So my latest hobby for the past week or so has been a grand strategy world war 2 game, hearts of iron 4 (or hoi4 if you don’t have much time). I actually bought the game ages ago cause a friend of mine had it and it looked interesting, but because it’s such a complicated mess of systems and I was overwhelmed I really only sat down and learnt how to play recently. And boy howdy have I learnt how to play (pretty poorly but we will get to that).

(For a bit of background in the game you pick a country and you start playing as that country, waging wars, building industry, changing the government and so on. It starts you off in 1939, and because I generally have the ‘historical focuses’ option ticked, other countries will follow what they did in real life at that time) The tutorial for the game is what I started off with. It makes you pick Italy because they start off at war with Ethiopia so it gives you a chance to learn the ropes and such. Long story short, it took me 3 restarts and many desperate last stands before I finally got a hang of the combat and managed to defeat and conquer of all Abyssinia. Wasn’t a great start but I had a good grasp of the game by that point. Anyway, in my infinite wisdom (and presumably the high that came from actually winning a war) my next goal was war with Germany. This ended as you might have expected, I was overrun in a matter of months and a civil war started.

After that stunning performance I decided to take it a bit more slowly and tried focusing a bit more on the conquering land through the games focus trees, diplomacy and decisions mechanics. This led to me to guaranteeing Austrias independence (I think I was a bit salty about the last run) to try and contain German expansion, this once again, went basically the way you would expect, Germany tried to take over, I tried to stop them, I failed. But by this point I had actually learnt a bit about combat and was doing reasonably well in defending my territory (the Germans were still advancing mind you, just slower than they otherwise would have). It probably also helped that I had managed to secure the annexation of Albania and was puppeting Yugoslavia. Either way, that run ended the same way as the last, civil war, giving up, starting over.

After my failed attempts at running Italy I decided to try my hand at the night USSR! With a stunning industrial base and a virtually unlimited supply of troops the soviets are apparently a really good beginner country to play. In my run I tried to follow the advice of people online, I built up my factories and developed my industry ahead of the upcoming conflicts. My mistake was trying to do to many things at once, I was trying to conquer the Baltic countries, go to war with Finland, and preemptively invade Germany, all at the same time. In the end, I got bogged down in Finland for longer than I needed to, foolishly denying a peace offer, thinking I could afford to take the rest of the country, and then when Germany invaded, I had no real plan as to how to counter it and eventually just gave up. Either way, not an amazing run but I learnt never to say no to a peace offer.

Now we get to my current run, Australia! Immediately after starting I realised that Australia didn’t have much in the way of infrastructure and factories, meaning it would be harder for me to wage war and such. I am doing my best to rectify this by just building as much as I can, developing until I can create a decent base to work on. In the meantime I started steering towards communism! Joining the Comintern and turning New Zealand into my puppet. This eventually led to a civil war, which, because of how large and empty the place is, is a real peace of cake, just kinda walk in and claim back the land. The problem arose when New Zealand joined the opposit side, dragging out the war. I ended up attempting an invasion of the southern island but I haven’t done naval invasions in the game before and ended up losing all my divisions lol.

And that’s pretty much where I’m at rn, I’m having a blast learning how to play and all I can hope is that it doesn’t fill my mind with alternate history that I will mix up with the real stuff :p