ULTIMATE Guide To Tank Modules - HOI4 Tank Module Tier List 

I do like softattack so I have a soft spot for Howitzers. But I think your analysis on the autocannon is faulty. You don't kill people (or ponies if you are into EaW) with tank guns you kill them with tanks. And that adds about 30 extra production cost to it. Let's say you make tank with a production cost of 30 I make that same tank but with a howitzer gun for 35, I'm still taking my design over yours because 6 tanks with doubled soft attack is better than 7 tanks with half soft attack.

In my opinion heavy machine guns as secondary turret combined whit stabilizers make a good combination of soft attack and breaktrough , i saw that soft attack is more important and making a division of tank with 800 soft attack trust me is good as fuck

HMG, put it as main armament for light tank, making it a better "armored car" for 3/4 of production cost of 1936 armored car.

Extra machine guns. Provide the most soft attack per cost.

U forgot both machine guns you bloody dult!! Quick pin a comment with what you rank them as so I don’t loose my shit.

I agree fully. It's also why I like to pick the +50% entrenchment speed for the generals of tank armies when possible. Combined with a recon tank with dozer blades and an engineer company they are quite formidable in holding off counter-attacks long enough for the infantry to mop up the encirclement.

Usually in SP, my motorized can take up the role of defense just fine. Just have them ready to follow the tanks

Yeah, but mostly you want Infantry to do the work of defending Some motorized infantry with the tanks cover the work of defending

The great thing about dozer blades is whether it's on a support tank or main tank battalion, it still gives +1 entrenchment to the whole division. So putting dozer blades on a flame tank which you might also want to attach to a regular division is very much worth it.

You're also bringing the radio for the breakthrough anyways, which massively buffs defense multiplicatively. Those additions to base stats adds up pretty quick. With the recent update, smoke is probably worthwhile to bring because.

Yeah, as someone who've been in love with the tank designer and trying to make semi-efficent historical/LARP tanks, being stuck with torsion bars and diesel sucks, and I notice simply changing to gasoline is just straight up better if you are ever messing with the armor/engine. That +0.5 max speed is huge, and while you might be able to squeeze some extra speed(which can be converted to armor & breakthrough) with a diesel engine and non-christie suspension, you'll need to increase the engine by a lot more, which mean more resource cost(which can be debilitating) and in some cases is not even available with engine limitation(You can only upgrade to 20 max, and years limit you teching the engine tech). Plus while Feedback might be indiffirent toward speed, I feel he is a bit harsh because more speed means less chance to be intercepted(reach a tile faster before you can get locked by an attack), and more overruns. You also get more distance per fuel because your tank can simply reach more distance per day which is huge in eliminating fuel/supply issue before you can take a supply base(Also fuel capacity scales with fuel usage anyway, so a faster tank with higher fuel usage is actually more fuel efficent combat wise).

>The amount of points that would otherwise go towards the engine can be reinvested into armor or nothing at all for the reliability boost all while keeping the same speed as you had with Diesel+Torsion/bogie suspension This is wrong. Bogie is almost always better than Christie. I tested it myself and a Bogie with 5 engine had the same speed and was CHEAPER than a Christie with 3 speed. Speed upgrades are much cheaper than changing to Christie. Go try making an 8km/h light tank, no matter how you do it the Christie will lose out to the Bogie every time.

​@@mainman879 When you did that test, did you pay any attention to Reliability? On a light tank, this isn't so important, but it becomes a big deal if you're aiming to use your focuses to create an ahead-of-time Medium '39 or Heavy '41 that has 8km/h speed and enough armor that your enemies will struggle to penetrate it. The decision between Christie and Bogie is not just a question of production cost, but also of Reliability.

Which is ironic, considering how much of a bitch to repair Christie's suspension was. Especially on T-34, not so much on Comet, but in both cases I'd rather pick bogies or torsion bars. Also love how interleaved and halftrack are somehow a separate suspension types.

@@martenkahr3365 with or without Christie I had no problem with reliability. You can get 8km/h mediums on bogie suspension and 100% reliability easy.

Dozers and defense stats on tanks are actually good. Yes they're meant to attack whenever they can, but once you capture a province, both AI and players would counterattack to that province. Yes the defense stat is not large but helps to the accompanying infantry divisions.

Are the stats of the tanks in a support company meaningful for the division?

@@marthvader14 yes. Recon tanks use Light tanks as equipment. Their armor, piercing entrenchment stats do give bonus to the division. Thus, the best recon tank design is with fixed turret and best medium at gun with dozers (for infantry) or three men turret with improved Auto guns (for tanks).

@@gildedphoenix Yeah but it's not even one full battalion, as a support company it's only a fraction, don't think much of their stats is left in the full division

@@marthvader14 not 100% some of them, yes, but that goes for every other support companies as well.

