Chromium should NOT be added to random units in the game. It is needed for the more powerful Tanks and Ships and can be a bottleneck in the late game, when the war is already decided.
Chromium was pretty vital and it should be added *but* substitutable, for example chrome lining for rifle barrels... Your gun will last longer (so basically you lose less due to attrition) but you can very well not do it and survive either way, just if you have chromium you can dedicate more factories to producing something other than infantry equipment
I lean more towards the historical aspect of the game so I don't think balance is really necessary, so long as each countries real world situation is represented reasonably accurately. I know this will be unpopular but I also don't really like that all of a nations issues can be solved by ~41ish simply by going down the focus tree and/or taking decisions, with no new "problems" being introduced from that point. For example, by the end of the war the UK is typically a juggernaut whereas in real life it was broke and struggling to stay afloat. I understand that it's a game to be played for fun, but thats just my opinion.
i agree with you on this, this is a historical game and should be treated as such. There is no need to balance every country for multiplayer we have mods for that.
I completely agree, I think it’s a little ridiculous how so many minors have the possibility of doing a world conquest. Minor nations shouldn’t be “balanced” as feedback described, because they are minors. And I think that the nations should be represented accurately like you said, which means they aren’t balanced, and shouldn’t be. The US should be far more powerful than it is when it joins the war, in reality the US was able to fund effectively two separate wars at the same time, but in hoi4 (especially with ai USA), they can barely manage that. Additionally Germany should be dwarfed by the factories, resources, and manpower of the allies by 42. This is just another side note, but if paradox wants to actually balance their game, the focus should be on the ai, not focus trees (Granted several focus trees could be made better, and there are several nations that still need focus trees). In the current state the ai is incompetent and the pacific war in particular is a joke (the pacific war needs a maaaajor rework).
I mean i agree with you on certain decree like adding new problems throughout the game however that could be still done in a fun way like: as yugo unite the balkans. you would gain factories manpower and so on but you would get debuffed as hell bcs it's balkans you know. i think the balance should be done in a fun way not to make all countries truly equal but so you can roleplay that country better
UK spent more than the Soviet during the war, they were an industrial powerhouse. But if you say that the game should be balanced historically then it should be impossible for the axis to win
I would argue, as others have said, that Paradox have balanced the game... And it is these 'balances', or rather unbalances, that contributed to the war (with the edition of the odd mad man here and there). If you want a game where everyone is either on (or soon can be on) an equal footing then don't choose a game based on the real world and history.
He never said that he wanted everyone to be equal but that each country must lack something at the start. And stop saying historical game when USA have way too much divisions compare to real life, when Germany has no horses (they used a lot of horses at the beginning bc they lacked trucks) at start of ww2 etc. It is based on history but with some limitations and things to make it fun. Usa had an army of 140k people before ww2 and yet in the game they start with more
@@Fox13440The way the U.S handles the national guard is different compared to other nations reservists, and the National Guard is separate from the Army reserve
For the China manpower bit and the Forced Conscription focus, I think that's in the game for the historical part, but also because I think Paradox feels that it's easy to overwhelm china, especially with it's army debuffs, and since they lose territory they then lose that man power and need to dig for more. Of course this doesn't take into account more experienced players that can hold china and therefore have access to more manpower
>steamroll the soviet union as germany with space marine template >send them to the uk and take it too >send the space marines to asia >they can't break china >build up the logistics over in asia and decide to see if i can actually beat china with japan >it takes fucking 2 years with all green air superiority, nukes, and an entire army group of my most overpowered units to finally bring them down man taking china gave me more trouble than the soviets and uk even
Honestly if that's what they was going for it doesn't really work. Supply in China is pretty garbage so you're better off going quality > quantity just so you don't get even more massive debuffs from supply issues on top of your army debuffs at the start. I delete quite a few units when starting as china just because of that.
While I can see your argument in this video, I feel like historical context HAS to be taken into account as well. Being a WW2 enthusiast, I probably lean a bit more towards the historical aspects of the game. I do believe there needs to be a certain balance between history and fun in the game. Not exactly 50/50, but some sort of balance.
Well, you can keep both: the goal of every game is that player will alter history. So give focuses that make sense to "balance" your nation, and just hardcode the AI not to take them if it's not historical. For example, I hate when a fascist country needs a 35 or 70 day focus to get a war goal in mid 1941. They can justify in 10 days, why wasting a focus? But if you give me more compliance on that country, or some other bonus, than it's worth it. Open the Italian focus tree, the newest in the game. There are a billion focuses to go to war with the whole world, but why would I pick one when I can easily manually justify and go? Or I can just get the "all roads lead to Rome" and have 10+ war goals in a single focus? That's not impacting the "historical" balance, but improves the game. On the other hand, for non-fascist ones, you should get something for destabilizing the dictatorships: every European country outside of Germany had revolts and resistance against the fascists in some way, shape or form, it's not too hard to implement: random damage to buildings, reduced manpower, stuff like that. You can say something similar can be done against communists. Something to give a meaning to those focuses. I think I've played 2000 hours and if I'm lucky I click a couple of those "declare war" focuses just for the sake of it every game, but I could avoid them all together.
@@12garksome buffs are actualy provided in ussr war goals part of focus tree Like "face western fascism" gives +10% attack/defence for a year, same with japan Also i think this game (and stellaris, both are paradox games after all) are kinda blunt with what focuses/events do Its kinda stupid that i get +50 opinion with saudi arabia just for doing single focus, cant it involve more f-ing around with politic decisions? After all politics are one of most important parts of the game, why is it so bland?
Dave I think you missed out on a 4th resource that more or less defines the entire game, time. Germany and Japan are in a race against the clock. If Germany fails to wipe out the soviets or neutralize the UK, then it will get rekt by the US. Same goes for Japan. Conversely, USA must get as big and OP as possible ASAP or it will fail to stop GER/JAP. USA being OP is a core gameplay mechanic in itself.
@@themecha47 This is a tricky situation because of the historical reality of American power. I think the power of the US should be represented in game and like how the US plays.
I do agree with Dave that the Great Depression needs to be more difficult to get rid of or at least take longer (and time locking focuses is definitely not the right way to go about it) but I think that could be better served by limiting the US to some "ratio" of mils-to-civs so that the US can build up a bigger military industrial base if it can also build up a bigger civilian industry base. Perhaps the entire way to get out of the Great Depression could be split between building up a bigger civilian industrial base (representing actual economic growth) and political reforms to shore up the US' political, social, and financial institutions to allow recovery to take place, with the side effect being that if you build up military factories then you are likely delaying your own ability to end the Great Depression.
Balance doesn't make sense in this game. At least it shouldn't. Not every nation should be "balanced". Not every nation had or could dream of having resources or manpower historically speaking. It depends on the nation. I think much of what you said is looking at hoi4 as an e-sport and not an actual historical game. Many nations made the decisions they made before and during the war precisely because of the imbalance between themselves and their enemies. Trying to balance everyone would ruin the entire point of the game.
@@FeedbackIRL Hoi4 doesn't need to be balanced, its a "historical" warsim not a competitive RTS. Its not history vs game, its sim game vs comp game. No one wants historical over gameplay but I think more people want sim game > competitive game.
@FeedbackIRL i don't think thats what he's saying, i think he's saying you can choose your nation, and thus, no balance is needed if you wana play a broken nation, you play America, if you wana play a difficult nation, you go into the Balkans, so there is no balance because balance would make it NOT fun, because nobody wants every nation to be around the same level, or even close, a lot of people wana play USA and just crush anyone, and not have any problems, that is what he is saying
@@VerticalBricks4186Basically. Nations have interesting play because of their challenges. If every nation was balanced they lose their flavor. I want to be weak or strong sometimes and struggle to build up or struggle to keep allies alive. im in favor of less balance not more. Just give nations alt paths to change that flavor, add more formables, more coring options, a market, and some culture/government decisions instead of balancing. I think the modern obsession with balance is largely driven by a misunderstanding of why imbalance is fun in tbe right context.
@@FeedbackIRL EU4 or CK3 aren't "balanced" either - the same goes for a lot of historical and grand strategy games. HOI4 has a multiplayer, but it's not treated like an MMO or a MOBA where every playable character/faction has to be somewhat balanced for the game to be fun. Those games are all about who wins and who loses, but you don't have to think that way - and many HOI4 players I know do not. If you're playing as Luxembourg and fighting Germany, holding out for long enough should be considered a success even if you lose the war in the end. There's a historical situation and the other performances with the same nation you can compare your success to. Different games have different needs, no matter the medium they're played on.
From a game balancing perspective (in terms of a single player game), USA has to fight both Japan and Germany simultaneously. AI Germany is exceptional at curb stomping Russia, and Japan is fairly competent at beating the tar out of China, and the UK is essentially just a naval power to help secure European waters. USA also functions as the manufacturing and resource hub for the allies. The game is designed around USA's strengths because it places a timer on the Axis to be as succesful as quickly as possible before big daddy USA joins and beats the shit out of them. Thats why the time gating, and thats why USA is so strong. Thats also how MP games are decided, and that also adds immense value to playing an Axis aligned faction because you know you're playing uphill from the start and the game is on a timer, and that timer is the USA waking up. So if we nerf USA we completely remove that massive tension from the Axis which breaks the fundamental balancing point of the entire game, which is time.
The USSR ai is literally designed to fold without Western Relief idk why anyone would argue to nerf the US without a total rework of how Industry works in this game the USA is expected to do the Hard Carry for the West
This is game, if it was realistic Axis had small possibility of winning, because in reality United Kingdom dominated seas and skies even without USA and won battle of Britain, and USSR also stopped Germany by itself in late 1941
On the idea of decisions trading manpower for other resources: I feel like that’s not necessarily going to have those connotations if you flavor it right. Maybe something like “commit conscripts to production” so the loss of manpower is seen as putting them as workers in factories and mines instead of sacrifices.
"...the USA has everything, so what's it's incentive to join the war?... Just isolate yourself from the rest of the world!" It's almost as if they were dragged into the war by a surprise attack, or something. Historical HOI4 balancing should be about making each country as a powerful as it was irl, and the balancing therein was not balanced at all. HOI4 where everyone gets what they need so that way they can have a balanced military showdown should be the purview of ahistorical focuses and mods.
Weren't they rather dragged into the war against Germany by British spies blackmailing the anti-war politicians and FDR letting it happen because he wanted to USA to join the war anyway?
