--TIME STAMPS-- 00:00 Intro 05:02 Brazil national focus review 14:44 Chile national focus review 16:29 Paraguay national focus review 18:02 Uruguay national focus review 18:37 Argentina national focus review 23:00 final tier list 23:19 thoughts on the modding comparison 27:14 final thoughts
Honestly if they just gave all of Latin America focuses I would be so much less annoyed with this dlc because at least it wouldn't feel so anemic for the price, even without features you could justify the cost if there were like 15ish trees. I still would not buy it unless if I was playing in the region and I would prefer some universal features but it wouldn't feel like such a scam
Just for the record: * "América du Sul" is Portuguese, not Spanish. * Incas are as native to Chile as the British to North America. What Paradox used are the Mapuche, an umbrella term for several native groups from Chile (exact composition is context dependent), located on south Chile and parts of the Argentinian Patagonia. This path makes about as much sense as the Cherokee taking over USA's government and setting a kingdom presided by the 3rd pretender of "Emperor" Joshua Norton (Do note that Norton had more real power and estime that the entire line of "Mapuche Kings" ever had... and Norton left no pretenders).
I think this is the thing. If it was cheaper, I don't think people would have complained as much. The entire Modding thing I ignore, because while they are cool, at the end of the day they are simply bonuses to stretch out a games lifespan.
The pricing is the same as every other regional pack of the same size. Well, technically a buck more expensive, which is remarkably low given the massive inflation the world went through.
@@Nerazmus, Rupiah lost 50% of its value in January 2022, resulting in the contents becoming twice as expensive for Indonesians. I preordered No Step Back on November 2021 at 109k Rupiahs, and when i discovered that the preorder for By Blood Alone in August 2022 is at 215k Rupiahs, i stopped buying DLCs altogether.
@@Darktrap-e5d I mean, the german focus tree is rather small tbh, for todays standards and considering how big Germanys is in the game, u could even say the entire game is focused around Germany, a Germany rework of the rework is long over due
@@Inquisite1031 One that doesn't cost cash, we already paid for the DLC that reworked Germany, shouldn't have to pay for the same thing twice just because they decided to change how they make their focus trees.
@@haukionkannel i would have whole south america with focus trees and some flavor and i dont need to wait for another dlc to add the remaining focus trees instead they would focus on germany?
Exactly. They chose this because they can make more money that way. Reworking previous DLC focus trees would be way harder to justify monetizing again to the community.
Nah, the last time i viewed the Workshop, AAT (an expansion) is at 20$, Battle for the Bosporus (a countrypack) is 10$, but Trial of Allegiance is at 15$. So it seems a halfway point between a countrypack and a proper expansion with mechanics.
Bizzare choices hurt Brazil like no coring Portugal as monarchists and the United States of South America not getting cores which hurts the play through.
The former is especially bizarre especially considering the Portuguese monarchist path can do so and is almost the prerequisite for the Macau My Day achievement.
I kind of agree with what you're saying, but Paradox really needs to learn how to give the player more freedom to incrementally and slowly gain more manpower and cores without ridiculous and comically overpowered focus trees granting the player millions of manpower at the click of a mouse. Things like modifiers to non-core manpower, monthly population growth, weekly manpower increases, boosting pop growth with public health, immigration policies, compliance of occupied territories, impressment of encircled prisoners of war into the military, etc. could be used alongside gaining additional cores. The player should be allowed to utilize resources like political power, factories, trade resources, command power, construct civilian buildings, etc. to slowly gain cores over the course of years of in game time. Paradox has arbitrarily and foolishly limited themselves in game design and development to only assigning cores through focus trees and political power decisions when we could have more comprehensive and fleshed out system instead.
@@eclipse_434hoi4 isn't the same global strategy as eu4/vic2/stellaris, it's more of an ordinary wargame about preparations for the Second World War and the Second World War itself. Monthly population growth is an absolutely useless thing while most of the games aren't last for even a 10 years, when you conquered Axis/Allies and the game starts to lag and slow down.
@@Бекрия Monthly population growth can easily net you tens of thousands of extra manpower over the course of a few years. You just don't notice it because it's really subtle when compared to the glaringly obvious losses of war casualties or the huge sudden influx of manpower gained when going up a conscription law or when gaining new core territories. Adding more mechanics in game that give the player the ability to unlock a slow trickle of increasing manpower through various mechanics like compliance, weekly increases, immigration, population growth, etc. would be a great addition to HOI4 because it avoids power creep while forcing the player to act in accordance to long term strategic interests of slowly gaining manpower while skillfully avoiding losses due to casualties. This is fundamentally way better game design than pressing a button and gaining millions of manpower due to the power creep of DLC focus trees giving the player the ability to core entire continents.
Vote with your wallets gentlemen. Dont buy it and tell PDX "No! This is f*cking bull💩!" Then they will do a Creative Assembly apology and lower their price. We can do this!
- Shared military path between all the trees, which lead to Brazil becoming horrifically unbalanced. - The sentiment that not every country needs an in-depth, 100+ foci tree, especially when they didn't have a noticeable impact on the period of history in general. - The neglect of trees that desperately need a re-work, such as Japan, Germany & the USA. - The fact that mods, primarily Road to 56, already gave us an overhaul for South America, completely for free. - The price was too expensive given that no new mechanics or features were included.
That last point is the biggest, especially since they've acknowledged through their recatagorizing this and Battle For the Bosporus as "Country Packs", rather than expansions.
It really feels like the trees were all just kind of made independent of each other instead of them being together. For example the focus that just let's Brazil invade Uruguay is nonsensical in real life Argentina would not let that happen. Instead of there being balance in the region one tree (the player) becomes super overpowered and just rolls over the other nations. Idk how many times I have to say this but look to kaisereich. The Devs of kaisereich balanced south America and made it interesting with various events that make it feel like the nation is reacting to your actions as a leader
They also went further and changed how some nations worked, ala, the USA. Before you could avoid the ACW via an event chain, but it will fail no matter what as you get Couped by MacArthur. The removed it because it would locked out or remove a number of event for Latin and South America.
I think the neglected state thingy is there so you don't build anything there, thus neglecting the state. It pushes you to neglect them as was historically. Neglect.
Except the focus tree and the buff you get from completing all the focuses to remove the neglect is counter to that. You are clearly not supposed to neglect them, it's just the way it's done is through the focus tree rather than something else, like decisions that have a cost, or building a little in that region with the penalty, to remove the penalty for future building. There are many better ways they could've done it.
@@crit-c4637 I think thats a massive problem of in HOI4 you got one recourse.... yes we also got civilian industry consumer product but thats just so backwards. what I mean is that when you on Civilian industry (civilian should use some of that factories to make roads and railways over time, pre war trucks and you know civilian industry stuff... I mean the capatalism are not just making toaster they are also at this point in time building factories and so on. Political power and you spend like 150 points on hiring one person or you spend X to do project Y and the output off them all are so over the place. think the game need two additional reseroces/point Civilian Capital this is found the civilian industry would use that is not controlled by the military. then Military Resorces/point same deal here.
Brazilian here. Where do we have Brazilians speaking Spanish? The soldiers speak with a Carioca accent that gives me the nerves but that is still Portuguese
If the DLC was more like $10, I think it would have gotten a lot better reviews. It's ONLY focuses. It's not one of the normal $20 DLCs with focuses, mechanics, rebalances and the likes. The issue is 100% the price. I like the Focus trees so far and think they are a great fit, just not at the price point it's at.
It truly is, when you have a mod like En Union y Libertad that not only reaches the north of south america, with a custom focus tree for most of them, not with a copy/paste military tree with each country having a solid buff for X for free, compared to this lackluster DLC, it just show's modder's love compared to "want money"
En Union y Libertad is the most mod this DLC should aspire to be. They integrate PDX dlc mechanics, focus trees for almost if not every nation in South America.
6:37 - This is the problem with all historical strategy games really. The game will naturally launch with the most content for history's heaviest hitters, so as expansions come out more and more marginal countries end up benefiting from the refinement that development goes through. Think about another game series for this too: Civilization. Civilization will presumably always launch with Persia, Rome, China, America, England, etc. as countries from day 1, so they get tethered to vanilla game features and sensibilities. Then when later expansions come along adding way less globally impactful countries like Canada those are the ones that get new mechanics or funky bonuses that make them more fun to play than history's greatest empires. The problem for this with HOI is that the games will always _need_ the main 8 countries of WW2 (China, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, UK, USA, USSR) to launch with content. And so the USSR or Italy can sit around for 5-6 years waiting for updates while the Chinese Warlords or Netherlands get gimmicks more novel than anything they can do. Since they're now directly integrating older expansions into the base game, I imagine that means we'll get _another_ paid set of expansions for the Commonwealth states, Central Europe, and/or the Chinese theater later this year.
I'm glad you mentioned the lack of consistency with localisation. Would be nice if there was a toggle for it. The focus trees lack of consistency makes the recent ones seem like a mod, where one modder has used localisation for their tree and another one hasn't. It kinda suggests the dev team aren't properly discussing it
I think in terms of focus trees this pack was actually better then AAT but I understand peoples frustration by the price- tag i feel sorry for the devs because hoi being such a sandbox game means that the community is full of people who play for very different reasons some love role play some are statistic addicts I guess a focus tree only dlc was never gonna make everyone happy
Kaiserriech, Kaiserredux, TNO and EaW devs give as much Content as every Vanilla DLC Combined FOR FREE. The Paradox Devs should review the Games Monetisation and Community because most people probably prefer to have 200 Hours worth of Content in EaW for free than only 60 Hours in any DLC that costs more than 10 Dollars
It has almost nothing to do with "pleasing everyone", and almost everything to do with Paradox's insane pricing scheme. Hearts of Iron IV is $39.99. Trial of Allegiance is $14.99 This DLC is 37.5% of the base game's price, almost 2/5. Does the DLC provide anywhere near 2/5 of the value as the base game? Even someone who really enjoys country packs like this is going to have a hard time justifying that. Especially when passionate fans in the community provide this exact type of content, free of charge. I can't say what the exact price should have been, as I imagine there would be a lot of debate over that. But for me personally, a DLC that provides this much content would start being "overpriced" in my eyes past 5 dollars. People are just outraged at Paradox because they keep doing this, for all of their games, and it has only been getting worse.
It's fairly simply. People wanted a Germany rework with an austrian and Belgian tree attached. We got a whole region no one cares about for way too much money with very little content.
@@andresdiazgarrido3940ok, except this is a game about world war 2, not a “make everyone in every country feel good” simulator. And Germany, the country that is basically the “main character” of the game hasn’t been updated in years, and the Latin American countries played virtually no role of significance in the entire conflict.
