I like to imagine how Bittersteel suddenly becomes the emperor of Japan in 1936 and tells his generals "OK your tanks divisions? They're shit, get rid of them. See those planes? They're also shit, get rid of them. Now, those submarines..."
Somebody actually trying to control the military? He'd get shot. It was very nasty back then. They were running absolutely rampant, and they didn't even know what they were going to DO with China once they had it.
@@LowlandlordYour tank divisions bring dishonor upon the Japanese Army and the Emperor is greatly disappointed, dispose of them immidiately. Your airplanes bring dishonor upon Japanese Airforce and the Emperor is greatly disappointed, dispose of them immidiately
14:55 It is not dependent on the amount of airplanes you have deployed, but on the amount of airplanes you have. So just having airplanes in stockpile is enough, you don't have to deploy them for it to count towards the volunteer limit.
47:56 "I prefer heavy machine guns..." Well at least that was historically accurate af lmao. Many post-war interviews with IJN ace pilots seemed to conclude that they too preferred to the 13.2mm HMG compared to the many iterations of the IJN aerial 20mm cannons (the type 99 no. 1 and 2) - simply for the better velocity which meant pilots would have to lead their shots less and the shots won't just fall off after a certain distance. Also yes, the type 99 no. 2 did have significant increased velocity compared to the no. 1, but I guess the pilots were much more used to the trajectory and handling of the 13.2mm HMG.
It does have to be horrible to try to aim/track for both weapons at the same time. Even to keep track of sounds like an extra bit of thinking you could really just be putting into other things to stay alive in a dogfight instead.
Came to this video because I hit a wall against China outside of Changde. Turns out I didn’t know about the “escalate the war in China” decisions; I got them 70% capitulated with a 40% debuff the whole time
5:40 but the basic carrier naval has full efficiency, you will still have plenty and better planes Also 11:06 Italy bought from the nation that just send volunteer against them :))
Hi Bitter! Brilliant video, although I have a quick guide to pronouncing the city of Dalian. Im from there, so a quick assortment of history. The city was taken by the Russians before being taken by the Japanese, and then being taken by the Communists in the Civil War. As a result, the city has sections with very Russian architecture, and is relatively diverse (sadly changing with time) with Mongolians, Manchus, Koreans, Russians, and normal Chinese. Another notable fact is that Grigory Seymonov was caught hiding there. Now, to the star of the comment: Pronunciation. Dalian can easily be sectioned into three different ways to say it easier. Da should be pronounced like the Russian yes (Da) but lighter, although that doesnt quite matter. Lian should be pronounced like Lee-An, but faster, to sound like one syllable. To summarize it: Dalian (Da Lee-An) As always, thank you for the great video bitter, and your guide will serve as my favorite Japan guide!.
Was literally cringing every time the name Dalian was said, thanks bro. I can never understand how people can change the order of the characters when reading something out loud.
1:00 divisiones 2:48 aviones 4:23 barcos 7:07 construcción 7:17 focus 8:44 divisiones org y cantidad 11:45 espias (hacer colab en china) enviar voluntarios etiopia y españa 20:16 producción 22:08 plantilla marines 21:11 plan batalla
34:35 - It's pretty silly how with this older Focus Tree Japan has to choose between the Zero and the Yamato. Two historical things you can't have both of via the Tree because the older trees were more around specializing your strategy for a historical war rather than larping.
Finally, the countury which I find the most glorious, yet the one I struggle the absolute most with! Thank you as always Bitt3rsteel for keeping us entertained and passively teaching us the game. Absolutely LOVE your content. Cheers from Colombia!
@@Bitt3rSteel What I find hard is mostly to defeat china in a reasonable time period, then going on island hopping campaign. Thanks so much for the video!
When the panay incident comes, you should pick the event where you get 100 pp. Yes the Us gets a wargoal against you, but they wont use that. I have done it always this way and the us never declared on me
I feel proud knowing this week I basically finalized the same strategy in China. Finished in October 38. I found the drive from Nanking to Wuhan can be a little far without supply, but if you take the supply depot south of Shanxi and drive to their wartime capital, while using your marines to take those last ports, the line gets stretched too far and you can walk to the last cities you need. I also used armored recon with 4 armor on my 15 width infantry and grand battle plan and we attack bonused and armored our way to victory.
Continuing my Bitt3rSteel tutorials - this guide is great! Worked great up to the part where I decided I didn't want to cap the Allies. So I tried to go pure historical. Here's some tips if you follow the historical focus path... - Build Anti-Sub Destroyers. A lot of them. Think you've got enough? Wrong. Triple it. I think 100 might do it though. - Take Singapore ASAP. Then don't lose it again. - Focus on the big Islands. I was losing garrison divisions so quickly just isolated on random pacific islands. That's the Americans strategy not the Japanese. - Don't go mental on the Army. I think you could expact on the tutorial a little bit. I think 120 Garrison infantry for your ports around Japan & S.China Sea. Maybe 4 x 24 good Inf and as many Marines as possible. Anyways, again, good guide Bitt3rSteel. Looking forward to the next one!
Actually assigning the whole fleet strike force (29:10) doesn't work. They just stay in the ports until someone is in combat with an enemy fleet (which is impossible in this situation). Instead, its better to separate all of the subs in to smaller fleets with the size of 6-7 subs per fleet under the same commander. Assign them to raid convoys. This action would lure the escort fleets of China to attack, then hopefully the big fleets attacking the escort fleets, then the Chinese fleets joining in, resulting in a big victory. Also, I personally recommend buliding destroyers with only the cheapest engine since they are cheap and they can shield the battleships and carriers in a relatively low construction cost. For carriers, there is a penalty if you have too many carriers in the same fleet, so it's best to assign 4 of them to a fleet. If you want 5, then you need one wing of cas and one wing of fighters in order to make sure that your naval bombers take off sucessfully.
i've tried this 4 times now, the naval invasion never gets past the first 3 tiles of the peninsula. I'm even doing it with more/better divisions than you and i still lose.