It's exceptionally easy to take your massive starting Navy to Hawaii and navally invade Japan while their entire army is fighting China. And since Germany doesn't declare war on the USA in HOI4 like what happened in real life, you can either immediately demolish Japan, or continue to isolate as Japan essentially never even attempts an invasion of the US.
more like forced to join from internal factors since Germany "needed" to be destroyed. so historically its was going to happen one way or another unless several live or die before the war.
and you're right, it probably would have happened regardless considering they joined the allied faction, however, HOI4 doesn't require you to be involved in the European conflict because you're not forced to join the allies (and you have no need) and Germany doesn't declare war on you. So in regards to what Dave said about isolating as the USA because you're not forced into conflict and becoming OP as hell, it's still an issue.@@Theanimeisforme
For the US, they can play the historical with a "segregated society" which could be a debuff to recruitable pop and have events that pop up that could increase "resistance" in your core states and have issues with taking more land. Might be something to help stunt the US and make it play more like a giant factory for the rest of the allies like it did in WW2 and give Germany and Japan more of a chance in the early game.
Giant factories in HOI are random jungle or desert nations in Asia or South America that fulfill the basic focus tree where they get more factories in a year than France by the start of WWII. More often than the US, some banana republic in Central America will send you equipment because the basic focus tree gives them a lot of industry. I love how Iraq in a desert province with a population of 50,000 owns more factories than the entire area of London
@@JosipBrozTITO8489The reason minor nations can hand out guns like candy later in the game is because they have never had any reason to spend them, barely have any men to give them to, and rarely switch their production lines. Nations like the US, Germany, and UK rarely have any equipment to hand out mid-war because they’re constantly losing them in combat *and* giving them to new troops they’re training, not because they aren’t producing anything.
But it is unthinkable that the Province of the Dominican Republic has more industry than Berlin. Small nations should be happy to have equipment from the First World War, not to have everything modern and still to give away.@@Buzzy_Bland
@@JosipBrozTITO8489 Minors *don’t* have more industry than Berlin. You can fit more factories in Berlin than a lot of minor nations can fit in their entire country. But you should basically never ask Germany for infantry equipment because the funny mustache man’s AI is written to be constantly training tons of divisions so they will basically always have a deficit of equipment, because there’s always an outward flow of weapons. Minor nations on the other hand will usually train up a handful of divisions and then completely run out of manpower. No manpower means no new troops, no new troops means no weapons going out, which means they will quickly stockpile. Which makes it *look* like they’re making more guns than Germany but in reality Germany is making many, *many* more guns… they’re just constantly spending them.
i f hate all this mechanic . I got this game to battle enemies not spend time on politics ! Old US was good same with Russia or Italy but now they so overcomplicated i dont like playing this nations anymore . I played once as Bulgaria with new focus tree and end up having civil wars every few months 🤣🤣🤣
@@Adumbshiba i knew someone gonna say that ! NO is not a skill issue is just i dont like politics in rts games ... If i did i would play crusader kings 3 instead . You know mod millenium dawn for HOI4 ? At the start in this mod i could wage wars in year 2000 .... and look at it now ! debt, corruption, budget-management , influence mechanics , new political system ....
@@Dynioglowy1986 hoi4 isn't even a rts. . . its a grand strategy game, if all you want to do is war just type in nocb and declare war on everyone, if you hate md download ww2 modern borders. Not everyone is like you, most enjoy the more expansive focus trees. Also I just realised did you fucking say crusader kings 3 has politics ?
@@satch5471 unless you spam troops out from the beginning, then you can do danzig 3-4 focuses in by just spamming shitty undermanned cav and converting it to infantry. it's an easy way to avoid ww2 or maybe get a decent sied reichskommisariat early in
It does not have to mean that you actually lose that manpower. Perhaps you can reserve manpower to carry out some tasks and you recover that manpower when the task is finished.
Another note on Yugoslavia is that Macedonia actually has quite the respectable deposits of Iron/Steel which are not represented in the game. Ofcourse, these were discovered/exploited after WW2, but I would argue that adding them as "prospecting focuses" or "exploitable resources" is more than justifiable. Quite honestly, Paradox really fumbled the bag with Yugoslavia's Focus Tree as it had the potential to be an incredibly fun one, especially the Communist Path and the Yugoslav Partisans.
USA needs similar nerf to what USSR got in No Step Back. US ground forces were wayyy behind everyone even up to Normandy, so maybe it could have something like "Isolationist military: +50% doctrine cost, -20% organisation", and also lock these focuses until you're at war with a major nation, just like in the USSR
China having manpower focusses is supposed to reflect the trouble with having both total mobilization and low war-support, making you unable to enact conscription laws, which is exacerbated by inefficient bureaucracy. It just doesn't work in practice.
Chromium is primarily used in later game units if I recall correctly. I know it is used in heavy tanks. So it is not completely useless. Just mostly useless
I love playing with the USA. I break the naval treaty early game, Japan, UK and France attack me, I activate home defense which puts me on war economy, mobilization and gets rid of the Great Depression. Then I fight on all fronts at the same time. Is fun, and not possible if you massively nerf the usa.
US should be OP af by 1942. The hard part should be mobilizing the latent resources. It’s far too easy to game the system to get rid of the modifiers at this point. And from a balancing perspective, US isn’t supposed to go elsewhere to find resources. It’s supposed to come in and defend the victims of fascist and communist nations that are being expanded into.
It would be cool if PDX overhauled resource development, extraction, and trade since it is so important but relatively underdeveloped compared to many other areas of the game. They should definitely induce more artificial scarcity on chromium and use additional chromium in more high-end technologies in the mid-late game especially for expensive things like armor, airplanes, and the navy. I do like the idea of revamped convoys and trains that are better but take more resources to produce. As an opposite to the austerity trains, high performance trains that deliver more supply at a higher resource and industrial cost is a decent idea, and similarly, more expensive convoys with better defensive capabilities like depth charges, AA, and movement speed could also work. Paradox should also add more strategic resources to the game like coal for electricity, paper for bureaucracy, textiles for infantry, food for manpower, copper for electronics, uranium for nukes, chemicals for refineries, plastics for support equipment, etc. There is a huge missed opportunity in not fleshing out the rest of the minor powers with unique tradeable resources that can be developed by political decisions or focus trees. In particular, Africa, Latin America, and South Asia lack many resources that should force the player to invest in economic relationships with less developed countries and regions to gain natural resources.
here is what i wanna say regarding japan's manpower, IT IS HUGE, not just from the home island, but also from its none core target area, if you really invest in collab government in all of its target, it used to have massive 10M manpower with limited conscription with female workers active, for now it is still massive, more than 4M, more than enough to deploy an entire army with full 40 width infantry division, with its standart right side grand battleplan, those infantry division can easily reach 200 breakthrough while no need to worry to replace the loss except for war support penalty from casualties which is also easily remedied by adding field hospital support company....
Losing Manpower doesn't need to mean sacrificing people, it's just using your able-bodied population for something other than the army. It would be nice if there was an economy law like Total Mobilization that reduced your manpower but increased your resource extraction, implying that people who would be conscripted are instead being sent to work in mines. I just played through Yugoslavia on most of the paths and tested most of the focuses to get the achievements. There's a couple pieces you're missing, especially with respect to conquest. If you stay non-aligned, you can't attack anyone until 50% world tension, at that point the UK will guarantee anyone you justify on. Even rushing fascist you can maybe get one war goal off before tension hits 20%, France revokes their guarantee on you and the UK and France guarantee everyone. Someone more clever with this than me could probably goad the AI into guaranteeing nations they don't care about but if you're just trying to play it straight it's a huge ballache. Also signing the Tripartite Pact or joining the Axis starts a civil war which as far as I could tell was unavoidable and I believe was a blocker for the rest of the fascist path. Half the focuses on the Axis path to remove country penalties are either "Eat a smaller version of the penalty for 1096 more days or give up your land to other countries," which isn't much of a choice, with one notable one where the option other than eat the penalty is to do a decision minigame to beat a rebellion, which was kind of OK once but I wouldn't want to bother with again. The Democratic/Non-aligned path isn't much better, you basically have to sit through 10ish focuses that release all your country as puppets and then reintegrate them to get rid of all the penalties, without much real choice. On the other hand the Communist path was presumably written by a Tito fanboy because Tito can apparently get everyone in the Balkans to stop hating each other if he puts his mind to it for 70 days at a time, 2 or 3 times total. It's definitely the most fun path I played out, I joined the Comintern since I needed to conquest all the neighboring countries for the achievements anyway but the Pan Balkan Congress could probably be fun. You'll have plenty of industry and manpower to put together a competent defense against the Axis, and if you did add Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to your faction your front line with them isn't even that big. I'd imagine the democratic path could be fun to if you want more of a desperate defense scenario, but it does require a lot of focus grind. For USA I think if they were going to rework it Congress would probably become a balance of power system. I'd think instead of having a magic lobby button, Congressional support for war measures could be influenced by war support and world tension, so one option is to build support naturally over the normal timeframe, but another is to use legislative tricks to pass the bills you want, with penalties to stability for doing it. If you're going for communist/fascist, this would be the only way to pass more radical bills and leads to a civil war, for a kind of "faster war entry" democratic path this would just mean you're entering the war earlier with poor stability and war support and maybe with Great Depression penalties not dealt with.
I think its ok to have an unbalanced game France for example has many disadvantages, but it can forge alliances. Every nation has to be aware of its weaknesses
It couls be an alternative, but then it wouldnt be a ww2 game anymore If every nation had the same infrastructure, resources manpower etc then its no different then playing something like age of empires, where everyone just starts at 0
Chinese building projects in WW2 often ment gobbling thousands locals serfes with pickaxes, so using manpower or even straight up population for construction buffs would make sense. But Paradox tries to stay away from war atrocities whenever possible.
so the new expansion seems to hype up the international market but why the hell would I want to sell equipment on the market, almost every faction thirsts for as much equipment as possible, as there is no upkeep, and you're going to upgrade your mobilization law anyway, meaning you need equipment. do I miss something or does paradox not understand their own game?
For minors, such as upcoming nordics, it really could be good to trade some of that military capacity for civs through this new mechanic. It adds dynamicity to the game, and it provides you a good way to get extra equipment in the late game as at some point the ai just stops creating new divisions, unlike player
At the beginning of the game in theory you'll have larger countries that won't be fighting until WWII starts selling their starting equipment to countries that have early game civil wars, in theory, effectively trading their existing stockpile for civilian factories to have a stronger industry later when they can make better equipment. Neutral countries can also RP selling equipment to the belligerents, although a player probably wouldn't want to stay neutral anyway. Lastly I'd guess countries will be more willing to sell their equipment than lend lease it, e.g. Germany might be able to buy arms from Nationalist Spain even if Spain's stockpile isn't that large.