@@Sherzam91 It is not the fault of the Latins that they have made a DLC like this, go complain to paradox, do not belittle a region that is not to blame for anything
@@mikkel066h I know, but you basically just proved my point, if that the first defense you have for this whole thing. We’re talking about the largest war in human history, and you’re talking about one country, who sent a fairly small amount of troops, to a third rate power on the other side. Nothing you just described can’t be replicated in the game by the Brazil player click “send volunteers” to America. Look, if South America as a whole didn’t exist, it wouldn’t have very little impact on the entirety of the war, that’s a fact. I get it if you’re from there, you’re excited your country gets some focuses, but that’s not what 99% of the player base wants, or what even makes sense from a game design perspective. There are mods that do what paradox did better and for free.
> Chile can core France within their focus tree before 1940 > Everybody can become a Superpower not by Player Strategy but by being force-fed Wargoals and Cores > "Ejercito xyz" "the xyz Army" Bonusses that break the game entirely, sure, a little +2,5% here can't hurt, but then late game you get to a point where you don't even need to think anymore, your Army is insanely buffed, and the carefully crafted Doctrines and Warfare/ Combat System with all the math that makes this game special is just not needed anymore. Overall I'm thoroughly disappointed in PDX, Countries like Germany still have bugged events like Molotov-Ribbentrop, not coring some states as some formables like south-western France/ Basque Country as the EU, or Cairo/ Yemes, etc. as Arabia, and so many other Bugs that ruin the game. The game itself needs a THOROUGH redirection toward Balance, sensible Focus Trees/ Formables and Fixing Bugs. We don't need or want a country that has done almost nothing in WW2 to be able to nonsensically core what is practically the entire world.
While I agree with some of your points (Particularly about OP focuses) I wholeheartedly disagree with others. Do you really want paid for patches? How otherwise do you propose funding the teams?
Well how should I say this. I'm Brazilian, I've been waiting for some kind of DLC or content for Brazil for a long time, and honestly when they announced it with the trailer, I cried with joy because the fuck there's finally going to be some attention for Brazil. In return what did I receive? a tree that politically doesn't make any sense if you look at the history of Brazil, some industrial businesses that don't make sense to exist, in addition to not correcting the issues of natural resources present in Brazil (remembering that Brazil is extremely rich in natural resources), and the military development tree is relatively decent, but the focus timing is really bad and you don't feel strong enough to beat Argentina, which received a focus in the same update, because if you play, you won't even be able to beat Uruguay. if you put the issue of military bonuses side by side. And that's because I haven't yet talked about the MIO or government advisors, many of whom should have requirements based on ideology and don't, and those of the war council simply haven't changed, so there are still mistakes like the former president from Brazil Floriano Peixoto as a possible advisor to the navy alive in 1936 and he died in 1895. Furthermore, many of the military and armed forces themselves had an ACTIVE life within Brazilian politics after the fall of the monarchy, and this is not represented IN NO ASPECT of the tree, much less with the generals who could have traces of factions like many other generals have in other nations, because as a Brazilian it is completely ridiculous for me to follow a monarchist path and still have access to Marshal Candido Rondôm, who was a firm republican, in addition to being an indigenist (which is another thing that is not portrayed), honestly the dlc is not worth its value or even its content.
Fr, as an argentinian i was also hyped for the DLC, since there was quite a bit of political turmoil in the country, and any political party movement ended up in the army taking up arms, but the fact that, if you know how to play, you can avoid every civil war by not doing the focus of the war, getting the national referendum, and skipping maybe a year's worth of focus without loosing the bonus, ngl, better stick to En Union y Libertad
being rich in natural resources doesn't mean brazil was able to access them in 1936. perhaps you would need a LOT of resource development decisions tied to excavation and construction technologies to make that accurate
Comunist Lampião... When you go down the monarchist path and conquer south america, the flag goes back to the republican one, and the name changes to just "South America" But this nothing new to the bloody game, remember "No Step Back"? the Russian alternate focus tree iss also nuts, Non Aligned Russia still has the old Naval st Andrew cross flag, the name is changed to "R U S S I A" instead of something like, Russian Empire or Tsardom of Russia, There are still advisors and other characters for a democratic path (Like Alexander Kerensky) but there's no Democratic path was ever implemented! And don't get me started on the whole Third Rome nonsense, Its just retarded.... but it pales in comparison to the new Mapuche/ Decolonization focuses, these are just Red Flood Level of mental retardation. Paradox's just lazy mate, you know what? the players DESERVE what they get, all they do is complain but they still fucken buying their incomplete, overpriced, POS DLC's and products.
It's a good addition to the game, it's just not the one the game needed, the stupid priorities Paradox has and the pricing annoys me. Where is the Japanese rework? The focus trees are actually really good and paths like Democratic paraguay are honestly some of the most fun I had playing in vanilla it's just absurd that we didn't get Gran colombia path for example.
Paradox was actually really clear on there priority. They can make 1 major DLC every year, while in betwen they can realise this smaller packs for less popular regions. As such, Germany/Japan rework will most likely come in major DLC.
The issue with a Japan or Germany rework was, that they already had one in a dlc, which are now to be integrated into the main game, so they can get a proper rework.
I feel like if you want to bring back a native empire, there needs to be some in-game way to make that happen. If I'm not mistaken, a lot of South American countries don't (or at least didn't) think much of native societies. So what would be cool is doing a focus to make an Army division with a unique Commmander, an admiral, and/or maybe Ace Pilot who are Native American. Then, if that army division's Commander is promoted to all the way to Field Marshall, there is a unique upgrade to the Field Marshall that allows them to become a political advisor. As a political advisor, all of your Army divisions gain like 20% of what he had as a Field Marshall, it unlocks a part of the focus tree to idolize native societies. That way, you have to decide whether to keep him as a Field Marshall for a long time to get as many universal bonuses as possible, or promote him to a Political Advisor as quickly as possible to start on the new focuses. The same could be done with the Admiral, but I'm not sure what you could do with the Ace Pilot... maybe you just have to keep generating Ace Pilots until you can form a Native Pilot Council by losing 3 Native Ace Pilots...? Anyway, in the formerly-locked Native part of the Focus Tree, you can do stuff like gain compliance faster in more rural states, gain a recruitable pop factor bonus in more rural states, core former Incan states once their compliance is high enough, and make Integrated Puppets of Aztec, Mayan, Cherokee, or Apache nations (maybe for displaced tribes, you have to control both their original territory and their new territory, connect both territories with trains, lose a certain number of trucks, trains, and civilian factories for a time, but you can form these Integrated Puppets even during wartime).
Well for my part is that I am played HOI4 so much that I am burnt out for a while, so I am gonna avoid it until me and my friends gets the itch back and then we probably gonna get it.
Issues with the DLC are South America > Does not include all of South America. Price Tag. Region that is very very Hit and Miss in most if not all games. Weird and Odd design choices, such as no cores in Portugal for Brazil if they go monarchist.
That died with Death or Dishonor. When Austria-Hungary became the 'default' tree for Hungary, it created a race to the bottom for the craziest nonsensically and overpowered focus trees
HoI4 never was a good WW2 experience. Glad they went full on ahistorical because the game is just lacking way too much to remotely simulate the real war. Even HoI3 is better in this aspect.
@@Scarface_1b i remember when people stopped complainig and went into modding... That used to be nice, nowdays it is jusr "UGH YU DIDI NOT GET WHAT AIII WANT"
@@picollojr9009 you paying for what the game is advertising, a ww2 simulator, still, paradox fans are so brainless, they believe mods are a core feature of the game, no dude, the community doesnt need to fix the useless state the game is
THAT RIGHT THERE! What you can do with the Faulkland Island white peace, is how ALL war goals should work. One of the most painful experiences as a minor player is the ludicrous focuses set by Paradox for minors. It's always like Rebuild the rail roads > An army of our own > Capitulate the UK..... This is something I want to see a complete overhaul of, so you can realistically complete your goal, or take a nation by small chunks if so. Its like halfway there with the weird war goal thing paradox has set up when you justify on a province, but then has no bearing after that. It should be, justify on the desired province > War > hold the land for X amount of time > White peace and take that land. Why is this so difficult for Paradox to do.
Also, it has not been playtested at all. For example, Monarchist Portugal can shut down half of Brazil focus tree if they take the path. No one can get wargoal focus on the Non-Aligned nations(which are most of the continent) and so many other issues
The main reason Argentina wants those islands is national prestige and security for their coast (as you know the UK and US are both known to solve issues by simply blockading nations until they're too weak to refuse any and all terms) having islands like that all over your coast allows them to force unfair trade treaties for fear of one of those blockades, something Argentina, Japan, Venezuela, China, etc etc etc all had to experience in at some point, Argentina's roca-truman treaty is one of those one sided unfair treaties, yes it gives Argentina a lot of bonuses and helped them develop faster than their neighbors, but historically it also made them way to dependent on the UK and once the UK stopped investing and trading, Argentina immediately collapsed into the mess it is today So to me having those islands should give you another boost to the treaty as you're no longer cornered and you can trade internationally with more ease Alternatively, those islands are sitting in a MASSIVE underwater oil reserve that the UK is not allowed to tap into (since the Islands are disputed territory), so another bonus it could give you is simply have the ability to dig for a bit more oil in them after you core them and solve the dispute
Deepwater Oil Drilling was not really a thing in the WW2 era (shallow water was done though). I personally doubt seizing some islands would gain a trade advantage (particularly compared to the far more low hanging Tierra del Fuego) although the prestige of defeating the UK at sea would be considerable. Personally, I think there should be more ways to snatch the islands if the UK is capped/has a revolution.
honestly if they had added focus trees of the same (not the best) quality to all of south america I would be fine with it and I wouldn't mind the price. You pay 15 bucks one time and you have QA tested content for the whole region and you don't have to worry about crashes etc. Just feels like their stretching out the amount of expansions that hoi4 really warrants.
I'm chilean and i played a lot with Chile on this DLC and i really think they made the country too strong. Strong enough to make it boring to play after conquering Argentina and Brasil. I think that the dev team needs to buff South American AI as when conquering said countries they don't even have enough divisions to fill the frontline. Chile, with it's very limited manpower can conquer the entire world with almost no micro and no encirclements. So reducing country buffs and buffing the SA AI and adding some mechanic to SA countries to form alliances or/and receive volunteers could make it more challenging.
Or make the America intervention decisions avaliable from the start and have the AI take them after you declare a second war or something like that. Make it much more interesting if you have to fight the US and Brazil after you take Argentina for example
I just did a commie chile play through and yeah was able to conquer neighbors is easy. But god damn did the USA rock my shit once I had instiaged wars in most places. I almost lost and germany almost collapsed. Would have lost without collabs / germany there.