If your first invasion fails (tends to happen frequently for me at the beginning), pull out with what you can and invade another port farther south. The second invasion always works out for me.
@@DethScarred Hi there, me from 4 months after i posted this. I now have 1154 hours on hoi4 and can basically win as any nation now, though i thank you for your advice nonetheless.
small tip i found about the military industries. you can auto select your preferred upgrades to auto-upgrade without having to keep going back. just hold shift and left click in the order you want (though you have work from top to bottom, no cheats for auto-bottom) the only drawback is that it doesn't auto-update the design for any active uses (i.e. guns, ships, truck, etc that have an assigned industrial designer)
Hey BitterSteel, i noitce halfway through the video some music starts playing, it's a little distracting when trying to use this as a guide. My recommendation, take it or leave it, is to just lower the volume a bit or have it fade out more when you speak, then go back up when your just moving things around etc. Overall great guide and it made my Japan THICK!
19:34 Just a heads up, planning bonus still applies if you directly micro the units. They just have to be assigned to an offensive battle plan. Insanely good if you have a handful of heavy-hitting units so you can use Staff Office Plan to build planning at a 400% rate. Not to mention that naval invasions count as well so they get the bonuses. Also while making the interwar naval bombers is solid advice for naval combat, it is worth keeping the carrier CAS for China since you can use your carriers as coastal airbases. Carrier-based planes get 4x mission efficiency over land-based planes (with the only downside being that they can't operate at night). Also having later naval bombers + carrier fighters is worth for parking your fleet and having them do air supremacy + naval strike or port strike, since the fleet only eats fuel while moving. Fantastic for hunting small fleets or submarines without risking your main fleet. Otherwise, great video!
Let's go this is my favorite country to play as. I used your guide from a couple years ago to get China before 39 and get England and France by myself. Can't wait to study this video and update my strategies.
I have like 1200 official hours, 2000 unofficial and learning about "shift and click red button" (all unused division select) first time from this video and NOW is wild....
I'm a fairly new player (70h) and I tried replicating your steps, and while I found your Guide insanely helpful, I was massively confused quite often because you switch some stuff around without mentioning it anywhere, gaining more XP and taking decisions that suddenly put me far behind. I really like your videos tho. All of them helped me a lot so far.
@@awesomedude222 yeah, I noticed that as well. Hearing the words of the song made it a little harder to concentrate on what he was saying. Maybe something for him to keep in mind for the next video I guess.
Speaking on the Ethiopian war, if you put your volunteers on aussa and the tile to the left of it it is impossible for italy to ever win. They may lose a couple front and bottom tiles per usual but after that they're dead in the water, the war escalates, then Italy gets rolled lol
I have honestly found thsi guide to be very difficult to follow along while playing. I do not have all of the dlc, nontheless my research and whatnot was about the same pace until you just stopped mentioning your next picks. What do I pick after I get the 5th research slot? what do I pick after certain other research. I never got that information. When did you mention I was supposed to make two of my volunteers truck divs? How much XP was i supposed to have at what point in the game? I didn't have enough when I was supposed to modify the division templates for the marines and hohei shidan. I usually enjoy your content but this was a really bad experience if I'm honest. I don't struggle a lot in hoi4. Japan really was one of the only things I somehow could never pull off, while I usually (if not always) "win" on other nations - that is getting the game to the place I want it to be, like forming austria hungary or getting a peace conference as the bad Germany with the weird cross, so I was hoping to find advice here but its honestly been just so frustrating so far and Im only about halfway through. I had to start deciding on what research to choose myself and thats honestly not what I was hoping to do. I wanted to experiment later, once I could win in China AT ALL... Edit: update, I still one, though I was very frustrated at times and had to wing it starting with the end of the China war and the island hopping and invasion of India. The guide is not really good at all for new players who probably won't have the dlc, they're really pricey and new players won't be willing to invest that amount. I have since bought them all but I had 1000h by the time I was looking at this video and I just didn't want to/couldn't afford the dlc so it's really stupid for a guide to expect all that Also I wrote mods instead of dlc in the original comment, don't know why
@@VeryCoolCatBF it was just a typo honestly, I use a lot of mods myself in addition to dlc and I've been playing thsi game for far too long to not know the difference
I would like to point out, that Grand Battleplan gives you you an amazing sprit of the army, which reduces your fuel consumption by 5 %. Which for the very thirsty IJN can really add up. So you can save on fuel imports.
Fantastic! Japan is my favorite HOI nation by far, as I love how they have to manage every aspect of the game thoroughly in order to succeed. I'm usually happy if I can capitulate China by 1940, but I always forget about collab govt. I'll definitely have to try another playthrough as Japan with some of these tips.
In case you aren't aware, to improve the early game fuel efficiency, for the naval invasions just split off the BBs and CAs and just manually move them to the sea provinces adjacent to the invasion. That uses no fuel once they've arrived :) You can also save fuel early game by micro-ing the fleet training, and only train ships which need it, rather than the whole fleet. Unlike armies every ship in the fleet trains if on training.
good guide, but I will add one thing. At the beginning, in China you can put harsh quotas, which will give you 1 military factory, which, in my opinion, is quite neat for Japan.
about those air volunteer thing, the amount you can send depends on how much airfield and the level of airfield a nation has, i noticed that when i played tno and built max level airfield in a state in madagascar before the civil war. It allowed me to send more air volunteers
What I like to do with Japan at the beginning is deleting all the bad (red arrow down) units, and horses, since they're going to be weak either way and won't be able to do much. Then, I take the divisions that are left, and edit the infantry to add 2 artillery and less infantry. In turn, it gives me less divisions that are so much stronger, and can fastly and easily push through the frontlines, eat less supply, and focus on artillery instead of guns.
