Albuquerque, I'm golfclapping here Axis, utterly golfclapping. You've pretty much ensured Breaking Bad will never exist in this world now. You absolute fascist units. #hoi4 After a moments silence for Saul Goodman, we return our attention to Guinea, the fort has taken a beating &. The system received the designation “Shturm” and was intended to be equipped on both air and ground units. In the end, it was the MT-LB that was chosen as the base for the former role. In 1979, the new ground combat vehicle was put into service under the designation 9P149 “Shturm-S”. As you can control the pathing of enemy waves, there is no need to use the Detector to hit stealth units.You can simply use Defenders and wait for these invisible units to come, then hit them with ranged Operators.

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Intro

AI now attempts to recover when units are unable to reach desired front location. AI now attempts to detect and react to many encirclement opportunities, both against itself and against enemies. Includes evacuating dangerous areas and cutting off bottlenecks. Tweaked prio for what AI considers 'weak enemy' to avoid attracting too many units.

In this video I will cover several Infantry Division Layouts from World War II. Although certain parts of the content is tailored for Hearts of Iron players most of the information is military history, only the initial remarks are mostly Hearts of Iron and methodology specific, so just skip ahead on click on the annotation on the screen.

Hearts of Iron IV

Be aware though that these layouts are aimed at being as historical as possible within the Hearts of Iron division builder, thus I am not sure how well they work in HOI 4. This is first and foremost a military history channel, thus I am mainly here for the historical flavor, the German accent and not to support your ambitions in conquering the world, at least for now.
I won’t use the division builder, since I generally try to avoid any copyrighted material and it would actually make everything more complicated and time-consuming. Yet, you will get in one shot the proposed HOI 4 setup and the historical setup together, so you can basically copy it and also learn a bit about the real units too. On the homepage, you can find the proper high resolution screenshots of these layouts see the link on screen and in the description.

Methodology & Accuracy

Some words about methodology and accuracy, if you want to discuss these layout listen to this section very carefully and if you can’t wait for the layouts, you might skip ahead by clicking the button on screen.

Well, figuring out the correct layouts can be quite complicated. Here are a few reason why. You need to be aware that some divisions – especially tank divisions – changed quite considerably throughout the war, thus I usually provide a date for each layout. Another major pitfall is the naming, what one country called a regiment was sometimes something different in another, thus this it was not as straightforward as it seems. Also there were even quite some difference within each country, e.g., a German tank division in 1939 had way more tanks than in 1941, or an US Army Battalion in 1942 was usually larger than an US Army Battalion after the reorganization of September 1943, well, except for two divisions of sixteen armored divisions.
Hence my approach was as follows, it consisted of looking at the data in hearts of Iron, checking the historical division layouts then compare these information to equipment and manpower tables to see if the numbers match for different units.

This process revealed quite some interesting information about hearts of Iron too. First I looked at the data of Hearts of Iron, namely how many manpower and equipment each unit had. This confirmed my assumption that the so called support companies are more like support battalions, only the three smallest ones the engineer, AA and artillery company have 300 men, the others have 400 or even 500 men. Whereas companies were usually around 100 to 200 men. Furthermore, the number of artillery guns for an artillery battalion in game is 36, whereas in real life this was the number of three battalions at least for the German and US Army Infantry division. I don’t know if this is an error on behalf of paradox or if an artillery battalion in game actually should represent a regiment or maybe it is for gameplay balancing reasons. For this video I assume that an artillery battalion in game, is also an artillery battalion historically, if this is not the case, just divide the number of proposed artillery battalions by 3 and you should be fine.

The second step was to look at the organization of these units and the third step was to look at the number of equipment tables and compare if it matches the organization, because the organization can sometimes be misleading. As an example. although an US Army infantry division didn’t have a dedicated anti-tank battalion like a German infantry division, but it had 57 anti-tank guns whereas the German division had only a few more with 75, but some these were also part of the recon battalion, so one might argue that the US Army Infantry division should have a dedicated anti-tank unit in-game if the German Infantry division has one or both should have none.
As you can see it is a bit complicated, thus, take all the following information with a grain of salt, because I had to use a wide variety of sources of different quality and level of detail, which is problematic in itself, but additionally the chances for errors increases due the variety and amount of data. To balance this, I usually added a short explanation why or why not I went with the proposed setup and provide the basic data for my reasoning.

German Infantry Division 1940

So, let’s get started, the Allied Grand Strategy in World War II was “Germany First” and it worked out, so let’s begin with a German Infantry Division from 1940.
It consisted of an Engineer Battalion, an Anti-Tank Battalion, a Recon battalion, an artillery regiment, which consisted of a heavy artillery battalion and 3 artillery battalions, additionally a signal battalion and finally 3 infantry regiments each with 3 infantry battalions. Now the division didn’t have a dedicated medical battalion, but it had 2 medical companies, a field hospital and two medical transport columns with almost 700 men in total, thus I would say this qualifies as a medical battalion. Additionally, it also had maintenance and logistics units attached. So this unit was very well equipped, the only unit type it definitely didn’t possess was an anti-aircraft unit, the division used solely heavy machine guns for anti-air defense. Now, the German infantry division had almost 17 000 men, whereas most other divisions have less than 15 000 men, thus my proposed HOI setup would be as follows:

For support units, an engineer, anti-tank, recon, signal and medical unit. The regular 3 times 3 infantry battalions should get an addition of 2 battalions due to the large amount of men in the division and finally 4 artillery battalions.
Note that for all divisions the non-combat units: logistics, medical and maintenance are the most debatable, because in my sources this information is often not included or limited. Furthermore, their functions sometimes were performed by non-divisional units in several armies.

Source: Buchner, Alex: The German Infantry Handbook 1939-1945 (amazon.com affiliate link)

Soviet Rifle Division 1941

I hope you have your Hammer and Sickle ready, next is a Soviet Rifle Division from April 1941.
It consisted of an a signal battalion, a medical battalion, a supply battalion, an Anti-tank Battalion, an anti-aircraft battalion, a Light Artillery Regiment with 2 battalions, a sapper battalion, one Howitzer Regiment with 2 battalions and 1 heavy battalion, a recon battalion and 3 infantry regiments with 3 battalions each. Yeah, this one seems to tick off all boxes. Yet, in total the division had only around 14500 (14454) men.

But let’s take a closer look at the data, now the number of five artillery battalions sound impressive and the firepower is also clearly more than that of the US and German unit. The number of heavy artillery above 150mm is the same, yet whereas the US and German units use 105 mm guns, the Soviets used 122mm howitzers although 4 less, but additionally they had several 76mm howitzers and cannons, which means that the firepower in artillery at least equal if not greater than the German division. Furthermore, the total number of 54 anti-tank guns is lower than the German division, but similar to the

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