Maybe like an intervention when you push so far you can get your claim states or resources right but you got a truce with the country if you deny it and keep going then you get a hit to your stability and resources like you get blockades and can only get rid of it if you have a massive sub fleet or blockade runners or do something with the USA. Also a massive debuff in the regions since each country has a theme of what type of terrian you have to fight in and have a series to decisions to get a support company to deal with it works because it would take time and that the counties can't fight well in any hard terrian so they have to take decisions to learn how to do it or research support companies to deal with them. Since South America has terrian that is hard to get around and maybe use that to help balance things.
After some time to think about the DLC and evaluate it, Paradox should've done full focus trees for all of South America, and we should have gotten a major mechanical release or rework. In particular, a rework of the political and trade system would have been perfect to release alongside South America since the continent largely takes a supporting role of the WWII great powers both in actual history and in game. The continent is a perfect early game sandbox for both players and the great powers to influence political relations and ideologies as South American states scramble in the mid game to support various powers, blocs, and factions that align with their interests before WWII erupts and entangles South America in the late game. The in game mechanics and systems for ideologies, civil wars, insurrections, diplomacy, relations, factions, puppets, allies, trade, resources, etc. are frustratingly rigid and outdated as they leave the player very little choice to freely and flexibly manipulate international relations or wage war without having a major faction of great powers (especially the Allies) jump right up their ass. Both in historic and in ahistoric modes, it is super frustrating to constantly tip toe around guarantees, world tension, and factions with very little in the way of counterplay. A good example of this would be a major rework of liberal democracies. Playing as democratic countries is one of the most unenjoyable experiences in the game, and there is little to no ability to do anything except sit around and wait for a war to jump into. There is also no way to slowly change your ideology or politics as a democracy in the mid/late game to become more militaristic, nationalist, expansionist, jingoist, revanchist, irredentist, or hawkish which could partially remedy how fucking awful democracies are in HOI4. By giving players the ability in the early/mid game (without locking themselves into focus trees) to slowly and peacefully change their governments (especially democracies) into something more hawkish, imperialistic, illiberal, and colonialist, the player can pursue a late/end game build where they can both participate in WWII as a democratic member of the Allies just to betray and dominate the post WWII balance of power. Also, the addition of other ideologies or ideological umbrellas would be a fun thing. Why is the non-aligned ideology so mechanically crude, lackluster, and mediocre? Why don't unaligned countries get significant bonuses to diplomacy with the other three major ideological blocs of liberalism, communism, and fascism? What about creating additional sub-ideologies like theocracy, isolationism, traditionalism, monarchism, illiberalism, social democracy, conservatism, militarism, etc. and sticking them under the four ideological umbrellas of non-aligned, communism (really Marxism), liberalism, and fascism? I know HOI4 is supposed to be a war game where you inevitably get sucked into a world war, but it's very annoying as a player to experience lack of freedom over your own ability to navigate and influence politics, diplomacy, and trade. Trials of Allegiance was marketed as a South American sandbox where the player gets entangled into regional South American conflicts tied to WWII, but in reality, it's just a continuation of the same annoying, tired, cliched political dynamics of the Allied powers declaring war on anyone that upsets their global hegemony just because there have been no serious efforts to rework the diplomatic, political, and trade mechanics of HOI4. I'm having fun with the expansion, but it's still a shallow, disappointing waste of potential for Paradox to squander the opportunity to mechanically rework the game and add respectable focus trees to all South American states.
Do you want full south america dlc for $30 or two south america DLCs for $15… what is better? This way they did take less risk by seing if this sell enough to make the other dlc or not!
@haukionkannel Quit making excuses for corporations that rip us off by selling low quality products. Paradox has the resources and could have easily have produced focus trees for all nine countries in South America. Modders do this shit for free and often do it better. Gamers are such uncritical, servile consumers that they feel the need to rationalize and justify the exploitative practices of corporations.
@@eclipse_434 The worst thing is this is not even a South America sandbox; but is a half South America sandbox. Peru and Ecuador had literally a war in the middle of WW2 and Bolivia still has aspirations to retake their coast. But no; for PDX are more important Chile and Argentina who didn't do nothing in this context or even Paraguay and Uruguay which are the most unknown countries of South America (besides the Guianas) and again they did nothing. You can see in the teaser trailer, inside the title box, a map which shows the north of South America; and realizing that from this region only Brazil is in the DLC looks even like a scam and a false advertising And also, based comment.
"What went wrong", making a DLC for the most uninvolved and untouched continent in a ww2 era game. Would be like making a DLC dedicated to sub-Saharan African releasable nations, Liberia focus tree up next no doubt. Even people from these countries are more often going to be playing in literally any other continent.
My biggest problem, funnily enough, is that these focus trees are so massive that by the time you finally get to the stuff you want, the war is either over, or it would simply be overkill.
There probably is a way to look at state debuffs all at once but we'll find it seven years from now, three menus deep, in a sub basement behind a door marked beware of the tiger.
I think adding a core feature behind a flavor dlc is something that I think most people don't want. Most people would only want to pay for the major dlc's that have core features in them, and adding such features in flavor/minor dlc's would make the price of getting every significant dlc be increased by a large amount. I really don't see a problem with this dlc overall, just don't buy it really if you think modders can do better.
I don't know how true this is, but I have heard that a lot of the focus trees for the new expansion were directly lifted from a mod called En Unión y Libertad, and the mod somehow does it better anyways, so you're paying for just a worse version of something that was free already.
Trial of Allegiance name says it all, its trial if we let rob ourselves by bad game content, seeing Fallout mode free along those payed DLCs its just shamefull display.
paradox on a mission to prove they have a couple of chapters to add to the Blizzard/Creative Assembly Opus on how to destroy your relationship with a loyal customer base.
As a peruvian, my only complain is Chile having an option to reform the Inca empire over other nations, having them little to do with the Incas besides the fact that the northern part of modern Chile was a really minor part of their empire for a short period of time, and the rest of Chile, under the Mapuche, was a Inca rival. Perú, Bolivia and even Ecuador have more weight in reforming the Incas than Chile have. On the other hand the Mapuche branch was quite interesting to be honest. But well, Ive enjoyed ToA this far.
I will say that I felt the same way as you about the neglected states in Brazil at first. But it's really not that bad. Once you have fixed them they will have a +20% bonus to construction speed. So even though you do as you said in the last Brazil video continue to neglect them in the beginning at least when you do start building in them it is with a pretty large bonus to construction.
7:13 "America do Sul, which is in spanish." Portuguese. Brazil doesn't speak spanish. Come on dude you've been playing historical map games your whole career and you don't know this?
You know, a company that actually cares about their player base would include focus trees like this as a part of a patch. Or put a symbolic price of $0.99 at the worst. To actually charge the full price of an expansion that adds several new features to the game... for a few focus trees for the least played countries in the game... they deserve all the flak they get from this. When your game is getting more substantial content for FREE from modders, including a whole conversion mods with crapton of content, publishing a DLC which is just very basic content and pricing it $15 is just a huge dick move. What they need to do is issue an apology for the mistake, refund the $ and make the focus trees a part of a patch. But they won't do that in a million years - it is Paradox. Outside those AAA developers with microtransactions and gaming-as-a-service etc. Paradox has the worst DLC monetization policy in the industry at the moment.
1:45 Those arent an emoji that was changed, Steam just has a default profanity filter that takes a little working around to turn off, probably not worth it for a content creator who is showing their screen, but im pretty sure we all know the 4 letter word being said there.
This dlc made Paradox had to change the dlc to Expansions and Country Packs A welcome adition if you dont care about focus trees And made 3 DLC free, which i still dont know if it is good or painful
I think Paradox forgets that it’s relevance is very quickly getting replaced by mods such as Kaiserreich and RT56 and the last thing it needs is giving us 3 focus trees for £15
coring once costs 75 whole pp for argentina, i thinks its insane. and i tested if taking the falklands would work if the uk called its allies, and it worked(if the rest of the allies would still naval invade you 1000 times every tick). dont take my word for it
Your point about oil in Venezuela I think highlights the most important part of this DLC, and that is adding resources to South America- especially rubber in Brazil. This makes South America a bigger player and also gives all nations an additional source of rubber to trade for, which has always been crippling late game for axis or allies depending on who occupies Indonesia and Malaysia. IMO, Paradox needs to do the same thing in Africa as part of a DLC- add some resources down there. For the European colonizing powers it would make sense to transfer some of their resources down there if they weren't simply added in. Again, Rubber is a big one- the Congo should have tons of it. Adding resources down there would make the rest of the game a bit more relevant, and help explain, for example, why Italy wants so much of Africa in peace conferences, etc. Right now, the only resources Africa is particularly rich in are steel in Algeria, Rubber in Nigeria (sort of), and chromium in South Africa- which is still underutilized in the game mechanics even with the upgrades to tank armor.
As I am Brazilian and a long-time fan of HOI, this DLC was disappointing. Firstly, the Focus Tree is pretty average to bad. Secondly, it maintained problems that we already had before, such as: Brazilian provinces continue to be wrong and divided incorrectly. Thirdly, the PT-BR translation is still bad, even though it receives a DLC from the country itself. Even the Brazilian mod TS's Brazil (which remakes the whole Brazil) is much better than this DLC and it's free.
I always felt like the DLC added a feature and changed a few nations focus trees to show off the new feature fully. I think in this DLC the idea may have been "border wars", I recall that being in the Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay trees (take and hold this province and you can keep it and white peace). Maybe it wasn't possible to add this idea on a large scale within the game due to backend, so the DLC got scaled back. I feel like the idea of this border war stuff was mentioned or teased by paradox a while back.
I think with minor nations focus trees, they should be focused on strengthening their historical 'national spirits' as well as strengthening their unique terrain and industrial features. It is up to the player to build their nation around these bonus's which may be only applicable for certain units or terrains. With Brazil brown water experts it basically ensures that the Amazon would be impassible for any invading armies and its the duty of the player to find a strategy to go bypass Brazils strengths. Brown water would also give good bonus for Marines on river tiles. if you're fighting against brazil with these bonus's it would be your prerogative to think a little harder on ways to counter these bonus's and use your nation's unique build to counter it. (don't fight mountaineers in mountains, marines on rivers, tanks in plains, etc.) Overall since the majority of HOI4 are single player and multiplayer games are governed by rule sets; I don't think that strengthening nations a bit more than what may be historically plausible isn't an issue. As if you're playing historical then Brazil for example wouldn't effect gameplay as they didn't fully commit their military. If you're playing without historical focus's then I think South America adds another depth of flavor rather than fighting a soulless AI country.