Couple of things I would like to add from my own Japanese gameplays: 1. Build more civs (at least 36-40), build level 3 infrastructure in those underdeveloped provinces if you wish. 2. If you want to play naval then you must priotize steel for ships, and build some additional dockyards if needed (2 sets of 5 for cruisers, 9 for the one line of destroyers). 3. Get anti air on the cruisers, depth charges and passive sonar for destroyers because British submarines can be painful. 4. Research Anti air very early, Japan doesn’t have it for some reason. When fighting china you don’t have to build collaboration governments prior to invasion. It can be during and it takes a better toll on your economy if you do so. 5. Tanks are absolutely worth it as Japan, you conquer Chinese industry and it gives you all the industry you could need. 6. Cavalry is absolutely dogshit, do not use it. 7. Focus on getting air early, really helps in the wrong run. 8. Should’ve stated before but getting airplane catapult on cruisers or destroyers helps a lot in hunting British ships (usually they are cowards). 9. Do not annex all Chinese cores, just the main part. You will have to build compliance and cannot get it with the collab governments. 10. Long term goal should be making battleships, great for countering US navy.
I'm not interested in a big discussion on this whole thing, but battleships suck at any other role than AA platforms. They are useless compared to light atk CA/CV stacks
@@Bitt3rSteel I don’t mean to disrespect you, but battleships can indeed be useful especially for gaining supremacy. By the time you will mostly use them in 1943-1950s they serve as a damage tank for all aircraft and other naval vessels. It could just be in my games and usually the IC and resources cost make it infeasible, but as Japan you have the opportunity to actually build a navy so it can be worth jt. I notice in my games my cruisers get constantly attacked and once the strength gets worn down they are just a steel husk on water. Carriers too can be worth it however I usually don’t use carrier planes in my games as they always get shot down no matter the upgrades I give them.
It's more roleplay for me but I've always liked having one bomb locks CAS and one bomb bay CAS to represent the dive bombers and light bombers that were used for CAS and logi strike irl
Taking as a given that "nothing matters vs AI", here are a few tidbits for anyone who wants to squeeze out some slightly more efficient play. Japans best air MIO is Mitsubishi, and it is locked inside the focus tree. I prefer to rush this first (New Naval Estimates -> Fighter Modernization -> Agility Focus) simply because if you want to have the MIO leveled up enough to give meaningful bonuses to the planes you produce for the war against the allies, then you have to get this MIO unlocked asap, period. Sasebo is easily the best naval MIO. It gives bonuses to visibility and speed, and those are key components to the naval hit chance equation. I prefer Ozawa as my main admiral. He has a bonus to speed from his background, can be given a role to boost speed further as chief of the navy, and can get Concealment Expert immediately to give another bonus to visibility. With a leveled up Sasebo MIO and Ozawa, you can have cruisers with a visibility of 9-10 (about that of a destroyer) moving at 45+ knots, even with armor stacked onto them. They will shred screens, and heavy batteries will struggle to ever hit them. Support equipment requires aluminum and Japan doesnt have any. Trucks need fuel and Japan doesnt have any. So design a line infantry unit (should compose the majority of your army) that requires no support equipment and no fuel. Take the starting 6/0 division, bump it up to 6/1, and add support ART and support AA. Thats it, and thats really all you need it to be. Sticking with GBP lets you get away with skipping out on engineers. You can add AT to it later if you want, but you wont need it vs China. If you dont want to sink research and industry into tanks early on, then using mobile infantry as seen here works, but I prefer to design attack infantry using marines. They will benefit from infantry and special forces bonuses, and you can unlock the marine doctrines really quickly using naval xp. Later on you can convert to mountaineers if you find the spare army xp to unlock those doctrines as well.
So. Air volunteer maximum is based on how many planes you have in total. Not airfields or deployed airwings as you said. So the reason you can send 1 and not 2 is that you sold your airplanes early. Sell them after the Spanish war instead.
Hi! I'm probably a minority here, but you got me quite confused at the beginning because of the extra Ki-2/Ki-3 planes and the research tech tree, as those are DLC which I do not yet have. I had to google a bit and look for myself. Then another thing, which I can not yet find, is assigining some sort of extra factory to the research you queue, for example the extra range for planes at the beginning, and then you say "just take yokusoka" or something similar, which is an option I do not have at all. Thanks anyway for the in-depth guide!
Always wondered which one is better, Marco polo incident or just manually justifying Manually justifying avoids having to get rid of the spirit and thus it avoids boosting the US war enthusiasm making them sleep for a longer time
Honestly, as much as I love to buy DLC for HoI 4, I have tried to follow every guide that has interested me that BitterSteel puts on YT. However, it seems like all my ironman games, I just get shot in the foot. Following this guide, I can get the first port that you need to capture, but my follow on attacks to secure the port fail, and then its like the Chinese can just body block me, no matter that they are near 1M losses just from attacking around the main front near Bejing.
By Blood Alone Man the Guns No Step Back At least these are the ones that I can tell, there might be more but I am not sure since I usually play with everything on.
I prefer light cruisers, with 4 or 5 light batteries and armour 3 to destroy enemy screens (with radar and fire-control refitted when unlocked). Light batteries pack more light attacks per slot and are more cost-effective to build (Higher light attack per production cost). More importantly, light cruisers, take light damage, and at game start, no navy has more than 7 light-piercing, and can't pierce amour 3 (1936 amour tech). So these "light" cruisers take significantly reduced damage. Though they still need to be surrounded by cheap destroyers to distract torpedoes, and a few heavy ships to soak up heavy damage. I am not certain if this is the best idea, maybe adding 4 or 5 light batteries is overkill (depends if they can target multiple ships at the same turn, I don't know for sure), and I don't know what ratio of destroyers to light cruisers to capitals is best (I went with equal production cost investment in Destroyers, Battleships and Light Cruisers in my tests). At least, in my tests this was very effective at removing Royal Navy destroyers. but If anybody disagrees, please let me know
Hi, after starting the invasion at 32:00 ... how do you exactly control army? In my own game, I do net get enough supply... chinese troops reinforce and i am not even able to conquer Qingdao... is there another video on your channel with more detailed explanation?