@@Vaelosh466 plus that oil nation in south America thats neutral boggers me that they dont sell there excess fuels. nope landlease only and they refuses it 99% of the time. meaning they just waste oil production instead of getting som factories something they don't have.
The only “nerf” the US needs is to make the penalties harsher and severely punishing the player for entering early wars in a similar fashion to how the French break out into a civil war if they go to war too early (I.e. a civil war). Outside of that, it’s worth noting that the US has all of the resources it needs to fight and win the war, but it has considerable issues with accessing them. For instance, the navy can’t be expanded much with heavy capital ships due to the Washington Naval Treaty limiting the tonnage of the vessels the US can build. Manpower expansion is limited as the US due to the severe lack of war support, which requires time to expand. Coupled with that point, you’re barred from using those resources early on by the economic trade policy you’re on, meaning that - with both of those issues combined - your military expansion is severely limited. To top it off, the US has a severe lack of political power gain, which is required to fix all of the problems. So, these are balanced in the early game, but I think they should be stretched out for longer and require more effort to remove to gain those benefits. You can usually get through most of these issues by 1938. So, extending it to 1939 or 1940 in-game might help with balancing out the US. After all, the US should still have all of those things and should be a super power in the game, but it shouldn’t be such too early on.
24:52 I would add some more advice to the list: * Add non-mutually exclusive focuses and mutually exclusive focuses (in case of idiology dependent focuses) to achieve the same objectives (maybe partially) so they don't pick the same focuses in the same order (for example, multiple focuses to obtain same small amount of resources or manpower or factories in different branches of the tree). * If, because of historical reasons, a nation does not have enough manpower, resources or factories, maybe we could add some focuses to obtain these resources from major powers through factions, aliances or improving relations (maybe join a faction or improve relation with some major as prerequisite). The rewards from this focuses could be obtaining factitional manpower as volunteers, free units, free equipment instead of factories (maybe faction dependent)...
I think another thing for the USA nerfs could be its research speed, as before the war they werent upgrading or really getting anything new, hence why the first like year of the war Marines in the Pacific were using WW1 weaponry. Then once the war starts through like an escalation event for the USA or something their research speed and everything just skyrockets so they may be behind early on, but the they get way ahead later on (like historically they had Nukes in 1945 while other nations would be 1946 or later before they get any in-game).
I always thought that “civilian economy” should benefit you during peace time and the opposite during war time. The inverse could be said for “war economy,” being obviously useful during war time and hinders you during peace time.
I think the problem with America being OP is fine because you have to look at it in tandem with Japan and Germany. You’re supposed to be the looming force in waiting to join forcing those 2 powers to move as fast as possible. So I agree that the Great Depression should be worse, but the US doesn’t need a true nerf its supposed to be OP to give the fascist powers a true threat if they don’t perform good enough. The US also needs better alternative paths, they feel too small and boring imo.
I would really like a mechanic that is unique to all the different ideologies. For example: Communist nations get to exchange recruitable population factor for factory output. Something like this for all of the different ideologies would make picking them feel different and could be incorporated into the focus to make the exchanges more efficient.
as someone who's played USA the most, I think they should penalize building mils more than they do, US has all these focuses for converting civs to mils, but I usually just build mils straight up after the first year or two and don't feel that penalized for it. If they made the penalty higher for mils, then it would better simulate how the US had to rapidly convert itself to a war industry in 1941 Having to go to war to get off the great depression completely would also be good
I don't agree with the China argument. Sure you've got virtually (underlined) manpower but the 3% debuff from total mobilization can hamper your plans of Defense, and don't forget the nasty incompetent generals modifier you have to get rid of. Trading manpower for army xp and you need a lot of xp. Plus you have to shit out pure infantry if you want to survive so I think it's semi balanced, especially for a country historically so supported by it's massive population.
I think one problem about balancing resources is that it both a produced value and a production: imaging 20 steel is produced and 10 used by mils during 1 year, if the next year the mils use 25 they can't, like the 10 produced last year vanished. A solution could be using manpower to run resources production (and storing it like oil) the max still being current value. For trade, allow a bulk of manpower like the repair dockyards mechanic... Maybe.
A -80% resource extraction great depression penalty is not bad. It would nerf oil and fuel gain which should stop the USA from having max naval doctrine in 1940. The USA should also be perma stuck on free trade or catch a -50% stability hit. We all know a civil war would start if this happened irl. The biggest problem the USA has is building slots. Give the USA a miracle focus that boosts factory output and military construction speed by 300% for a year and add a shit load of building slots once the USA is in a defensive war with a major power. Pre 1942 USA should be weak.
For countries with resources that are not being sold on the market, especially when resources are earmarked for it, those countries should be able to buy their resources. The foreign factory would not be added to your count. Also, it is weird to me that AA guns, tier 1 and 2, cost more resources than artillery. A dual 40 mm cannon cannot cost more to make than a 75mm howitzer.
I like balance but i think its cool that this is so "unbalanced" Its meant to be realistic, ww2, so some nations are way stronger then others, and some can just not catch up at all through gobbling up the world
To me, the easy way to balance the US without throwing historical accuracy in the dumpster entirely, is nerfing the soviet and the British and giving them a cheap way to get lend lease. For example: if the soviet lose eastern Poland, they lose xxx trains and xxxx trucks, but if the US are in the war, they can get a decision to get a lend lease to compensate (which is also somewhat historical, the soviet received MASSIVE support in their logistics). And the US has to go ham on extra production just to keep up with things like that. And again, when they take the focus to move the industry to the urals, the amount of train and trucks required for their supply gets higher by a substantial amount, that you can get from the Allies via decision If the UK loses Egypt, they lose a bunch of equipment by event (and some goes to the Axis), and the US have to compensate losing their own, before even being the war. And you add a "submarines tax", that gets reduced by researching better techs, so for every 100 train the soviet ask, you lose 150 because something gets lost at sea, and if you don't oblige to these requests, then you see your allied die and you have to face off Germany without them. So if you play the US, you have to constantly fight to get a better industry and stockpile just to keep up with these things. At this point you'd have a massive economy, but 15 mils on train (that should cost more steel then they do in the game right now, for every nation) and 50 on trucks midgame is a massive toll for everyone. And you should get a spirits that makes convoys needs higher, because you are on the other side of an ocean and that's ridiculous that you can supply a million men with convoys you make in 3 weeks... On the other hand, US mainland should get some major buff in case of invasion. A real life invasion of the US is basically impossible, every man, women and children would point a gun at you, and in the game you usually steamroll them in 3 seconds after you land. It's so boring, landing in the US and winning should be like the final boss mission of every game, and that's embarrassingly easy. Same for Japan, you usually sweep them so easily that you never need nukes, while in irl it would have been a massacre with civilians trying to kill you in every way possible.
As Chromium is very rarely traded in then maybe its time to add another resource either in its place or in addition too. Manganese, Magnesium, Zinc, Tin, Copper etc were vastly important to the war economies of the world. Adding say a "soft metals" resource would help add more trade between nations, more decisions like "Scrap for Victory' , further exploit resources options. A little more complexity to plane/tank/ship designs in terms of resources needed and also the negative effects of not having enough.
Idk, WW2 was not a balanced conflict and Paradox has always gone for historicity over balance in their games, so I like it. For multiplayer balance is more important , but this is primarily a single player game. I'm good with nerfing the allies and buffing the axis in a competitive multiplayer ww2 game (like, say the board game Axis and Allies) for balance, but HOI4 isn't that kind of game, and that's ok.
I have to disagree with your argument on the USA. Before the USA gets rid of the great depression and joins the war, the Allies are in poor shape in both manpower/factories. They need a huge Super major to really do anything like D-day against a massive Germany or take on a Japan that will eat away the Allies rubber/ colonies in the east. You might argue that in a non historical play through, the USA is too strong but even for the USA to switch Communist/Fascist it needs to go through a civil war. Basically from a game play standpoint the USA is pretty much balanced.
I think resources need to be expanded. Not just for certain countries that already have focus trees, but for every nation. Resources can be a major roadblock. Even if resources are added as a decision unlocked through excavation technology, then so be it. Africa definitely needs more resources, and so does China. Why are all the Chinese resources in Guangxi?
I argue that USA focus tree should focus on improving their army, air, and navy(like italy and soviet). Even for historical perspective, they fought badly on both fronts at the start. For example, they should get rid of 'inaccurate torpedo' only by a focus tree(yes there is a focus to get rid of it, but no one does that since you can just use naval xp to simply replace it with a good spirit).
At the start of the war in the US a lot of production for minor things took place at nearly bespoke sites. People made things like tin utensils at workbenches in small towns, townhalls.converting manpower into offmap factories at a terrible efficiency should be a decision.
This video did come out a couple months ago but I think ToA kind of took this to heart - but it didnt turn out too well (and AAT to a degree). It gives minor nations the focus trees to not only solve the 3 issues he points out, but in terms of the context of a ww2 game, they are super unbalanced. Small nations can have focuses that give them industry/buffs, manpower/army buffs, and resources/cores to the point where they are so ridiculous. The balance of unbalanced nations (as it was historically) makes it a lot more enjoyable. Not only are you fighting against the condition of your starting nation, but you also have to fight against the luck of the draw for resources like they did. There should honestly be a more in-depth resource system that allows more control over the resources. IE steel needs to be refined with coal and iron, aluminum from bauxite, etc etc. The beauty is blackIce did a pretty good job of it and I am glad its around - but i would love to see more steps to make nations balanced through the unbalanced aspects (ie they can play to their strengths better)
On historical the game has to script UK to be kinda dumb for the axis to have a chance at all. They dont help france even if you as the player are holding off the axis for 2 years, and their giant navy doesnt hunt down the axis very often either. I feel like the axis may struggle even more with the new DLC coming out.
20:20 I would argue that the "industry" side of the US focus tree should actually be "No" at the start and "Yes" because of the focus tree because that is literally the one thing that the entire US focus tree revolves around: Waking the Sleeping Giant. Half of the entire tree is devoted to handling that issue whether you go with the Gold Standard, the fascists, the New Deal, or the communists.
China's manpower is just ridiculous. I had a game as Manchuko where I successfully unified China, but then got into a bloodbath with the European Axis (that steamrolled the allied and the soviet). I had no industry to make quality troops, but I compensated with quantity, and pushed through Siberia and India to reach Europe. I lost 30 some milion men. When i finally got the notification "low manpower", i went to my main page looking to up my conscription law, and I realized I was on volunteer only 🤣. Upped one law, back to 35M manpower, off we go 🤣
America dont get no chromium which is one thing they actually need since you will want to build more carriers and north carolina style bbs but you get so many civs you could probs just trade that shit
15:15 if you take democratic path and release your angry nations as subjects, the generic focus tree will give them additional factories, so when you unite you will get even more!
