Is there cosmetic or "quality of life" mods, that can be played with enable achievements? For example for more unit models, or something like "coloring puppet"?

Okay this one has been bothering me a lot while playing democratic countries. So basically the current guarantee system sucks as it's by default (which allows achievements) set on limited such jeans I can only do after would tension hits 25. Second thing that bothers me is that I really want them to be cheaper for democratic countries via decree or some other thing you can enact as I just wanna play world policeman and bully minor fascist and commie nations by denying them any expansion at all. Also paradox should really change default settings and make it so always free is default and not limited when it comes to guarantees so anyone can guarantee anyone no matter what ideology or what tension is at the moment. Yes I know it can be changed in its settings but it doesn't allow achievements then how I know soo.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3820030132 everyone should play

Also R5 new Chernobyl hoi4 mod and it's peak

So beginner player here i was playing as Italy i went down this route conquer ethiopia then make peace and take annex north and puppet south worked great. then i puppeted Yugoslavia via the skill tree and albaina to. joined the allies via the skill tree then destroyed nazi germany. UK kicked me out of the faction then Romania and hungry had disputes of transavenia. so i guaranteed Hungary so it automatically started a war with Romania. the problem is Romania and hungary is apart of the allies so immediately hungary and all the allies start a war with me. This game makes no sense.

Challenge:

• Capture Berlin and defeat Germany as USSR

Conditions:

• Have no more than 100 military factories assigned at any moment.
• Accept no lend lease
• Build no forts
• Stay as an all volunteer army

Other stuff:
You can have more than 100 military factories, they just can't be used to build stuff. So like you don't need to be converting mil to civilian as you conquer land.

I just completed on my first attempt and that was with a traditional opening of building civvies until 1939, so if you can do a world conquest I'd think this challenge is within reach.

The capstone focuses and formable available to Iceland in my mod. Most of the focuses are about what type of government you'll get. You can have a bunch of types, even communist or fascist ones. But you also get access to a small foreign policy branch.

The foreign policy branch starts off by you determining if you'll be neutral or not. You can be historical and join NATO, or join any other available faction. And if that's not your speed, you can become neutral.

You then get focuses where you send demands to Denmark about its Atlantic territories. You can demand Faroe's independence, which is the same regardless of government type. However, the Greenland focus works a little differently. If you have a left-wing government, you will demand their independence. However, if you go any other government type, you will demand its annexation. This is to represent how the Icelandic communists were the only party that supported Greenlandic independence and opposed the Icepandic claim to Greenland.

Then you get a choice on what to do with your Atlantic neighbours. You can form an alliance with them, the West Nordic Council. Or you can united with them into the West Nordic Federation where you propose a unification of the three islands. Greenland is less likely to accept than Faroe for historical reasons.

And then you also get an option to buy Jan Mayen off of Norway.

AI Germany knew how to concentrate its planes, and there were thousands in the air zones I tried to contest. My plane template is the third image, but despite how good it was, they beat me in the air by sheer mass.

Upfront: I built this with AI coding agents (Claude Code and Codex). It's mainly for roleplay in my campaigns, a toy I tinker with after my day job as an AI software engineer. If the AI part bothers you, fair enough, just don't download it. I'm not going to argue about it.

Links

- Rename Anything on the Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3819937546

- CAPIE on the Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3819929471

- Rename Anything source: https://github.com/capie-mods/rename-anything

- CAPIE source and releases: https://github.com/capie-mods/capie

You click a pencil next to a name, type a new one, and press Enter. That works for:

- your country's name and adjective, without touching its flag or colour
- your leader and your parties (all four ideology groups)
- states, cities and other characters (generals, admirals, advisors)
- factions you lead
- your subjects, through a new "Rename this country" diplomatic action

There's also a flag picker (any flag from the game, or a subset, depending on the game rules you set) and a leader portrait picker. Game rules decide who may rename what, and any feature can be switched off. The host can also turn on a news event when someone renames a country. There's a 5-day cooldown between renames. Polish letters (ą, ę, ł and the rest - my native language) work, typed straight from your keyboard.