The price may have been a bit high, but Brazil was one of my first countries I played for HOI4 and I had a lot of fun with it, along with other SA countries. That said, I have been constantly playing this and am enjoying it a lot. I like the trees and what they have done, but this DLC is more for a niche market: Either you love it or probably will never play it.
I enjoyed the battle for the bosohorus dlc because I had an interest on the area and forming bizantium. My main problem with this one is that it's an area that doesn't interest me, it is way too far from the actual conflict of the time, it feels only slightly more fun than neutral New Zealand . Then again, if you live there you'd probably love it, which is fair.
I think a nicer solution than just limiting to two problems at most per tree. Maybe there should be ways to solve the problems quickly but at greater risk or less reliable outcomes. For instance maybe two or three of these modifies could be removed or lessened completely with a change of government that increases tensions with the US but requires working with the cartels to improve the local situation at a smaller cost than the previous malice, this could open up completely different decisions. Or a focus path policy that takes probably 140 days for laissez-faire economy. Where the modifiers dont go away or get reduced a little but instead more natural insturial growth occurs, giving a random factory per 3 months or random infrastructure per month that offset the malice. This could even have events connected to them such as poor construction methods just gives you a factory but needs repair, or "increase foreign investment" that gives an additional infrastructure or a radar station or better yet a refinery, or even using cp to encourage mil growth or to prevent scandals with populace and government. Or maybe some lend lease quests that give you cetian bonus once youve leased enough equipment to a certain nation. This could give outcomes such as france gifting you French Guiana or japan gifting you long lance torpedoes or Germany gifting you refinery tech or russians sending you a thank you letter. Just some thoughts
you made a good point about insignificant minors becoming too OP, there's also the fact that the OP buffs on focuses on new DLCs make them more powerful than the focuses in old DLCs that aren't as strong
Tbf they should rework all big nations first (except Italy imo) because they are boring now I think. They keep adding new focus trees for nations that didn’t had and it’s good and they are usually okay, but the thing is that with constantly doing that, the big nation focus trees fall outdated and uninteresting. If I we’re them, I would consider a 1 big nation rework/new DLC or big patch (not DLC included, free update ofc.) until every nation gets a reworked focus tree.
I'm telling yall right now, you don't want paradox to update Germany. It will be the most miserable goddamned exercise in trying to have fun with hoi4 while getting massive guilt trip events that add "flavor". Will be the game killer if they do it I think.
My biggest gripe here is that you're just playing locally, without ever getting involved in the world war at all. There's no global intervention or pushback if you complete your local conquest before WW2 kicks off. I feel like America or Germany should interfere with some kind of consequence if you conquer half the sub-continent.
PI: Let's release an expansion that just focuses on counties people play because they are forced to or are bored with the others! PI Fans: So a mod? PI: Except you pay me. PI Fans: Wow you really do need to die.
The biggest problem with it isn't the price or lack of content, but that the focus trees aren't well made, there is some interesting and very plausible alt-history that are either poorly made or simply aren't there, and the worst of all, historical inaccuracies. Examples: Peron path was forgotten and only made later on development (???), no Vargas path for supporting the axis but there is a integralist Vargas one (???????), communist cangaço (??????????????????), and even more...
The two examples that I recall that are similar to the bandits thing is Manchuria and Greece/Yugoslavia. In Manchuria I think it actually is bandits you have to deal with and one way I think is to garrison troops. Greece and Yugoslavia get those IMRO Bulgarian rebels that you can eliminate with stationing troops in the claimed states and picking decisions too.
One really basic thing paradox could do to beef up the game as part of a broader DLC would be to add more advisors to countries. This would be great since there are a lot of countries that have horrible political advisors or just very bog standard ones, e.g. Japan doesn't have a civ construction advisor. Literally just a small picture and very easy to add in.
I feel like the problem is that south america is pretty isolated. Other DLCs like battle for the bosporus were similar, but at least with that it added a bit of flavor for other nations because other nations actually interact with them. Like for example when playing Germany, sooner or later you will interact with Greece, one way or another. But that's just not the case for south america
What went wrong was the fact that Paradox expected people to pay full price for focus trees. Not full-on updates like Arms Against Tyranny or By Blood Alone or No Step Back which shifted how the game was played, but just for _focus trees_ .
12:44 somewhat agree. It feels more rewarding, but also feels in a way weaker than the generic focus tree. Ultimately you get more with the free war goals and the options with Portugal/Colonies, but as far as blitzing South America it doesn't feel as powerful as it did before. The navy modifier hits especially hard since I really don't want to spend focuses there, -40% on naval production is crippling to get any escorts or good amount of subs out.
I’m hoping that paradox finally adds the finally reworks the focus tree to the German empire so that you can gain a core on Southern Jutland and so you can make the September plan possible. With maybe even adding a rework Belgium’s states so that you can core the small border region with German so you can have the complete German Imperial borders without something like the Endsieg states mod.
Not adding dyamism to interact with the existing Mexico tree? Or give Mexico cores to their LatAm conquest after all this time given a lot of people also got South America cores?
I'm actually working on a mod that does that, giving focus trees without overhauling a bunch of other stuff. I want to maybe optimize one or two things that makes the game work really slow and maybe fix the peacetime AI a little bit, but I don't want to introduce anything too terribly grandiose. It is in very early development, Aka, I'm currently starting with overhauling the generic focus tree, but after that, I'm working on a few groups of countries at a time, starting with the Germanic ones.
The problem is that there is no resource like food in the game, if so, air defense, the devastation of war zones, naval play, etc., would have more importance, since for example, the Axis would want food from Argentina (Grain, meat too, but it is only around because it does not survive the trip, although for game reasons transport could be possible), that would make the attack on Ukraine much more useful, Denmark instead of giving it some modifiers no sense giving food in large quantities, Central Asia would have some value apart from a province next to Xinjiang, etc. To add, we Argentines want the Malvinas for national pride, but also for the limit of maritime exploitation, since that would enlarge it a lot, in addition to the fact that the British base their entire claim for their piece of Antarctica on those 3 Islands, which are overlap with the Argentine and Chilean claims. Finally, the Argentine Facist tree is Broken, 20% attack is very good, but if you go through Argentina first the approach below gives you 30% recruitable population, then you don't need the South American cores for your manpower. And as a last fact, I managed to have Hitler capitulate to Germany myself much later (the Axis was my final boss in the game, and I fought them all over the world before arriving in Europe because I thought it was fun, since his United States, to Africa, then to China, then to India, then to what was left of the Middle East, and then all the way from Siberia to Spain), when I capitulated to Germany a week later Hitler came with me, but I had done the Fascist Union approach, so I understand the only approach you need is German Investments.
The fact they picked Uruguay and Paraguay over Peru Colombia and Venezuela is baffling, they will 100% make another dlc in south America for focuses for these far more important countries
Nice thing with the Brazil focus tree is you can achieve some form of Autarky with your resources. But yeah this is all stuff we already had from mods :/
--TIME STAMPS--
00:00 Intro
05:02 Brazil national focus review
14:44 Chile national focus review
16:29 Paraguay national focus review
18:02 Uruguay national focus review
18:37 Argentina national focus review
23:00 final tier list
23:19 thoughts on the modding comparison
27:14 final thoughts
Bro became that guy 💀
are you seriously ignore En Unión y Libertad mod?
Honestly if they just gave all of Latin America focuses I would be so much less annoyed with this dlc because at least it wouldn't feel so anemic for the price, even without features you could justify the cost if there were like 15ish trees. I still would not buy it unless if I was playing in the region and I would prefer some universal features but it wouldn't feel like such a scam
Feedback: Brazil is a bit overwhelming...
Have you played Russia?
Just for the record:
* "América du Sul" is Portuguese, not Spanish.
* Incas are as native to Chile as the British to North America. What Paradox used are the Mapuche, an umbrella term for several native groups from Chile (exact composition is context dependent), located on south Chile and parts of the Argentinian Patagonia. This path makes about as much sense as the Cherokee taking over USA's government and setting a kingdom presided by the 3rd pretender of "Emperor" Joshua Norton (Do note that Norton had more real power and estime that the entire line of "Mapuche Kings" ever had... and Norton left no pretenders).
The pricing went wrong
I think this is the thing. If it was cheaper, I don't think people would have complained as much. The entire Modding thing I ignore, because while they are cool, at the end of the day they are simply bonuses to stretch out a games lifespan.
The pricing is the same as every other regional pack of the same size.
Well, technically a buck more expensive, which is remarkably low given the massive inflation the world went through.
@@Nerazmus the V3 version of this DLC is 6 dollars and has way more content, insane cope
@@Nerazmus, Rupiah lost 50% of its value in January 2022, resulting in the contents becoming twice as expensive for Indonesians.
I preordered No Step Back on November 2021 at 109k Rupiahs, and when i discovered that the preorder for By Blood Alone in August 2022 is at 215k Rupiahs, i stopped buying DLCs altogether.
but every over dlc adds some expansion to gameplay, aside from focuses. Eg tank, airplane designers, weapon market, agencies, etc
The "mini" focus trees for Uruguay and Paraguay are the same size as the German focus tree LMAO
He says mini because most of them are focuses where u have to choose one or the other. It makes the focus tree alot smaller when you play it
XD
half of german focus tree is mutually exclusive with each other @@Darktrap-e5d
@@Darktrap-e5d I mean, the german focus tree is rather small tbh, for todays standards and considering how big Germanys is in the game, u could even say the entire game is focused around Germany, a Germany rework of the rework is long over due
@@Inquisite1031 One that doesn't cost cash, we already paid for the DLC that reworked Germany, shouldn't have to pay for the same thing twice just because they decided to change how they make their focus trees.
If this DLC was all of South America it would be a lot less painful.
Try American Dictator mod
Yeah currently it's just a worse paid version of "En Unión y Libertad"
Yeah that's just bizarre.
If it would be whole south america… it would be at least douoble as expensive…
So do we get two dlc $15 each or one dlc $30… whatnis the difference?
@@haukionkannel i would have whole south america with focus trees and some flavor and i dont need to wait for another dlc to add the remaining focus trees instead they would focus on germany?
USA and Japan still need reworked Focus Trees, but instead we got half of South America. For the price of an expansion.
4 games during summer fest
Exactly. They chose this because they can make more money that way. Reworking previous DLC focus trees would be way harder to justify monetizing again to the community.
And Germany. It isn’t a bad tree, but it’s quite lackluster for the most important country in the war.
@@Labargoth they made 3 DLCs free to justify just that.