You can go overkill on soft attack against AI. On multiplayer where you can play against someone who shits out an unbelievable amount of 10/20 widths, you’re right there’s no overkill. But also rocket launchers on tanks as a module would probably be broken.

I mean, there were tanks where rockets were the only weapon so why is calliope more important than, say, BM-8-24? I'd argue go both for historical accuracy.

Rockets should be both main weapon and module but you couldn't pick both at the same time. Module rockets should have lesser stats than primary weapon ones.

Personally? I think Rocket Launchers should be both main and secondary weapons. Since they were both historically. See the Calliope and the Pershing T99, as well as the Katyusha and Panzerwerfer. Hell, look at all the stuff the Germans slapped Wufrahmen 40 rockets to. They slapped em on tanks, half-tracks, trucks, everything they could, sometimes as secondary weapons, sometimes as primary. As for howitzers, I have no idea what they were thinking. The Heavy Howitzer would, in my mind, equate to a 150mm< cannon, like the 150mm sfh, 152.4mm ML20, and the 155mm Long Tom. Which were all designed and produced either during the early parts of the war, or before. So I don't get why it's locked behind the *entirety* of the Artillery tech.

@@jdon6484 I mean you can't tho. The ai only has soft targets. Winning battles faster will literally always help.

Yeah

The problem is the research cost.

It's *really* good until you get Easy Maintenance, then it falls off almost entirely. They take up the same slot on the tank, and at the point in the game when you have EM, the tank chassis themselves base cost is usually rising by about 1 point per generation. Replacing Wet Ammo with EM basically lets you produce the latest tanks at the cost of the tank from the previous generation while hardly losing any stats. There's pretty much no situation after EM is researched where spending 1 more on production is worth getting 5% more reliability. So after EM is researched, its only role is to really give you a lot of emergency reliability if you're going crazy with your other components. If EM didn't exist in the game, Wet Ammo Storage would probably be S tier.

@@IceMaverick13 i give this point to you. However the research for easy maintenance is difficult for small power. With 2-3 research slot, you got so much to research and your industry won't support big number of tanks 😬

@@fredericcote1577 The research cost is a pain, yeah. Then again, I often like to use maintenance companies with minors anyways. More reliability and a better equipment capture ratio is quite beneficial if your army is backed up by a small industrial base.

At least give us a max of 2 stabilizers so we can simulate a 2-plane stabilizer. It does make sense why 3 or 4 stabilizers can't be added, since a Z axis stabilizer isn't actually a thing, and a 4th stabilizer would mean the cannon can shoot through all possible timelines and realities at once, so that's out.

@@scumbaggaming9418 tbh that last one sounds sick we should actually be able to do that

Seems historical too, considering the Maresal Tank was just that, a light tank with a powerful piercing gun.

I tend to later on design a light tank destroyer with a superstructure and the advanced medium or medium high-velocity gun and convert my early game light tanks en masse. One battalion of these TDs can get an infantry div enough piercing and hard attack to deal with medium and even some heavy tank divisions, and converting is dirt-cheap with dispersed industry and/or the covnersion speed upgrades.

I like them sloped also not squared lol

@@roboparks Easy maintenance or a wet ammunition storage?

Or, if you do go the heavy route, you can put the super heavy gun on heavy/modern TDs.

Combien it with the bonuses SPATs get to piercing and even light TDs with a superstructure and medium-size gun can give you enough piercing to deal with some earlier/less armored heavies. Superheavy gun SPAT would be disgustingly overkill, I think. Just the advanced high-velocity gun plus the inherent piercing bonuses for SPAT should shred even superheavies.

@@magni5648 The superheavy gun costs no steel and gives you the most hard + soft attack. Piercing just neutralizes armor bonuses; the attack stat is what actually "shreds" them. It's expensive and niche, but can be a very good option in the right late game circumstance.

@@zacharytaylor2423 Costing no steel is a bit of a fallacy. It costs so much production and can only be put on steel-heavy chassis' that it will effectively use up a lot of steel anyway.

​@@magni5648 No, heavy chassis has the same steel cost as the corresponding medium. And the advanced ones have the same steel cost (2) as a modern chassis. But all of the advanced heavy guns cost 3 steel. You actually use more steel for the gun than the chassis.

And that's why you pair tanks with mechanized.

Best Defense tanks . Put Tanks on Forts !!!

