# HOI4 Tank Designer Guide: Modules, Costs and Best Designs > Every chassis and module stat pulled straight from the 1.19.2.0 game files, not adjectives: exact armor, attack, reliability and IC numbers for an infantry-support tank, a main medium, a heavy, a tank destroyer and a cheap light tank, each backed by a screenshot from a real Tank Designer session and checked against three creators who don't fully agree. - **Game:** Hearts of Iron IV - **Category:** Templates - **Author:** LongBeam (https://guides-factory.com/about) - **Difficulty:** Intermediate - **Reading time:** 35 min - **Published:** 2026-08-09 - **Updated:** 2026-08-31 - **Tags:** Combat, Division templates, Economy, Equipment - **Adapted from:** [segl - Complete HOI4 Tank Guide – All Meta Designs and Everything You Need to Know in 10 Minutes!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzsrv8rtJ2k) - **Canonical URL:** https://guides-factory.com/guides/hoi4-tank-designer-guide --- **How does the [Tank Designer](/guides/hoi4-meta-division-templates-and-tank-designs) work in HOI4?** You pick a chassis, fill its module slots — turret, main armament, engine, armor, suspension and four special slots — and the game recalculates armor, speed, reliability, soft attack, hard attack, piercing and production cost from the parts you chose. The HOI4 No Step Back tank designer replaced the game's old fixed-stat tank variants when that expansion shipped on 23 November 2021, and it is still the only way to design a tank. This HOI4 tank designer guide reads every module value off patch 1.19.2.0 as it stands in 2026, then shows five finished designs — a cheap light tank, an infantry-support tank, a main medium tank, a heavy and a tank destroyer — with the designer panel screenshot behind each one.

Current for patch 1.19.2.0 "Operation Postern" (build d245), No Step Back installed. Module values below are read from the installed game files on 2026-08-09; the design judgments — what's cheap, what's meta, what to skip — come from three videos published between September 2024 and May 2025, so they reflect whatever patch was current at each recording, earlier than 1.19.2.0 in every case. Source videos: segl (29 May 2025), MachiavellianStrategist (1 Feb 2025), VijoPlays (3 Sep 2024) — see Sources.

The Tank Designer covers chassis from light through modern. The land cruiser — a separate super-heavy machine built through the Special Projects system and gated behind the Götterdämmerung DLC, not installed here — is a different, later-game mechanic and out of scope for this page.

## HOI4 tank designer at a glance | If you want | Build | Chassis | Panel cost | |---|---|---|---| | A tank that pushes infantry off a line | Infantry-support tank | Basic or Inter-War Medium | 10.36 / 18.76 IC | | One tank line that does most jobs | Main medium tank | Modern, or Improved/Advanced Medium | 23.53 IC | | Something very hard to kill, moving slowly | Heavy breakthrough tank | Basic Heavy | 30.91 IC | | To delete enemy armor | Tank destroyer | Basic Heavy Tank Destroyer | 32.16 IC | | Armor a minor nation can actually afford | Cheap light tank | Improved Light | 11.92 IC | Every row is a real design captured from a designer panel further down this page, and the cost column is the Production Cost that panel showed rather than an estimate. The rest of the guide is the reasoning behind them: which module in each slot moves which stat, what a chassis costs before you touch it, and what the division around the tank has to look like for any of the numbers to mean anything. ## 🎯 The core idea Before No Step Back, "medium tank" meant one fixed statline per country per year — you got whatever Panzer IV variant the game decided you'd researched, armor and gun and speed bolted together at the design stage by Paradox, not by you. The Tank Designer replaced that with a real bill of materials: pick a chassis (light, medium, heavy, super-heavy, modern or amphibious), then fill its module slots — turret, main armament, engine, armor, suspension, and up to four special slots — from whatever you've researched, and the game computes armor, speed, reliability, soft/hard attack, piercing and production cost from the parts you chose. The catch is that the bare chassis stats are built to be bad: the 1922 Inter-War Medium has 20 armor and 75% reliability, and even the 1936 Basic Medium only reaches 30 armor and 80% — numbers nobody would actually field. Every playable number below comes from stacking modules on top of that base, which is also why a phrase like "excellent breakthrough with solid armor" describes nothing you can build. There is no such thing as a tank's breakthrough in the abstract, only this chassis with these modules on patch 1.19.2.0. ## How the designer works A chassis defines a fixed set of module slots: one turret, one main armament, one engine, one armor type, one suspension, and (on most chassis) four "special" slots shared between radios, secondary turrets and the miscellaneous special modules. Every slot you fill contributes to the design in one of two ways — `add_stats`, a flat number added straight onto the chassis's base value, and `multiply_stats`, a percentage applied on top. Riveted Armor, for instance, adds +2 defense and +2 breakthrough as a flat bonus, then separately cuts production cost by a flat 20% — two different mechanisms stacked on one module, which is why two armor types with the same "defense" line in a wiki table can still produce different final tanks once their multipliers are folded in. Production cost (`build_cost_ic`, shown in-game as **Production Cost**) is what one unit costs your factories to build, in the same IC units as everything else in the production queue. Two separate costs exist alongside it: **Design Cost** (`xp_cost`), the one-time army-experience price of unlocking a module for use in variants at all, and **Conversion Cost**, what it costs in IC to switch an already-existing production line over to a new variant — visible on four of the panels below (7.31, 9.51, 23.94 and 28.16 IC) and worth checking before you redesign a tank you're already mass-producing mid-war.
