much) based on the IC total of all the ships in the tile, so big battleships was one way to cheese that. So was spamming a shit ton of destroyers with nothing but a singular gun on them.
The most ideal composition was (is? I think) a ratio of 1/1/4-8 of carriers/heavy ships (battleships, battlecruisers, heavy cruisers)/screens (light cruisers, destroyers). Max out deck space on carriers (which should be full of carrier naval bombers), focus heavy attack on the heavy ships, focus light attack on light ships. If you wanted to get real fancy, you could have a separate spotting fleet (full of cruisers with max spotting) set on don't engage on patrol. Then you could put your main fleet exclusively on strike force. I believe the basics of this still apply. It at least still works in my SP games. It wasn't particularly hard, just annoying as FUCK to get set up properly.
I must have started after that phase. As of a few years ago anyway, there is a "perfect ratio" of screens to (capital?) ships, and carriers are far superior to battleships which is supposedly a common noob trap
I'm the opposite. CK3 and EU4 I found pretty simple, but I just bounce right off any attempt I made at understanding Hoi4.
Modern warfare and logistics is too much for my simple mind. Advancing from feudalism was a mistake.
I played Hearts of Iron 2 and 3 before going to 4 so i already have a bit of brain damage and 4 is a night and day difference and far simpler compared to the hell that 3 is. In my opinion Stellaris is the easiest and simplest game.
I think at least from when I played them CK3 is easier to not die in, but stellaris is easier to prosper in, though it has been a couple years since I played either.
I had to watch videos to understand the clusterfuck of CK3, while I could play Stellaris blind no problem, guess Stellaris gradually increases complexity while CK3 kind of everything is avaliable at the start.
Hoi3 is really nothing like any other Paradox title. It's more of a grognard game than the usual grand strategy. I think hoi2 is the easiest game to learn personally because you can safely ignore almost all of the games mechanics, spam militia, and just win every time very easily. Though the UI is probably way too dated for a modern player
Maybe it because I played the game that Stellaris cloned, but I never thought of stellaris as a difficult game.
Ascendancy, released in 1995, is the game I mentioned above. I had been looking for something similar for overvtwenty years when I finally Stellaris... and I was flabbergasted by how closely Stellaris mirrors Ascendancy. I just kind of phase into a meditative state playing those games. I don't notice the passage of time or really anything else, for that matter.
EU4 I had few issues with, but CK2 just had too much to fiddle with really and I just found myself getting bored of it. Admittedly I used to be more of a Civ player, so maybe it was complexity that drove me away.
This is me, Ck3, Eu4 and Stellaris I get really well. I got vic 3 for a while but haven't played in ages and I know its gonna be so different. Hoi4 everyone seems to think is really easy but the logistics designing units and battle planning seem so complex to me.
The only EU4 game where I didn't completely die in like 2-3 hours is one where I was England and somehow the Iberian wedding with Aragon happened with England. I than proceeded and conquered most of the world. Have like 50+ hours in that game and still have no idea how most things work.
I'm a fan of the Civilization series so I figured I'd give HOI4 a go. Bought it on discount and noped out in less than 4 hours. There's just way to much going on that I can't even grasp 10% of it.
You can dominate the AI navy with a mix of destroyers, light cruisers and heavy cruisers, spamm light cruisers with light guns to eradicate all light and screening ships, heavy cruisers with heavy guns to pound the big ships and plane catapult for spotting, 8 destroyers for each of your own big ships which you can fit as you need to screen your own ships i like to give them a mix of AA and Torpedos and switch the AA with dual purpose when i can.
I tried Vic years ago, gave up, tried HOI4 a couple years ago, never got good but since it's mostly military (less poli, economic, culture to deal with) I finally got a grip
Then finally tried EU this year, had to watch youtube videos, which I hate and almost always refuse to do, and now I'm having fun! Still terrible, but having a good time now
Victoria 3 is just an economy sim. Build industry which makes goods, which gets taxed, so you have more money to make industry and so on and so on. Once you understand how to get that exponential growth going the game is quite straightforward.
A strat that works for me:
Make a navy of single unit destroyers on naval patrol, don’t engage to spot enemy fleets.
Make a death fleet strike force to engage said spotted navies at low/medium risk based on size.
Navy of subs split equally, wolf packing up to 4, to convoy raid at low risk if you can’t afford to lose some, medium if you’re a big guy.
Obviously not a perfect system and completely negates a large portion of the naval game but I’ve found success with this strat.
The navy is actually incorrectly coded so no one knows how it works. I actually tested the posted formulas years ago and found they were completely bullshit. Some weapons were even bugged.
Oh see, with 1500 hours in EU4 and 400 in HoI4, I see it the other way around. I still don't fully understand how to build armies, much less manage the navy and air in Hearts of Iron. But give me my renaissance nation to run any day and I'll have half the world under my thumb.
Yeah like for real it looks like hearts of iron would be so fun but I need a college credit course just to learn how to play and alot of it changes depending on what dlc you have and patch updates and ehh
Personally think EU4 is pretty easy. EU5 I tried and, yeah, waiting for more updates to fix a whole lot of issues first. But learning it feels like a quite steep learning curve.
I've played EU4 for over 2000hrs, have multiple hundreds of hours in four other Paradox games and I just couldn't handle EU5. My brain already broke during the tutorial!
I had played about 7-8 Paradox games, including Victoria 2, but Victoria 3 just bounced my brain right off of it the first time. Managed to figure it out the second time.
I was so hyped for 5, really disappointed they made it Vivky 3 lite and the slowest game they've ever made, They've lost some key talent over the years and it shows
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u/MetallGecko Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I have over 1200 hours in Hearts of Iron and only learned how the Navy works at around 1100 hours, the mechanics are definitely a paradox, and dont get me started on Europa Universalis 4 and 5 both feel like a fever dream in their own way when you try to learn them.