Are Bicycles Any Good? HOW TO Build The BEST Divisions 

PDX balance moment.

Imagine being a german soldier seeing 20000 belgians cycling towards you at 60mph

@@uckbritley1305 Imagine being anyone being chased by a bike going 65.3 Miles per hour

@@shinyaltaria1388 imagine CHASING someone on a bicycle at 65.3 mph.

@@FWAKWAKKA imagine WATCHING someone chase someone at 65.3 mph on a bike

Dave has never missed anything. He only reveals them later

From equipment and doctrines?!?

@@johngalt5166 yes.

@@SCComega that’s… really based

Do you think if a mod added Bicycles as a separate equipment that was slightly cheaper than support equipment, they'd be even more useful?

Special forces build

@@lucjanl1262 why not Marines or para in this case.

@@Raptorsified Maybe you're fighting a purely land war and don't have air superiority.

Isn't the combat width of mountains 75(+25)? How come you wouldn't make it 25? I don't totally understand combat width

​@@TheWrestler52 you should absolutely make them 25 width to maximize it

Yes. Bycicles are good actually. I massively disagre with the video. I think don't see much use because netherlands don't see much use for this any way. Japan don't use because you unlock to late. But if all contries started with. 50% more speed for suport equipment not using any fuel is a massive buff for divisions you need to be faster in low supply areas. And the fact scale as normal infantary and get infantary modifiers is what makes it viable. But to japan is to little to late. Maybe you do medium tanks with it.

Yeah, the reason cav is shit is because doctrines and techs usually don't include cav.

@@wandy3606 i personaly disagree , 10W bicle division support equipment cost is equivalent of having 2-3 good support companies , 5-6 when you make it 20W , if you want speed you can make infantry faster becouse that extra %speed boost for bigger cost is rarely ever utilised its something you can build your army on but considering how cheap light tanks are in the last big update (they got like 2.2 times cheaper in this expansion) you can just make cheap light tanks instead of bicycles most battlefields you fight dont relies on minor speed buffs and support equipment is very prone on being lost due how relialability works to speed be bigger factor they would have to be faster , if you make really fast light tanks , like 30km/h or 40km/h you can do some ridicules things 4 to 6.4 while big % increse dont impacts that super much for extra loses in equipment you will be having i could be wrong but unless somone does extensive compat tests how well it preforms attacking diffrent countries (and equipment loses) , id say they are niche , maybe good for attacking big countries but otherwise nah to give you perspective , 10W infantry costs prod:215-250 , 10W bicycle prod:415-450 so your paying almost twice as much , considering support equipment gets lost more often real cost is more around 2.5-3 times then regular infantry (not to say bikes got 5% relialability lower) so for every bike division , you could field 2 infantry divisions with them being sustainable almost like 3 divisions cavalry is only 20% more expensive and has same speed bonus , aside from terrain bonuses and stats , also cavalary has higher org

@@VarenvelDarakus light tanks especially pre 1940 is a bit hard to get a good speed 6.4 MPH and have the other stats. medium is even harder. but after that getting a light tank that can clock 12 MPH is not to hard. that said if your enemy is moving at 4.0 and your moving at 6.4 you have a easier time to cause overrun total and from the looks of thing partial overrun. and also not get over run (for what ever reason). the thing whit Bycles is that they count as infantry but move as cav and that is somewhat big consider there is not a whole lot that benefits from cav. but a lot more benefits from infantry. motorized (trucks) and APC is counted diffrent from both infantry and cav. finlly Bycles does not requires fuel something motorized does (no fuel massive breakdown out of supplies, and no speed). Bycles no penalty from no fuel as they dont use it sure they use a bit more support equipment but your not going to burn support equipment at the same rate as trucks and what not.

@@Zack_Wester cavalery does not require fuel , and has better stats then basic bicycle and you can field 1.7 more for same cost fuel is not as big deal if you know how it works and can stockpile it before war (you can also proriretise where fuel goes first) speed of bicycle is not that high to make overuns , especialy you forget as attacker you get big penalty to moving into enemy territory , so even with 6.4 you wont attack enemy faster then it can fall back , even 8 speed tanks cant do that , you generaly not see "overuns" till like 15 or 20 ill give you hypotetical scenariop , 2 armies with same production , army B can field 10 bycycle divisions , army B made infantry and fielded 18-20 . who going to win? speed is only useful if you got advantage of firepower and if you have advantage of firepower you dont need speed (as you will be winning battles reguardless)

Me, using armored car in a division as germany. In my defense, i had a lot of armored cars and motorized, few mechanised and rocket motorised, so i mixed them all together. they had more hardness than motorised only and adds more armor to the division.