6:58 Why build infrastructure in those two places in the start , versus just spamming civ factories , they're also on your starting island , so I really don't understand
I have no idea what these people are yapping abt saying "ChInA iS sO eAsY" , im 100% certain they are just deleting the divisions becaise there is nothing you can do without being doomstacked by hoardes of chinese troops.
I feel so bad about not being able to buy the mousepad now, as I am quite in a bad situation with the money. Hopefully you will have a future collab and I will be able to buy a similar one. Great video as always btw
I’m surprised people still make videos about this game, I think this game is coming back due to the increased player count over the past few months, if so then I thank every content creator out their for making these videos.
I think you actually need some fighter(and cas) if you have 5+ carriers. There is a penalty on number of air wings, which is 20% per carrier above 4. So for 6 carriers outfit 4 carriers with VT, 1 with VT and VF, 1 with VT, VF and VB you get 40% penalty on 9 wings which is 5 wings. You only have 6*0.6=3 wings available otherwise.
I want it after Austria gets a focus tree, and the Commonwealth Nations and Allies get theirs fixed (Though I suspect the Allies and Axis majors will get their focuses updated at the same time to prevent any unbalanced stuff)
If they gonna rework Japan and Germany it should be a free update to owners of WTG. Also just update the entire WTG dlc. They should not release them as new DLC that’s a slap in the face imo
I start off by invading Siam to maintain access to rubber without having to naval invade later on. And then I just refuse to do Marco Polo Incident, wait for the Chinese to start an incident, and then get a war goal without the debuffs against China. Though sometimes that does take time and the Chinese don't always form their faction.
b2m is cheaper because it doesnt have bomb locks. b4y is cool because you can use it as cas early game before you transition to good 1940 carrier navs. also you can use the interwar carrier cas on land against china, i don't see why you'd sell them
I havent even watched the whole video yet but some people said that you should escalate the Second Sino-Japanese War at least to the point where even Iran will be against you. Because getting Iran to capitulate would gain Japan a significant source of oil.
BitterSteel is so cool I wish Belgium as a concept was real
Sadly, wishes will never come true.
What do you mean? Belgium is a real gas planet.
At least he’s flemish and not a bootleg frenchie
@@Rownosccthat I agree with. I hate those fake french
Yo are you Syrian?
I like to imagine how Bittersteel suddenly becomes the emperor of Japan in 1936 and tells his generals "OK your tanks divisions? They're shit, get rid of them. See those planes? They're also shit, get rid of them. Now, those submarines..."
"why why
*cry of despair
Why would you use anti tank, it's useless"
"Also send help to Ethiopia"
Somebody actually trying to control the military? He'd get shot. It was very nasty back then. They were running absolutely rampant, and they didn't even know what they were going to DO with China once they had it.
Weird things to say in Japanese too, because of how politeness is built into the language.
@@LowlandlordYour tank divisions bring dishonor upon the Japanese Army and the Emperor is greatly disappointed, dispose of them immidiately.
Your airplanes bring dishonor upon Japanese Airforce and the Emperor is greatly disappointed, dispose of them immidiately
14:55
It is not dependent on the amount of airplanes you have deployed, but on the amount of airplanes you have. So just having airplanes in stockpile is enough, you don't have to deploy them for it to count towards the volunteer limit.
Oh Smart boy
47:56 "I prefer heavy machine guns..." Well at least that was historically accurate af lmao.
Many post-war interviews with IJN ace pilots seemed to conclude that they too preferred to the 13.2mm HMG compared to the many iterations of the IJN aerial 20mm cannons (the type 99 no. 1 and 2) - simply for the better velocity which meant pilots would have to lead their shots less and the shots won't just fall off after a certain distance.
Also yes, the type 99 no. 2 did have significant increased velocity compared to the no. 1, but I guess the pilots were much more used to the trajectory and handling of the 13.2mm HMG.
It does have to be horrible to try to aim/track for both weapons at the same time. Even to keep track of sounds like an extra bit of thinking you could really just be putting into other things to stay alive in a dogfight instead.
Came to this video because I hit a wall against China outside of Changde. Turns out I didn’t know about the “escalate the war in China” decisions; I got them 70% capitulated with a 40% debuff the whole time
Classic
Great video, wonderful that you went a little bit deeper into naval and air - I realy like your longer more detailed videos
Glad you liked it!
5:40 but the basic carrier naval has full efficiency, you will still have plenty and better planes
Also 11:06 Italy bought from the nation that just send volunteer against them :))
This used to be called the Ultimate Japan Guide 2024
He often changes video titles recently after they are uploaded
Probably because it could be confused with a travel video
@@generalgrievous2580 lol
Hi Bitter! Brilliant video, although I have a quick guide to pronouncing the city of Dalian. Im from there, so a quick assortment of history. The city was taken by the Russians before being taken by the Japanese, and then being taken by the Communists in the Civil War. As a result, the city has sections with very Russian architecture, and is relatively diverse (sadly changing with time) with Mongolians, Manchus, Koreans, Russians, and normal Chinese. Another notable fact is that Grigory Seymonov was caught hiding there.
Now, to the star of the comment: Pronunciation.
Dalian can easily be sectioned into three different ways to say it easier. Da should be pronounced like the Russian yes (Da) but lighter, although that doesnt quite matter. Lian should be pronounced like Lee-An, but faster, to sound like one syllable. To summarize it:
Dalian
(Da Lee-An)
As always, thank you for the great video bitter, and your guide will serve as my favorite Japan guide!.
Was literally cringing every time the name Dalian was said, thanks bro. I can never understand how people can change the order of the characters when reading something out loud.
@@rowan5690 It's perfectly fine if you can't speak Chinese, but one could always learn. Thanks for the support!
