General information | Army Hearts of Iron IV Guide

Military formations are the most important part of the game and they allow you to accomplish all goals you want. The game takes place during World War II, which means you can select units from that historical time. Depending on nation you can use various types of units. In this chapter you will find crucial information about all aspects related to leading and managing units.

The most important action you should do after starting the game is checking your forces. Check what units you have, what are their needs for supplies production and what templates were configures for each unit. At the beginning of the game you don't have to position them strategically, but it is important that you use the interface to create an army of them.

Units that belong to the army can be trained. This will improve their combat effectiveness. When set up, units are trained to level two. If you decide to use them before the training end, then they will remain at recruit level and they will receive negative modifiers to their actions. If you wait for the training to end and the division to be ready, then the soldiers will be at recruit level. For initial training of soldiers you won't receive army experience points which allow modifying unit templates and tank personalization. In order to get these points you must combine units into armies which cannot be trained.

Creating fronts is the base for organizing military actions

During training units temporarily lose durability and they are starting to generate fatigue which in long term can greatly reduce their vitality. During that you will gradually receive army experience points and the soldiers will rise to higher level and receive modifiers to military actions. You should frequently check the state of your army because units sent to combat will be losing soldiers. When that happens, new recruits will be sent as supplement from the headquarters. Due to difference in levels between the army and recruits, after some time the overall level of unit will drop. If there will be many supplements, then the army level will drop to second and all modifiers will be lost. Because of that, it is important to control the situation after the military operation ends. You should train army that is temporarily outside combat.

When creating an army you can select a commander. By default each commander can lead 24 divisions. Of course you can also promote him thanks to which the limitation to the size of unit will be gone. Each commander can obtain special awards during military actions which will increase the effectiveness of units he commands.

You should remember about forming an army because land forces when created don't count on their own. It's difference with naval and air forces. Units in ports, if you aren't doing anything with them, combine automatically into fleets which you can then manage. Planes after produced are moved to reserves and they can be assigned to selected airport where they will combine into wings. Each wing can consist of specific number of units and that number is what you must always control. Overfilled airports can cause accidents and they greatly reduce the effectiveness of air missions. Each wing can have different mission assigned depending on orders available for each unit type.

Further in the chapter you will find detailed information required for correctly using each of available military forces.