Nah, the last time i viewed the Workshop, AAT (an expansion) is at 20$, Battle for the Bosporus (a countrypack) is 10$, but Trial of Allegiance is at 15$.
So it seems a halfway point between a countrypack and a proper expansion with mechanics.
Bizzare choices hurt Brazil like no coring Portugal as monarchists and the United States of South America not getting cores which hurts the play through.
The former is especially bizarre especially considering the Portuguese monarchist path can do so and is almost the prerequisite for the Macau My Day achievement.
What cores the USSA doesn't get?
I kind of agree with what you're saying, but Paradox really needs to learn how to give the player more freedom to incrementally and slowly gain more manpower and cores without ridiculous and comically overpowered focus trees granting the player millions of manpower at the click of a mouse. Things like modifiers to non-core manpower, monthly population growth, weekly manpower increases, boosting pop growth with public health, immigration policies, compliance of occupied territories, impressment of encircled prisoners of war into the military, etc. could be used alongside gaining additional cores. The player should be allowed to utilize resources like political power, factories, trade resources, command power, construct civilian buildings, etc. to slowly gain cores over the course of years of in game time. Paradox has arbitrarily and foolishly limited themselves in game design and development to only assigning cores through focus trees and political power decisions when we could have more comprehensive and fleshed out system instead.
@@eclipse_434hoi4 isn't the same global strategy as eu4/vic2/stellaris, it's more of an ordinary wargame about preparations for the Second World War and the Second World War itself.
Monthly population growth is an absolutely useless thing while most of the games aren't last for even a 10 years, when you conquered Axis/Allies and the game starts to lag and slow down.
@@Бекрия Monthly population growth can easily net you tens of thousands of extra manpower over the course of a few years. You just don't notice it because it's really subtle when compared to the glaringly obvious losses of war casualties or the huge sudden influx of manpower gained when going up a conscription law or when gaining new core territories. Adding more mechanics in game that give the player the ability to unlock a slow trickle of increasing manpower through various mechanics like compliance, weekly increases, immigration, population growth, etc. would be a great addition to HOI4 because it avoids power creep while forcing the player to act in accordance to long term strategic interests of slowly gaining manpower while skillfully avoiding losses due to casualties. This is fundamentally way better game design than pressing a button and gaining millions of manpower due to the power creep of DLC focus trees giving the player the ability to core entire continents.
Paradox Failed their Trial of Allegiance to the players! 🤣
Yoooooooo ☠️☠️☠️
Frrrrrrrrrr
Vote with your wallets gentlemen. Dont buy it and tell PDX "No! This is f*cking bull💩!" Then they will do a Creative Assembly apology and lower their price. We can do this!
Bro cooked PDX 😂😂😂
it's not a DLC it's a focus tree mod that you could find on steam workshop
what was the name of the mod?
@@sejozwak I think he's talking about En Unión y Libertad
@@Eldesmentidordecreepypastas Ah yeah, paradox
For those wondering, the country with the banditry problems is Manchukuo
- Shared military path between all the trees, which lead to Brazil becoming horrifically unbalanced.
- The sentiment that not every country needs an in-depth, 100+ foci tree, especially when they didn't have a noticeable impact on the period of history in general.
- The neglect of trees that desperately need a re-work, such as Japan, Germany & the USA.
- The fact that mods, primarily Road to 56, already gave us an overhaul for South America, completely for free.
- The price was too expensive given that no new mechanics or features were included.
As a dev on Road to 56: our South American trees are bad. Some of the oldest in the mod. These are absolutely better trees.
There is also a mod called Union y Liberdad that is literally better than a DLC made by a company that is worth millions 😂
@@vlanderytbr Yep! Its a very good mod.
That last point is the biggest, especially since they've acknowledged through their recatagorizing this and Battle For the Bosporus as "Country Packs", rather than expansions.
2 and 4 are nonsense
It really feels like the trees were all just kind of made independent of each other instead of them being together. For example the focus that just let's Brazil invade Uruguay is nonsensical in real life Argentina would not let that happen. Instead of there being balance in the region one tree (the player) becomes super overpowered and just rolls over the other nations. Idk how many times I have to say this but look to kaisereich. The Devs of kaisereich balanced south America and made it interesting with various events that make it feel like the nation is reacting to your actions as a leader
They also went further and changed how some nations worked, ala, the USA. Before you could avoid the ACW via an event chain, but it will fail no matter what as you get Couped by MacArthur. The removed it because it would locked out or remove a number of event for Latin and South America.
Exactly this. It feels like some random new modders teams were each assigned a country and told to do whatever they want with it. It’s nonsensical.
Kaiserreich sucks tho.
@@lokenontherange Best rated mod for hoi4. Most people disagree.
@@ShakyBakey Most people liking something isn't evidence of quality.
I think the neglected state thingy is there so you don't build anything there, thus neglecting the state. It pushes you to neglect them as was historically. Neglect.
Except the focus tree and the buff you get from completing all the focuses to remove the neglect is counter to that. You are clearly not supposed to neglect them, it's just the way it's done is through the focus tree rather than something else, like decisions that have a cost, or building a little in that region with the penalty, to remove the penalty for future building. There are many better ways they could've done it.
@@crit-c4637 I think thats a massive problem of in HOI4 you got one recourse.... yes we also got civilian industry consumer product but thats just so backwards.
what I mean is that when you on Civilian industry (civilian should use some of that factories to make roads and railways over time, pre war trucks and you know civilian industry stuff... I mean the capatalism are not just making toaster they are also at this point in time building factories and so on.
Political power and you spend like 150 points on hiring one person or you spend X to do project Y and the output off them all are so over the place.
think the game need two additional reseroces/point Civilian Capital this is found the civilian industry would use that is not controlled by the military.
then Military Resorces/point same deal here.
It's so obvious that it hurts when he doesn't get it
Paradox inventing “Brazilian Spanish” must be the real problem.
Wait seriously? I don’t have hoi4 installed to check.
Brazilian here. Where do we have Brazilians speaking Spanish? The soldiers speak with a Carioca accent that gives me the nerves but that is still Portuguese
@@DiogoSalazarsotaque carioca realmente é a pior coisa que a paradox poderia adicionar
Lmao😂
Please explain..
How bad did things get?
If the DLC was more like $10, I think it would have gotten a lot better reviews. It's ONLY focuses. It's not one of the normal $20 DLCs with focuses, mechanics, rebalances and the likes. The issue is 100% the price. I like the Focus trees so far and think they are a great fit, just not at the price point it's at.
The Mostly Negative Reviews it’s been given on Steam reminds me of By Blood Alone.
It problems goes away soon when they release new big dlc for $40 to $50… so $15 will be cheap!
😂
take a drink every time dave says trail instead of trial
Being a dlc about south america yet not even having any shit for the northern half of the continent with that pricing is crazy
It truly is, when you have a mod like En Union y Libertad that not only reaches the north of south america, with a custom focus tree for most of them, not with a copy/paste military tree with each country having a solid buff for X for free, compared to this lackluster DLC, it just show's modder's love compared to "want money"
"Brazil has many issues" ... thats literally Brazil IRL
"américa do sul is in spanish"
no my man, this is portuguese
womp womp, maybe be more relevant as a language and people wont mistake it
@@SaintRubiconPoor ragebait
„Uhm guyz its akshually not spanish its (basicly the same language) 🤓☝️!”
@@meliwest Very different language.
@@VkrauRJ exact same language
En Union y Libertad is the most mod this DLC should aspire to be. They integrate PDX dlc mechanics, focus trees for almost if not every nation in South America.
6:37 - This is the problem with all historical strategy games really. The game will naturally launch with the most content for history's heaviest hitters, so as expansions come out more and more marginal countries end up benefiting from the refinement that development goes through.
Think about another game series for this too: Civilization. Civilization will presumably always launch with Persia, Rome, China, America, England, etc. as countries from day 1, so they get tethered to vanilla game features and sensibilities. Then when later expansions come along adding way less globally impactful countries like Canada those are the ones that get new mechanics or funky bonuses that make them more fun to play than history's greatest empires.
The problem for this with HOI is that the games will always _need_ the main 8 countries of WW2 (China, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, UK, USA, USSR) to launch with content. And so the USSR or Italy can sit around for 5-6 years waiting for updates while the Chinese Warlords or Netherlands get gimmicks more novel than anything they can do. Since they're now directly integrating older expansions into the base game, I imagine that means we'll get _another_ paid set of expansions for the Commonwealth states, Central Europe, and/or the Chinese theater later this year.
Bad example, the Netherlands is garbage, it's not even terrible, but it forces you not to play alone in your own faction.
I'm glad you mentioned the lack of consistency with localisation. Would be nice if there was a toggle for it. The focus trees lack of consistency makes the recent ones seem like a mod, where one modder has used localisation for their tree and another one hasn't. It kinda suggests the dev team aren't properly discussing it
Selling focus trees when the workshop is free
And the free mods are generally higher quality than the crud Paradox pumps out.
Workshop things are done for fun…
Dlc are done for salary. Big difference!
@@haukionkannel A salary for a mediocre work? No thanks, that doesn't deserve my money.
Cutting trees to sell in the workshop - paradox
Then don't buy it man- nobody is forcing you to support the game.
I think in terms of focus trees this pack was actually better then AAT but I understand peoples frustration by the price- tag i feel sorry for the devs because hoi being such a sandbox game means that the community is full of people who play for very different reasons some love role play some are statistic addicts I guess a focus tree only dlc was never gonna make everyone happy
Certainly not when they charge so much
Kaiserriech, Kaiserredux, TNO and EaW devs give as much Content as every Vanilla DLC Combined FOR FREE.
The Paradox Devs should review the Games Monetisation and Community because most people probably prefer to have 200 Hours worth of Content in EaW for free than only 60 Hours in any DLC that costs more than 10 Dollars
It has almost nothing to do with "pleasing everyone", and almost everything to do with Paradox's insane pricing scheme. Hearts of Iron IV is $39.99. Trial of Allegiance is $14.99
This DLC is 37.5% of the base game's price, almost 2/5. Does the DLC provide anywhere near 2/5 of the value as the base game? Even someone who really enjoys country packs like this is going to have a hard time justifying that. Especially when passionate fans in the community provide this exact type of content, free of charge.
I can't say what the exact price should have been, as I imagine there would be a lot of debate over that. But for me personally, a DLC that provides this much content would start being "overpriced" in my eyes past 5 dollars.
People are just outraged at Paradox because they keep doing this, for all of their games, and it has only been getting worse.
It's fairly simply. People wanted a Germany rework with an austrian and Belgian tree attached. We got a whole region no one cares about for way too much money with very little content.
