Some nations (Germany in particular) have national focuses that give you the choice between annexing a whole nation, annexing part of it and puppeting the rest, or puppeting the whole nation.

• Hoi4 How To Increase Manpower Tax

Putting aside World Tension, is there a benefit to creating a puppet instead of annexing it outright?

Available manpower. The manpower from a given state is determined by the following formula: State population is visible by clicking on a state. The population of each state increases each month by 0.12%. So the recruitable population increases every month as more people get to a recruitable age.

Hoi4 How To Increase Manpower Tax

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1 Answer

Puppeting vs Annexation is essentially a question of army size vs security+production.

When you annex a country, you will gain full access to its resources and factories, but the population counts as non-core pop, you can only ever recruit 0.1% of your non-core pop into the army, so the manpower gain from annexation is minimal.

A puppet does not provide its resoruces immediately, but will do so for free, you only have to spend the convoys, however you won't be able to use their factories or build in their territory, you may use air and naval bases though.

A puppet has it's population as core pop, meaning, it will provide a lot more manpower and thus the puppet is able to recruit many more divisions than you would be by annexing, the puppet will also frequently grant a significant portion of its army to your control as an expeditionary force. While you won't be able to control what divisions you get, your army size will be much larger by puppeting. For comparison, in my game I got about 50 divisions total from Vichy France, with a total pop of perhaps 20M, my entire non-core pop that game was 500M, which is only worth 500k manpower, or about 50 divisions as well.

The second issue is security. What happens, when an enemy captures an annexed state? Well, it's occupied and usable by him, that's it. What happens, when he captures a puppet? The puppet may surrender, if the enemy gets enough victory points. This causes all army divisions of the puppet to immediately disband, including those in your own army, which can prove fatal if it happens at the wrong time. On the other hand a puppet will be able to handle occupation resistance better than you.

So, in summary: if you need production or the location is risky go for annexation. If you need more troops, go for puppet.

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Hearts of Iron 4 is a complicated game, but hopefully you’re starting to learn the ropes. Our basic tips can help you out with the interface, and check out our motivational lecture on how you really ought to put in the time and energy to learn the game properly. That’s all well and good, but let’s get to the nitty-gritty: unit production and management. Check out these tips for help managing and creating your perfect World War II army.

Entering The Field: Land, Sea And Air

Different types of units enter the field in different ways. For land units: in the building screen you're only building their equipment. You still need to train the soldiers to actually use the equipment, which you can do in the deployment screen. Ships, however, are automatically deployed from the building screen (and you can choose the location in a small icon that should start ticked to ‘auto’). Once built, planes appear in your hangar, which has no size limits. They're useless there, so get them to the front by clicking on the insignia on the map of one of your airfields. You can also deploy directly to the decks of your aircraft carriers. Either way, once you transfer the planes to airfields or carriers, they can be assigned to missions.

Using Support Positions

Researching support positions can give your army a major edge as you improve your medics, mechanics and other behind-the-front-lines forces. However, to actually reap the rewards of these developments, you have to edit the composition of your divisions in the deployment screen. You can choose the makeup of each division and add the support positions to the vanilla infantry divisions. It will take more training before divisions with heavy support units can enter the field, but they can give you a significant edge.

Division Training

Divisions train at roughly the same speed—you can train ten divisions at once at the same speed as just one. The only limitations: you need the hardware (tanks, guns, etc.) for the units or the training will stall out, and you need sufficient manpower. Training naturally scales up with how quickly you can manufacture weapons, which will usually be the limiting factor early on.

Using Armies Effectively

The best way to manage your troops is with armies. The tutorial shows you how to make them, but that’s about it. Don’t just lump a bunch of random troops into a giant army for each front and go at it. You want to be a little more nuanced when you form your armies. For instance, to fight a campaign on a large front, you might want a very large infantry army. These can deploy to a large section of the front and will spread out and defend it. Then, you can add smaller specialized armies to individual sections of the same front by holding right-click and drawing the section using the front line selection tool. This gives you more tactical options, like having the infantry army push forward everywhere as your tanks try to crack through the line in the south. Pulling units from one army to another isn’t the easiest thing to do in the interface, so be careful and form them right in the first place to save yourself some time.

The Front

We included this tip in our basic tips article too, but if you’re messing it up, it’ll fix a lot of your problems at one go. When you're drawing your battle plan, you aren’t drawing the path where your armies should move. Instead, you’re drawing the new front line, rather than the line of movement. Your armies will automatically advance based on the front line you draw. Battle plans can have multiple steps, too: just draw further front lines and your armies will push forward to those after getting to the first ones.

Any other big Hearts of Iron IV unit tips you want to throw into the mix?