About the injector, because people will ask: HOI4 mods can't do this on its own. There's no way for a mod to read free text the player types, and the only way to change a country's name from script is a cosmetic tag. Cosmetic tags have to be written into the mod ahead of time, and they swap the flag and colour along with the name. I wanted any name, typed in game, without touching the flag.

So the mod comes with a small native library, CAPIE (Cyprian's API Extender, after my name). A launcher loads it into the game once the main menu is up, and the game files on disk stay as they are. It makes no network connections, and it only starts on the exact game build it was written for (1.19.3.0). On any other build it stays off and the game runs normally. You switch it on and off like a mod: there's a "CAPIE" item on the Workshop, and the launcher only loads CAPIE when that item is in your playset.

Without CAPIE the mod still partly works: characters, states and cities can be renamed with an on-screen keyboard, and everything else tells you it needs CAPIE.

A few things before you try it. Multiplayer hasn't been tested with two players yet. It might work, it might desync, so I'd play single player with it for now. It's also only for HOI4 1.19.3.0 currently; a game patch turns CAPIE off until I update it.

Some antivirus engines on VirusTotal flag the DLLs (4 out of 75 at most, all machine-learning or reputation engines; Defender, Kaspersky, ESET, Bitdefender and Avast don't). That's expected for a new, unsigned file that loads itself into another process. The results are linked in the release notes, and the code is open, so you can check what it does or build it yourself.

If something breaks, tell me here or open a GitHub issue. Ideas are welcome too. I'm thinking right now about giving an ability to switch your nation's colors, and in the future it'd be nice to create something resembling a custom nation builder.

Ive done everything posted in the post below, including a fresh install and deleting of all folders related to hoi 4 and I still cannot get my game to launch. Any advice would be appreciated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hoi4/comments/1x3uwad/i_have_tried_everything_every_post_has/

I am pretty new to hoi4 and I was wondering are the DLCs actually worth it? Because on one hand the mechanics and features they add look pretty cool but on the other they all have pretty negative recent reviews and from my understanding I could probably just get mods that do what most of the DLCs do.

(Also I know about the subscription but I want to get opinions before I even spend my money on that and I also know the "swashbucklin'" route but I wouldn't even know where to start and don't really want to do that.)

I am playing as Communist Germany (non-historical), joined the 4th International after struggling to beat Austria (they control all austro-hungarian territory but didn't form Austria-Hungary yet) who joined the allies which only has the UK and Denmark. Stuck in a stalemate with the British after defeating bothAustria and Denmark and only started building an airforce in 1942. Is it too late? What steps should I take considering all of my neighbours are neutral (for now)

I wish I could take a screen shot of the latest example of this but I kind of rage quit.

This seems to happen almost exclusively on the Eastern front when invading the Soviet Union from Europe. It's happened with Democratic Germany, with France, and in my latest run as Poland which I will talk about. Basically everything will be going well, I'm pushing into Soviet territory and then once we push kind of past the imaginary line extending down from the Baltic states eastern border to Romania, all of a sudden all of my divisions bunch up on the northern and southern flanks and the middle is wide open.

I think maybe this has something to do with Romania giving Bessarbia up (which was dumb because Soviet troops had been pushed further east of there already)? Or Baltic states flipping or changing governments or something? Or the AI just not understanding the border anymore once you get too far?

But basically the middle was left wide open and the Soviets just started walking through. Infantry divisions, mind you. This wasn't an armor breakthrough or something. There was just this huge gap opening up a wide highway for them from Minsk to Warsaw. Hell, to Berlin if they wanted (had already capped Germany in a separate war).

I deleted orders. Added new front line orders. Added fall back line orders. Deleted again. Took divisions away from one general and gave them to another. Heck, at one point about 10 new divisions deployed in Warsaw at once and I assigned them to a brand new general, gave them front line order and watched them all head way north or way south to continue to leave the middle open despite the fact they were right next to the huge bulge into the line. Like nothing I could do would get my troops to protect that center.

Does this happen to anyone else? How do I fix it?????

