HOI4 Tank Guide For Beginners

The tanks in HOI4 are brimming with flavor for new players to enjoy. There’s a ton of variety to pick through, especially if you’ve yet to gain experience with Paradox games. Then, it gets even more in-depth if you’ve enabled the No Step Back DLC. This HOI4 tank guide for beginners briefly covers the six different types of tanks in the game. This is a great first concept that any beginner should understand. The six types of tanks within the game are:

1. Light
2. Amphibious
3. Medium
4. Heavy
5. Super-Heavy
6. Modern

Each tank type serves a different purpose and has specific benefits and downsides.

Want to know about how tanks have changed over time? Check out Keengamer’s piece that briefly discusses the No Step Back DLC and how it influenced tanks:

• Hearts of Iron IV DLCs Explained

Light Tanks

Light tanks are primarily designed to fight non-armored infantry units. They can also be used as supportive recon units and flame tanks. They hold these qualities because the tanks are:

• Small
• Fast
• Cheap to produce
• Suffers the least of all tank types from harsher land terrain, such as mountains, jungles, and forests.

Because of the reduced cost, less-industrialized minor countries in the game can often make good use of them.

Some downsides to Light Tanks are:

• Can’t mount a large enough gun to pierce the armor of the larger and more well-armored tanks
• Armor limitation, making them vulnerable to high-armor-piercing guns

An example of an auto-generated Light Tank design.

Amphibious Tanks

Amphibious tanks are special tanks that can perform these actions without the severe combat penalties that other tanks suffer:

• Move across rivers
• Land onto beaches

These tanks are invaluable in certain situations. From experience, they’re handy for fighting Japan in the Pacific Ocean or landing in France on D-Day.

Their downsides are:

• Less armored and have a lower reliability rating than their non-amphibious tank counterparts.
• An inflated production cost that doesn’t efficiently translate into combat power while fighting in land battles that don’t involve bodies of water.

An example of an auto-generated Amphibious Tank design.

Medium Tanks

Mediums are the jack of all trades in this HOI4 Tank Guide. They have numerous benefits to consider:

• They resemble a balance of the four major tank qualities: the armor, the cannon, the production cost, and the speed.
• These tanks can hold their own in the high-stakes battles of Europe if you upgrade them well enough and early enough.
• These tanks tend to be very popular to produce and deploy, and have been throughout the game’s history.

Some downsides to medium tanks are:

• Standard tank penalties to harsh terrain types such as mountains, jungles, forests, marshes, etc.
• Tough time crossing rivers until late game propeller tech
• Due to their production cost, losing several medium tank divisions to the enemy in encirclements can be costly and often irreplaceable

An example of an auto-generated Medium Tank design.

Heavy Tanks

Heavy tanks are usually the biggest ones you will see on the field before your game ends, unless someone’s feeling particularly large. These tanks are extremely strong because:

• Can stack high amounts of armor. Their armor rating, stacked high enough, can be used to partially negate even specialized armor-piercing guns of other tanks.
• Capable of mounting the Super-Heavy Cannon, an incredibly powerful gun which you can unlock later in the round by researching the super-heavy tank chassis.

The downsides to heavy tanks are:

• Very slow on the battlefield and very expensive to produce
• Have worse harsh-terrain penalties than all of the smaller tanks
• Take up more logistical resources in the areas that they’re operating in
• Are usually irreplaceable due to their inflated production cost

An example of an auto-generated Heavy Tank design.

Super-Heavy Tanks

Super-heavy tanks can be researched earlier than Modern tanks, and are absolute monsters if you manage to produce them and field one on the battlefield. Here’s why:

• Super-heavies offer the highest armor potential available on any tank type.
• Researching the super-heavy hull gives you access to the super-heavy cannon, which gives you the highest stats for all combat situations.

As you can imagine, this type of tank comes with many downsides:

• Extremely negative penalties in harsh terrain
• Reliability rating is very low, speed is very low
• Astronomical production cost
• Accessibility is low due to being a late-game tech

An example of an auto-generated Super-Heavy Tank Design.

Modern Tanks

These are the latest and greatest tanks in HOI4. Here’s a few of their benefits:

• The highest reliability rating, meaning you can stack all sorts of advanced engines, armor, and modules onto the tank and it won’t break down.
• The modern turret module, offering one of the highest breakthrough modules in the game
• Capable of weilding the super-heavy cannon

These tanks usually destroy everything they come across if you have the privilege of actually seeing them deployed onto the battlefield, because they usually comes paired with other advanced attachments such as the stabilizer, updated radios, maintenance, engines, armor and such.

Unfortunately, some downsides to Modern Tanks are:

• The accessibility of these tanks is extremely low. You’re forced to wait until very late in the round usually, 1944 or so, to even start researching these.
• The cost is expensive, although cheaper than a heavy tank.

An example of an auto-generated Modern Tank Design.

I hope that my HOI4 Tank Guide For Beginners helps you along your journey and to better understand the different types of tanks in the game. If you’re looking for more content related to tanks, I recommend the FeedbackIRL Youtube video posted below that will teach you more about the different tank types.