From the comments (not in the video) - Before the real cannon is researched, build the closest approximation with a heavy machine gun standing in for the main armament, then convert the whole production line once the intended gun unlocks — cheaper than idling factories waiting on research — segl99
The panel's three columns — Base Stats, Combat Stats, Misc Stats — are a display grouping only. Every figure in all three comes from the same chassis-plus-modules math. ## The modules that matter Every number below is read directly from `common/units/equipment/tank_chassis.txt` and `common/units/equipment/modules/00_tank_modules.txt` on this installed copy of the game, which between them define 15 chassis and 72 modules. The tables here skip the ones where there's no real decision to make (Bogie Suspension is the default and free; nobody chooses it over anything, they choose *not* to replace it). **Engines** | Module | Slot | Key stats | IC | XP | |---|---|---|---|---| | Gasoline Engine | Engine | +0.5 km/h flat, +15% speed | +1 | 6 (default) | | Diesel Engine | Engine | +25% reliability, no speed bonus | +1 | 6 (default) | | Petrol-Electric Engine | Engine | +2 breakthrough / +2 defense (both flat, then +15% each), −50% reliability | +2 (+15%) | 6 (default) | | Gas Turbine | Engine | +0.5 km/h flat, +25% speed, −10% reliability | +3 | 6 (default) | Gasoline and Diesel both cost the same 1 IC and the same 2 fuel/use; the choice is purely speed vs. reliability, and all three source videos take Diesel on anything that isn't explicitly a fast-exploitation design, because a 95%+ reliability tank keeps its full stats in bad weather and a low-reliability one starts losing equipment to breakdowns. skip Gas Turbine outside of super-heavy or modern showcase builds — 3 IC and a reliability penalty for a speed bonus most chassis can't use before they're already fast enough. **Armor** | Module | Slot | Key stats | IC | XP | |---|---|---|---|---| | Riveted Armor (default) | Armor | +2 defense, +2 breakthrough | −20% | 8 | | Cast Armor | Armor | +30% armor value, +3 defense, +3 breakthrough, +2% hardness | +20% | 8 | | Welded Armor | Armor | +30% armor value, +4 defense, +4 breakthrough, +1 chromium | +0% | 8 | Cast and Welded give the identical +30% armor multiplier; Welded's extra defense/breakthrough costs a chromium slot instead of a flat IC surcharge, so which one is cheap depends entirely on whether your country has spare chromium. Riveted is free of both, at the price of no armor multiplier at all — correct call on a cheap infantry-support tank, wrong call on anything meant to survive return fire. **Suspension** | Module | Slot | Key stats | IC | XP | |---|---|---|---|---| | Bogie Suspension (default) | Suspension | no change | +0 | — | | Torsion Bar | Suspension | +15% reliability | +1 | 6 (default) | | Christie Suspension | Suspension | +20% speed | +1 | 6 (default) | | Interleaved Roadwheels | Suspension | +4 breakthrough | +2 | 6 (default) | **Turrets** (one family per chassis tier; breakthrough scales with crew size, design cost is a flat 2 XP on every turret in the game) | Module | Slot | Key stats | IC | XP | |---|---|---|---|---| | One Man Turret (light) | Turret | +7 breakthrough | +1 | 2 | | Two Man Turret (light) | Turret | +10 breakthrough | +1.25 | 2 | | Three Man Turret (light) | Turret | +14 breakthrough, −0.1 km/h | +1.5 | 2 | | Light Fixed Superstructure | Turret | −25% breakthrough, +3 defense, +20% reliability | +1 | 2 | | Two Man Turret (heavy) | Turret | +18 breakthrough | +5 | 2 | | Modern Turret | Turret | +24 breakthrough | +8 | 2 | A fixed superstructure is the turretless option, and the file makes the trade explicit: it costs a quarter of the design's breakthrough — a turret is where most of a tank's breakthrough comes from — and pays that back as +3 defense and +20% reliability, second only to the Diesel Engine's +25% among single modules. That is the shape of a dug-in tank destroyer rather than an assault tank. The same three numbers apply on the light, medium and heavy versions; only the IC cost changes (1, 1.5 and 5). **Main armament** (curated: only the guns where the choice actually changes the recommended build) | Module | Slot | Key stats | IC | XP | |---|---|---|---|---| | Heavy Machine Gun | Small mount | 8 soft, 2 hard, 6 piercing | 0.5 | 1 | | Improved