You do have to win the civil war for that, but it’s usually not too hard.
Or you could play the Equestria at War total conversion mod. It’s (un) surprisingly incredibly detailed.
Or if you prefer the Fallout universe there’s also Old World Blues.. Also with huge amount of detail and custom writing.
HOI4 is a game with legs.
Oh yes, the mods are crazy at this point. A person could spend a hundred hours or more just playing Kaiserreich. Um, theoretically speaking of course.
So I am going to try a run as Japan in the HoI4 “Ultra” Mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1516163124
The mod has fairly historical relative industrial strengths, so USA about 12x as many factories as Japan. I also think they have some events to raise a quick army if the continental US is invaded, so that kind of victory is out of the picture.
The game’s naval AI is not too great, so I think I should be able to do better than the historical Japan. On the other hand, the games doesn’t really have any concept of negotiated peace, so I guess my goal will be to grab a good chunk of real estate in East Asia and Oceania try to hold on to it until 1948.
They released a new DLC, which brought almost nothing new outside of the focus trees for those 3 countries. Very disappointing. HOI IV has turned into the bastard child of Paradox.
I don’t get the bastard child comment. There’s still an ongoing major expansion around the Soviet Union in development, this is just a smaller DLC built around focus trees, similar to the content/immersion packs you can find for EU4 or the Species packs for Stellaris. It’s half the price of a typical expansion as the scope is smaller by design.
Personally, I’ve been wanting focus trees for Turkey and Greece since the game came out so I was looking forward to this one. I’ve only had a chance to try Turkey so far but it’s been pretty interesting with unique mechanics/scenario around Ataturk, his death, and how to move the country forward with regards to Islamic fundamentalists, the Kurds, etc.
Now, if you’re not interested in unique trees for Greece, Turkey, or Bulgaria it’s an easy pass which I don’t think is a bad thing. It’s self-contained and bite-sized content for those interested.
Between this and the Le Resistance, it just hasn’t packed the punch that the game needed (for me). I’d like to see the game evolve around the 1944-1950 frame to add more interesting “what if” scenarios, especially new tech. Generic 70 day focus tree items, many which can’t be completed in the time frame of a game, just doesn’t do much.
I don’t even mind the Soviet focus tree as is. I just want more added to the base game that isn’t country specific.
The last expansion didn’t do much for me either, but that’s because I have an ingrained aversion to espionage systems stemming from… every single strategy game I’ve played with them. :) So I never really touched it.
I wouldn’t expect them to ever extend the timeline or do much with regards to post-WW2, they don’t seem to have any interest in that. I don’t think they can get much mileage out of it since most games are wrapped up by then. Mods are your best bet for that sort of thing, IMO. The Soviet expansion should come with new mechanics and won’t “just” be a focus tree, although it remains to be see how much those mechanics might add to the game. I imagine they’ll start talking details soon.
Theyve done the major dlc now. Air. Naval. Far East. Espionage. What’s left? Paradox are going to paradox, you dont have to buy it.
I dont think the game is going to extend to 1944 onwards, any post WW2 war is always going to be a horrendousy unbalanced mess. I dont see how they fix that.
It was in the 1.4 patch that released alongside Death or Dishonor. This covers most of what they changed:
Yugoslavia also got a little love.
An awesome exp pack for those who like to play these countries, but if you just play the usual suspects, no need to bother.
I guess it is not Paradox’s style but I think HOI IV is done at this point. They’ve had a revision of all the major power focus trees. Fixed a number of bugs, improved the AI added some nice quality of life features, and done some pretty decent balancing, nerf artillery, making researching ahead more expensive etc. and nerfing the benefits of German conquest.
For me starting the Man the Guns the game has gone backward in terms of enjoyment. Plus honestly with 1500+ actual hours. I’m burned out.
The busy working of training my aircrews, and ships while micromanaging my fuel supply far out ways the fun. The resistance was sort of fun, but it again I end up pausing the game figuring what my next op is shuffle spies around. The actual outcome on the war is relatively minor, but makes the game longer.
Buying Resistance DLC was more of thanking Paradox than actual interest, I feel similarly to Kevin about espionage. (Old War espionage maybe the exception)
Have the team move on to other projects, have a junior programmer or two deal with bug fixes. Then reunite some of the other key guys in a couple of years for an HOI V.
This is a general Paradox question, but is there an easy way to read their dev diaries in chronological order by game, rather than by DLC per game?
I tend to go to the Wiki for each game, which has a Dev Diary section in chronological order (which then links to the actual diary on the paradox forum site).
For example for EU4:
https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Developer_diaries
(edit - unless this is what you mean by “by DLC by game”)
yeah,
I’d like to just read everything from say 2020 backwards, but some of it is by DLC, some by patch.
I think for Crusader Kings 3 someone on their own compiled all of them.
As @von_schmidt mentioned the Wiki is where to go. While dev diaries are listed under DLC categories, that’s because a major patch comes along with each DLC, so they tend to be related. They are posted in chronological order, though, and the dates of the dev diaries are listed. Start at the bottom and work your way up.
Ok, thanks.
What threw me was Death and Dishonor had a 2020 diary, which made me think that was common.
Oh! That’s unusual, but the reason the Wiki authors put it there was because the most recent update updated some of the old focus trees that came with Death or Dishonor. I get why they categorized it that way in the wiki but that is definitely confusing. Really, that dev diary was for the most recent 1.10 version of the game.
I guess where I am it is the things that are crying out to be fixed in the game don’t need a HoI 5, but also don’t fit nicely in the DLC model. I mean, I’d pay $100 for an update that makes battle lines work properly, stacked divisions in a more logical and less visually jarring way and refactored away some of the UI busywork.
I think part if the reason battle lines are such a mess is that the core people HAVE moved on, and the people working on it these days don’t understand that code and don’t want to touch it with a 10ft pole.