Have more respect for Latin America, you know who cares? To Latinos, every region deserves to be represented so measure your words
@@andresdiazgarrido3940ok, except this is a game about world war 2, not a “make everyone in every country feel good” simulator. And Germany, the country that is basically the “main character” of the game hasn’t been updated in years, and the Latin American countries played virtually no role of significance in the entire conflict.
@@Sherzam91Brazil send some soldiers to italy.
@@Sherzam91 It is not the fault of the Latins that they have made a DLC like this, go complain to paradox, do not belittle a region that is not to blame for anything
@@mikkel066h I know, but you basically just proved my point, if that the first defense you have for this whole thing. We’re talking about the largest war in human history, and you’re talking about one country, who sent a fairly small amount of troops, to a third rate power on the other side. Nothing you just described can’t be replicated in the game by the Brazil player click “send volunteers” to America. Look, if South America as a whole didn’t exist, it wouldn’t have very little impact on the entirety of the war, that’s a fact. I get it if you’re from there, you’re excited your country gets some focuses, but that’s not what 99% of the player base wants, or what even makes sense from a game design perspective. There are mods that do what paradox did better and for free.
> Chile can core France within their focus tree before 1940
> Everybody can become a Superpower not by Player Strategy but by being force-fed Wargoals and Cores
> "Ejercito xyz" "the xyz Army" Bonusses that break the game entirely, sure, a little +2,5% here can't hurt, but then late game you get to a point where you don't even need to think anymore, your Army is insanely buffed, and the carefully crafted Doctrines and Warfare/ Combat System with all the math that makes this game special is just not needed anymore.
Overall I'm thoroughly disappointed in PDX, Countries like Germany still have bugged events like Molotov-Ribbentrop, not coring some states as some formables like south-western France/ Basque Country as the EU, or Cairo/ Yemes, etc. as Arabia, and so many other Bugs that ruin the game. The game itself needs a THOROUGH redirection toward Balance, sensible Focus Trees/ Formables and Fixing Bugs.
We don't need or want a country that has done almost nothing in WW2 to be able to nonsensically core what is practically the entire world.
While I agree with some of your points (Particularly about OP focuses) I wholeheartedly disagree with others.
Do you really want paid for patches? How otherwise do you propose funding the teams?
We wanted Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia. They gave us Brazil, Argentina, Chile
unironically much better
Well how should I say this. I'm Brazilian, I've been waiting for some kind of DLC or content for Brazil for a long time, and honestly when they announced it with the trailer, I cried with joy because the fuck there's finally going to be some attention for Brazil. In return what did I receive? a tree that politically doesn't make any sense if you look at the history of Brazil, some industrial businesses that don't make sense to exist, in addition to not correcting the issues of natural resources present in Brazil (remembering that Brazil is extremely rich in natural resources), and the military development tree is relatively decent, but the focus timing is really bad and you don't feel strong enough to beat Argentina, which received a focus in the same update, because if you play, you won't even be able to beat Uruguay. if you put the issue of military bonuses side by side. And that's because I haven't yet talked about the MIO or government advisors, many of whom should have requirements based on ideology and don't, and those of the war council simply haven't changed, so there are still mistakes like the former president from Brazil Floriano Peixoto as a possible advisor to the navy alive in 1936 and he died in 1895. Furthermore, many of the military and armed forces themselves had an ACTIVE life within Brazilian politics after the fall of the monarchy, and this is not represented IN NO ASPECT of the tree, much less with the generals who could have traces of factions like many other generals have in other nations, because as a Brazilian it is completely ridiculous for me to follow a monarchist path and still have access to Marshal Candido Rondôm, who was a firm republican, in addition to being an indigenist (which is another thing that is not portrayed), honestly the dlc is not worth its value or even its content.
Fr, as an argentinian i was also hyped for the DLC, since there was quite a bit of political turmoil in the country, and any political party movement ended up in the army taking up arms, but the fact that, if you know how to play, you can avoid every civil war by not doing the focus of the war, getting the national referendum, and skipping maybe a year's worth of focus without loosing the bonus, ngl, better stick to En Union y Libertad
being rich in natural resources doesn't mean brazil was able to access them in 1936. perhaps you would need a LOT of resource development decisions tied to excavation and construction technologies to make that accurate
Comunist Lampião...
When you go down the monarchist path and conquer south america, the flag goes back to the republican one, and the name changes to just "South America"
But this nothing new to the bloody game,
remember "No Step Back"? the Russian alternate focus tree iss also nuts, Non Aligned Russia still has the old Naval st Andrew cross flag, the name is changed to "R U S S I A" instead of something like, Russian Empire or Tsardom of Russia,
There are still advisors and other characters for a democratic path (Like Alexander Kerensky) but there's no Democratic path was ever implemented!
And don't get me started on the whole Third Rome nonsense, Its just retarded.... but it pales in comparison to the new Mapuche/ Decolonization focuses, these are just Red Flood Level of mental retardation.
Paradox's just lazy mate, you know what? the players DESERVE what they get, all they do is complain but they still fucken buying their incomplete, overpriced, POS DLC's and products.
It's a good addition to the game, it's just not the one the game needed, the stupid priorities Paradox has and the pricing annoys me. Where is the Japanese rework? The focus trees are actually really good and paths like Democratic paraguay are honestly some of the most fun I had playing in vanilla it's just absurd that we didn't get Gran colombia path for example.
Paradox was actually really clear on there priority. They can make 1 major DLC every year, while in betwen they can realise this smaller packs for less popular regions. As such, Germany/Japan rework will most likely come in major DLC.
The issue with a Japan or Germany rework was, that they already had one in a dlc, which are now to be integrated into the main game, so they can get a proper rework.
Well we pray it comes the next dlc because Japan and Germany and China really need to be looked at again
@lisaruhm6681 The old reworks were done poorly so they'll sell you another product.
@@lokenontherange Id say more like they are in some of the oldest dlcs of the game. They were done in 2017 and 2018, so 6 and 7 years ago...
I feel like if you want to bring back a native empire, there needs to be some in-game way to make that happen. If I'm not mistaken, a lot of South American countries don't (or at least didn't) think much of native societies. So what would be cool is doing a focus to make an Army division with a unique Commmander, an admiral, and/or maybe Ace Pilot who are Native American. Then, if that army division's Commander is promoted to all the way to Field Marshall, there is a unique upgrade to the Field Marshall that allows them to become a political advisor. As a political advisor, all of your Army divisions gain like 20% of what he had as a Field Marshall, it unlocks a part of the focus tree to idolize native societies. That way, you have to decide whether to keep him as a Field Marshall for a long time to get as many universal bonuses as possible, or promote him to a Political Advisor as quickly as possible to start on the new focuses. The same could be done with the Admiral, but I'm not sure what you could do with the Ace Pilot... maybe you just have to keep generating Ace Pilots until you can form a Native Pilot Council by losing 3 Native Ace Pilots...? Anyway, in the formerly-locked Native part of the Focus Tree, you can do stuff like gain compliance faster in more rural states, gain a recruitable pop factor bonus in more rural states, core former Incan states once their compliance is high enough, and make Integrated Puppets of Aztec, Mayan, Cherokee, or Apache nations (maybe for displaced tribes, you have to control both their original territory and their new territory, connect both territories with trains, lose a certain number of trucks, trains, and civilian factories for a time, but you can form these Integrated Puppets even during wartime).
Not only is this DLC overpriced for what it offers, but it's also a bundle of powercreep.
Well for my part is that I am played HOI4 so much that I am burnt out for a while, so I am gonna avoid it until me and my friends gets the itch back and then we probably gonna get it.
8:25 that would be Manchukuo
Turkey as well
@@gildedphoenixturkey doesn’t have bandits it has Kurdish rebels
@@Carlo_von_Habsburg same mechanic though
@@gildedphoenix similar
@@gildedphoenix if i recall the kurds actually free themselves if not delt with the bandits dont
Issues with the DLC are
South America > Does not include all of South America.
Price Tag.
Region that is very very Hit and Miss in most if not all games.
Weird and Odd design choices, such as no cores in Portugal for Brazil if they go monarchist.
Manchukuo is the nation with banditry
Someone at Paradox must be a fan of South America. Within a few months both Victoria 3 and HOI4 got South America DLCs
I recommend the mod EN UNION Y LIBERTAD if you want a bigger expansion (Argentina used to be more fun in the mod tho, nowadays DLC feels better)
I remember when hoi4 was a ww2 experience, now is a cluster of clown paths
That died with Death or Dishonor. When Austria-Hungary became the 'default' tree for Hungary, it created a race to the bottom for the craziest nonsensically and overpowered focus trees
HoI4 never was a good WW2 experience. Glad they went full on ahistorical because the game is just lacking way too much to remotely simulate the real war. Even HoI3 is better in this aspect.
@@Scarface_1b i remember when people stopped complainig and went into modding... That used to be nice, nowdays it is jusr "UGH YU DIDI NOT GET WHAT AIII WANT"
It hasn’t been about WW2 in a long time.
@@picollojr9009 you paying for what the game is advertising, a ww2 simulator, still, paradox fans are so brainless, they believe mods are a core feature of the game, no dude, the community doesnt need to fix the useless state the game is
7:15, its portuguese :c
Sim 😂😂😂😂😂
to say spanish on the brazilian focus is a disgrace, we deserve another video playing brazil for that 🤣
It's fiber optic cable
THAT RIGHT THERE! What you can do with the Faulkland Island white peace, is how ALL war goals should work. One of the most painful experiences as a minor player is the ludicrous focuses set by Paradox for minors. It's always like Rebuild the rail roads > An army of our own > Capitulate the UK..... This is something I want to see a complete overhaul of, so you can realistically complete your goal, or take a nation by small chunks if so. Its like halfway there with the weird war goal thing paradox has set up when you justify on a province, but then has no bearing after that.
It should be, justify on the desired province > War > hold the land for X amount of time > White peace and take that land. Why is this so difficult for Paradox to do.
