Lend leasing is one of the most underappreciated mechanics in Hearts of Iron 4, as most players tend to completely ignore it, only noticing it when their allies send a few hundred pieces of equipment.
Unfortunately, if you don’t ever use it, it would seem that all the lend leasing does in HOI4 is that it can help you get 14 Support Equipment once from an ally and then never see it again for the whole playthrough.
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Well, there are actually some secret bonuses that you can get if you use the Lend Lease command and it can help you progress relatively fast.
In this guide, we will go through all the advantages that you can gain from sending and receiving Lend Lease in HOI4, showing you that it can, indeed, help you.
Table of Contents
- Does Using Lend Lease Help in HOI4?
- How to Use Lend Lease as a Sender in HOI4 to Gain War Participation and Experience
- How to Use Lend Lease as a Receiver in HOI4
Does Using Lend Lease Help in HOI4?
Yes, Lend Lease can be very helpful in HOI4, as both the receiver and the sender.
There are quite a few things you can gain in both situations.
How to Use Lend Lease as a Sender in HOI4 to Gain War Participation and Experience
You can use Lend Lease in HOI4 to do three things:
- Help Allies
- Gain War Participation
- Gain Experience
Helping Allies
One of the reasons you would use Lend Lease in HOI4 is to help allies win wars against common enemies.
Generally, the only equipment you should send your allies to help is Convoys and Fighters.
Convoys get destroyed very often, and the AI forgets that they need to constantly produce them.
By sending them Convoys, you make sure that they can actually get anything else you Lend Lease them and help them keep up their production.
Otherwise, the only thing that can actually help them defeat their enemies are Fighters. Fighters will help them keep Air Superiority and will help them avoid getting destroyed.
War Participation
If you are a great production power, like the USA, and you’ve joined the World War late, you will notice that even conquering the capital of the enemy won’t give you enough War Participation to sit at the table with countries that just lost troops and did nothing else in the war.
However, sending a Lend Lease to a country will increase your War Participation and lower theirs.
So, if you join the war late, you can just Lend Lease equipment to your allies with the largest War Participation to lower theirs and increase yours.
Any equipment is good for this purpose since the game doesn’t consider if your ally is actually using the equipment or not. So, spam Lend Lease equipment to your allies and see how their War Participation falls, and yours increases drastically.
This way, you can control all peace deals from now on just because you have an incredibly powerful military production that you like to share with your allies.
Gain Experience
One hidden aspect of Lend Leasing in HOI4 is that you can gain Army, Air, and Navy Experience by sending over equipment.
How this works is that you will get Experience for the equipment that you’ve produced (captured equipment doesn’t work) that is being used by the receiving country.
So, if you send a bunch of Infantry Equipment to China and they use it, which they most likely will, you will slowly get Army Experience in return.
However, to make this work, you will have to keep a monthly Lend Lease with them.
The best way to do this is to start the Lend Lease with a lot of equipment to make sure it is used by their armies, and then modify the Lend Lease to send 1 piece of equipment per month.
Now, you will keep getting Experience every time your equipment is used.
This strategy can help you gain a lot of Army Experience at the start of the game, before the war, if you send Infantry Equipment to China and Japan.
As they fight each other, you can gain a lot of Army Experience passively while profiting off of their war.
This strategy is incredibly efficient, as you can gain as much as 1 Army Experience every day if there is a lot of equipment sent.
How to Use Lend Lease as a Receiver in HOI4
First of all, never accept or request Lend Lease help from allies in the same war in HOI4. This will lower your War Participation and increase theirs, for nothing real in return.
The best way to efficiently use Lend Lease as a receiver in HOI4 is to profit off of Germany, the USSR, and Italy. These three countries are the most likely to send Lend Leases to other countries they aren’t allied with.
They also have really good production, which means that they have equipment to send. What you can do is increase your relationship with all three of them and create a fake deficit of equipment.
Usually, Infantry Equipment is the only thing they could have in abundance around 1938-39, and that they will send. So, spam deployment orders for a lot of Infantry divisions and make your deficit huge.
Now, ask the three countries for Lend Lease on Infantry Equipment once you know, they will say yes and receive a couple of thousand guns from them.
Besides this strategy, you should generally decline Lend Lease offers from the AI, as they will just give you 5 guns and it will just be annoying.
That’s everything you need to know about lend lease in Hearts of Iron 4!
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