In Hearts of Iron 4, you will often gain new puppets and vassals that you will want to slowly integrate into your country. To do this, you will need to lower their Autonomy.
Autonomy represents how close your puppet is to either becoming independent or annexing them. To annex all of your puppets, you will have to lower their Autonomy to 0.
Recommended Read: How to Increase Stability in Hearts of Iron 4
However, the game never explains properly what you can do to lower Autonomy in HOI4 for your puppets, and most things that you might try out might have really lower results.
To lower Autonomy in HOI4 for your puppets, you can either lend-lease them equipment, build factories in their territories, choose the Suppress subjects national focus, or send an attache.
Table of Contents
How to Lower Autonomy in HOI4
There are 4 ways to lower Autonomy efficiently as any country in HOI4:
- Lend-lease Equipment
- Build Factories
- Suppress Subjects
- Send Attache
There are also countries, like the United Kingdom, that have special focuses that lower Autonomy, but those are special, so we won’t mention them here.
Lend-lease Equipment
Lend-leasing equipment to puppets is one of the first methods that come to mind to lower Autonomy in HOI4 for most players. However, depending on your military production, this might not be such a good idea.
Giving equipment to puppets in HOI4 will usually make small Autonomy changes, so it isn’t the best way to go. Also, if you have a balanced military production queue, you won’t likely have too many weapons on hand.
Subjects lose 1 Autonomy for every 100 production points. However, the equipment also has to be the best one you can produce. So, giving equipment you get through war will usually result in a loss of equipment for nothing.
Infantry equipment costs 0.5 production points, which means giving your vassal 200 weapons will lower Autonomy by 1.
So, if you wanted to instantly lower Autonomy from 1,000 to 0, you would need to give your puppet 200k infantry equipment.
That is a huge number, and you would be better off keeping that equipment for yourself. However, you can also give other types of equipment, like Convoys.
Lend-leasing Convoys in HOI4 is the best way to lower the Autonomy of puppets. Each Convoy costs 70 production points, which means each one of them will lower Autonomy by 0.7.
So, to lower Autonomy from 1k to 0 in an instant, you just need to lend-lease 1,430 Convoys to your vassal.
If you were to play as a Fascist country, you would usually need to lower the Autonomy by 1,500, so you would need 2,145 Convoys.
Convoys are the best investment for an overlord that plans on diplomatically conquering every last one of their puppets.
Build Factories
Building factories or any kind of buildings in a puppet’s territory will lower their Autonomy in HOI4. The puppet will lose 0.7 Autonomy for every 100 production points invested in the construction.
This means that building a single Military Factory (7200 construction cost) will lower the puppet’s Autonomy by 50. This is much better than giving equipment, and you will also get to use those factories later.
Even before annexing a puppet, you will get to use a percentage of their factories.
In general, when you have an Integrated Puppet or something close to being annexed, you will get 25% of the Civilian Factories and 75% of the Military Factories that the puppet has.
Fascist countries gain 25% of their puppet’s Civilian Factories right when they become either an Imperial Associate or Reichsprotectorate.
When they get close to annexation, you will get 65% of their Military Factories instead of 75%, as opposed to what you’d get as a Democratic, Non-Aligned, or Communist country.
So, here is how much Autonomy you will lower by building in your puppet’s territory in HOI4:
- Military Factory – 50 Autonomy
- Civilian Factory – 75 Autonomy
- Naval Dockyard – 44 Autonomy
- Infrastructure – 42 Autonomy
Considering how many Military Factories you need to build in a puppet state to annex them, it might be a good idea to also lend-lease them equipment to speed up the process.
Otherwise, you might have to build 10 Mils in a puppet state just to integrate them.
Suppress Subjects National Focus
Once you finish 10 national focuses in HOI4, you can use the continuous focus, Suppress Subjects, which will lower Autonomy for your puppets by 0.5 every day.
If you don’t have a lot of interesting focuses to complete and feel like you can leave your focus stuck on Suppress Subjects, you can use this to passively conquer all of your puppets.
However, most people won’t even consider this until around 1942.
Send Attache
Another way to lower Autonomy in HOI4 is to Send Attache while at war. You can only send an attache to your puppets while at war, and they can only be at war if you called them.
Usually, it is not a good idea to call your puppets in your wars. They do a good job of not helping in the war but gaining points by losing planes and manpower.
By doing this, they will increase their Autonomy, making your annexation job a lot harder.
So, generally, avoid getting your puppets involved in wars, as they will bring down an insignificant amount of enemy planes and increase their Autonomy by a lot.
However, if you call them, make sure to send an attache and never accept lend-leases from them.
That’s everything you need to know about how to lower Autonomy in Hearts of Iron 4!
Have any input or suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