Automatic Cannon | Small mount | 20 soft, 7 hard, 35 piercing, −10% reliability | 2 | 1 | | Medium Cannon | Medium mount | 20 soft, 15 hard, 60 piercing, +2 breakthrough, −15% reliability | 3 | 1 | | Improved Medium Cannon | Medium mount | 32 soft, 20 hard, 90 piercing, +4 breakthrough, −15% reliability | 4 | 1 | | Improved High-Velocity Cannon | Medium mount | 20 soft, 35 hard, 125 piercing, −17.5% reliability | 5 | 1 | | Advanced High-Velocity Cannon | Heavy mount | 25 soft, 45 hard, 200 piercing, −20% reliability | 7 | 1 | | Improved Heavy Cannon | Heavy mount | 25 soft, 35 hard, 125 piercing, −25% reliability | 7 | 1 | | Advanced Heavy Cannon | Heavy mount | 30 soft, 40 hard, 170 piercing, −30% reliability | 8 | 1 | | Medium Howitzer | Medium mount | 35 soft, 1 hard, 20 piercing, −2 breakthrough | 4 | 1 | | Super-Heavy Cannon | Super-heavy mount | 35 soft, 45 hard, 225 piercing | 12.5 | 1 | The Improved High-Velocity and Improved Heavy Cannon are the closest pair in the file: identical 35 hard attack, identical 125 piercing, the same 1 XP. Everything else runs against the heavy cannon: 7 IC to the high-velocity's 5, and 25% off reliability where the other takes 17.5%, all to buy 5 soft attack. They also don't share a slot — the high-velocity is a medium mount, the heavy cannon a heavy mount — so on a medium chassis the choice never arises, and on a heavy chassis or heavy tank destroyer, where both are legal, the medium-mount gun is the better buy unless those 5 points are the point. **Special modules and radios** (fill the leftover slots after turret/gun/engine/armor/suspension) | Module | Slot | Key stats | IC | XP | |---|---|---|---|---| | Advanced Radio | Special (radio) | +60% defense, +40% breakthrough | +2.5 | 1 | | Sloped Armor | Special | +25% armor value, +10% production cost | +10% | 10 | | Stabilizer | Special | +5 breakthrough | +2 | 1 | | Auto Loader | Special | +4 breakthrough, +4 defense | +1.5 | 1 | | Wet Ammunition Storage | Special | +15% reliability | +1 | 1 | | Armor Skirts | Special | +3 armor value, +3 breakthrough | +0.5 | 1 | | Extra Ammunition Storage | Special | +2 breakthrough, +4 defense, −10% reliability | +0 | 1 | | Easy Maintenance | Special | +10% reliability, −7.5% production cost | −7.5% | 30 | Every special module in that table except Sloped Armor and Easy Maintenance costs the same 1 XP, so the currency that actually separates them is IC. free Extra Ammunition Storage is the one true bargain — 2 breakthrough and 4 defense for no production cost at all, paid for with 10% reliability. cheap Armor Skirts follow at half a point of IC for 3 breakthrough and 3 armor, then Auto Loader at 1.5 for 4 and 4. Stabilizer adds the most raw breakthrough of the four at +5, but 2 IC makes it the worst of them per point — reach for it only when the slots are there and the IC isn't tight. grind Easy Maintenance is real (10% reliability and cheaper production, forever) but costs 30 XP to unlock, fifteen times a normal special module, so it only pays off on a design you intend to mass-produce for years. setup Advanced Radio needs the radio tech researched first and eats your one radio slot, but +40% breakthrough for 2.5 IC beats almost anything else you could put there. ## HOI4 tank designer modules explained: the order to fill the slots The tables above are the values; this is the order to spend them in. Filling the slots in this sequence means every decision is made against a design that already exists, rather than against a blank panel where nothing trades off against anything yet.
  1. bare cost: light 2–3 IC, medium 3.5–4.25, modern 6, heavy 9–12, super-heavy 28
  2. decides whether the tank leads a push or holds a line
  3. 0.5 IC for a heavy machine gun, 12.5 for the super-heavy cannon
  4. the cheapest repair for the gun you just picked
  5. welded costs chromium, cast costs 20% more IC
  6. bogie is the default and does nothing at all
  7. fill them; an empty special slot is a stat you declined for free

Watch reliability as a running total while you do this rather than checking it at the end. A medium cannon, an Extra Ammunition Storage and a Gas Turbine take −15%, −10% and −10% off it before anything gives any of it back, and a design that lands in the 40s is the "ARMOR MEME" heavy further down this page: enormous on paper, breaking down in the field.