@@furens-aru I love armored cars. Very underrated!

honestly they can be great in MP to cut of supply lines , droping them onto hubs or rail lines

Yeah Paradox was always good at making games, but not at explaining them. Another example is that Attack is actually important when defending. Just call it "damage" or whatever, makes it way less confusing.

The way hardness, soft attack, and hard attack work is that hardness determines what percentage of the damage you take is from soft attack or from hard attack. 10% hardness for example would mean that it receives 90% soft attack and 10% hard attack from enemy units. The reason high hardness is so effective is that the AI has a lot of difficulty making divisions with lots of hard attack (the player will have a fair amount of difficulty with this as well unless they're doing something really strange or really know what they're doing), so that means that high hardness divisions are not only less vulnerable to divisions with high soft attack, but they will often take much less damage overall because hard attack is often significantly lower than soft attack. Part of the reason that the 7-2 was the meta for so long (and arguably still is a really strong template) is because regular artillery has a decent amount of hard attack on top of very good soft attack, so unless the AI or another player was throwing something with extremely high hardness at it, it was pretty effective at dealing damage to it. Note that the 7-2 with rocket artillery doesn't work particularly well against high hardness divisions because rocket artillery has very little hard attack.

@@efulmer8675 thx for the explanations! It is still more complex than total war, but i understand^^

@@seijurohikko6382 There are a lot of complexities to HOI4 if you're trying to cheese everything, but if you're just looking to win in single player or have a nice time with your friends, all you really need to worry about is having a decent division template and 5 million fighters and close air support (CAS) and you'll just win. And if you're having difficulty getting enough military factories to do that, try building some infrastructure and prioritize civilian factories more and you'll be just fine.

@@efulmer8675 i mean, if using the game core mechanics is cheesing it is sad xD abusing the IA not puting CAS into the Alpes is cheesing, but searching to understand how something intended works isn't cheese for me. But i agree that knowing everything is not fully needed, but if you like to be efficient and understand what and why you do things, clean mechanics are nice too, and helps to improve your gameplay

Medium tanks IC cost should be between 10 and 20. Light tanks less than 12. Heavies can be expensive as you want. Breakthrough should be close to enemy's soft attack. And soft attack should be bigger than enemy's breakthrough.

This is actually genius. And also historically accurate!

First they would have to make reconnaissance a stat worth getting. Then they can think of making motorbike recon somehow worth adding to the 6 or so different recon divisions we already have.

@@ruukinen it's already worth getting. Counterring enemy general's tactics is quite a powerful thing.

@@user-fo8ff2gl8n It's really not, I don't have the patience to explain why since there are adequate videos and reddit threads already explaining it. The crux of the issue is that it only triggers in very specific circumstances and in those very specific circumstance it only lasts for a short while. The average bonus is something like 2%.

I do something similar with the Japanese, but I Tag on SPGs aiming just under 15 wipth (15 wipth before I get the upgrade) Honestly no better way going through America. And you capture light tanks from everyone, you can convert into more SPGs. I usually keep them unconverted till I'm at war with the allies and may lack recourses and convert them with the latest tech then. Gives you a big extra stockpile

@@MyILoveMinecraft spg?

OMG! Japan mass assault tank meta

Uhm...who do you think pulls the regular Arty? Its surely not mice, and neither men...its horsies or some other strong animal.

@@CG-eh6oe yeahhh Elephants!!!

@@CG-eh6oe I think that's pull by a truck, like the photo in the game is literaly a truck

@@alexsandermc9794 My Grandfather served in what would be translated as "horse artillery". Because it was artillery that was mobile, because it used horses to pull wagons with arty and ammunition. Motorized is an "upgraded" version. And it is called motorized artillery IIRC.

Thanks for that!

also have more org

Uhhhh sama lamaa duma lamaa

Can't you just use motorized to get there first?

If you play SP then indeed AT is kinda pointless and AA generally will suffice. AI never seem to make really high armor tanks.

I did the "Narrow path" achievement for Netherlands and yes you do actually need AT for the medium tank divisions Germany brings. Tier2 AA support gave me 29 piercing while the german divisions had 46 armour. You could of course just mix it into the line but I don't know if that gives you enough piercing or not.

