A player should identify their limiting and abundant resource types. Such identification is important for developing a harmonious strategic plan that employs the player’s resources proportionately, which in turn helps avert unnecessarily bottlenecked development. This general principle appears in many games. Here we’ll take a look at its relevance through moments from a Hearts of Iron 4 multiplayer game review by content creator FeedBackGaming.
Germany’s initial spawn has access to high production relative to manpower. This lets us identify manpower as the limiting resource and production as abundant. The faction is therefore encouraged to spend production to increase the efficacy of the manpower, in this case by adding support battalions to infantry divisions:
Soviet strengths are flipped relative to Germany. The Soviet start has a huge pool of manpower relative to their factory production capability. This lets us identify production as a limiting resource and manpower as abundant. A harmonious Soviet plan is therefore angled towards quantity over quality. The nation has access to national foci, advisors, and techs that further reward a quantity-over-quality strategy. This game’s Soviet player erred with the design of their basic infantry division. By adding anti-tank and artillery infantry divisions, he nearly doubled their production cost relative to the default. This bottleneck and the limiting production resource in turn halved the rate at which he could actually field his manpower reserves. Ultimately, he lost a defensive war against Germany and Japan while still having plenty of unfielded manpower stagnating uselessly: