Airlift Troop Transport

Airlift Troop Transport

A click-and-go troop airlift system for Hearts of Iron IV. Pick two states on the map, wait three days, and your divisions arrive at the destination airbase. Works for your own territory and for partners that have granted you military access.

What this mod adds

The mod adds a custom planner GUI for moving divisions between airbases. Unlike paradrops or naval invasions this is a peaceful airbase-to-airbase transfer with a real preparation phase. It is useful for reinforcing a distant front faster than any rail or naval route would allow, for repositioning paratroopers and elite units across your empire, or for deploying expeditionary forces to allied territory without having to cross land borders.

How to use it

Open the planner from the decisions tab under the new Airlift Operations category. Click on Open Airlift Planner to bring up a floating planning window. Then click any state on the map. A popup appears at the bottom of the screen with two buttons, one labelled Set as Origin and one labelled Set as Destination. Click a state you own and control, then use Set as Origin. Click another state and use Set as Destination. The destination must be either your own territory or a state owned by a country that has granted you military access.

In the planner window press Execute Airlift. The status changes to Operation in progress and a three-day preparation phase begins. After three days an arrival event fires and every division of yours that was stationed at the origin state is now at the destination. The planner closes automatically.

If you want to abort before the three-day timer starts, press Cancel in the planner window. This clears the selection and closes the planner.

Safety net

When the airlift arrives the eligibility of the destination is re-checked. If during the three days you lost control of the destination, or if military access was revoked, the airlift aborts cleanly and your divisions stay where they were. There is no silent loss of units to enemy hands.

The mod also handles the awkward edge case where the destination is foreign but accessible. It briefly takes engine-level control of the destination state, runs the teleport, and immediately returns control to the rightful owner. You will not see this happen during normal play – it is a single tick inside a hidden effect block.

Compatibility

The mod targets HOI4 1.18.x. You can adjust the supported_version string in the descriptor for other game versions. It is a pure script mod with no asset replacements, using only vanilla GUI sprites and fonts, so the visual style stays consistent with whatever else you have loaded.

Compatibility with other mods is generally good. The only conflict points are if another mod uses the GUI window names airlift_planner_window or airlift_state_selector_window, or hooks the airlift event namespace. None of these are commonly used names.

In multiplayer the mod should be safe in normal single-faction setups, but two human players doing simultaneous airlifts could conflict because the global event_targets are shared. A future version will move to country-scoped state arrays. Singleplayer ironman compatibility has not been validated.

Languages

Both English and German are included with proper UTF-8 BOM. Other languages can be added by dropping a localisation YAML in the appropriate folder.

Roadmap

Future versions will add a Transport Cost Units capacity model with plane count scaling, division-level checkbox selection inside the planner, a diplomacy lock during preparation and after arrival to prevent airlift-then-betray exploits, waypoints with per-leg air superiority checks, and AI heuristics so the AI uses airlifts to reinforce threatened fronts on its own.

Feedback and bug reports

Comments are welcome. If something breaks, please include the relevant lines from your error.log file in the Documents/Paradox Interactive/Hearts of Iron IV/logs folder, especially anything mentioning airlift_events, airlift_scripted_gui, or any GFX or font errors. A screenshot of the planner window helps too.

Have fun reinforcing distant fronts at airspeed.