1:00 divisiones
2:48 aviones
4:23 barcos
7:07 construcción
7:17 focus
8:44 divisiones org y cantidad
11:45 espias (hacer colab en china)
enviar voluntarios etiopia y españa
20:16 producción
22:08 plantilla marines
21:11 plan batalla
52:25 that luxembourg leader portrait 😂😂😂
It’s Pydgin (AKA the goat). He made a mod for bitter to be able to assign member names on his special divisions.
34:35 - It's pretty silly how with this older Focus Tree Japan has to choose between the Zero and the Yamato. Two historical things you can't have both of via the Tree because the older trees were more around specializing your strategy for a historical war rather than larping.
>sell weapons to italy
>send volunteers to ethiopia
sigma grindset
Some 4d chess right there
I'm sure they won't notice...
Military Industrial Complex moment
the american dream coming true
US pentagon be like:
Finally, the countury which I find the most glorious, yet the one I struggle the absolute most with! Thank you as always Bitt3rsteel for keeping us entertained and passively teaching us the game. Absolutely LOVE your content. Cheers from Colombia!
Happy to help!
@@Bitt3rSteelur my favourite UA-camr bitter3rsteel
What makes Japan hard for you?
@@Thermonnuclear I think most people get intimidated by the big navy and the prospect of invading China, which is also big.
@@Bitt3rSteel What I find hard is mostly to defeat china in a reasonable time period, then going on island hopping campaign. Thanks so much for the video!
When the panay incident comes, you should pick the event where you get 100 pp. Yes the Us gets a wargoal against you, but they wont use that. I have done it always this way and the us never declared on me
This. Even if they do - you'll be in a defensive war against very weak US in 38'
Do you want to jinx it? Because this is how you jinx it😅
It’s fun to rewatch this months later and re-absorb the information, thanks for the guides dude.
Glad you enjoyed!
I feel proud knowing this week I basically finalized the same strategy in China. Finished in October 38. I found the drive from Nanking to Wuhan can be a little far without supply, but if you take the supply depot south of Shanxi and drive to their wartime capital, while using your marines to take those last ports, the line gets stretched too far and you can walk to the last cities you need. I also used armored recon with 4 armor on my 15 width infantry and grand battle plan and we attack bonused and armored our way to victory.
I still expected the Japan focus tree to be updated by now. But there still my favourite nation just for fun of land and naval battles
Continuing my Bitt3rSteel tutorials - this guide is great! Worked great up to the part where I decided I didn't want to cap the Allies. So I tried to go pure historical. Here's some tips if you follow the historical focus path...
- Build Anti-Sub Destroyers. A lot of them. Think you've got enough? Wrong. Triple it. I think 100 might do it though.
- Take Singapore ASAP. Then don't lose it again.
- Focus on the big Islands. I was losing garrison divisions so quickly just isolated on random pacific islands. That's the Americans strategy not the Japanese.
- Don't go mental on the Army. I think you could expact on the tutorial a little bit. I think 120 Garrison infantry for your ports around Japan & S.China Sea. Maybe 4 x 24 good Inf and as many Marines as possible.
Anyways, again, good guide Bitt3rSteel. Looking forward to the next one!
ye capping the allies thru germany just feels like cheating
like that wouldn't happen irl
Did what you did, got encircled and lost my marines then had no equipment.
Folowed this guide more closely in another save and got it! Thank you so much for this guide!
Actually assigning the whole fleet strike force (29:10) doesn't work. They just stay in the ports until someone is in combat with an enemy fleet (which is impossible in this situation). Instead, its better to separate all of the subs in to smaller fleets with the size of 6-7 subs per fleet under the same commander. Assign them to raid convoys. This action would lure the escort fleets of China to attack, then hopefully the big fleets attacking the escort fleets, then the Chinese fleets joining in, resulting in a big victory. Also, I personally recommend buliding destroyers with only the cheapest engine since they are cheap and they can shield the battleships and carriers in a relatively low construction cost. For carriers, there is a penalty if you have too many carriers in the same fleet, so it's best to assign 4 of them to a fleet. If you want 5, then you need one wing of cas and one wing of fighters in order to make sure that your naval bombers take off sucessfully.
I was literally just searching for a Japan guide when you posted this, wtf. Stop listening in on me.
i've tried this 4 times now, the naval invasion never gets past the first 3 tiles of the peninsula. I'm even doing it with more/better divisions than you and i still lose.
Same. Frustrating to invest like 4h to get to that point and then get stuck and fail.
If your first invasion fails (tends to happen frequently for me at the beginning), pull out with what you can and invade another port farther south. The second invasion always works out for me.
@@DethScarred Hi there, me from 4 months after i posted this. I now have 1154 hours on hoi4 and can basically win as any nation now, though i thank you for your advice nonetheless.
The music threw me off in this one, great video tho, keep up the good work
Sorry about that
@Bitt3rSteel since I'm a member when do I get do have an elite division named for me
Just as soon as I update the list.
These videos are recorded about, 2-3 weeks ahead of release, So I expect your name to show up in about, 3-4 videos
@@Bitt3rSteelI love you're channel btw you're amazing
Yeah I don’t get why almost all youtubers put music in everything. I’m here to listen to his information, not music that distracts me from it.
grats on 200k, you deserve it.
have you ever considered ulti admiral dreadnaughts playthrough?
That game looks too big brain for me
small tip i found about the military industries. you can auto select your preferred upgrades to auto-upgrade without having to keep going back. just hold shift and left click in the order you want (though you have work from top to bottom, no cheats for auto-bottom) the only drawback is that it doesn't auto-update the design for any active uses (i.e. guns, ships, truck, etc that have an assigned industrial designer)
Hey BitterSteel, i noitce halfway through the video some music starts playing, it's a little distracting when trying to use this as a guide. My recommendation, take it or leave it, is to just lower the volume a bit or have it fade out more when you speak, then go back up when your just moving things around etc. Overall great guide and it made my Japan THICK!