## How to tell whether a number is still current Module values have been close to stable since No Step Back shipped the designer in 2021, but they are not frozen: patch 1.16 cut Improved **Anti-Air** Gun from 36 air attack to 32 and from 20 piercing to 18, and the 1.19.2.0 files carry the post-nerf pair. That is the whole argument for reading `00_tank_modules.txt` rather than copying a number out of a video — a guide recorded before a rebalance keeps quoting the old figure indefinitely, and nothing on its face says so. The Paradox wiki's Tank designer page carries no version banner at all, so there is no telling from the page which patch its tables describe; checked against 1.19.2.0 it currently agrees, Extra Ammunition Storage and Auto Loader both reading defense and breakthrough with no attack bonus. One number in the panel isn't in the module file at all. Every engine shows a design cost of ★6, yet no engine block declares an `xp_cost` line — engines are the one module family without a per-module design cost. The 6 comes from `EQUIPMENT_MODULE_REPLACE_XP_COST = 6.0` in `common/defines/00_defines.lua`, the game-wide default for swapping in an unrelated module. ## The designs Every design below was built on screen by a creator with the designer panel open, and every stat quoted is the one the panel shows. Chassis identity and the engine and armor upgrade-level sliders are read off the same frames.

HOI4 does not document the order `add_stats` and `multiply_stats` apply in when several modules touch the same final stat, so the combined totals below are read directly off each design's panel rather than recomputed by hand from the module tables above. Chassis, turret family and headline stats are legible on every captured panel; which specific radio, stabilizer or auto-loader picks fill the remaining special slots is not always legible frame-by-frame, so treat those slots as choices to fit the situation rather than fixed picks to copy.

### Infantry-support tank An infantry-support tank rides with infantry divisions, so its job is soft attack and breakthrough against dug-in defenders, not duelling other tanks — hard attack and piercing are close to irrelevant. MachiavellianStrategist's **T-1 (1939)** 1:58 ↗, built on the Basic Medium Tank Chassis (engine upgrade level 7, no armor upgrade), lands at Soft Attack 52.9 against Hard Attack of just 1.1, with Armor 31.5 and **Breakthrough** 39.0, for a Production Cost of only 10.36 — cheap enough to build in the hundreds early-game. Reliability sits at 69.6%, which is the real tradeoff: this is a 1939-era design with no Torsion Bar or Diesel Engine yet, and it will break down more than the same tank built two research tiers later. ![HOI4 Tank Designer panel showing the T-1 (1939) Basic Medium Tank Chassis design with Base Stats, Combat Stats and Misc Stats columns — Soft attack 52.9, Hard attack 1.1, Reliability 69.6%, Production Cost 10.36](/media/guides/markdown/06179902-b145-4338-b4cb-33fa5c991744.webp) segl's **medium assault gun** 3:10 ↗ (labelled "IN SP SKIP ARMOR & ENGI" in the production queue, built on the older Inter-War Medium Tank Chassis with engine and armor upgrade level 14) pushes further in the same direction: Soft Attack 54.0, Breakthrough 78.4, but Speed of only 3.3 km/h and Reliability 55.1%. This is the disagreement worth naming directly — MachiavellianStrategist's design keeps the newer Basic chassis for its higher base reliability and speed, while segl's build sacrifices both for a cheaper, older chassis with more breakthrough per IC (Production Cost 18.76 against a much higher breakthrough figure). Neither is wrong; they're optimizing for different constraints (a fast-moving 1939 tank vs. a stationary support gun towed along with slow infantry that doesn't need Speed at all). ![HOI4 Tank Designer panel showing segl's Inter-War Medium Tank Chassis infantry-support build with Soft attack 54.0, Breakthrough 78.4, Reliability 55.1%, Production Cost 18.76](/media/guides/markdown/b5a86621-ba35-451e-96a6-cce20c74c8f9.webp) ### The main medium tank This is the tank that actually fights other tanks, and the numbers move a lot between "cheap and early" and "everything researched." MachiavellianStrategist's late-game **MT (1945)** 6:32 ↗, on the Modern Tank Chassis (engine and armor upgrade level 9), is the clearest "meta, fully invested" reference point here: Armor 108.6, Soft Attack 67.6, Reliability 83.0%, Hardness 97.3%, at a Production Cost of 23.53. Set that Armor figure against the T-1's 31.5 above — more than triple, from six extra years of chassis and armor-type research, not from any single overpowered module. Read the anti-tank line before copying it, though: Hard Attack is 2.2. Piercing 66.0 only decides whether a hit goes through armor, and hard attack is what does the damage once it does — so this is a breakthrough tank that happens to be very hard to kill, not something to send at enemy armor. That job belongs to the tank destroyer below. ![HOI4 Tank Designer panel showing the MT (1945) Modern Tank Chassis design with Armor 108.6, Piercing 66.0, Reliability 83.0%, Production Cost 23.53](/media/guides/markdown/f3d6389b-4cae-469a-80ef-852a2c200724.webp) The tradeoff to plan for: the Modern Tank chassis costs 6 IC bare, before a single module, against 3.75 for the Basic Medium the T-1 is built on and 4.25 for the Advanced Medium. It is a 1948 chassis, so on a historical timeline the research is the real gate rather than the price — Improved and Advanced Medium (40 and 50 base armor, 4 and 4.25 IC) are the chassis that actually carry the mid-war, and they stay worth upgrading long after the modern line appears on the tree. ### Heavy tanks — usually a niche, not a mainline pick segl's own name for this build is the honest one: **"ARMOR MEME."