HOI4 it’s a game about Word War II. It is not 100% historically accurate, but the developers have done their best to make the game believable and close to the real events. There are many events built into the game that allow you to do exactly what happened during World War II, but if you want you can take an alternate path…
… if you want to repeat history, you definitely can. If you want to try what if, you can. And that is why I love HOI4 and why is HOI4 so popular. The realistic side of the game is affected by the AI setup (we are gonna talk about them below).
HOI4 AI settings
In HOI4, there are two AI settings that you can set before the game starts. HOI4 has a very simple setup either you want believable AI or you not. If you decide you want an alternate AI, you can choose the option below (I’ll write about that later).
These are exactly the setting that will make you entertained for hours and hours.
If you want to play an alternate history, you can even choose how the country will develop – the AI will then try to pick that line from the decision tree. This selection is named AI behavior.
However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that if you choose “historical AI”, World War II will play out the same way. Some events may play out slightly differently, for example when I play in Czechoslovakia, Germany always occupies the Sudetenland +/- at the same time. Similar cases are reported on the official forums, but the game is still very accurate.
Other custom game settings
It’s not just the just AI settings that can affect your game. There are also sliders related to “major nation buffs”. With these sliders, you can add more strength to major countries that are in the game. In the next picture you can see buffs you can get:
There are buffs like more political power gain, or you can get more strength divisions because of better division recovery rate or faster research speed. Remember, if you want to give a buff to yourself, give it to some of your opponents as well so that you don’t have to play win a game too easily.
Second things you can change is “game setup”. In these options, you can set what state each country will be in. One of them, for example, is whether or not Great Britain will have as many colonies as before the World War II or whether or not the Soviet Union will be united.
The great advantage is that under each option Paradox has prepared a description of exactly what you will choose for each option, so you can customize the game in detail. We are talking more of an alternate history.