19:34 Just a heads up, planning bonus still applies if you directly micro the units. They just have to be assigned to an offensive battle plan. Insanely good if you have a handful of heavy-hitting units so you can use Staff Office Plan to build planning at a 400% rate. Not to mention that naval invasions count as well so they get the bonuses.
Also while making the interwar naval bombers is solid advice for naval combat, it is worth keeping the carrier CAS for China since you can use your carriers as coastal airbases. Carrier-based planes get 4x mission efficiency over land-based planes (with the only downside being that they can't operate at night). Also having later naval bombers + carrier fighters is worth for parking your fleet and having them do air supremacy + naval strike or port strike, since the fleet only eats fuel while moving. Fantastic for hunting small fleets or submarines without risking your main fleet.
Otherwise, great video!
Let's go this is my favorite country to play as. I used your guide from a couple years ago to get China before 39 and get England and France by myself. Can't wait to study this video and update my strategies.
I have like 1200 official hours, 2000 unofficial and learning about "shift and click red button" (all unused division select) first time from this video and NOW is wild....
I'm a fairly new player (70h) and I tried replicating your steps, and while I found your Guide insanely helpful, I was massively confused quite often because you switch some stuff around without mentioning it anywhere, gaining more XP and taking decisions that suddenly put me far behind.
I really like your videos tho. All of them helped me a lot so far.
This game is insane to learn it took me 260 hours and I still don’t no wtf I’m doing
43:58-47:30 Tokyo Dreaming by Particle House is one of my favorite songs! It's a shame they haven't come out with new songs since 2021.
it was good, I just wish it was a hair quieter, it was hard to hear him while it was playing.
@@awesomedude222 yeah, I noticed that as well. Hearing the words of the song made it a little harder to concentrate on what he was saying. Maybe something for him to keep in mind for the next video I guess.
Speaking on the Ethiopian war, if you put your volunteers on aussa and the tile to the left of it it is impossible for italy to ever win. They may lose a couple front and bottom tiles per usual but after that they're dead in the water, the war escalates, then Italy gets rolled lol
I have honestly found thsi guide to be very difficult to follow along while playing. I do not have all of the dlc, nontheless my research and whatnot was about the same pace until you just stopped mentioning your next picks. What do I pick after I get the 5th research slot? what do I pick after certain other research. I never got that information. When did you mention I was supposed to make two of my volunteers truck divs? How much XP was i supposed to have at what point in the game? I didn't have enough when I was supposed to modify the division templates for the marines and hohei shidan. I usually enjoy your content but this was a really bad experience if I'm honest. I don't struggle a lot in hoi4. Japan really was one of the only things I somehow could never pull off, while I usually (if not always) "win" on other nations - that is getting the game to the place I want it to be, like forming austria hungary or getting a peace conference as the bad Germany with the weird cross, so I was hoping to find advice here but its honestly been just so frustrating so far and Im only about halfway through. I had to start deciding on what research to choose myself and thats honestly not what I was hoping to do. I wanted to experiment later, once I could win in China AT ALL...
Edit: update, I still one, though I was very frustrated at times and had to wing it starting with the end of the China war and the island hopping and invasion of India. The guide is not really good at all for new players who probably won't have the dlc, they're really pricey and new players won't be willing to invest that amount. I have since bought them all but I had 1000h by the time I was looking at this video and I just didn't want to/couldn't afford the dlc so it's really stupid for a guide to expect all that
Also I wrote mods instead of dlc in the original comment, don't know why
Those are DLCs
@@VeryCoolCatBF yeha I honestly don't know why I wrote mods?
@@Helycon probably because he said he uses 1 mod, like the one with renaming units
@@VeryCoolCatBF it was just a typo honestly, I use a lot of mods myself in addition to dlc and I've been playing thsi game for far too long to not know the difference
The Spy Network also suddenly jumped locations. Set up in Nanking and suddenly its 55% somewhere south in China
Man your Hoi videos are fantastic, really has made the game more enjoyable for me. Paradox should hire you to design tutorials that actually work!
That's some nice, funky music you have in the backround, Bitt3rSteel (right after the China peace deal).
I oppened the comments and found out that people be commenting on a 51 minute video 10 minutes after it came out now💀
I wish you would make a list of the research you choose, I’m constantly trying to figure out what you picked.
Yo man, you are one of my favourite hoi4 youtubers, i did not even ask for a Japan (I needed it) guide and here we are
By far the best hoi4 UA-camr it’s like an entertaining lesson
godDAMN this was some relaxing beats you got here!
Note for myself on ships
16:21
Zero. 47:40
Improved Template 49:00
I literally just played Japan for the first time yesterday and struggled with the Chinese and not a day later you dropped a guide for it.
40:15 "Just to mop up the little mess we left in Nanqing"
What have you done in Nanqing with the Japanese Bitter Steel? 🤨
with the chinese u mean? 🤦♀️
He didn't do anything, he gave hsi soldiers a free pass
I would like to point out, that Grand Battleplan gives you you an amazing sprit of the army, which reduces your fuel consumption by 5 %. Which for the very thirsty IJN can really add up. So you can save on fuel imports.
Fantastic! Japan is my favorite HOI nation by far, as I love how they have to manage every aspect of the game thoroughly in order to succeed. I'm usually happy if I can capitulate China by 1940, but I always forget about collab govt. I'll definitely have to try another playthrough as Japan with some of these tips.
In case you aren't aware, to improve the early game fuel efficiency, for the naval invasions just split off the BBs and CAs and just manually move them to the sea provinces adjacent to the invasion. That uses no fuel once they've arrived :) You can also save fuel early game by micro-ing the fleet training, and only train ships which need it, rather than the whole fleet. Unlike armies every ship in the fleet trains if on training.
Who else thinks the original title of "HoI4 Guide: The Ultimate Japan in 2024" was wayyy better?