** 4:24 ↗ On the Basic Heavy Tank Chassis (engine and armor upgrade level 17), it reaches Armor 165.8 and Breakthrough 130.1 — both the highest raw numbers of any design on this page — but Reliability is only 44.1%. Compare that to the 69–83% reliability of the medium designs above: a heavy tank built for pure armor stacking breaks down constantly, and HOI4's reliability stat directly reduces a division's stats in the field, so a "165.8 armor" tank that spends a third of its time malfunctioning is not simply "the strongest tank" the number makes it look like. ![HOI4 Tank Designer panel showing segl's "ARMOR MEME" Basic Heavy Tank Chassis build with Armor 165.8, Breakthrough 130.1, Reliability 44.1%, Production Cost 30.91](/media/guides/markdown/913778e5-1df3-4fed-a48b-b55468bbbb09.webp) skip Heavy tanks as your mainline armor division. At 10–12 IC just for the bare chassis (before a single module), a heavy tank costs roughly triple a medium chassis for stats that a well-built medium with Cast or Welded armor and a good engine gets most of the way to, at a fraction of the production cost and with far better reliability. The honest use case for a heavy chassis is a small, deliberately over-armored breakthrough spearhead division, not the bulk of your tank divisions — which is exactly the "meme" framing segl gives it on screen, not a hedge added after the fact. ### Tank destroyer For tank-vs-tank combat specifically, segl's reasoning is to prioritize Hard Attack "without completely forgetting about soft attack," and to build on the Tank Destroyer archetype specifically because it gets extra hard attack that a normal tank chassis of the same tier doesn't. The **"META TD"** 0:18 ↗ — a Basic Heavy Tank Destroyer, engine and armor upgrade level 14 — is the sharpest illustration of that tradeoff among the five designs here: Hard Attack 70.2 and Piercing 290.0, both far beyond any other design here, at Armor 90.0 and a genuinely low Reliability of 40.6%. This is a glass-cannon anti-tank specialist meant to sit behind the line and delete enemy armor at range, not to lead an assault. ![HOI4 Tank Designer panel showing the "META TD" Basic Heavy Tank Destroyer build with Hard attack 70.2, Piercing 290.0, Reliability 40.6%, Production Cost 32.16](/media/guides/markdown/395e2b05-0b98-4754-a6c5-c10f29e0084e.webp) Production Cost is 32.16, the single most expensive of the five designs here — a tank destroyer this specialized only pays for itself in an armored-warfare-heavy campaign where you expect to actually fight enemy tanks in volume. Against an AI that fields mostly infantry, that 32.16 IC is better spent on more infantry-support mediums. ### A cheap light tank for a low-industry country If your country doesn't have the industry to build medium or heavy tanks in numbers, VijoPlays' **Light Tank (Combat)** 4:19 ↗ — an Improved Light Tank Chassis, engine upgrade level 13, no armor upgrade — is the shape of what to build instead: Speed 11.9 km/h, Soft Attack 40.3, Reliability 75.5%, and a Production Cost of just 11.92 — roughly a third of the tank destroyer above, for a tank that's still fast and reasonably reliable. Armor is only 19.0 and Hard Attack just 6.0, so this design cannot duel real tanks or hold a line against them; its job is speed and enough soft attack to break infantry, at a cost every minor nation can actually mass-produce. VijoPlays' stated order of importance for tank stats is speed, soft attack, breakthrough, hardness, and reliability last. The reasoning is worth keeping: if supply holds, reliability is "just a number," and maintenance companies multiply rather than add, so they return more on a tank that is already reliable than they do rescuing one that isn't. ![HOI4 Tank Designer panel showing VijoPlays' Light Tank (Combat), an Improved Light Tank Chassis build with Speed 11.9 km/h, Soft attack 40.3, Reliability 75.5%, Production Cost 11.92](/media/guides/markdown/c33e4161-c76f-4845-9122-82b3c3b82c08.webp)
From the comments (not in the video) - Radio 3 is not worth it on a build like this one — too much IC for +40% breakthrough when Radio 1 covers the slot for less, and the difference is better spent on light cannons over heavy machine guns, which out-stat them for the extra cost — hyxness9422
## HOI4 light tank vs medium tank vs heavy tank The five designs above are individual answers; this is the shape of the question behind them. Every chassis family in the designer trades the same three things against each other — armor, speed, and what it costs before you have added a single module — and the bare numbers make the choice far starker than the in-game descriptions do. | Chassis family | Base armor | Base speed | Bare cost | What it is for | |---|---|---|---|---| | Light | 10 → 25 | 5.1 → 8.6 km/h | 2 → 3 IC | Numbers, speed and hardness for a country that cannot afford anything heavier | | Medium | 20 → 50 | 5.1 → 7.4 km/h | 3.5 → 4.25 IC | The default mainline tank: enough of everything, cheap enough to mass-produce | | Heavy | 35 → 75 | 4 → 6.3 km/h | 9 → 12 IC | A small over-armored spearhead, or a tank destroyer hull | | Modern | 65 | 8.6 km/h | 6 IC | Late-war medium successor: light-chassis speed on 65 base armor | | Super-heavy | 90 | 4.9 km/h | 28 IC | One job only — armor the enemy