In hearts of iron 4, the workforce is essential in increasing your wartime advantage over your enemies. Learning how to increase manpower in Hearts of Iron 4 will improve your gameplay and speed up your progress.
By default, your country gains manpower when your citizen’s age and gets drafted into the army. However, there are other ways to increase your manpower without waiting for your citizen’s progress. Let’s take a closer look.
What Is Manpower in Heart of Iron 4?
Manpower is the total number of men and women available to serve as military personnel on military bases. Manpower sustains and drives your army on land, air, and sea.
Maintaining a high level of manpower is essential for winning wars, reducing your enemy’s strength, and strengthening yourself. When your manpower is low, you can’t reimburse your army, and your military strength gets affected. You must always keep an eye on your available manpower, especially during the heat of war, taking as few losses as possible.
When military units sustain injuries during combat or war, they are immediately removed from the manpower pool. This, in turn, can diminish the threats you pose at war. Also, when a military unit gets destroyed in combat, only 20% of the remaining manpower reverts, making you lose the rest.
How Can I Increase My Manpower in Hearts of Iron 4?
There are different ways to increase your manpower in Hearts of Iron 4, and some of them are:
- Building Structures
- Carrying Out Research
- How to Increase Manpower Through National Focus
- How to Increase Manpower Through Laws
Building Structures
You can reduce your enemy’s manpower in HoI4 by erecting buildings in their nation or your territory. Constructing buildings will help you increase your manpower and also help when you have inactive civilian factories.
Some of the buildings you can construct are;
- Shared buildings like civilian and military factories. Military factories will produce weapons for your army helping to reduce casualties.
- Province buildings like land forts and naval bases. Forts will help to save manpower.
- State buildings like air bases and radar stations.
To get access to the construction of buildings, follow these steps;
- You can access all construction-related features by clicking on the construction tab at the top of your screen.
- After clicking, you can decide which buildings you’d like to construct and their location.
- You can either select one building to construct one after the other or queue up multiple projects to build at once.
Carrying Out Research
Researching certain technologies in Hearts of Iron 4 will help you monitor rival nations’ development. This will make your factories work effectively, increase manpower, and allow your military base to be seen as a massive threat to other countries.
Carrying out research helps you unlock technologies for land, air, naval, and industry. These technologies can only be opened when you assign a research slot for the required days. The technologies provide access to new units, equipment, and defensive and productive structures.
To carry out research, follow these steps:
- You can access the research center screen by clicking on the small research icon in the top left corner of your screen.
- A pop-up menu with research slots is displayed on your screen.
- Each nation comes with two free research slots, and you can get more slots when you carry out more research.
- Click on one of the empty slots on the research tab menu.
- Select a technology you would like to research, left-click on it, and hit the research button.
- Research costs and the time taken to complete depending on the technology you’re currently working on.
There are many research options to pick from, some of which are:
- Land research.
- Air research.
- Naval research.
- Industry research.
Land Research
When you research land, you gain access to technologies like infantry technology, where they unlock mechanized and motorized units, special forces, and improve infantry weapons. You also get access to armor technology, where you can unlock different types of tanks like self-propelled heavy artillery, self-propelled anti-air, and other kinds of chassis.
Artillery technology is also a product of land research, and it improves and unlocks several kinds of artillery, from light to heavy. Support company technology is the last one; it upgrades all kinds of support troops like; military police, engineers, and maintenance troops.
Air Research
When you conduct air research, you either unlock or improve technologies that aid aerial combat equipment. Light, heavy, or medium airframes, as well as their jet propulsions, are opened after extensive air research.
Naval Research
Naval research involves unlocking every technology related to the ship units. They include:
- Battlecruiser battleships.
- Submarines.
- Cruisers.
- Carriers.
- Naval invasion transports.
Industry Research
Carrying out industry research unlocks two significant technologies—engineering technology, which unlocks all technologies related to electronic engineering, like radios and computers. Engineering technology also opens technologies related to atomic and rocket research. Secondly, industry research unlocks technologies that improve factories’ volume and productivity and opens synthetic refineries and resource excavations.
How to Increase Manpower Through National Focus
National focus trees act as a guide for you to improve your nation through manpower. There are many focus trees, several of which are linked to their origin, while others differ entirely. The options for your focus trees vary based on international and national activities.
When pursuing a national focus tree in Hearts of Iron 4, you have the option of interchanging your conscription and financial laws. For instance, If you move from an economy that suffers conflicts to one with total mobilization, your country’s military base will have no saddening outcome. With this option, you can get an extra 2% manpower for your military base.
Countries like Great Britain, Spain, and the United States have higher national focus trees that increase their man power.
How to Increase Manpower Through Laws
The best way to improve your manpower in Hearts of Iron 4 is by changing conscription laws. These laws are located in your country’s leader screen.
Below are conscription laws and their requirements that you can choose from to increase your manpower:
Disarmed Nation
This allows you to recruit 1% of your population as manpower and has no requirement.
Volunteer Only
This allows you to recruit 1.5% of your population as manpower and requires not having isolation economy laws.
Limited Conscription Law
This allows you to recruit 2.5% of your population as manpower and requires a minimum of 10% of war support.
Extensive Conscription
This allows you to recruit 5% of your population as manpower and requires up to 20% of war support. Additionally, you must be a fascist, communist, or nation at war.
Scraping the Barrel
This law turns 25% of your population into manpower. This law requires 85% war support or 25% surrender progress, and you must have an enemy that is your equal.
Service by Requirement
This allows you to recruit 10% of your population as manpower and requires 60% of war support or any surrender progress.
All Adults Serve
This law allows you to recruit 20% of your population as manpower and requires you to have an enemy with at least 70% of your strength. It also requires 70% war support and any surrender progress.