Personally I think the mobilization options need to be reworked. Like there are some soft factors in trade that makes each option something to consider, and conscription there's invisible soft factors that have some impact on the timing of when you upgrade. But Mobilization there is NO reason not to jump up the first chance you get since civilian factories producing civilian goods does literally less than nothing for your nation, apparently them getting less or more toasters doesn't impact their war support or their unity in any way, so even the late comer nations like the US have no reason not to jump on War Mobilization or total mobilization first possible chance, heck even the supposed negatives (for factory build times) is entirely offset by even getting one extra factory for construction by upgrading. The mechanics of the game more or less make you rush to war rather than encouraging nations who it might be wiser to hold off to actually do so.
USA idea for a better balance of the Focus Tree, aside of adding more nerfs to the Great Depression debuff (e.g. less resource efficiency, less construction speed, more consumer goods factories), I would front load the "cost" of getting rid of the debuff and delay the gratification. This would also play to the historical community, with the first couple of New Deal focuses giving barely any advantages and having a higher waiting time and political requirement. Then the next 2 (adding to 4 rather than 3) focuses are the ones that really ramp up thanks to the previous ones, with smaller requirements. At the moment, if you just focus on getting rid of the Great Depression, the debuffs are gone by Feb 1938. The idea of adding an extra focus and upfronting the costs would mean getting rid of it perhaps by mid 1939. A way of balancing the political side of things, with the Congress, would be to somewhat link it to stability. Start with lower stability due to Great Depression, making it harder to get the majority to start the New Deal path. Also maybe force something like, make research more average, and buff it through focuses giving refuge to German, Italian and other scientists, at the cost of stability (once again, if you want the current level of research slots and research bonuses, make it harder for you to get out of the Great Depression). In general, play with the Great Depression indirectly via reducing/boosting Stability, therefore reducing/increasing your ability to complete those focuses
I like your ideas and presentations, but I don't agree about erring on the side of balance. I feel a major source of fun is specifically the imbalance. The disparity is what allows for the "upset victory". If I were specifying the direction of this game's mechanics, I would try to use historic data as the constraints when refining the parameters. In other words, I would attempt to develop the underlying mechanics and set the parameters such that, when players make the in game same decisions as historic figures did, the historic outcomes would result. The fun of the game would be: using those mechanics but making different decisions. Of course this explicitly goes against the idea of balancing the nations, it makes them decidedly imbalanced. I respect your point of view that more balanced nations adds a benefit to the game, it has merit. However, it's not a characteristic that draws me towards HoI4 in the first place. Despite not agreeing on one of your premises, I still enjoyed this video. Keep up the good work.
USA should and is meant to have every resource except rubber lmao (it doesnt start with chormium but can build it), it should also have way more building slots soo it can also build rubber and actually have more factories than the entire axis or entire rest of the allies combined but i think people wouldnt like that for some reason
The way to balance the US is to incentize building Sythnetic rubber you know the thing it did in real life to the point where natural rubber almost doesn't exist
This is why the Polish tree is basically perfect. You start off weak in all three areas and gradually gain strength until you can roll over all your enemies. Easily my favourite country.
The US is like easy mode, and at the same time it's kinda boring to play with it. I haven't explored all the paths in the focus tree but playing the US is click buttons to get free stuff in the early game, and then smash everybody else mid game. There is no late game. But... from a different point of view having a very small starting army, the US is a very tempting target for other countries if you can take them down before they snowball out of control. They have so much industry, manpower and resources that even with the occupation penalties conquering the US is an automatic ticket to major power. For example, Mexico or Canada's only restrain to invade the US is how fast you can go facist or communist. But any latin american country with a reasonable size and in range of the US can do it too, I've done it with Argentina and Brazil, I'm thinking I could also do it with Venezuela which already starts facist and can get a lot of manpower by coring Colombia, Ecuador and Panama to form Gran Colombia
I love it when a person whose maximum is to shoot video clips on a single player, where he removes enemy divisions through the console and gives himself the best equipment, tries to seriously talk about the balance in a game in which he UNDERSTANDS NOTHING. The USA is locked up to 37-38, you can't build factories and military plants +- until the moment when all the major majors, including MP and single, start doing this. About chrome, just lmao. the top 2 resource in the game is more important after steel, but of course he knows better, because it's obvious that if he makes infantry and lets it push with autoplan, then everyone does it
@@FeedbackIRL Can I ask you a serious question. When was the last time you made a proper tank, non-crappy or actually constructed a proper navy that wasn't just crappy cruisers? You'll understand why chromium is a cherished resource by the end of it. Try constructing a 250-ship navy, 25 ships per task force. Ten submarines, ten destroyers, two light cruisers, one heavy cruiser, one battleship (or battlecruiser, if escort fleet) and one carrier per task force. Except with the most high-quality templates.
I think part of the problems with resources is beacuse you didn't think about trading, and maybe thr correct ponit of wiev is if you need to trade a lot of your factories for resources
The United States is the backstop for the Allies. It's got all the oil. France has none so trade is born. British Navy and Air Force need oil too. At start the US doesn't have enough factorys to arm it's skeleton Army and allies. But has steel for France. Midgame the US needs to supply guns and tanks to everybody. Especially the Soviets who lost factories to make their own . It takes time to rebuild factories from the Germans. The shipbuilding was to replace merchant ship losses in the Atlantic for US /Britain and provide heavy lift and supply in the Pacific no railroads there. The Indian army also needs guns artillery as well .India needs Trains, trucks and merchant ships to deploy to Africa and supply its country. Soviets too.The Australians need planes. That is a lot of building but not necessarily for the direct benefit of the United States. Did you ever read a book?
If we want to be talking historical, then US needs a massive nerf to their army quality, since their equipment was absolute shit compared to everyone else pretty much until 1944
Honestly, for the USA they should make it that you need to nationalize factories and resources in order to use them, to slow them down. Which would mirror what the real United States did
I think in US case you should go more to the war suport and mobilizing your economy mostly with focus tree. So you need more focuses that slowly gain war support and unlock mobilization branch . So you can have that almost 200 factorys but you need time to shift. World tension also should be a factor.
It is a factor Giant wakes can't be unlocked until your war support is above 35%. The great depression doesn't make your economy good your still losing 50% of your factories to your economy law it just gives you 35% of ther other 50%
Id be fun if they add a decent bit of Tungsten in Austria, as Austria really does nothing in game expect get eaten by germany or hungary. Both countries having a severe lack of tungsten which for Hungary makes it difficult to make artillery and Germany difficult to make Medium tanks (if your playing without no step back) Not sure if tungsten in Austria makes sense historically but gameplay wise id be fun.
i wholeheartedly disagree with your stance on the USA. When every nation is balanced around the same principles in the exact same way, it hurts the uniqueness of each nation and reduces the replayability of the game. USA being stupidly strong is just fine. Not every nation needs to be similar in strength. A large variety in strength between nations is what makes this game appealing to both casual players and highly skilled players.
Great depression should have tiers. And decisions and events while it's on to keep the player engaged. I agree it should be way worse but slowly improved over time.
The comments on the implications of decisions are really interesting. Which is why IMO, you really can't squeeze out everything as a country like the USSR, Germany or countries with colonies or puppet states like UK, France and Japan. If you had a decision to say, increase metal production in Manchuria but you would be taking manpower away, that's an implication. If you could increase recon at the cost of higher equipment loss or attrition as the USSR, that's an implication. If you force more conscripts and take them from your colonies as the UK or France, that's an implication. If you could increase compliance and reduce resistance for the cost of large amounts of population in a state as Germany, that's an implication. These are all things that could have been considered but it's too touchy for PDX to really touch beyond abstraction via game mechanics (Harsh Quotas occupation setting, coring, etc.).
Chromium should NOT be added to random units in the game. It is needed for the more powerful Tanks and Ships and can be a bottleneck in the late game, when the war is already decided.
True True TRUEEEEEEEEEE
As turkey I never see my Chromium being traded only iron...........
@@polatpolatcan4749cause the AI is incompetent. In multiplayer games chromium is always needed by navy countries and usually tank minors and germany.
Chromium was pretty vital and it should be added *but* substitutable, for example chrome lining for rifle barrels... Your gun will last longer (so basically you lose less due to attrition) but you can very well not do it and survive either way, just if you have chromium you can dedicate more factories to producing something other than infantry equipment
@@domaxltv at that point it would be a gun designer
I lean more towards the historical aspect of the game so I don't think balance is really necessary, so long as each countries real world situation is represented reasonably accurately. I know this will be unpopular but I also don't really like that all of a nations issues can be solved by ~41ish simply by going down the focus tree and/or taking decisions, with no new "problems" being introduced from that point. For example, by the end of the war the UK is typically a juggernaut whereas in real life it was broke and struggling to stay afloat. I understand that it's a game to be played for fun, but thats just my opinion.
i agree with you on this, this is a historical game and should be treated as such. There is no need to balance every country for multiplayer we have mods for that.
I completely agree, I think it’s a little ridiculous how so many minors have the possibility of doing a world conquest. Minor nations shouldn’t be “balanced” as feedback described, because they are minors. And I think that the nations should be represented accurately like you said, which means they aren’t balanced, and shouldn’t be. The US should be far more powerful than it is when it joins the war, in reality the US was able to fund effectively two separate wars at the same time, but in hoi4 (especially with ai USA), they can barely manage that. Additionally Germany should be dwarfed by the factories, resources, and manpower of the allies by 42.
This is just another side note, but if paradox wants to actually balance their game, the focus should be on the ai, not focus trees (Granted several focus trees could be made better, and there are several nations that still need focus trees). In the current state the ai is incompetent and the pacific war in particular is a joke (the pacific war needs a maaaajor rework).
Check the Ultra Historical mod that tries to recreate historical situation and not gamey balance
I mean i agree with you on certain decree like adding new problems throughout the game however that could be still done in a fun way like: as yugo unite the balkans. you would gain factories manpower and so on but you would get debuffed as hell bcs it's balkans you know. i think the balance should be done in a fun way not to make all countries truly equal but so you can roleplay that country better
UK spent more than the Soviet during the war, they were an industrial powerhouse. But if you say that the game should be balanced historically then it should be impossible for the axis to win
I would argue, as others have said, that Paradox have balanced the game... And it is these 'balances', or rather unbalances, that contributed to the war (with the edition of the odd mad man here and there). If you want a game where everyone is either on (or soon can be on) an equal footing then don't choose a game based on the real world and history.
He never said that he wanted everyone to be equal but that each country must lack something at the start.
And stop saying historical game when USA have way too much divisions compare to real life, when Germany has no horses (they used a lot of horses at the beginning bc they lacked trucks) at start of ww2 etc.
It is based on history but with some limitations and things to make it fun.
Usa had an army of 140k people before ww2 and yet in the game they start with more
@@Fox13440 because national guard is counted as the army
@@tizi087 so why reservist in America are counted as army and not in other countries wtf
@@Fox13440 i guess because the national guard is a mobilised reserve force
@@Fox13440The way the U.S handles the national guard is different compared to other nations reservists, and the National Guard is separate from the Army reserve
For the China manpower bit and the Forced Conscription focus, I think that's in the game for the historical part, but also because I think Paradox feels that it's easy to overwhelm china, especially with it's army debuffs, and since they lose territory they then lose that man power and need to dig for more. Of course this doesn't take into account more experienced players that can hold china and therefore have access to more manpower
maybe reduced training time too?
>steamroll the soviet union as germany with space marine template
>send them to the uk and take it too
>send the space marines to asia
>they can't break china
>build up the logistics over in asia and decide to see if i can actually beat china with japan
>it takes fucking 2 years with all green air superiority, nukes, and an entire army group of my most overpowered units to finally bring them down
man taking china gave me more trouble than the soviets and uk even
Honestly if that's what they was going for it doesn't really work. Supply in China is pretty garbage so you're better off going quality > quantity just so you don't get even more massive debuffs from supply issues on top of your army debuffs at the start. I delete quite a few units when starting as china just because of that.
@@TheJimmy11also you have zero factories to give guns to those soldiers. Better equipped divisions is better than more divisions
While I can see your argument in this video, I feel like historical context HAS to be taken into account as well. Being a WW2 enthusiast, I probably lean a bit more towards the historical aspects of the game. I do believe there needs to be a certain balance between history and fun in the game. Not exactly 50/50, but some sort of balance.
Well, you can keep both: the goal of every game is that player will alter history. So give focuses that make sense to "balance" your nation, and just hardcode the AI not to take them if it's not historical.
For example, I hate when a fascist country needs a 35 or 70 day focus to get a war goal in mid 1941. They can justify in 10 days, why wasting a focus?
But if you give me more compliance on that country, or some other bonus, than it's worth it. Open the Italian focus tree, the newest in the game. There are a billion focuses to go to war with the whole world, but why would I pick one when I can easily manually justify and go?
Or I can just get the "all roads lead to Rome" and have 10+ war goals in a single focus?
That's not impacting the "historical" balance, but improves the game.
On the other hand, for non-fascist ones, you should get something for destabilizing the dictatorships: every European country outside of Germany had revolts and resistance against the fascists in some way, shape or form, it's not too hard to implement: random damage to buildings, reduced manpower, stuff like that.
You can say something similar can be done against communists.
Something to give a meaning to those focuses. I think I've played 2000 hours and if I'm lucky I click a couple of those "declare war" focuses just for the sake of it every game, but I could avoid them all together.
@@12garksome buffs are actualy provided in ussr war goals part of focus tree
Like "face western fascism" gives +10% attack/defence for a year, same with japan
Also i think this game (and stellaris, both are paradox games after all) are kinda blunt with what focuses/events do
Its kinda stupid that i get +50 opinion with saudi arabia just for doing single focus, cant it involve more f-ing around with politic decisions? After all politics are one of most important parts of the game, why is it so bland?
Dave I think you missed out on a 4th resource that more or less defines the entire game, time. Germany and Japan are in a race against the clock. If Germany fails to wipe out the soviets or neutralize the UK, then it will get rekt by the US. Same goes for Japan. Conversely, USA must get as big and OP as possible ASAP or it will fail to stop GER/JAP. USA being OP is a core gameplay mechanic in itself.
i dont think thats a good standard to have an entire game warped by a single nation.
@@themecha47 Really? You think that it's a bad standard for a WW2 game to model WW2?
@@themecha47 This is a tricky situation because of the historical reality of American power. I think the power of the US should be represented in game and like how the US plays.
I do agree with Dave that the Great Depression needs to be more difficult to get rid of or at least take longer (and time locking focuses is definitely not the right way to go about it) but I think that could be better served by limiting the US to some "ratio" of mils-to-civs so that the US can build up a bigger military industrial base if it can also build up a bigger civilian industry base. Perhaps the entire way to get out of the Great Depression could be split between building up a bigger civilian industrial base (representing actual economic growth) and political reforms to shore up the US' political, social, and financial institutions to allow recovery to take place, with the side effect being that if you build up military factories then you are likely delaying your own ability to end the Great Depression.
Balance doesn't make sense in this game. At least it shouldn't. Not every nation should be "balanced". Not every nation had or could dream of having resources or manpower historically speaking. It depends on the nation. I think much of what you said is looking at hoi4 as an e-sport and not an actual historical game. Many nations made the decisions they made before and during the war precisely because of the imbalance between themselves and their enemies. Trying to balance everyone would ruin the entire point of the game.
History Vs Computer game. Somethings got to give
@@FeedbackIRL Hoi4 doesn't need to be balanced, its a "historical" warsim not a competitive RTS. Its not history vs game, its sim game vs comp game. No one wants historical over gameplay but I think more people want sim game > competitive game.
@FeedbackIRL i don't think thats what he's saying, i think he's saying you can choose your nation, and thus, no balance is needed if you wana play a broken nation, you play America, if you wana play a difficult nation, you go into the Balkans, so there is no balance because balance would make it NOT fun, because nobody wants every nation to be around the same level, or even close, a lot of people wana play USA and just crush anyone, and not have any problems, that is what he is saying
@@VerticalBricks4186Basically. Nations have interesting play because of their challenges. If every nation was balanced they lose their flavor. I want to be weak or strong sometimes and struggle to build up or struggle to keep allies alive.
im in favor of less balance not more. Just give nations alt paths to change that flavor, add more formables, more coring options, a market, and some culture/government decisions instead of balancing. I think the modern obsession with balance is largely driven by a misunderstanding of why imbalance is fun in tbe right context.
@@FeedbackIRL EU4 or CK3 aren't "balanced" either - the same goes for a lot of historical and grand strategy games.
HOI4 has a multiplayer, but it's not treated like an MMO or a MOBA where every playable character/faction has to be somewhat balanced for the game to be fun. Those games are all about who wins and who loses, but you don't have to think that way - and many HOI4 players I know do not. If you're playing as Luxembourg and fighting Germany, holding out for long enough should be considered a success even if you lose the war in the end. There's a historical situation and the other performances with the same nation you can compare your success to.
Different games have different needs, no matter the medium they're played on.
From a game balancing perspective (in terms of a single player game), USA has to fight both Japan and Germany simultaneously. AI Germany is exceptional at curb stomping Russia, and Japan is fairly competent at beating the tar out of China, and the UK is essentially just a naval power to help secure European waters. USA also functions as the manufacturing and resource hub for the allies. The game is designed around USA's strengths because it places a timer on the Axis to be as succesful as quickly as possible before big daddy USA joins and beats the shit out of them. Thats why the time gating, and thats why USA is so strong. Thats also how MP games are decided, and that also adds immense value to playing an Axis aligned faction because you know you're playing uphill from the start and the game is on a timer, and that timer is the USA waking up. So if we nerf USA we completely remove that massive tension from the Axis which breaks the fundamental balancing point of the entire game, which is time.
The USSR ai is literally designed to fold without Western Relief idk why anyone would argue to nerf the US without a total rework of how Industry works in this game the USA is expected to do the Hard Carry for the West
makes sense
This is game, if it was realistic Axis had small possibility of winning, because in reality United Kingdom dominated seas and skies even without USA and won battle of Britain, and USSR also stopped Germany by itself in late 1941
On the idea of decisions trading manpower for other resources: I feel like that’s not necessarily going to have those connotations if you flavor it right. Maybe something like “commit conscripts to production” so the loss of manpower is seen as putting them as workers in factories and mines instead of sacrifices.
Yeah exactly, "Conscript Workers" instead of "Conscript Soldiers"
"...the USA has everything, so what's it's incentive to join the war?... Just isolate yourself from the rest of the world!"
It's almost as if they were dragged into the war by a surprise attack, or something.
Historical HOI4 balancing should be about making each country as a powerful as it was irl, and the balancing therein was not balanced at all.
HOI4 where everyone gets what they need so that way they can have a balanced military showdown should be the purview of ahistorical focuses and mods.
check the Ultra Historical Mod that is made under historical situation and not gamey balance
Weren't they rather dragged into the war against Germany by British spies blackmailing the anti-war politicians and FDR letting it happen because he wanted to USA to join the war anyway?
It's exceptionally easy to take your massive starting Navy to Hawaii and navally invade Japan while their entire army is fighting China. And since Germany doesn't declare war on the USA in HOI4 like what happened in real life, you can either immediately demolish Japan, or continue to isolate as Japan essentially never even attempts an invasion of the US.
more like forced to join from internal factors since Germany "needed" to be destroyed. so historically its was going to happen one way or another unless several live or die before the war.
and you're right, it probably would have happened regardless considering they joined the allied faction, however, HOI4 doesn't require you to be involved in the European conflict because you're not forced to join the allies (and you have no need) and Germany doesn't declare war on you. So in regards to what Dave said about isolating as the USA because you're not forced into conflict and becoming OP as hell, it's still an issue.@@Theanimeisforme
For the US, they can play the historical with a "segregated society" which could be a debuff to recruitable pop and have events that pop up that could increase "resistance" in your core states and have issues with taking more land. Might be something to help stunt the US and make it play more like a giant factory for the rest of the allies like it did in WW2 and give Germany and Japan more of a chance in the early game.
Giant factories in HOI are random jungle or desert nations in Asia or South America that fulfill the basic focus tree where they get more factories in a year than France by the start of WWII.
More often than the US, some banana republic in Central America will send you equipment because the basic focus tree gives them a lot of industry. I love how Iraq in a desert province with a population of 50,000 owns more factories than the entire area of London
@@JosipBrozTITO8489The reason minor nations can hand out guns like candy later in the game is because they have never had any reason to spend them, barely have any men to give them to, and rarely switch their production lines. Nations like the US, Germany, and UK rarely have any equipment to hand out mid-war because they’re constantly losing them in combat *and* giving them to new troops they’re training, not because they aren’t producing anything.
But it is unthinkable that the Province of the Dominican Republic has more industry than Berlin. Small nations should be happy to have equipment from the First World War, not to have everything modern and still to give away.@@Buzzy_Bland
@@JosipBrozTITO8489 Minors *don’t* have more industry than Berlin. You can fit more factories in Berlin than a lot of minor nations can fit in their entire country.
But you should basically never ask Germany for infantry equipment because the funny mustache man’s AI is written to be constantly training tons of divisions so they will basically always have a deficit of equipment, because there’s always an outward flow of weapons.
Minor nations on the other hand will usually train up a handful of divisions and then completely run out of manpower. No manpower means no new troops, no new troops means no weapons going out, which means they will quickly stockpile. Which makes it *look* like they’re making more guns than Germany but in reality Germany is making many, *many* more guns… they’re just constantly spending them.
I love being delayed doing anything as America because i get 400 bad events in a row so congress hates me
i f hate all this mechanic . I got this game to battle enemies not spend time on politics ! Old US was good same with Russia or Italy but now they so overcomplicated i dont like playing this nations anymore .
I played once as Bulgaria with new focus tree and end up having civil wars every few months 🤣🤣🤣
@@Dynioglowy1986sounds like a skill issue tbh
@@Adumbshiba i knew someone gonna say that ! NO is not a skill issue is just i dont like politics in rts games ... If i did i would play crusader kings 3 instead .
You know mod millenium dawn for HOI4 ? At the start in this mod i could wage wars in year 2000 .... and look at it now ! debt, corruption, budget-management , influence mechanics , new political system ....
@@Dynioglowy1986 sounds like a skill issue tbh
@@Dynioglowy1986 hoi4 isn't even a rts. . . its a grand strategy game, if all you want to do is war just type in nocb and declare war on everyone, if you hate md download ww2 modern borders. Not everyone is like you, most enjoy the more expansive focus trees. Also I just realised did you fucking say crusader kings 3 has politics ?
we need a Germany rework. 70 day focuses equate to suffering.
Hard agree, even rushing the bare essential focuses your still past the 1 september 1939 point when doing danzig or war.
Bitt3rSteel has a good video that can get you to war decently before the actual historical date.
And if they're 70 days, they should at least be worth it.
Those fucking focus times are such bullshit. The Westwall one especially. That one should honestly just be unlocked by default. Makes zero sense.
@@satch5471 unless you spam troops out from the beginning, then you can do danzig 3-4 focuses in by just spamming shitty undermanned cav and converting it to infantry. it's an easy way to avoid ww2 or maybe get a decent sied reichskommisariat early in
8:00 that part should not be a problem if we take into account that you can sacrifice manpower in EU4 to build great projects.
It does not have to mean that you actually lose that manpower. Perhaps you can reserve manpower to carry out some tasks and you recover that manpower when the task is finished.
Another note on Yugoslavia is that Macedonia actually has quite the respectable deposits of Iron/Steel which are not represented in the game. Ofcourse, these were discovered/exploited after WW2, but I would argue that adding them as "prospecting focuses" or "exploitable resources" is more than justifiable.
Quite honestly, Paradox really fumbled the bag with Yugoslavia's Focus Tree as it had the potential to be an incredibly fun one, especially the Communist Path and the Yugoslav Partisans.
Can’t forget that the us has isolationist economy where they lose even more factories and construction speed.
USA needs similar nerf to what USSR got in No Step Back. US ground forces were wayyy behind everyone even up to Normandy, so maybe it could have something like "Isolationist military: +50% doctrine cost, -20% organisation", and also lock these focuses until you're at war with a major nation, just like in the USSR
China having manpower focusses is supposed to reflect the trouble with having both total mobilization and low war-support, making you unable to enact conscription laws, which is exacerbated by inefficient bureaucracy.
It just doesn't work in practice.
As historical accuracy fanboy: PLEASE DON'T LISTEN TO HIM
Chromium is primarily used in later game units if I recall correctly. I know it is used in heavy tanks. So it is not completely useless. Just mostly useless
Why would you need to increase the amount of senators to pass laws in hoi4? Thats how it is irl they need 51% support not 60%
We need less balance and more histotical things and options to choose.
I love playing with the USA. I break the naval treaty early game, Japan, UK and France attack me, I activate home defense which puts me on war economy, mobilization and gets rid of the Great Depression. Then I fight on all fronts at the same time. Is fun, and not possible if you massively nerf the usa.
US should be OP af by 1942. The hard part should be mobilizing the latent resources. It’s far too easy to game the system to get rid of the modifiers at this point.
And from a balancing perspective, US isn’t supposed to go elsewhere to find resources. It’s supposed to come in and defend the victims of fascist and communist nations that are being expanded into.
Except no.
The quality of US military equipment was still behind everyone else in 1942
It would be cool if PDX overhauled resource development, extraction, and trade since it is so important but relatively underdeveloped compared to many other areas of the game. They should definitely induce more artificial scarcity on chromium and use additional chromium in more high-end technologies in the mid-late game especially for expensive things like armor, airplanes, and the navy. I do like the idea of revamped convoys and trains that are better but take more resources to produce. As an opposite to the austerity trains, high performance trains that deliver more supply at a higher resource and industrial cost is a decent idea, and similarly, more expensive convoys with better defensive capabilities like depth charges, AA, and movement speed could also work. Paradox should also add more strategic resources to the game like coal for electricity, paper for bureaucracy, textiles for infantry, food for manpower, copper for electronics, uranium for nukes, chemicals for refineries, plastics for support equipment, etc. There is a huge missed opportunity in not fleshing out the rest of the minor powers with unique tradeable resources that can be developed by political decisions or focus trees. In particular, Africa, Latin America, and South Asia lack many resources that should force the player to invest in economic relationships with less developed countries and regions to gain natural resources.
here is what i wanna say regarding japan's manpower, IT IS HUGE, not just from the home island, but also from its none core target area, if you really invest in collab government in all of its target, it used to have massive 10M manpower with limited conscription with female workers active, for now it is still massive, more than 4M, more than enough to deploy an entire army with full 40 width infantry division, with its standart right side grand battleplan, those infantry division can easily reach 200 breakthrough while no need to worry to replace the loss except for war support penalty from casualties which is also easily remedied by adding field hospital support company....
You have to consider that the USA spends half the game not doing anything. Yeah it's the most powerful but, it's caged until mid game or later.
Losing Manpower doesn't need to mean sacrificing people, it's just using your able-bodied population for something other than the army. It would be nice if there was an economy law like Total Mobilization that reduced your manpower but increased your resource extraction, implying that people who would be conscripted are instead being sent to work in mines.
I just played through Yugoslavia on most of the paths and tested most of the focuses to get the achievements. There's a couple pieces you're missing, especially with respect to conquest. If you stay non-aligned, you can't attack anyone until 50% world tension, at that point the UK will guarantee anyone you justify on. Even rushing fascist you can maybe get one war goal off before tension hits 20%, France revokes their guarantee on you and the UK and France guarantee everyone. Someone more clever with this than me could probably goad the AI into guaranteeing nations they don't care about but if you're just trying to play it straight it's a huge ballache. Also signing the Tripartite Pact or joining the Axis starts a civil war which as far as I could tell was unavoidable and I believe was a blocker for the rest of the fascist path. Half the focuses on the Axis path to remove country penalties are either "Eat a smaller version of the penalty for 1096 more days or give up your land to other countries," which isn't much of a choice, with one notable one where the option other than eat the penalty is to do a decision minigame to beat a rebellion, which was kind of OK once but I wouldn't want to bother with again. The Democratic/Non-aligned path isn't much better, you basically have to sit through 10ish focuses that release all your country as puppets and then reintegrate them to get rid of all the penalties, without much real choice.
On the other hand the Communist path was presumably written by a Tito fanboy because Tito can apparently get everyone in the Balkans to stop hating each other if he puts his mind to it for 70 days at a time, 2 or 3 times total. It's definitely the most fun path I played out, I joined the Comintern since I needed to conquest all the neighboring countries for the achievements anyway but the Pan Balkan Congress could probably be fun. You'll have plenty of industry and manpower to put together a competent defense against the Axis, and if you did add Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to your faction your front line with them isn't even that big. I'd imagine the democratic path could be fun to if you want more of a desperate defense scenario, but it does require a lot of focus grind.
For USA I think if they were going to rework it Congress would probably become a balance of power system. I'd think instead of having a magic lobby button, Congressional support for war measures could be influenced by war support and world tension, so one option is to build support naturally over the normal timeframe, but another is to use legislative tricks to pass the bills you want, with penalties to stability for doing it. If you're going for communist/fascist, this would be the only way to pass more radical bills and leads to a civil war, for a kind of "faster war entry" democratic path this would just mean you're entering the war earlier with poor stability and war support and maybe with Great Depression penalties not dealt with.
But Tito was basically the only reason Yugoslavia stayed united for as long as it did
I think its ok to have an unbalanced game
France for example has many disadvantages, but it can forge alliances.
Every nation has to be aware of its weaknesses
Maybe that could be a mod. Balancing out nations so it is more fun. The base game should be historical all the way
It couls be an alternative, but then it wouldnt be a ww2 game anymore
If every nation had the same infrastructure, resources manpower etc then its no different then playing something like age of empires, where everyone just starts at 0
Chinese building projects in WW2 often ment gobbling thousands locals serfes with pickaxes, so using manpower or even straight up population for construction buffs would make sense. But Paradox tries to stay away from war atrocities whenever possible.
doing that in a WW2 game is either woke or just stupid probaply both
@@goodmusic4673 give it a few decades and people will stop caring
so the new expansion seems to hype up the international market
but why the hell would I want to sell equipment on the market, almost every faction thirsts for as much equipment as possible, as there is no upkeep, and you're going to upgrade your mobilization law anyway, meaning you need equipment.
do I miss something or does paradox not understand their own game?
For minors, such as upcoming nordics, it really could be good to trade some of that military capacity for civs through this new mechanic. It adds dynamicity to the game, and it provides you a good way to get extra equipment in the late game as at some point the ai just stops creating new divisions, unlike player
At the beginning of the game in theory you'll have larger countries that won't be fighting until WWII starts selling their starting equipment to countries that have early game civil wars, in theory, effectively trading their existing stockpile for civilian factories to have a stronger industry later when they can make better equipment. Neutral countries can also RP selling equipment to the belligerents, although a player probably wouldn't want to stay neutral anyway. Lastly I'd guess countries will be more willing to sell their equipment than lend lease it, e.g. Germany might be able to buy arms from Nationalist Spain even if Spain's stockpile isn't that large.