Bandits in manchuko is what you were thinking off. Added all the way back in WTT
Also, it has not been playtested at all. For example, Monarchist Portugal can shut down half of Brazil focus tree if they take the path. No one can get wargoal focus on the Non-Aligned nations(which are most of the continent) and so many other issues
The main reason Argentina wants those islands is national prestige and security for their coast (as you know the UK and US are both known to solve issues by simply blockading nations until they're too weak to refuse any and all terms) having islands like that all over your coast allows them to force unfair trade treaties for fear of one of those blockades, something Argentina, Japan, Venezuela, China, etc etc etc all had to experience in at some point, Argentina's roca-truman treaty is one of those one sided unfair treaties, yes it gives Argentina a lot of bonuses and helped them develop faster than their neighbors, but historically it also made them way to dependent on the UK and once the UK stopped investing and trading, Argentina immediately collapsed into the mess it is today
So to me having those islands should give you another boost to the treaty as you're no longer cornered and you can trade internationally with more ease
Alternatively, those islands are sitting in a MASSIVE underwater oil reserve that the UK is not allowed to tap into (since the Islands are disputed territory), so another bonus it could give you is simply have the ability to dig for a bit more oil in them after you core them and solve the dispute
Deepwater Oil Drilling was not really a thing in the WW2 era (shallow water was done though). I personally doubt seizing some islands would gain a trade advantage (particularly compared to the far more low hanging Tierra del Fuego) although the prestige of defeating the UK at sea would be considerable.
Personally, I think there should be more ways to snatch the islands if the UK is capped/has a revolution.
honestly if they had added focus trees of the same (not the best) quality to all of south america I would be fine with it and I wouldn't mind the price. You pay 15 bucks one time and you have QA tested content for the whole region and you don't have to worry about crashes etc. Just feels like their stretching out the amount of expansions that hoi4 really warrants.
I'm chilean and i played a lot with Chile on this DLC and i really think they made the country too strong. Strong enough to make it boring to play after conquering Argentina and Brasil.
I think that the dev team needs to buff South American AI as when conquering said countries they don't even have enough divisions to fill the frontline. Chile, with it's very limited manpower can conquer the entire world with almost no micro and no encirclements.
So reducing country buffs and buffing the SA AI and adding some mechanic to SA countries to form alliances or/and receive volunteers could make it more challenging.
Or make the America intervention decisions avaliable from the start and have the AI take them after you declare a second war or something like that. Make it much more interesting if you have to fight the US and Brazil after you take Argentina for example
Yeah, more Challenger equals more fun
I just did a commie chile play through and yeah was able to conquer neighbors is easy. But god damn did the USA rock my shit once I had instiaged wars in most places. I almost lost and germany almost collapsed. Would have lost without collabs / germany there.
Maybe like an intervention when you push so far you can get your claim states or resources right but you got a truce with the country if you deny it and keep going then you get a hit to your stability and resources like you get blockades and can only get rid of it if you have a massive sub fleet or blockade runners or do something with the USA. Also a massive debuff in the regions since each country has a theme of what type of terrian you have to fight in and have a series to decisions to get a support company to deal with it works because it would take time and that the counties can't fight well in any hard terrian so they have to take decisions to learn how to do it or research support companies to deal with them. Since South America has terrian that is hard to get around and maybe use that to help balance things.
After some time to think about the DLC and evaluate it, Paradox should've done full focus trees for all of South America, and we should have gotten a major mechanical release or rework. In particular, a rework of the political and trade system would have been perfect to release alongside South America since the continent largely takes a supporting role of the WWII great powers both in actual history and in game. The continent is a perfect early game sandbox for both players and the great powers to influence political relations and ideologies as South American states scramble in the mid game to support various powers, blocs, and factions that align with their interests before WWII erupts and entangles South America in the late game.
The in game mechanics and systems for ideologies, civil wars, insurrections, diplomacy, relations, factions, puppets, allies, trade, resources, etc. are frustratingly rigid and outdated as they leave the player very little choice to freely and flexibly manipulate international relations or wage war without having a major faction of great powers (especially the Allies) jump right up their ass. Both in historic and in ahistoric modes, it is super frustrating to constantly tip toe around guarantees, world tension, and factions with very little in the way of counterplay.
A good example of this would be a major rework of liberal democracies. Playing as democratic countries is one of the most unenjoyable experiences in the game, and there is little to no ability to do anything except sit around and wait for a war to jump into. There is also no way to slowly change your ideology or politics as a democracy in the mid/late game to become more militaristic, nationalist, expansionist, jingoist, revanchist, irredentist, or hawkish which could partially remedy how fucking awful democracies are in HOI4. By giving players the ability in the early/mid game (without locking themselves into focus trees) to slowly and peacefully change their governments (especially democracies) into something more hawkish, imperialistic, illiberal, and colonialist, the player can pursue a late/end game build where they can both participate in WWII as a democratic member of the Allies just to betray and dominate the post WWII balance of power.
Also, the addition of other ideologies or ideological umbrellas would be a fun thing. Why is the non-aligned ideology so mechanically crude, lackluster, and mediocre? Why don't unaligned countries get significant bonuses to diplomacy with the other three major ideological blocs of liberalism, communism, and fascism? What about creating additional sub-ideologies like theocracy, isolationism, traditionalism, monarchism, illiberalism, social democracy, conservatism, militarism, etc. and sticking them under the four ideological umbrellas of non-aligned, communism (really Marxism), liberalism, and fascism?
I know HOI4 is supposed to be a war game where you inevitably get sucked into a world war, but it's very annoying as a player to experience lack of freedom over your own ability to navigate and influence politics, diplomacy, and trade. Trials of Allegiance was marketed as a South American sandbox where the player gets entangled into regional South American conflicts tied to WWII, but in reality, it's just a continuation of the same annoying, tired, cliched political dynamics of the Allied powers declaring war on anyone that upsets their global hegemony just because there have been no serious efforts to rework the diplomatic, political, and trade mechanics of HOI4.
I'm having fun with the expansion, but it's still a shallow, disappointing waste of potential for Paradox to squander the opportunity to mechanically rework the game and add respectable focus trees to all South American states.
Do you want full south america dlc for $30 or two south america DLCs for $15… what is better?
This way they did take less risk by seing if this sell enough to make the other dlc or not!
@haukionkannel Quit making excuses for corporations that rip us off by selling low quality products. Paradox has the resources and could have easily have produced focus trees for all nine countries in South America. Modders do this shit for free and often do it better. Gamers are such uncritical, servile consumers that they feel the need to rationalize and justify the exploitative practices of corporations.
@@eclipse_434 The worst thing is this is not even a South America sandbox; but is a half South America sandbox.
Peru and Ecuador had literally a war in the middle of WW2 and Bolivia still has aspirations to retake their coast.
But no; for PDX are more important Chile and Argentina who didn't do nothing in this context or even Paraguay and Uruguay which are the most unknown countries of South America (besides the Guianas) and again they did nothing.
You can see in the teaser trailer, inside the title box, a map which shows the north of South America; and realizing that from this region only Brazil is in the DLC looks even like a scam and a false advertising
And also, based comment.
1. Price
2. Lack of content
3. No one wanted it
4. Mods do a better job
5. Not very interesting focus trees
"What went wrong", making a DLC for the most uninvolved and untouched continent in a ww2 era game. Would be like making a DLC dedicated to sub-Saharan African releasable nations, Liberia focus tree up next no doubt.
Even people from these countries are more often going to be playing in literally any other continent.
7:14 *what did you just said*
💀💀💀💀💀
average streamer not reading properly
@@Corristo1994 most linguistically aware native English speaker
My biggest problem, funnily enough, is that these focus trees are so massive that by the time you finally get to the stuff you want, the war is either over, or it would simply be overkill.
There probably is a way to look at state debuffs all at once but we'll find it seven years from now, three menus deep, in a sub basement behind a door marked beware of the tiger.
I think adding a core feature behind a flavor dlc is something that I think most people don't want.
Most people would only want to pay for the major dlc's that have core features in them, and adding such features in flavor/minor dlc's would
make the price of getting every significant dlc be increased by a large amount.
I really don't see a problem with this dlc overall, just don't buy it really if you think modders can do better.
I don't know how true this is, but I have heard that a lot of the focus trees for the new expansion were directly lifted from a mod called En Unión y Libertad, and the mod somehow does it better anyways, so you're paying for just a worse version of something that was free already.
HoI4 players when Europe/USA doesn't get its billionth update in a new DLC
battle of the bosporus is 5 bucks cheaper and that was already to pricy
10 dolars is super cheap, considering some other game companies. Or do you believe that devs dont deserve to get payed for their work?
@@Kubulin24the devs can be paid with no prob, but shareholders dont need even more profit
Trial of Allegiance name says it all, its trial if we let rob ourselves by bad game content, seeing Fallout mode free along those payed DLCs its just shamefull display.
paradox on a mission to prove they have a couple of chapters to add to the Blizzard/Creative Assembly Opus on how to destroy your relationship with a loyal customer base.
As a peruvian, my only complain is Chile having an option to reform the Inca empire over other nations, having them little to do with the Incas besides the fact that the northern part of modern Chile was a really minor part of their empire for a short period of time, and the rest of Chile, under the Mapuche, was a Inca rival. Perú, Bolivia and even Ecuador have more weight in reforming the Incas than Chile have. On the other hand the Mapuche branch was quite interesting to be honest. But well, Ive enjoyed ToA this far.
I will say that I felt the same way as you about the neglected states in Brazil at first. But it's really not that bad. Once you have fixed them they will have a +20% bonus to construction speed. So even though you do as you said in the last Brazil video continue to neglect them in the beginning at least when you do start building in them it is with a pretty large bonus to construction.
7:13 "America do Sul, which is in spanish."
Portuguese. Brazil doesn't speak spanish. Come on dude you've been playing historical map games your whole career and you don't know this?
I can’t believe i paid 15€ for a dlc that i usually wouldn’t even download if it was a free mod because there are so many better South American mods
You know, a company that actually cares about their player base would include focus trees like this as a part of a patch. Or put a symbolic price of $0.99 at the worst. To actually charge the full price of an expansion that adds several new features to the game... for a few focus trees for the least played countries in the game... they deserve all the flak they get from this.
When your game is getting more substantial content for FREE from modders, including a whole conversion mods with crapton of content, publishing a DLC which is just very basic content and pricing it $15 is just a huge dick move.
What they need to do is issue an apology for the mistake, refund the $ and make the focus trees a part of a patch. But they won't do that in a million years - it is Paradox. Outside those AAA developers with microtransactions and gaming-as-a-service etc. Paradox has the worst DLC monetization policy in the industry at the moment.
DLC was made by the only guy in Santiago with a PC
1:45
Those arent an emoji that was changed, Steam just has a default profanity filter that takes a little working around to turn off, probably not worth it for a content creator who is showing their screen, but im pretty sure we all know the 4 letter word being said there.
This dlc made Paradox had to change the dlc to Expansions and Country Packs
A welcome adition if you dont care about focus trees
And made 3 DLC free, which i still dont know if it is good or painful
Those 3 dlc are being integrated into base game.
We need hearts of iron 5 with ww1 and 2 or other periods it’s about the time
I think Paradox forgets that it’s relevance is very quickly getting replaced by mods such as Kaiserreich and RT56 and the last thing it needs is giving us 3 focus trees for £15
Belgium ,Austria, and Luxembourg literally being PRIMARY TARGETS but not getting trees yet.
