In HOI4, manpower is one of the most powerful elements that can affect the game. It includes both people serving in military branches and people available for duty. The shortage of manpower can mean problems and it is important to increase it as much as possible. In today’s article, we will focus on all of this.
How to increase manpower in HOI4?
In case you need to increase manpower, it is can be done by several ways:
- Extracting manpower from controlled states (more about puppet countries and manpower below)
- Passing new conscription laws or increasing proportion of the population subject to conscription (this needs some planning and takes time)
- Choosing more moderate occupation policies. This increases the recruitable population in occupied states outside the center.
- Taking control of other states.
- Deleting/ reducing less important units to get back some manpower.
- Using monthly population growth to obtain a small amount of recruitable population each month.
The last possible way can be to cheat which adds manpower. However, do not forget that this is a short-term solution that can ruin your game experience. Do not also forget that the capture of states by the enemy may mean the loss of recruitable manpower.
How does manpower work in HOI4?
As I mentioned above, manpower is key to a game advantage, especially against your enemies. Manpower is increased passively over time by letting your citizens reach a certain age and being recruited. However, it takes some time and as can be seen above, this whole process can be sped up.
How to use puppet manpower?
If you want to puppet a state and gain manpower, you have to follow a certain method. Moreover, and that is very important, you need to have the Together for Victory DLC. Imagine you have a state that has a huge amount of manpower and you want to take it away (For example USA on one side and Great Britain on the other). The whole procedure takes 10 steps:
- Create a small unit in Division designer and prepare circa 300-500 divisions.
- Reduce the US autonomy. The speed of the process depends on how many resources you have. Send weapons and build factories – increase their dependence on you. Don’t worry, all the resources you invest will come back to you. It is a good investment. With dominions, the same process should be done by sending convoys.
- In the meantime, as the autonomy is coming down, deploy your small unit with its divisions.
- Integrate puppet towards America (or a different country).
- America, under the influence of support from your side, is getting to a very low level of autonomy. Be prepared with your divisions.
- Click on Recruit and Deploy -> Templates -> Division Designer -> choose the USA, choose any template you want (it is recommended to choose the biggest one) -> modify the division so that is has as many units as possible -> click on Save -> all the deployed divisions now switch on the big division.
- You got all the manpower and America has 0.
- Annex the state.
- America is now yours.
- Destroy the switched divisions and you get the remaining manpower.