@@Vaelosh466 plus that oil nation in south America thats neutral boggers me that they dont sell there excess fuels. nope landlease only and they refuses it 99% of the time. meaning they just waste oil production instead of getting som factories something they don't have.
The only “nerf” the US needs is to make the penalties harsher and severely punishing the player for entering early wars in a similar fashion to how the French break out into a civil war if they go to war too early (I.e. a civil war).
Outside of that, it’s worth noting that the US has all of the resources it needs to fight and win the war, but it has considerable issues with accessing them.
For instance, the navy can’t be expanded much with heavy capital ships due to the Washington Naval Treaty limiting the tonnage of the vessels the US can build. Manpower expansion is limited as the US due to the severe lack of war support, which requires time to expand. Coupled with that point, you’re barred from using those resources early on by the economic trade policy you’re on, meaning that - with both of those issues combined - your military expansion is severely limited.
To top it off, the US has a severe lack of political power gain, which is required to fix all of the problems.
So, these are balanced in the early game, but I think they should be stretched out for longer and require more effort to remove to gain those benefits. You can usually get through most of these issues by 1938. So, extending it to 1939 or 1940 in-game might help with balancing out the US.
After all, the US should still have all of those things and should be a super power in the game, but it shouldn’t be such too early on.
24:52 I would add some more advice to the list:
* Add non-mutually exclusive focuses and mutually exclusive focuses (in case of idiology dependent focuses) to achieve the same objectives (maybe partially) so they don't pick the same focuses in the same order (for example, multiple focuses to obtain same small amount of resources or manpower or factories in different branches of the tree).
* If, because of historical reasons, a nation does not have enough manpower, resources or factories, maybe we could add some focuses to obtain these resources from major powers through factions, aliances or improving relations (maybe join a faction or improve relation with some major as prerequisite). The rewards from this focuses could be obtaining factitional manpower as volunteers, free units, free equipment instead of factories (maybe faction dependent)...
I think another thing for the USA nerfs could be its research speed, as before the war they werent upgrading or really getting anything new, hence why the first like year of the war Marines in the Pacific were using WW1 weaponry. Then once the war starts through like an escalation event for the USA or something their research speed and everything just skyrockets so they may be behind early on, but the they get way ahead later on (like historically they had Nukes in 1945 while other nations would be 1946 or later before they get any in-game).
I always thought that “civilian economy” should benefit you during peace time and the opposite during war time. The inverse could be said for “war economy,” being obviously useful during war time and hinders you during peace time.
I think the problem with America being OP is fine because you have to look at it in tandem with Japan and Germany. You’re supposed to be the looming force in waiting to join forcing those 2 powers to move as fast as possible. So I agree that the Great Depression should be worse, but the US doesn’t need a true nerf its supposed to be OP to give the fascist powers a true threat if they don’t perform good enough. The US also needs better alternative paths, they feel too small and boring imo.
2016 paradox: all must be balanced
2023 paradox: Make random country be a god
11:33 "Yugoslavia is a satisfying nation to play as, because you've got a lot of problems internally"
I would really like a mechanic that is unique to all the different ideologies. For example: Communist nations get to exchange recruitable population factor for factory output. Something like this for all of the different ideologies would make picking them feel different and could be incorporated into the focus to make the exchanges more efficient.
I so disagree with gaining balance through the focus tree. There is no equity in HoI4. There are reasons why nations won and lost.
Most national focus's are fictional. I'm not saying they should all be the same
as someone who's played USA the most, I think they should penalize building mils more than they do, US has all these focuses for converting civs to mils, but I usually just build mils straight up after the first year or two and don't feel that penalized for it.
If they made the penalty higher for mils, then it would better simulate how the US had to rapidly convert itself to a war industry in 1941
Having to go to war to get off the great depression completely would also be good
I don't agree with the China argument. Sure you've got virtually (underlined) manpower but the 3% debuff from total mobilization can hamper your plans of Defense, and don't forget the nasty incompetent generals modifier you have to get rid of. Trading manpower for army xp and you need a lot of xp. Plus you have to shit out pure infantry if you want to survive so I think it's semi balanced, especially for a country historically so supported by it's massive population.
I think one problem about balancing resources is that it both a produced value and a production: imaging 20 steel is produced and 10 used by mils during 1 year, if the next year the mils use 25 they can't, like the 10 produced last year vanished. A solution could be using manpower to run resources production (and storing it like oil) the max still being current value. For trade, allow a bulk of manpower like the repair dockyards mechanic... Maybe.
That's why I love mods which give extra ressources just like ETT and better national focus.
A -80% resource extraction great depression penalty is not bad. It would nerf oil and fuel gain which should stop the USA from having max naval doctrine in 1940.
The USA should also be perma stuck on free trade or catch a -50% stability hit. We all know a civil war would start if this happened irl.
The biggest problem the USA has is building slots. Give the USA a miracle focus that boosts factory output and military construction speed by 300% for a year and add a shit load of building slots once the USA is in a defensive war with a major power. Pre 1942 USA should be weak.
adding more building slots would be enough, the MP USA build sees you run out of building slots by 1942
Perma stuck on free trade? No thanks.
For countries with resources that are not being sold on the market, especially when resources are earmarked for it, those countries should be able to buy their resources. The foreign factory would not be added to your count.
Also, it is weird to me that AA guns, tier 1 and 2, cost more resources than artillery. A dual 40 mm cannon cannot cost more to make than a 75mm howitzer.
I like balance but i think its cool that this is so "unbalanced"
Its meant to be realistic, ww2, so some nations are way stronger then others, and some can just not catch up at all through gobbling up the world
To me, the easy way to balance the US without throwing historical accuracy in the dumpster entirely, is nerfing the soviet and the British and giving them a cheap way to get lend lease.
For example: if the soviet lose eastern Poland, they lose xxx trains and xxxx trucks, but if the US are in the war, they can get a decision to get a lend lease to compensate (which is also somewhat historical, the soviet received MASSIVE support in their logistics). And the US has to go ham on extra production just to keep up with things like that. And again, when they take the focus to move the industry to the urals, the amount of train and trucks required for their supply gets higher by a substantial amount, that you can get from the Allies via decision
If the UK loses Egypt, they lose a bunch of equipment by event (and some goes to the Axis), and the US have to compensate losing their own, before even being the war. And you add a "submarines tax", that gets reduced by researching better techs, so for every 100 train the soviet ask, you lose 150 because something gets lost at sea, and if you don't oblige to these requests, then you see your allied die and you have to face off Germany without them. So if you play the US, you have to constantly fight to get a better industry and stockpile just to keep up with these things. At this point you'd have a massive economy, but 15 mils on train (that should cost more steel then they do in the game right now, for every nation) and 50 on trucks midgame is a massive toll for everyone. And you should get a spirits that makes convoys needs higher, because you are on the other side of an ocean and that's ridiculous that you can supply a million men with convoys you make in 3 weeks...
On the other hand, US mainland should get some major buff in case of invasion. A real life invasion of the US is basically impossible, every man, women and children would point a gun at you, and in the game you usually steamroll them in 3 seconds after you land. It's so boring, landing in the US and winning should be like the final boss mission of every game, and that's embarrassingly easy. Same for Japan, you usually sweep them so easily that you never need nukes, while in irl it would have been a massacre with civilians trying to kill you in every way possible.
As Chromium is very rarely traded in then maybe its time to add another resource either in its place or in addition too.
Manganese, Magnesium, Zinc, Tin, Copper etc were vastly important to the war economies of the world.
Adding say a "soft metals" resource would help add more trade between nations, more decisions like "Scrap for Victory' , further exploit resources options.
A little more complexity to plane/tank/ship designs in terms of resources needed and also the negative effects of not having enough.
balanced aint fun, games should be fun.
Idk, WW2 was not a balanced conflict and Paradox has always gone for historicity over balance in their games, so I like it. For multiplayer balance is more important , but this is primarily a single player game. I'm good with nerfing the allies and buffing the axis in a competitive multiplayer ww2 game (like, say the board game Axis and Allies) for balance, but HOI4 isn't that kind of game, and that's ok.
I have to disagree with your argument on the USA. Before the USA gets rid of the great depression and joins the war, the Allies are in poor shape in both manpower/factories. They need a huge Super major to really do anything like D-day against a massive Germany or take on a Japan that will eat away the Allies rubber/ colonies in the east. You might argue that in a non historical play through, the USA is too strong but even for the USA to switch Communist/Fascist it needs to go through a civil war. Basically from a game play standpoint the USA is pretty much balanced.
Life is Unbalanced.
I think resources need to be expanded. Not just for certain countries that already have focus trees, but for every nation. Resources can be a major roadblock. Even if resources are added as a decision unlocked through excavation technology, then so be it. Africa definitely needs more resources, and so does China. Why are all the Chinese resources in Guangxi?
The increased man power for China is usfull if your near capitulation
I argue that USA focus tree should focus on improving their army, air, and navy(like italy and soviet). Even for historical perspective, they fought badly on both fronts at the start. For example, they should get rid of 'inaccurate torpedo' only by a focus tree(yes there is a focus to get rid of it, but no one does that since you can just use naval xp to simply replace it with a good spirit).
21:45 don't forget that they can have like 6 research spots too
Dave, counterpoint: USA USA USA!!! 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅
I keep saying USA is OP. I must love USA
Then, it really needs is more buffs! USA USA!!! 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅@@FeedbackIRL
homie wants Yugoslavia to be able to get on equal footing with America
At the start of the war in the US a lot of production for minor things took place at nearly bespoke sites. People made things like tin utensils at workbenches in small towns, townhalls.converting manpower into offmap factories at a terrible efficiency should be a decision.
This video did come out a couple months ago but I think ToA kind of took this to heart - but it didnt turn out too well (and AAT to a degree).
It gives minor nations the focus trees to not only solve the 3 issues he points out, but in terms of the context of a ww2 game, they are super unbalanced. Small nations can have focuses that give them industry/buffs, manpower/army buffs, and resources/cores to the point where they are so ridiculous.
The balance of unbalanced nations (as it was historically) makes it a lot more enjoyable. Not only are you fighting against the condition of your starting nation, but you also have to fight against the luck of the draw for resources like they did. There should honestly be a more in-depth resource system that allows more control over the resources. IE steel needs to be refined with coal and iron, aluminum from bauxite, etc etc.