Luxembourg I can understand. But the fact that austria and belgium dont have custom focus trees is really surprising
coring once costs 75 whole pp for argentina, i thinks its insane. and i tested if taking the falklands would work if the uk called its allies, and it worked(if the rest of the allies would still naval invade you 1000 times every tick). dont take my word for it
Your point about oil in Venezuela I think highlights the most important part of this DLC, and that is adding resources to South America- especially rubber in Brazil. This makes South America a bigger player and also gives all nations an additional source of rubber to trade for, which has always been crippling late game for axis or allies depending on who occupies Indonesia and Malaysia.
IMO, Paradox needs to do the same thing in Africa as part of a DLC- add some resources down there. For the European colonizing powers it would make sense to transfer some of their resources down there if they weren't simply added in. Again, Rubber is a big one- the Congo should have tons of it. Adding resources down there would make the rest of the game a bit more relevant, and help explain, for example, why Italy wants so much of Africa in peace conferences, etc.
Right now, the only resources Africa is particularly rich in are steel in Algeria, Rubber in Nigeria (sort of), and chromium in South Africa- which is still underutilized in the game mechanics even with the upgrades to tank armor.
As I am Brazilian and a long-time fan of HOI, this DLC was disappointing. Firstly, the Focus Tree is pretty average to bad. Secondly, it maintained problems that we already had before, such as: Brazilian provinces continue to be wrong and divided incorrectly. Thirdly, the PT-BR translation is still bad, even though it receives a DLC from the country itself. Even the Brazilian mod TS's Brazil (which remakes the whole Brazil) is much better than this DLC and it's free.
I always felt like the DLC added a feature and changed a few nations focus trees to show off the new feature fully.
I think in this DLC the idea may have been "border wars", I recall that being in the Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay trees (take and hold this province and you can keep it and white peace).
Maybe it wasn't possible to add this idea on a large scale within the game due to backend, so the DLC got scaled back. I feel like the idea of this border war stuff was mentioned or teased by paradox a while back.
I think with minor nations focus trees, they should be focused on strengthening their historical 'national spirits' as well as strengthening their unique terrain and industrial features. It is up to the player to build their nation around these bonus's which may be only applicable for certain units or terrains. With Brazil brown water experts it basically ensures that the Amazon would be impassible for any invading armies and its the duty of the player to find a strategy to go bypass Brazils strengths. Brown water would also give good bonus for Marines on river tiles. if you're fighting against brazil with these bonus's it would be your prerogative to think a little harder on ways to counter these bonus's and use your nation's unique build to counter it. (don't fight mountaineers in mountains, marines on rivers, tanks in plains, etc.)
Overall since the majority of HOI4 are single player and multiplayer games are governed by rule sets; I don't think that strengthening nations a bit more than what may be historically plausible isn't an issue. As if you're playing historical then Brazil for example wouldn't effect gameplay as they didn't fully commit their military. If you're playing without historical focus's then I think South America adds another depth of flavor rather than fighting a soulless AI country.
The price may have been a bit high, but Brazil was one of my first countries I played for HOI4 and I had a lot of fun with it, along with other SA countries. That said, I have been constantly playing this and am enjoying it a lot. I like the trees and what they have done, but this DLC is more for a niche market: Either you love it or probably will never play it.
Cause those kids think german rework is more important than ToA
I enjoyed the battle for the bosohorus dlc because I had an interest on the area and forming bizantium.
My main problem with this one is that it's an area that doesn't interest me, it is way too far from the actual conflict of the time, it feels only slightly more fun than neutral New Zealand . Then again, if you live there you'd probably love it, which is fair.
I think a nicer solution than just limiting to two problems at most per tree. Maybe there should be ways to solve the problems quickly but at greater risk or less reliable outcomes. For instance maybe two or three of these modifies could be removed or lessened completely with a change of government that increases tensions with the US but requires working with the cartels to improve the local situation at a smaller cost than the previous malice, this could open up completely different decisions. Or a focus path policy that takes probably 140 days for laissez-faire economy. Where the modifiers dont go away or get reduced a little but instead more natural insturial growth occurs, giving a random factory per 3 months or random infrastructure per month that offset the malice. This could even have events connected to them such as poor construction methods just gives you a factory but needs repair, or "increase foreign investment" that gives an additional infrastructure or a radar station or better yet a refinery, or even using cp to encourage mil growth or to prevent scandals with populace and government. Or maybe some lend lease quests that give you cetian bonus once youve leased enough equipment to a certain nation. This could give outcomes such as france gifting you French Guiana or japan gifting you long lance torpedoes or Germany gifting you refinery tech or russians sending you a thank you letter. Just some thoughts
you made a good point about insignificant minors becoming too OP, there's also the fact that the OP buffs on focuses on new DLCs make them more powerful than the focuses in old DLCs that aren't as strong
Tbf they should rework all big nations first (except Italy imo) because they are boring now I think. They keep adding new focus trees for nations that didn’t had and it’s good and they are usually okay, but the thing is that with constantly doing that, the big nation focus trees fall outdated and uninteresting. If I we’re them, I would consider a 1 big nation rework/new DLC or big patch (not DLC included, free update ofc.) until every nation gets a reworked focus tree.
I quit enjoy the soviet one i think it is fine
I quite like the simple Germany tree, especially for beginners. Maybe I just don’t have the time to git gud anymore.
Another group is allready making new DLC for one of the big countries!
Those takes more time so it will come out later.
I'm telling yall right now, you don't want paradox to update Germany. It will be the most miserable goddamned exercise in trying to have fun with hoi4 while getting massive guilt trip events that add "flavor". Will be the game killer if they do it I think.
love your channel man
Probably manchuko for the local bandit negative modifier.
My biggest gripe here is that you're just playing locally, without ever getting involved in the world war at all.
There's no global intervention or pushback if you complete your local conquest before WW2 kicks off.
I feel like America or Germany should interfere with some kind of consequence if you conquer half the sub-continent.
PI: Let's release an expansion that just focuses on counties people play because they are forced to or are bored with the others!
PI Fans: So a mod?
PI: Except you pay me.
PI Fans: Wow you really do need to die.
The biggest problem with it isn't the price or lack of content, but that the focus trees aren't well made, there is some interesting and very plausible alt-history that are either poorly made or simply aren't there, and the worst of all, historical inaccuracies. Examples: Peron path was forgotten and only made later on development (???), no Vargas path for supporting the axis but there is a integralist Vargas one (???????), communist cangaço (??????????????????), and even more...
8:10 the bandits thing is also present in Manchukuo and Bulgaria
At this point road to 56 it's just worth the base game.
The two examples that I recall that are similar to the bandits thing is Manchuria and Greece/Yugoslavia. In Manchuria I think it actually is bandits you have to deal with and one way I think is to garrison troops. Greece and Yugoslavia get those IMRO Bulgarian rebels that you can eliminate with stationing troops in the claimed states and picking decisions too.
One really basic thing paradox could do to beef up the game as part of a broader DLC would be to add more advisors to countries. This would be great since there are a lot of countries that have horrible political advisors or just very bog standard ones, e.g. Japan doesn't have a civ construction advisor. Literally just a small picture and very easy to add in.
1:00 That one Hungary mod that makes a larger focus tree than all dlc soviet and german combined:
I feel like the problem is that south america is pretty isolated. Other DLCs like battle for the bosporus were similar, but at least with that it added a bit of flavor for other nations because other nations actually interact with them. Like for example when playing Germany, sooner or later you will interact with Greece, one way or another. But that's just not the case for south america
What went wrong was the fact that Paradox expected people to pay full price for focus trees.
Not full-on updates like Arms Against Tyranny or By Blood Alone or No Step Back which shifted how the game was played, but just for _focus trees_ .
12:44 somewhat agree. It feels more rewarding, but also feels in a way weaker than the generic focus tree. Ultimately you get more with the free war goals and the options with Portugal/Colonies, but as far as blitzing South America it doesn't feel as powerful as it did before. The navy modifier hits especially hard since I really don't want to spend focuses there, -40% on naval production is crippling to get any escorts or good amount of subs out.
I’m hoping that paradox finally adds the finally reworks the focus tree to the German empire so that you can gain a core on Southern Jutland and so you can make the September plan possible. With maybe even adding a rework Belgium’s states so that you can core the small border region with German so you can have the complete German Imperial borders without something like the Endsieg states mod.
Not adding dyamism to interact with the existing Mexico tree? Or give Mexico cores to their LatAm conquest after all this time given a lot of people also got South America cores?
I'm actually working on a mod that does that, giving focus trees without overhauling a bunch of other stuff. I want to maybe optimize one or two things that makes the game work really slow and maybe fix the peacetime AI a little bit, but I don't want to introduce anything too terribly grandiose.
It is in very early development, Aka, I'm currently starting with overhauling the generic focus tree, but after that, I'm working on a few groups of countries at a time, starting with the Germanic ones.
The problem is that there is no resource like food in the game, if so, air defense, the devastation of war zones, naval play, etc., would have more importance, since for example, the Axis would want food from Argentina (Grain, meat too, but it is only around because it does not survive the trip, although for game reasons transport could be possible), that would make the attack on Ukraine much more useful, Denmark instead of giving it some modifiers no sense giving food in large quantities, Central Asia would have some value apart from a province next to Xinjiang, etc.
To add, we Argentines want the Malvinas for national pride, but also for the limit of maritime exploitation, since that would enlarge it a lot, in addition to the fact that the British base their entire claim for their piece of Antarctica on those 3 Islands, which are overlap with the Argentine and Chilean claims.
Finally, the Argentine Facist tree is Broken, 20% attack is very good, but if you go through Argentina first the approach below gives you 30% recruitable population, then you don't need the South American cores for your manpower.
And as a last fact, I managed to have Hitler capitulate to Germany myself much later (the Axis was my final boss in the game, and I fought them all over the world before arriving in Europe because I thought it was fun, since his United States, to Africa, then to China, then to India, then to what was left of the Middle East, and then all the way from Siberia to Spain), when I capitulated to Germany a week later Hitler came with me, but I had done the Fascist Union approach, so I understand the only approach you need is German Investments.
7:12 That's Portuguese bro wdym 💀
The fact they picked Uruguay and Paraguay over Peru Colombia and Venezuela is baffling, they will 100% make another dlc in south America for focuses for these far more important countries
Nice thing with the Brazil focus tree is you can achieve some form of Autarky with your resources. But yeah this is all stuff we already had from mods :/
15:45 its the supression of the indigenous people that happens majorly at the south