I'm still waiting for ya to do the 1945 mod but as Japan and later Italy. This is awesome though!
good guide, but I will add one thing. At the beginning, in China you can put harsh quotas, which will give you 1 military factory, which, in my opinion, is quite neat for Japan.
about those air volunteer thing, the amount you can send depends on how much airfield and the level of airfield a nation has, i noticed that when i played tno and built max level airfield in a state in madagascar before the civil war. It allowed me to send more air volunteers
I wash myself with a rag on a stick
fascinating, tell me more
@@markstar9948 Ew, mom
i'm confused on how you had so much oil early on without trading
What I like to do with Japan at the beginning is deleting all the bad (red arrow down) units, and horses, since they're going to be weak either way and won't be able to do much. Then, I take the divisions that are left, and edit the infantry to add 2 artillery and less infantry. In turn, it gives me less divisions that are so much stronger, and can fastly and easily push through the frontlines, eat less supply, and focus on artillery instead of guns.
Couple of things I would like to add from my own Japanese gameplays:
1. Build more civs (at least 36-40), build level 3 infrastructure in those underdeveloped provinces if you wish.
2. If you want to play naval then you must priotize steel for ships, and build some additional dockyards if needed (2 sets of 5 for cruisers, 9 for the one line of destroyers).
3. Get anti air on the cruisers, depth charges and passive sonar for destroyers because British submarines can be painful.
4. Research Anti air very early, Japan doesn’t have it for some reason.
When fighting china you don’t have to build collaboration governments prior to invasion. It can be during and it takes a better toll on your economy if you do so.
5. Tanks are absolutely worth it as Japan, you conquer Chinese industry and it gives you all the industry you could need.
6. Cavalry is absolutely dogshit, do not use it.
7. Focus on getting air early, really helps in the wrong run.
8. Should’ve stated before but getting airplane catapult on cruisers or destroyers helps a lot in hunting British ships (usually they are cowards).
9. Do not annex all Chinese cores, just the main part. You will have to build compliance and cannot get it with the collab governments.
10. Long term goal should be making battleships, great for countering US navy.
I'm not interested in a big discussion on this whole thing, but battleships suck at any other role than AA platforms. They are useless compared to light atk CA/CV stacks
@@Bitt3rSteel I don’t mean to disrespect you, but battleships can indeed be useful especially for gaining supremacy. By the time you will mostly use them in 1943-1950s they serve as a damage tank for all aircraft and other naval vessels. It could just be in my games and usually the IC and resources cost make it infeasible, but as Japan you have the opportunity to actually build a navy so it can be worth jt. I notice in my games my cruisers get constantly attacked and once the strength gets worn down they are just a steel husk on water.
Carriers too can be worth it however I usually don’t use carrier planes in my games as they always get shot down no matter the upgrades I give them.
As a Japan main I highly disagree with 80% you said
Before this I could barley entering into China and win let alone stand up to the allies so this is really helpful
Honestly I'll probably never get air wing sizes
(I just use whatever the default is, it works fine, so eh?)
It's more roleplay for me but I've always liked having one bomb locks CAS and one bomb bay CAS to represent the dive bombers and light bombers that were used for CAS and logi strike irl
26:27 can we point out isn't that Argentina of all nations that have sent volunteers to Ethiopia
A heavy hull actually has more light attack per production cost and total light attack, if you put secoundary batteries on it.
damn it, i thought the Next video was My playthrough
thought*
@@sheep7 pretty 🤓 but anyways
Taking as a given that "nothing matters vs AI", here are a few tidbits for anyone who wants to squeeze out some slightly more efficient play.
Japans best air MIO is Mitsubishi, and it is locked inside the focus tree. I prefer to rush this first (New Naval Estimates -> Fighter Modernization -> Agility Focus) simply because if you want to have the MIO leveled up enough to give meaningful bonuses to the planes you produce for the war against the allies, then you have to get this MIO unlocked asap, period.
Sasebo is easily the best naval MIO. It gives bonuses to visibility and speed, and those are key components to the naval hit chance equation.
I prefer Ozawa as my main admiral. He has a bonus to speed from his background, can be given a role to boost speed further as chief of the navy, and can get Concealment Expert immediately to give another bonus to visibility.
With a leveled up Sasebo MIO and Ozawa, you can have cruisers with a visibility of 9-10 (about that of a destroyer) moving at 45+ knots, even with armor stacked onto them. They will shred screens, and heavy batteries will struggle to ever hit them.
Support equipment requires aluminum and Japan doesnt have any. Trucks need fuel and Japan doesnt have any. So design a line infantry unit (should compose the majority of your army) that requires no support equipment and no fuel. Take the starting 6/0 division, bump it up to 6/1, and add support ART and support AA. Thats it, and thats really all you need it to be. Sticking with GBP lets you get away with skipping out on engineers. You can add AT to it later if you want, but you wont need it vs China.
If you dont want to sink research and industry into tanks early on, then using mobile infantry as seen here works, but I prefer to design attack infantry using marines. They will benefit from infantry and special forces bonuses, and you can unlock the marine doctrines really quickly using naval xp. Later on you can convert to mountaineers if you find the spare army xp to unlock those doctrines as well.
So. Air volunteer maximum is based on how many planes you have in total. Not airfields or deployed airwings as you said. So the reason you can send 1 and not 2 is that you sold your airplanes early. Sell them after the Spanish war instead.
Hi! I'm probably a minority here, but you got me quite confused at the beginning because of the extra Ki-2/Ki-3 planes and the research tech tree, as those are DLC which I do not yet have. I had to google a bit and look for myself. Then another thing, which I can not yet find, is assigining some sort of extra factory to the research you queue, for example the extra range for planes at the beginning, and then you say "just take yokusoka" or something similar, which is an option I do not have at all.
Thanks anyway for the in-depth guide!
Always wondered which one is better, Marco polo incident or just manually justifying
Manually justifying avoids having to get rid of the spirit and thus it avoids boosting the US war enthusiasm making them sleep for a longer time
Can you do a guide for greece to restore byzantium very early on? Its been a long time since you did one.
