Thanks, very helpful!
To prepare for La Resistance I have been playing this game lately and enjoying it. It’s really impressive how many ideas and alt-history fantasy has gone into the focus trees of the big nations these days, it can be an absolute hoot to play some of them out.
It does also show, in my view, that they are trying take ambitious and open-ended narratives and shorehorn them into a poor little game mechanic (national focuses) that was never designed to have this scope. It is really cumbersome to not only navigate the national focuses these days but also to figure out what the real consequences of each are. Some of the more complex game events, like the imperial conference for the UK, have strange requirements (thatneed to be planned for long before you come up to the focus) and results that are really unintuitive because it’s working through this national focus system.
When I completed the national focus for the imperial conference, it said that the conference will be held in the next two months. I sped time up to await the conference but to no avail. Later I learned that the focus actually unlocked a 60-day ‘decision’ to actually do the conference. Because I missed this window it was all over, and there was no way to get the achievement I was going for, so the advice online was just to start again. I don’t really want to read detailed ‘achievement guides’ because half the fun is figuring out how to do it yourself, but with all these complex and obtuse requirements to work some of these trees, it’s impossible to do without.
Yes, the focus trees are interesting but can be game-breaking. Especially when two alt-historical options collide.
It’s to late for HOI4, but I assume the next game will try to transfer more of the interesting stuff to actual mechanics.
Is there a good nation to try to re-join this game? I was playing Romania and got very irritated by games where both/either the USSR and Hungary attacked me & I quickly got myself hammered.
FYI you can get the preorder of la resistance for 22% off at GMG right now with code FEB22.
Spain is always fun as is Brazil. These countries won’t lock you into a major alliance unless you want to be, and let you do some warring in the early game. Spain is getting a huge improvement when the new expansion hits at the end of this month though, and afaik Brazil only has the generic focus trees.
Boughtened! Thank you!
The AI changes sound good. I’m especially excited about the giving modders (like the Expert AI mod) a logging tool to collect data on how well the changes work.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/hoi4-dev-diary-ai-feature-updates.1332546/
La Resistance is out!!!
I know what I’m doing tonight!
Sending your seducer grandma agent to Berlin?
How did you get anarchist Spain? I played up to triggering the civil war twice, and both times seem to have been railroaded onto the communist path (this is with completing the “Disband the Army” focus). It just throws me into the worker’s party whatever.
After going down the initial ‘prepare for the civil war’ focuses, it splits into three and the anarchist tree is the left-most one. You’re getting forced into the communist route? That’s weird. I have only played the civil war once and I did not get to the end of the preparation focuses before the event fired.
No, I think I’m just an idiot. Finishing ‘disband the army’ starts the civil war and gives you an event with three choices. The tooltip text looked the same for each choice from a quick scan so I though it was a “comet style” event where the choices are just flavour. I think that chooses which type of government you have.
Kaiserreich shows these sort of event-selected focuses much more clearly in the focus tree. Paradox shouldn’t make it look like a focus you need to select in the normal way.
Oh that makes sense. I agree it’s confusing, I had to double check which option led to the right branch of the focus tree before clicking as it isn’t immediately clear.
By the way, clicking the anarchist route then doesn’t just make republican spain anarchist spain, there’s a later ‘uprising’ that happens in Catalonia and you have to face both republican and nationalist spain. So keep that in mind.
Oh I am looking forward to the 3-way fight. Also trying to expand after the civil war. The anarchists are supposed to have special decisions to trigger uprisings in neighbours and convert to core territory. Should make for an interesting game, having everyone hate you!
I started a game as Germany with midlevel bonus for the opponents. Just started 1939.
My impression of intelligence is it a lot of busy work with not a lot of payback. Even for a country like Germany it is a significant investment (5-10 civilian factory each month for upgrades) I have noticeably smaller army and air force. Yes its kinda of cool to have an overview of your opponents economy and army, once you’ve broken their cypher code. But as feared just more of excuse to put the game on pause.
Also Japan seems to have forgotten how to do invasion of China. She declared war but if was for my 4 panzer and 4 infantry division I don’t think Japan would have captured Beijing. But zero amphibious invasion. I’m basically conquering China with my dozen divisions I’ve sent (volunteer for Manchuria also).
I’m interested to see how Spain works out.
So far the best use I’ve seen for intel is get it to where you can decrypt, then stop. Decrypt whoever you think you’ll be at war with and sit on it once you have it. Then pop it when you go to war with them.
Most of the other stuff is just… so iffy. Steal blueprints might be worth it, but the investment to get there seems kind of crazy. Pacification of conquered areas is also probably worth it later on.
I had an agent infiltrate the civilian side of things and steal some industrial blueprints. I got a tranche of research that finished off a project. I suspect the military blueprints do the same for equipment research.
I like it overall. I had a spy captured in Paris and sent Skorzeny in to rescue her. He’ll probably end up in Spain after the war like the real one.
The occupation/garrison changes are nice. Steam rolling should be harder and that’s good for the game.