The beauty is blackIce did a pretty good job of it and I am glad its around - but i would love to see more steps to make nations balanced through the unbalanced aspects (ie they can play to their strengths better)
Explain how the United States focus tree fits into that triangle
if i wanted balace i would play "risk"
WRONG. *SYLPHORIC ACID!*
The most important thing in Hoi is equiqment, your soldiers cant just throw rocks.
"decent amount of chromium". The country which owns about the 1st or 2nd most of it in the world.
you look more and more like my dad, I am concerned.
I AM YOUR DAD
On historical the game has to script UK to be kinda dumb for the axis to have a chance at all. They dont help france even if you as the player are holding off the axis for 2 years, and their giant navy doesnt hunt down the axis very often either. I feel like the axis may struggle even more with the new DLC coming out.
20:20 I would argue that the "industry" side of the US focus tree should actually be "No" at the start and "Yes" because of the focus tree because that is literally the one thing that the entire US focus tree revolves around: Waking the Sleeping Giant. Half of the entire tree is devoted to handling that issue whether you go with the Gold Standard, the fascists, the New Deal, or the communists.
China's manpower is just ridiculous. I had a game as Manchuko where I successfully unified China, but then got into a bloodbath with the European Axis (that steamrolled the allied and the soviet). I had no industry to make quality troops, but I compensated with quantity, and pushed through Siberia and India to reach Europe. I lost 30 some milion men. When i finally got the notification "low manpower", i went to my main page looking to up my conscription law, and I realized I was on volunteer only 🤣.
Upped one law, back to 35M manpower, off we go 🤣
America dont get no chromium which is one thing they actually need since you will want to build more carriers and north carolina style bbs but you get so many civs you could probs just trade that shit
15:15 if you take democratic path and release your angry nations as subjects, the generic focus tree will give them additional factories, so when you unite you will get even more!
Personally I think the mobilization options need to be reworked. Like there are some soft factors in trade that makes each option something to consider, and conscription there's invisible soft factors that have some impact on the timing of when you upgrade.
But Mobilization there is NO reason not to jump up the first chance you get since civilian factories producing civilian goods does literally less than nothing for your nation, apparently them getting less or more toasters doesn't impact their war support or their unity in any way, so even the late comer nations like the US have no reason not to jump on War Mobilization or total mobilization first possible chance, heck even the supposed negatives (for factory build times) is entirely offset by even getting one extra factory for construction by upgrading. The mechanics of the game more or less make you rush to war rather than encouraging nations who it might be wiser to hold off to actually do so.
USA idea for a better balance of the Focus Tree, aside of adding more nerfs to the Great Depression debuff (e.g. less resource efficiency, less construction speed, more consumer goods factories), I would front load the "cost" of getting rid of the debuff and delay the gratification.
This would also play to the historical community, with the first couple of New Deal focuses giving barely any advantages and having a higher waiting time and political requirement. Then the next 2 (adding to 4 rather than 3) focuses are the ones that really ramp up thanks to the previous ones, with smaller requirements.
At the moment, if you just focus on getting rid of the Great Depression, the debuffs are gone by Feb 1938. The idea of adding an extra focus and upfronting the costs would mean getting rid of it perhaps by mid 1939.
A way of balancing the political side of things, with the Congress, would be to somewhat link it to stability. Start with lower stability due to Great Depression, making it harder to get the majority to start the New Deal path. Also maybe force something like, make research more average, and buff it through focuses giving refuge to German, Italian and other scientists, at the cost of stability (once again, if you want the current level of research slots and research bonuses, make it harder for you to get out of the Great Depression). In general, play with the Great Depression indirectly via reducing/boosting Stability, therefore reducing/increasing your ability to complete those focuses
When u were talking about USA I think this case should be divided between mode Historical balance and non-historical balance for multi and fun.
I like your ideas and presentations, but I don't agree about erring on the side of balance. I feel a major source of fun is specifically the imbalance. The disparity is what allows for the "upset victory". If I were specifying the direction of this game's mechanics, I would try to use historic data as the constraints when refining the parameters. In other words, I would attempt to develop the underlying mechanics and set the parameters such that, when players make the in game same decisions as historic figures did, the historic outcomes would result. The fun of the game would be: using those mechanics but making different decisions. Of course this explicitly goes against the idea of balancing the nations, it makes them decidedly imbalanced.
I respect your point of view that more balanced nations adds a benefit to the game, it has merit. However, it's not a characteristic that draws me towards HoI4 in the first place. Despite not agreeing on one of your premises, I still enjoyed this video. Keep up the good work.
USA should and is meant to have every resource except rubber lmao (it doesnt start with chormium but can build it), it should also have way more building slots soo it can also build rubber and actually have more factories than the entire axis or entire rest of the allies combined but i think people wouldnt like that for some reason
The way to balance the US is to incentize building Sythnetic rubber you know the thing it did in real life to the point where natural rubber almost doesn't exist
@@Aragon1500 yh but, uh thing is that the US has extreamly limited building slots
Probably the game need an historical and arcade mode for the focus trees (?
This is why the Polish tree is basically perfect. You start off weak in all three areas and gradually gain strength until you can roll over all your enemies. Easily my favourite country.
Poland is OP.
100% agree with everything. The game should focus more on fun and making every nation fun to play for the player.
Destroying planets isn't enough so you also conquer them?
@@tuluppampam Depends on the planet!
it also doesnt help that almost every focus is 70 days and all you get for it is stupid shit like +25 relations
They should add food and ammo honestly.
The US is like easy mode, and at the same time it's kinda boring to play with it. I haven't explored all the paths in the focus tree but playing the US is click buttons to get free stuff in the early game, and then smash everybody else mid game. There is no late game.
But... from a different point of view having a very small starting army, the US is a very tempting target for other countries if you can take them down before they snowball out of control. They have so much industry, manpower and resources that even with the occupation penalties conquering the US is an automatic ticket to major power. For example, Mexico or Canada's only restrain to invade the US is how fast you can go facist or communist. But any latin american country with a reasonable size and in range of the US can do it too, I've done it with Argentina and Brazil, I'm thinking I could also do it with Venezuela which already starts facist and can get a lot of manpower by coring Colombia, Ecuador and Panama to form Gran Colombia
I love it when a person whose maximum is to shoot video clips on a single player, where he removes enemy divisions through the console and gives himself the best equipment, tries to seriously talk about the balance in a game in which he UNDERSTANDS NOTHING. The USA is locked up to 37-38, you can't build factories and military plants +- until the moment when all the major majors, including MP and single, start doing this. About chrome, just lmao. the top 2 resource in the game is more important after steel, but of course he knows better, because it's obvious that if he makes infantry and lets it push with autoplan, then everyone does it
Wut?
@@FeedbackIRL
Can I ask you a serious question. When was the last time you made a proper tank, non-crappy or actually constructed a proper navy that wasn't just crappy cruisers? You'll understand why chromium is a cherished resource by the end of it.
Try constructing a 250-ship navy, 25 ships per task force. Ten submarines, ten destroyers, two light cruisers, one heavy cruiser, one battleship (or battlecruiser, if escort fleet) and one carrier per task force. Except with the most high-quality templates.
Navy? Like over a year ago. Tanks? I vary them all the time
Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't increasing the resource penalty on the USA mean less resources globally because they have less to export?
I think part of the problems with resources is beacuse you didn't think about trading, and maybe thr correct ponit of wiev is if you need to trade a lot of your factories for resources
The United States is the backstop for the Allies. It's got all the oil. France has none so trade is born. British Navy and Air Force need oil too. At start the US doesn't have enough factorys to arm it's skeleton Army and allies. But has steel for France. Midgame the US needs to supply guns and tanks to everybody. Especially the Soviets who lost factories to make their own . It takes time to rebuild factories from the Germans. The shipbuilding was to replace merchant ship losses in the Atlantic for US /Britain and provide heavy lift and supply in the Pacific no railroads there. The Indian army also needs guns artillery as well .India needs Trains, trucks and merchant ships to deploy to Africa and supply its country. Soviets too.The Australians need planes. That is a lot of building but not necessarily for the direct benefit of the United States. Did you ever read a book?
if USA couldnt make mils with isolation eco, that'd both make sense and force conversion of civs to mils like IRL
If we want to be talking historical, then US needs a massive nerf to their army quality, since their equipment was absolute shit compared to everyone else pretty much until 1944
Honestly, for the USA they should make it that you need to nationalize factories and resources in order to use them, to slow them down. Which would mirror what the real United States did
I think in US case you should go more to the war suport and mobilizing your economy mostly with focus tree. So you need more focuses that slowly gain war support and unlock mobilization branch . So you can have that almost 200 factorys but you need time to shift. World tension also should be a factor.
It is a factor Giant wakes can't be unlocked until your war support is above 35%. The great depression doesn't make your economy good your still losing 50% of your factories to your economy law it just gives you 35% of ther other 50%
Id be fun if they add a decent bit of Tungsten in Austria, as Austria really does nothing in game expect get eaten by germany or hungary. Both countries having a severe lack of tungsten which for Hungary makes it difficult to make artillery and Germany difficult to make Medium tanks (if your playing without no step back) Not sure if tungsten in Austria makes sense historically but gameplay wise id be fun.
You Austrian right?
We need ways to end wars against minor nations that don't require conquering multiple continents.
i wholeheartedly disagree with your stance on the USA. When every nation is balanced around the same principles in the exact same way, it hurts the uniqueness of each nation and reduces the replayability of the game. USA being stupidly strong is just fine. Not every nation needs to be similar in strength. A large variety in strength between nations is what makes this game appealing to both casual players and highly skilled players.
Totally agree. No balance. Its up to modders to clean up devs. mess.
Great depression should have tiers. And decisions and events while it's on to keep the player engaged. I agree it should be way worse but slowly improved over time.
The comments on the implications of decisions are really interesting. Which is why IMO, you really can't squeeze out everything as a country like the USSR, Germany or countries with colonies or puppet states like UK, France and Japan. If you had a decision to say, increase metal production in Manchuria but you would be taking manpower away, that's an implication. If you could increase recon at the cost of higher equipment loss or attrition as the USSR, that's an implication. If you force more conscripts and take them from your colonies as the UK or France, that's an implication. If you could increase compliance and reduce resistance for the cost of large amounts of population in a state as Germany, that's an implication. These are all things that could have been considered but it's too touchy for PDX to really touch beyond abstraction via game mechanics (Harsh Quotas occupation setting, coring, etc.).
We gonna talk about how good he looks with those glasses ? That's tge only resource I need right there
Maybe there should be a slider ranging from current lack of balance to fully balanced.
Slash the resources and factories and let them develop themselves through the focus tree in order to simulate the Great Depression.