44:19Thick Mengkukuo for the Win
Honestly, as much as I love to buy DLC for HoI 4, I have tried to follow every guide that has interested me that BitterSteel puts on YT. However, it seems like all my ironman games, I just get shot in the foot. Following this guide, I can get the first port that you need to capture, but my follow on attacks to secure the port fail, and then its like the Chinese can just body block me, no matter that they are near 1M losses just from attacking around the main front near Bejing.
Thank you for actually giving the territory to Mengkukuo, it just feels right 😂
why tf did the spy show up at chongching, she was suppose to be in beijing someone plz explain
39:37 BITERSTEEL WHAT THE HELL BOY 😳🫢
you should try Armor piercing CAS on a carrier, I didn't believe but it appears someone at PDX said "we need to stop making Carrier CAS useless"
how to play Japan:
crank up Battotai on full volume
13:13 Puts spy in Beijing
13:58 "Our spy in Chongqing...."
wat
Yeah i saw that
what dlc is being used here? he has so many more things to research and more boats and planes to produce, please help me
By Blood Alone
Man the Guns
No Step Back
At least these are the ones that I can tell, there might be more but I am not sure since I usually play with everything on.
Old title: Hoi4 Guide: The Ultimate Japan in 2024
Edit: The title changed again.
I prefer light cruisers, with 4 or 5 light batteries and armour 3 to destroy enemy screens (with radar and fire-control refitted when unlocked).
Light batteries pack more light attacks per slot and are more cost-effective to build (Higher light attack per production cost).
More importantly, light cruisers, take light damage, and at game start, no navy has more than 7 light-piercing, and can't pierce amour 3 (1936 amour tech).
So these "light" cruisers take significantly reduced damage.
Though they still need to be surrounded by cheap destroyers to distract torpedoes, and a few heavy ships to soak up heavy damage.
I am not certain if this is the best idea, maybe adding 4 or 5 light batteries is overkill (depends if they can target multiple ships at the same turn, I don't know for sure), and I don't know what ratio of destroyers to light cruisers to capitals is best (I went with equal production cost investment in Destroyers, Battleships and Light Cruisers in my tests).
At least, in my tests this was very effective at removing Royal Navy destroyers. but If anybody disagrees, please let me know
"We could boost those numbers by deploying a few more air wings."
- BitterSteel
Hi, after starting the invasion at 32:00 ... how do you exactly control army? In my own game, I do net get enough supply... chinese troops reinforce and i am not even able to conquer Qingdao... is there another video on your channel with more detailed explanation?
6:58 Why build infrastructure in those two places in the start , versus just spamming civ factories , they're also on your starting island , so I really don't understand
Increase local steel supply, and build faster subsequently in those states as well
@@Bitt3rSteel ahhhhh okay cool , using this and your template video to get back into the game, thanks for the reply :)
I dont know how to do this everytime i go in to china with a navel invade I get like 2 block in and then its just stacks of 16 and can never get in
I have no idea what these people are yapping abt saying "ChInA iS sO eAsY" , im 100% certain they are just deleting the divisions becaise there is nothing you can do without being doomstacked by hoardes of chinese troops.
This guy never butchers pronunciations. Respect+
I used to conquer china at 1938 always and easy..now i cant even sometimes annex them...do i miss something?did the game got harder or something
These vids are an amazing experience
10:56 Am I the only one that noticed the Warhammer boxes?
I'm in the Guard, son.
Combining Hoi4 and Warhammer (THE GUARD ESPECIALLY), my man really hates free time
Would it not be good to add Propaganda upgrade to your 5 intel network upgrades as it reduces collaboration cost by 25%?
Love how the Japan music becomes increasingly silly
I feel so bad about not being able to buy the mousepad now, as I am quite in a bad situation with the money. Hopefully you will have a future collab and I will be able to buy a similar one. Great video as always btw
we need a machu/qing update, bc of some wierd new mechanics and bc i like to see ppl play it (:
I’m surprised people still make videos about this game, I think this game is coming back due to the increased player count over the past few months, if so then I thank every content creator out their for making these videos.
I think you actually need some fighter(and cas) if you have 5+ carriers. There is a penalty on number of air wings, which is 20% per carrier above 4. So for 6 carriers outfit 4 carriers with VT, 1 with VT and VF, 1 with VT, VF and VB you get 40% penalty on 9 wings which is 5 wings. You only have 6*0.6=3 wings available otherwise.
You keep 4 carriers max per fleet tho. And usually, you'd have those fleets engaged in different zones. But you are correct
here's hoping for a japan rework in the lines of italy
Both Japan and Germany need one so bad. Fingers crossed for an Axis Rework DLC at some point
I want it after Austria gets a focus tree, and the Commonwealth Nations and Allies get theirs fixed
(Though I suspect the Allies and Axis majors will get their focuses updated at the same time to prevent any unbalanced stuff)
If they gonna rework Japan and Germany it should be a free update to owners of WTG. Also just update the entire WTG dlc. They should not release them as new DLC that’s a slap in the face imo
@@alisso23e THIS
I start off by invading Siam to maintain access to rubber without having to naval invade later on. And then I just refuse to do Marco Polo Incident, wait for the Chinese to start an incident, and then get a war goal without the debuffs against China. Though sometimes that does take time and the Chinese don't always form their faction.
b2m is cheaper because it doesnt have bomb locks. b4y is cool because you can use it as cas early game before you transition to good 1940 carrier navs. also you can use the interwar carrier cas on land against china, i don't see why you'd sell them
OMG! It's Emperor BitterKōtetsu!
Which doctoring are you using butter3rdsteel
planning bonuses still apply when you move stuff manually
I havent even watched the whole video yet but some people said that you should escalate the Second Sino-Japanese War at least to the point where even Iran will be against you. Because getting Iran to capitulate would gain Japan a significant source of oil.
is ww1 greece on your plans to play?