Complete Beginner's Guide

If you've never opened Hearts of Iron IV and the rest of the guides on this site sound like gibberish, start here. We're not going to explain any mechanic in depth — that's what the rest of the files are for — just orient you enough to survive your first game without getting overwhelmed.

What Hearts of Iron IV Is

It's a large-scale strategy game set between 1936 and the late 1940s. You control an entire country: you decide its internal politics, economy, army and diplomacy, and you can end up fighting (or avoiding) World War II exactly as it happened historically, or diverging completely from the real script. It plays in real time, but you can pause at any moment — and you should, a lot, at the start.

Before Your First Game

• Pick a small, well-documented nation for your first game — don't jump straight into Germany or the USSR yet. Spain is a good option: it has a complete guide on this site and a game with a clear beginning, middle and end.
• Don't turn on "Ironman" (the no-manual-save mode) for your first game. Being able to save and reload will save you from more than one rookie mistake.
• Turn the game speed down to minimum at the start. You'll speed it up once you're comfortable.

How to Read the Main Screen

Before touching anything, identify these elements — they're always there and will be for the whole game:

• Political Power (PP): top left. It's the "currency" you spend to activate focuses and change national laws. It accumulates on its own, gradually.
• Stability and war support: two bars next to PP. They affect production, morale and how many people you can recruit. The lower they are, the worse everything goes.
• Manpower: the population available to form divisions. It's spent when you recruit and recovers very slowly.
• Time controls: top right — date, speed and pause. Keep a finger near the spacebar.
• The focus tree: the button with your country's flag. This is where you decide your nation's direction, one focus every few days.
• The minimap: bottom right. Switches between political mode, supply mode, production mode, etc. — it tells you what information is shown on the main map.

Your First Game, Step by Step

1. Pick your nation and enter the game. Don't touch everything at once: first take a calm look at the main screen.
2. Open the focus tree (the button with your country's flag) and activate your first focus. If there's a guide for that nation on this site, follow its "recommended route."
3. Check the production screen and set a couple of civilian factories or an infrastructure upgrade building, depending on what you can afford.
4. Check the research screen and queue up a technology — never leave it empty.
5. Let time pass at low speed, pausing whenever an event pops up or a focus finishes, and repeat the process.

The Game's Pillars, One Sentence Each

You don't need to master all of this from day one. Here's the essential gist of each mechanic, so you know it exists and where to go when you actually need it.

• Focus tree: your nation's political, military and economic decision path. Every country has its own — check the specific guide for the nation you're playing.
• Production: civilian factories build infrastructure and buildings; military factories build equipment. Everything else depends on this.
• Research: technologies that upgrade your equipment and unlock new things. Never leave a slot empty.
• Combat width: how much "room" your army takes up in a battle. Calculated wrong, your divisions fight at half strength without you knowing why.
• Combat doctrines: your army's overall long-term "style." You pick one once and it's costly to change, so there's no rush to decide in your first game.
• Military command: generals and field marshals leading your armies. Their traits and experience affect combat.
• Diplomacy and factions: alliances, guarantees and non-aggression pacts. Never go into a major war completely alone.
• Naval warfare: fleets, convoys and protecting your maritime trade. Matters much more if you play a coastal power.
• Air warfare: air superiority, close air support and bombing. Almost everything else in the air depends on controlling the sky first.
• Intelligence: espionage, counter-espionage and covert operations. A more advanced mechanic, not essential at the start.
• Trade: buying and selling resources with other countries. Useful as soon as you're short on a strategic resource.
• Self-sufficiency: relying as little as possible on outside resources. Interesting in the medium term, not the first problem you'll run into.

Typical New-Player Mistakes

• Leaving research idle. An empty research slot is time lost forever — there should always be something queued.
• Building too many military factories too soon. Without enough civilian factories first, your economy never takes off.
• Building divisions without checking combat width. A badly calculated template performs far worse than it looks on paper.
• Ignoring stability and war support until they're already in the gutter and fixing them costs twice as much.
• Not pausing enough. Playing in real time without pausing constantly is the fastest way to lose track of the game.
• Going to war completely alone, with no faction or guarantee behind you. Even small nations need allies.

Where to Go From Here

Once you feel comfortable moving through the menus, these are the logical next stops:

• The glossary of terms, for when you run into an acronym or word you don't understand.
• The list of nations — filter by the #basic tag to find countries meant for starting out.
• The Spain guide if you want a second guided game from start to finish before improvising on your own.