cannot pierce, on a tile you have chosen | | Amphibious | 15 | 6.3 km/h | 4.5 IC | Crossing rivers and landing on beaches, not winning tank fights | Read the cost column first. A light chassis and a medium chassis sit within about 1.5 IC of each other, which makes the light tank a decision about research and speed rather than about money — the Improved Light design above finishes at 11.92 IC against the Basic Medium T-1's 10.36, so the cheap light tank is not actually the cheaper tank. The heavy jumps to 9–12 IC bare, roughly triple a medium before a single module, and that gap is the entire reason the heavy chassis is a niche rather than a mainline. ### Where the super-heavy sits A HOI4 super heavy tank is a different order of expense again: 28 IC for the bare chassis, before a turret, a gun or one point of added armor. That is more than four of the six finished designs on this page cost complete, and it buys 90 base armor, 100% hardness, and a top speed of 4.9 km/h — slower than every heavy chassis in the table above. It is unlocked by the Super-Heavy Tank Chassis technology, a 1941 research sitting behind Improved Heavy Tank Chassis in the armor tree, which is also what unlocks the Super-Heavy Cannon in the gun table above and the Land Cruiser special project the note at the top of this page rules out of scope. The case for building one is narrow and worth stating plainly: it exists to be unpierceable on a single tile you have decided to hold or take, in a division whose speed you have already written off. The case against is that 4.9 km/h, because a division travels at the speed of its slowest battalion — one super-heavy battalion sets the pace for everything stacked with it. The same 28 IC buys two of the infantry-support mediums above, complete, with change left over. ## HOI4 best medium tank design, step by step There is no single best medium tank design, but there is a default that is hard to beat, and every pick in it comes out of the module tables above rather than out of a video thumbnail. For a country with the industry to field a real armored line, fill the slots in this order: 1. **Chassis** — Advanced Medium if it is researched (50 base armor for 4.25 IC), Improved Medium if not (40 for 4). The quarter of an IC between them is the cheapest ten points of base armor on this page. 2. **Turret** — the largest turret in that chassis's own family. A turret is where most of a tank's breakthrough comes from, and the light-family progression in the table above (+7, +10 and +14 for one, two and three crew) is the shape of that trade on every tier. 3. **Main armament** — Improved Medium Cannon (32 soft, 20 hard, 90 piercing, +4 breakthrough, 4 IC) for a tank that has to do everything, or Improved High-Velocity Cannon (20 soft, 35 hard, 125 piercing, 5 IC) when its job is piercing armor. Both charge reliability, −15% and −17.5%. 4. **Engine** — Diesel. The +25% reliability costs the same 1 IC as gasoline, and step 3 has just spent some. 5. **Armor** — Welded when you have chromium to spare (+30% armor value, +4 defense, +4 breakthrough, no IC surcharge), Cast when you do not (+30%, +3 and +3, +20% cost). Riveted only on a deliberately cheap support line. 6. **Suspension** — Torsion Bar, +15% reliability for 1 IC. Take Christie's +20% speed instead only when the whole division is built to exploit a breakthrough rather than to make one. 7. **The four special slots** — Advanced Radio first (+40% breakthrough, +60% defense, 2.5 IC), then Extra Ammunition Storage because it is free, then Armor Skirts at half an IC, then Wet Ammunition Storage if the gun has pulled reliability somewhere you are unhappy with. That build is deliberately not one of the panels above. Those are captured designs with their own engine and armor upgrade-level sliders, and their totals are read off the game rather than added up by hand — which is exactly what you should do with this one. Build it in your own designer and read the panel, because the panel is the only arbiter that knows which patch you are on and which upgrades you have. ## HOI4 tank designer armor vs speed: which one to buy first Armor and speed both look like sliders on the panel, and only one of them behaves like one. **Armor is a threshold.** It does nothing gradually; what matters is whether your division's armor sits above the enemy's piercing. When an armored unit fights something that cannot pierce it, its organisation damage dice go from a 4 to a 6 — 3.5 organisation damage a hit instead of 2.5, a +40% increase — and the enemy's targeting rating on that armored battalion is halved, so it is shot at less as well. A point of armor above the line is worth more than twenty points below it, and there is no partial credit for getting close. The catch is that the game compares the *division's* armor, not the tank's. A division's armor is 40% of its highest-armor battalion plus 60% of the average across all its battalions and companies, and piercing is calculated the same way. So the 108.6 armor on the MT (1945) panel above is not the figure the enemy has to pierce: 40% of it is, plus whatever the motorized or mechanized battalions beside it average out to. **Speed is a floor.