Welcome to Paradoxplaza. It is friday morning, and the weekend starts here as far as we are concerned. Today we’ll talk a bit about land combat.Some things are still the same as in the previous iterations of the series. We still have movement is attack, we still have combat width, and we still have divisons with modifiers firing at each other.First of all, when you have a list of units selected, you can see the progress of all battles those units are involved in, and you can select any of those battles to view from there, or by clicking the combat indicator on the map.We felt that the role of air support in HOI3 was not really showing off its historical importance, so decided to make it vital in HOI4. First of all having air superiority over the area you are fighting limits the enemy’s ability to defend properly (its hard to dig trenches when someone is strafing you) as well as slowing down movement (its really hard to drive a truck when someone is strafing you). Planes can also directly join combats unlike HOI3 where they had their own separate combats they now join with the ground forces and when this happens it even gives a bonus to your divisions fighting ability (its a really good morale boost when a plane is strafing the enemy). Enemy divisions with AA battalions or support companies can fire back of course, but to remove the effects of air superiority completely you need your own flyboys to help out.Combat tactics is something that we added to HOI3 with The Finest Hour to add more depth and interesting things happening in battles. When a battle starts each leader will pick a tactic for that day (a new tactics will be picked with the start of a new day if the combat drags on). Tactics are given based on what doctrine you have and terrain, troop composition and traits of the commander influence the choice. Tactics are also separated in different phases depending on location so you can get into a battle over a bridge, or close quarters fighting in cities, or performing a fighting retreat and the like. A commander with higher skill or better reconnaissance also has a chance to pick a counter to the enemy's tactic making it useless.Notice how I wrote reconnaissance above? Reconnaissance is a new concept in HOI4. This stat is primarily coming from having Recon Companies in your divisions. Recon companies is one of the ten different support companies you can add to your divisions, where you can have an absolute maximum of 5, so it is one of the hard choices you have to make.Here Sikorski elected for a tactic of Shock, which gives a -25% attack modifier to the defender, but since von Rundstedt has higher skill, and the panzer division has a recon company, they had the final pick of tactics, and could use the good counter of backhand blow, which nullifies the shock penalty and instead gives the attacker a -20% attack modifier.Next week we’ll go into detail about the support companies.Combat width works a lot like in HOI3, but is now more detailed. Each division will have a combat width which will tell you how many divisions fit into the frontline for active fighting. The available width of the combat goes up the more directions you attack from, so tactical flanking is needed if you want to leverage a numerical advantage. Width is also affected by certain combat tactics (more on that below). Divisions that do not fit on the frontline at the start of combat end up in reserves and will have a chance to join every hour in as long as there is room. The chance to join is greatly affected by doctrine tech, or by having a signal company attached to the division, and is important if you want to be able to leverage a lot of units in a single location, because if the frontline fall your side is forced to retreat no matter what.Winning in HOI4, just like HOI3 is still best achieved with encirclements and cutting off large parts of the enemy's army and not by grinding down your men in individual battles, but this is a topic for a later diary on battleplans and strategic planning.