Yeah, but the tank design itself doesn't (and shouldn't) do that job. That's the job of the other battalions in the division, like your motorized or mechanized battalions or the fill-in infantry divisions that are following a tank thrust. If you're maxing out breakthrough, you aren't going to lose much org pushing into enemies anyways because you're hardly going to take any damage. All of the org provided by your mot/mech will soak up any potential counter-attack by the freshly weakened infantry divisions, but they shouldn't be much of any kind of threat given that you just depleted their org and pushed them back moments ago. At best, they can cycle-charge you to delay your thrust (until hopefully armor or anti-armor can arrive), but at such a massive cost to manpower and equipment that its almost always better to let you have the tiles and retake them later than it is to try and halt the advance with your fill-ins. Even then, any player worth their salt isn't going to be counter-attacking into the tank divisions making the thrust, the counter attack will come on the fill-ins holding the territory behind them to try and encircle the tanks and get free tank division kills. Nobody wants to push a tank division back 1 tile and just have them thrust back in after they've fallen back and recovered their org. They want that division completely dead so its not on the board anymore and the only way to do that is to encircle it. You can't encircle a low defense tank as easily because "pinning" units will win the battle and force it back faster than your counter-attack can break their fill-ins behind them. The _only_ reason I can think of to make the tank design have a high Defense stat is to slow down the rate at which you lose tank equipment whenever somebody attacks your tanks directly, but the actual division defense of that unit will almost always be coming from your mot/mech battalions, not the tanks themselves. The value of this is greatly diminished by the reasons outlined above: any sane commander is not attacking your tanks directly; they're attacking everything around them instead.

@@IceMaverick13 You're forgetting about the (common) mp tactic to have tanks hold the fill ins while a smaller contingent pushes. Nobody puts all their tanks on the frontline spearheads - way to easy to lose them. Ex: it's 1942, Germany has 15 tanks on the soviet frontline. 8 are pushing in 2 spearheads, 7 are holding. Also, while defense isn't that important in tanks, having a decent defense on the tank designs means you can get away with less motorized/mechanized in the division to make up for it. And you can absolutely pin low defense tanks if you pin them with infantry. The only divisions I can think of that have such low defense they can't be pinned are also unusable due to low health and org. That said, IMO it's best to use a 1:1.5 mechanized - tank ratio. That's good enough for defense.

@@IceMaverick13 Sure but Feedback even makes the same "defence doesn't matter" comments when making tank division templates, not just when designing tanks. Also if your tank itself has basically no defence then the division as a whole is gonna suffer cos the tanks make up a big proportion of the division's stats (and cost)

What's outta date?

We’re all about carbon neutrality, which is why we scrape the carbon fouling out of the gun

All of these vids are geared towards single player ;)

I wish there were medium sized secondary guns for medium and large tanks. That would be a workable solution.

Soviets used diesel cause the fuel is easier to make . And Didn't explode the Tanks Like Gas. The diesel back then Used more fuel vs Gas(More Oil to make a gallon of Fuel) t wasn't diesel #2 like today. Why The Soviets had to put extra fuel tanks on their tanks. Diesel engines are actually simple to work on . There is only 4 Components to a Diesel engine. Overheating is the main issue with diesel engines . And the diesel Fuel can Gel or freeze in the winter. Gas in 1940 Better Gas Mileage in 1940 Didn't Freeze or gel in the winter American's and Brits were used to Gas cars so for the allies there were more Gas engine Machines. Second Plane Mechanics Making the Gas a fuel a higher Octane. Since Gas was already being process . Its wasn't a extra process. Mechanics could switch from Planes to Tanks to other Vehicles with out issue. Germans Synthetic Gas (Terrible Fuel usage and maintenance nightmares) because they ran out of Oil during the war. Oil Not a Issue issue with Russia or the USA .

Right, they should also give a speed bonus. This could be balanced by debuffs on certain terrain types, definitely in swamps as a wheeled 50 ton monster would just sink in. Requiring rubber would also make sense

Spam Naval Bombers or CAS or Tac Bombers and Subs. Nothing else matters.

Naval bombers (for close range, tactical bombers for long range sea zones). Subs to draw out their navy, or score on points (for naval invasions). Nothing else matters.

My preferred bicycle build: Wheeled suspension, easy maintenance, extra machine gun, smoke launchers

71cloak did a video on SPAA: In short, its completely shit ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uiZTajZFeGU.html

It will give them 1 extra entrenchment each (compared to 1939 engineers giving 7 entrenchment).

If you build SP Arty, they get the soft attack bonus too.

@@sld1776 Really? Could you explain how to do that?

@@ScurvyBoi In the tank designer, give your tank one of the modules that can be converted into self-propelled artillery--medium howitzer, say--then in the drop-down menu in the upper left select the "self-propelled artillery" icon.

Recon tank is still decent if you are just trying to add armor to your infantry, which makes it a great defensive division that won’t be pushed by other infantry

@@bradlygamez4549 They patched recon tanks just today. They now give much less armor.

@@bradlygamez4549 is that tracking with the announced hotfix today that reduces recon tank armor contributions?

No more recon but instead putting a dirt cheap high armor tank in as a battalion.