Hey everyone,а е

I’ve been following Bittersteel’s guide for the Soviet Union, and I’ve tried to do everything properly. I built a decent, even pretty good, air force, developed a strong infantry industry, and got almost all my focuses done. My supply hubs are mostly motorized, and I’ve tried to prepare my country as well as possible before the German invasion.

I do have a small tank equipment deficit, but my overall industry is pretty strong. However, I still keep losing to the AI Germany, and I honestly have no idea what I’m doing wrong.

I usually lose the air war, which obviously makes things harder, but even when I try to play defensively, hold my borders, and wear the Germans down through attrition, they still manage to break through my lines in multiple places. I try to micro my divisions and respond to breakthroughs, but eventually the Germans push all the way toward Moscow.

By the time the fighting reaches Moscow, I haven’t upgraded the railways or supply hubs in that area, so the situation becomes pretty much hopeless.

One thing I should admit is that I haven’t built any tank divisions at all. Could that be a major mistake? I followed Bittersteel’s guide pretty closely, so I thought my preparation would be enough, but apparently I’m missing something important.

I’d really appreciate any advice, especially on how to defend against Germany effectively, win the air war, and stop the German breakthroughs without losing half the country.

That post is kinda bold, so I’ll try to elaborate a little.
I myself is a fan of eu games (900hrs in eu4 and 500hrs in eu5), so my friend invited me to play with him. Can’t tell that it was bad or anything but I rather felt nothing. We were playing Great War redux and I was playing Austria, I was just moving the frontline and researching, not really anything catching. The economy was nonexistent with only market where you trade resources for factories( which is really strange).

I understand that it’s just not my type of games, because I prefer a mix of everything, economy, warfare, etc. But I’m genuinely interested as to why did this game catch you? Is it just the warfare that drags the whole game?

As a high school student I don’t have much time on my hands, but after I finish my A levels next week I’ll have 3 months with nothing to do, so I’m planning on making a mod for Hoi4, does anyone want to guess the premise

I'm trying find a good mod for russia democratic path. no mods with different timeline. I've already tried those.

any recommendations? thanks!

Is anyone also expieriencing issues with hoi4 workshop rn? I cant access it no matter if I open it in steam, browser or even phone

Im looking for countries to play has a 100h player very bad, i have played india and i had a lot of fun and did a good job defending from the japanese. what countries do you guys suggest me to play?

I have every single state in the med under my control, malta was (surprisingly) let free, I got the levant because Israel became a thing (RT56), and I own all other states through the wars I won. Yet it says I need to own all British states bordering the mediterranean, but I have ALL of them in and around the med so what do I need? Is it bugged? Because I did this three months ago with zero issues.

I recently learned that in the real WW2, the Soviet encirclement of the Axis forces at Stalingrad consisted of 22 encircled German divisions.

I feel like in HOI4, a 22 division encirclement would be nice, but wouldn't be a particularly large one that turns the tide of the whole war, as Stalingrad was.

Likewise when reading about the island hopping of the Southwest Pacific campaign, I read that the US had to deploy 6 divisions to deal with Japanese holdouts and remnants. Specifically Wikipedia has the following sentence:

Containing these Japanese forces tied up six American divisions, threatening to make the American Army the one that became strategically ineffective.

From all my HOI4 experience, six divisions of the US army is nothing in strategic terms. I might easily use more than six marine divisions to naval invade a single significant pacific island, like Guam, let alone deploying six divisions to clean up New Guinea or something.

So my question is, is the scale of HOI4 armed forces inflated compared to the real orders of battle?

...or in this case, a reinforcement route.

Soviets keep sending in more troops to reinforce their exclave in lithuania, to the delight of German seamen. Their convoy drops from 300 to 60 in a month.

So I am new to this game and I want to play as Italy, but every run I get absolutely fried by the British navy. When this happened the first time I decided to look up naval combat and learned the meta. I researched into the navy a lot in order to beat them, but because of how much naval research I was doing my land units were trash, not to mention that it said it would take 2 years to finish refitting all of my ships to the current model. What is the best strategy that people usually use? I can’t seem to find a way to have a decent navy without having terrible land units

On certain army leaders, you can only choose either or - which one do you prefer and why?