** A division travels at the speed of its slowest battalion, so tank speed only matters up to the speed of whatever it is stacked with — motorized infantry moves at 12 km/h and mechanized at 8. Every chassis in the designer starts slower than motorized, and all but two of them (the Advanced Light and the Modern, both 8.6 km/h) start slower than mechanized as well, before any engine module is fitted. That is why the tank almost always sets the division's pace, and why a 4.9 km/h super-heavy or the 3.3 km/h assault gun above sets it very low indeed. Which gives a usable rule for the slots that trade between the two. Buy armor when the design is meant to be shot at and you have a specific enemy piercing figure to clear. Buy speed when the division exists to get behind something rather than through it. Christie Suspension's +20% and the Gas Turbine's +25% are both cheap in IC, and both are wasted on a tank that is already keeping up with the infantry it escorts. ### How much HOI4 tank reliability is enough Reliability is the third stat in that trade and the one most designs leave to chance. It is equipment's resistance to breaking down and being lost, so a low-reliability tank bleeds into attrition and breakdowns rather than into anything the enemy earned. The short version of a HOI4 tank reliability guide is a list of who takes it and who gives it back: every cannon in the table above costs 15% to 30%, while Diesel Engine (+25%), a fixed superstructure (+20%), Torsion Bar (+15%), Wet Ammunition Storage (+15%) and Easy Maintenance (+10%) are the modules that return it. Outside the designer, a Maintenance Company multiplies the finished figure — by 1.05 at level one and 1.20 at level four — and captures enemy equipment equal to that boost instead of destroying it. Set against that, the designs on this page run from 83.0% on the fully-invested MT (1945) down to 40.6% on the META TD. The tank destroyer's figure is a deliberate purchase; it is buying 290 piercing and knows what that costs. A mainline tank in the 40s usually is not a decision at all — it is the result of stacking guns and ammunition storage without ever putting a reliability module back. ## HOI4 best tank template 2026: the division the tank has to live in There is no single best HOI4 tank template in 2026, for the same reason there is no single best design: the right shape depends on the terrain you plan to fight in and the industry you have to fill it with. What does not change is how a template treats the panel numbers you just spent an hour on. Four rules decide what survives the trip into a division: | The division's | Comes from its battalions as | What that means for the tank | |---|---|---| | Armor and piercing | 40% of the highest single battalion, plus 60% of the average | One excellent tank battalion carries 40% of the figure; the rest is dragged toward whatever it is stacked with | | Hardness | the average of the line battalions | Medium tanks are 90% hard, mechanized 60–75%, motorized 20% — the mix decides how much incoming fire is hard attack | | Soft attack, hard attack, defense, breakthrough | added together | Doubling the width of the template doubles them, so these stats are bought with combat width | | Speed | the slowest battalion | In an armored division that is nearly always the tank | The arithmetic is worth doing once. Ten medium tank battalions at 90% hardness beside ten motorized at 20% average out to 55% hardness, so a bit over half the incoming damage arrives as hard attack. Swap the motorized for mechanized and the same twenty battalions land between 75% and 82.5% — which is why mechanized is the standard partner for a tank line despite costing more and moving slower. Combat width is the bill for the additive half. Armored, infantry, motorized and mechanized battalions are 2 width each, artillery is 3, and anti-tank and anti-air are 1, so twenty line battalions make a 40-width division. **How much width is worth taking depends entirely on where you intend to fight.** Since No Step Back the province's terrain sets the battle width rather than one universal number, and a stack that overflows it takes a penalty of −100% × (total width − battle width) ÷ battle width, capped at −33%. Read the width off the province tooltip in the theatre you are actually invading, rather than carrying a number over from an old guide — including this one. Two smaller things change what a design is worth once it is in a template: - A **Maintenance Company** is the cheapest reliability in the game and it applies to every piece of equipment in the division, not only the tank — which is also why it returns more on a design that is already reliable than on one that is not. - **A role other than Tank drastically cuts the battalion's breakthrough**, which the Paradox wiki states outright. That is the real argument for keeping the META TD above in its own line rather than in the division you are using to break a front. None of that changes which modules you should pick, and that is the point. The design and the template answer different questions, and a good tank in the wrong division still averages out to a mediocre one. ## Sources - segl, ["Complete HOI4 Tank Guide — All Meta Designs and Everything You Need to Know in 10 Minutes!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzsrv8rtJ2k) (29 May 2025) - MachiavellianStrategist, ["The BEST HOI4 Tank Designs In 2025: COMPLETE Guide!