I've managed to get up to 36 peircing with just one company of support AA and one battalion of AA mixed with 12 infantry battalions.

@@atomicLord97 Yeah so that wouldn't have been enough then.

For SP you dont need AT, for MP it seems to depend on your build - if you go mostly tanks to counter enemy tanks, its not that needed, otherwise you might need. Btw AA beeing high piercing makes sense, AA guns where used as makeshift anti tank weapons.

You missed AA

@@FeedbackIRL Thanks for your reply. Really appreciate it, considering this was a half-assed half-shitpost. But even though I like watching your videos and I understand what you're doing and how those mechanics wok, I really can't be assed to change my template mid-playthrough when I have better things to do. I frequently incorporate your tips if they aren't too much trouble, but I would never micromanage my units or produce units optimized for special cases only. And I could never produce enough of anything to equip my whole army with all that (but I'm just a casual player and want to have fun). I actually just use fighters and literally never even research AA or AT (until recently when I got the expansions with the tank designer).

a horse is faster in the mountainous terrain, until they aren't because the rocks are so treacherous, even a horse can't cope, and only a foot mobile can crawl

best counter is to make smaller units with proportionally more defense, large divs are split if they attack small units, so a 40w will attack 2 20w at the same time at 50% power for each, if they can overpower their defense, then great, if not then oh no

I had all doctrine researched while I was testing

There is always an optimal division. It just isn't as simple as 7-2 etc now.

@@ruukinen oh, so what is it then?

@@timothyhouse1622 What do you mean what is it then? Even before there wasn't just one division. 7-2 was a cookie cutter infantry division that could attack but if you could afford tanks 7-2 were a waste of production so you should build just 10 infs. Like then it still depends on the circumstances but for each circumstance there is always one optimal division.

@@timothyhouse1622 i make 30w infantry 10/3/1 the 1 being either AA or AT as needed and both support arties, eng, aa support, and then either logi, or recon light tanks with close support guns they seem to work equally excellently everywhere, in basically all cases

Experience

@@FeedbackIRL my dude, stuff like that is what people need to know to make good divs. I know, for example, that you need more than 30 org, but I couldn't tell you why that's the benchmark.

no

SPA are really good, however you use them on motorized or mechanized divisions (or Bicycles / Cavalry) to replace motorized artillery. As the fact they use fuel tends to make them not worth it for regular infantry divisions so you can get that extra bit of armor and massive soft attack on the attacking division you are fielding. Also since you don't need too many its not too heavy of an investment either. However if you are using SPA on Infantry, thats a loosing game, as you want to use Heavy tanks that are barely moving at 4km/h with excess amounts of armor on infantry so as to give you that extra mix of piercing armor and breakthrough.

🥄

For single player if you can spam CAS and make pure inf with Engi support + AA. Has worked for me. It's very vital to do something with air. Can also try fighters to intercept their CAS. (if you are a minor dont go for air superiority but just intercept to prevent many fighter losses). And forts can work too. Not sure what country you are trying to defend with but especially NL make forts along the border as they terrain is hard to defend.

521 likes when i got here lmao

Any time

😌

no

support arty alway out performe standard arty for cost efficiency for instance, 1 pieces of line arty adds 1 soft attack while one peice of support arty add 2 soft attack (that mean +36SAfor a battalion of line and +24 for a batallion of suport). So if you want a division with good soft attack you start by adding support arty then if its not enough you add line arty until its good. same goes with AA just the support in 1940 if only around 23% more effective and not 100%.

Yeah basically it's a cost effective way to add soft attack, using just a few pieces of artillery to give the division some extra kick, soft atk is always good

TLDR is always add Support Artillery and Support AA. even if its just a basic 20w port garrison template as its so cheap.

i mean, you btfo china as japan, and then the world is your oyster

Yay! But in reality you should have won the game by the time modern tanks are viable.

My man you tried that in Ukrain all that happend was your Paratroopers where turned into a chaotic mess phisically

@@theboysclips2094 how is that relevant to the discussion? Also, you do know that game and real life are quite different?

and why should you do that? i assume most of your divisions wont need tha amphib bonus

the last time i tried to naval invade britain it went bad and i thought this would be a bit effective

Sounds like a waste, only a few of your divisions will be fighting in the first wave of landings, so there is no reason to spread your marines out to the divisions that arn't gonna naval invade...