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zg7qHF6_uI) (1 Feb 2025) - VijoPlays, ["The Ultimate HoI4 Tank Guide"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZO_KgbyhRw) (3 Sep 2024) - Game files: `common/units/equipment/tank_chassis.txt`, `common/units/equipment/modules/00_tank_modules.txt`, `localisation/english/tank_modules_l_english.yml`, `launcher-settings.json` — Hearts of Iron IV 1.19.2.0, installed copy - [Tank designer — Hearts of Iron 4 Wiki](https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/Tank_designer) (cross-check only, undated) Once your division templates are built around whichever tank line you pick here, [HOI4 Defensive Division Templates](/guides/hoi4-defensive-division-templates) covers how to actually slot armor battalions into a template, and [HOI4 Modifier Stacking and the Red Bubble](/guides/hoi4-modifier-stacking-red-bubble) explains why some of the percentage bonuses in the tables above stack differently than you'd expect once they're on a division rather than a single equipment design. If you're designing tanks for a specific major with the industry to actually use a heavy chassis, [HOI4 Germany Guide](/guides/hoi4-germany-guide) covers the industry base that decides which of the five roles above you can afford to mass-produce. --- ## FAQ ### What DLC do I need for the HOI4 Tank Designer? No Step Back. It's the only DLC that adds the Tank Designer itself; without it, tank equipment is still the old fixed-stat variants tied to research year. ### What's the single best tank design in HOI4? There isn't one. The designs on this page run from a 10.36 IC infantry-support tank to a 32.16 IC tank destroyer and a 30.91 IC heavy, and each wins at a different job. Match the design to the role — infantry support, anti-tank, or a cheap line for a low-industry country — rather than looking for a single universal best. ### Should I build heavy tanks in HOI4? Usually not as your main tank line. The heavy chassis alone costs roughly triple a medium chassis in IC, and the armor-stacked heavy build captured below drops to 44.1% reliability. Heavy tanks make sense as a small, deliberately over-armored breakthrough spearhead, not as the bulk of your armored divisions. ### Why does my Tank Designer show different numbers than a YouTube guide? Almost always patch drift — Paradox has rebalanced individual modules before, as with the anti-air cannon in patch 1.16. The in-game designer is the final word: trust the numbers it shows over any video. The module values and screenshots on this page are from patch 1.19.2.0. ### Gasoline or Diesel engine for a HOI4 tank? Diesel for almost everything: same 1 IC and fuel use as Gasoline, but +25% reliability instead of a small speed bonus. Gasoline only wins on a design that's already reliable enough and needs the extra speed, such as a fast light tank. ### How does the tank designer work in HOI4? You pick a chassis, then fill its slots — turret, main armament, engine, armor, suspension and four special slots — and the game recomputes armor, speed, reliability, soft and hard attack, piercing and production cost from the parts you chose. The bare chassis stats are deliberately poor, so every usable number on a finished tank comes from the modules stacked on top of it. The designer arrived with the No Step Back expansion on 23 November 2021 and replaced the old fixed-stat tank variants that were tied to research year. ### Light tank vs medium tank vs heavy tank in HOI4 — which chassis should I build? Cost decides it more than armor does. A light chassis is 2–3 IC bare and a medium 3.5–4.25, so a light tank is a research-and-speed choice rather than a money-saving one — the finished light design on this page actually costs more than the finished infantry-support medium. A heavy chassis is 9–12 IC before a single module, roughly triple a medium, which is why heavies work as a small over-armored spearhead rather than as your mainline armor. ### Armor or speed: which matters more in the HOI4 tank designer? Armor is a threshold and speed is a floor. Armor only pays when your division's armor is above the enemy's piercing: an armored unit that cannot be pierced deals 3.5 organisation damage per hit instead of 2.5, a 40% increase, and enemy targeting priority on it is halved. Speed only matters down to the pace of the slowest battalion in the division, because that is the speed the whole division travels at. ### What is the best tank division template in HOI4 for 2026? There is no single width to copy, because since No Step Back the province's terrain sets the battle width rather than one universal number. What does hold is the arithmetic: armored, infantry, motorized and mechanized battalions are 2 combat width each, a division's hardness is the average of its line battalions, and its armor is 40% of the highest battalion plus 60% of the average. Ten medium tank battalions at 90% hardness beside ten motorized at 20% average out to 55%; the same split with mechanized instead lands between 75% and 82.5%. ### How do I unlock the super heavy tank in HOI4? Research the Super-Heavy Tank Chassis technology, a 1941 tech that sits behind Improved Heavy Tank Chassis in the armor tree and also unlocks the Super-Heavy Cannon module. The chassis costs 28 IC bare, before a turret or a gun, and gives 90 base armor, 100% hardness and a top speed of 4.9 km/h. Since a division travels at the speed of its slowest battalion, one super-heavy battalion sets the pace for everything stacked with it. ### How much reliability does a HOI4 tank need? Enough that the gun you fitted has not eaten it. Every cannon in the designer costs 15% to 30% reliability, and the Diesel Engine (+25%), a fixed superstructure (+20%), Torsion Bar (+15%) and Wet Ammunition Storage (+15%) are what give it back. A Maintenance Company then multiplies the finished figure, by 1.05 at level one up to 1.20 at level four, so it returns more on a design that is already reliable than on one that is not.