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France vs Germany in HOI4

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FOARP said:
Americans being critical of the performance of other countries in the 1939-41 period always bring out a wan smile on the face of the average European who knows their history. As Winston Chruchill pointed out, no country in the democratic camp bears heavier responsibility for the war than America.
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This is a little too strong and is historical nonsense. WWII as well as WWI was the end (for the time being) of a Euro centric world where most of the economic and military power was concentrated in Europe. These wars were due to the total failure of European diplomacy and the ultra nationalism of the various European powers. The US bailed out Britain and France twice in the first half of the the 20th century and between the wars Europe basically went back to business as usual after the first world war and shunned US recommendations at the time of the peace conference (Wilson by that time was an incapacitated President) and not feeling particularly wanted or willing to play the game that was failing we went home and did our own thing. Some of our own things made have made the economic situation in the world worse but we weren't alone in our policies there either and were also suffering. We also did not have a particularly good record in responding to some of the things that we can't talk about in this forum on either a humanitarian or diplomatic basis. While the US had tremendous economic potential it had essentially no military projection capability in the pre WWII decade and also minimal capability to give economic aid.
 
Secret Master said:
See, there's a ton of interesting what-ifs available even if Germany loses quickly to France and Britain. Hearts of Iron doesn't have to be a game that boils down to Germany versus the Soviets in Barbarossa.
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+1.
 
Secret Master said:
The AI in HOI3 in its current form does not launch blind attacks on the Soviet Union now. There's no reason the AI in HOI4 has to say, "Hmmm, we're at war with France, so let's also attack the Soviets."




Well, I'm hoping that changes made in HOI3 in the last two expansions are taken a notch up. In HOI3 right now, the UK will attack the Soviets if they generate too much threat before war starts with Germany. And the US will attack Japan if her threat gets out of control.

But I'd like to see more with these same mechanics. If Germany is defeated in 1940, and the Soviets did take their half of Poland and Finland according to the terms of the M-R Pact, this should be a volatile situation. Would the Allies just let the Soviets have half of Poland in such a situation? What if the Soviets attack Germany as Germany falls to French troops? Would the Allies let the Soviets get away with that? What if the Soviets make a move to puppet/annex Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, or Hungary during Germany's weakness?

And what if the Allies "liberate" Axis minors in Eastern Europe in 1940? Would the Soviet Union tolerate that encroachment on its sphere of influence? What about a non-Axis but imperialistic Japan who attacks the Soviets, and the Soviets win, dominating China, Korea, and Japan? How will the US respond to that?

See, there's a ton of interesting what-ifs available even if Germany loses quickly to France and Britain. Hearts of Iron doesn't have to be a game that boils down to Germany versus the Soviets in Barbarossa.
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If Germany is defeated in late 1940/early 1941- or being pushed back, a USSR dow on Germany is very much plausible to gobble up Eastern Germany/Remaining Poland...
Finnish War is over by early 1940, Bessarbia and Baltic States are also annexed by mid- 1940, so USSR is a threat for allies.

Maybe, a loss for Germany can have a peace treaty followed by a coup (with substantial success %age as now- Most people will hate Hitler for losing a war, so early and easily!) and following which either a right wing monarchist Govt. backed by the Junker Officers which may declare war on USSR with France and Britain as its allies!!
 
Secret Master said:
See, there's a ton of interesting what-ifs available even if Germany loses quickly to France and Britain. Hearts of Iron doesn't have to be a game that boils down to Germany versus the Soviets in Barbarossa.
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Sure, we may think they are interesting in an academical way, partially because we played the usual WW2 hundreds of times already...

But will the average new player or reviewer trying out a WW2 game for the first time really think so. And will they walk away from their first experience feeling like the played a world war two game?


IMHO if it happens the game must be super clear in regards to what player action that caused the game to go off historical track. In other cases such "major" deviations will simply not be accepted regardless of how plausible they actually are.
 
I think with some narrative events that wouldn't be too much of a problem. Suppose France lasts until winter, a global even fires announcing that the Germans are getting bogged down and are worried about how British and American support means they can't compete with France industrially. That way the player sees what is going ahistorical. If things keep dragging on then an event can fire about how the Soviets are looming over German Poland and how the Germans are afraid of getting caught in another two front war like WWI. If things keep dragging on then the Soviets go for Poland and an event fires about how the German fears of a repeat of WWI are happening. If it's based on the real concerns the belligerents had at the time it would seem authentic.
 
FOARP said:
Americans being critical of the performance of other countries in the 1939-41 period always bring out a wan smile on the face of the average European who knows their history. As Winston Chruchill pointed out, no country in the democratic camp bears heavier responsibility for the war than America.
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Well quite frankly Winston Churchill was full of shit.

Both France and Britain had plenty of opportunities to tell Germany to back down, and furthermore had long had substantial military forces, were much closer to Germany, and thus had much more interest and opportunity to prevent war.

If you truly believe that then you should probably tone down the anti-Americanism.
 
Alex_brunius said:
IMHO if it happens the game must be super clear in regards to what player action that caused the game to go off historical track. In other cases such "major" deviations will simply not be accepted regardless of how plausible they actually are.
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I do not disagree. In fact, better feedback on HOI3 things like threat, neutrality, and the like is really important.

Keep in mind that before the war starts, I want AI countries to behave in a historical way unless a human does something off the rails. The Soviets need to sit on their hands in Eastern Europe, the French and British need to appease Hitler at least until Munich, and the US should simply be unable to enter a war until attacked or until Japan ahistorically conquers a bunch of stuff.

But I don't want the way it was in SF, where Stalin annexes everything from Warsaw to Istanbul, and both Hitler and Chamberlain continue to play appeasement poker over Czechoslovakia.

CK2 is probably our model for interface here. Tooltips on diplomatic actions and event choices need to spell out clearly how much threat is generated for various actions. Also, there needs notifiers on the screen (like the faction notifier or adventurer notifier in RoI) that pop up when threat starts getting out of control.

Events also need to spell out the historical choices made by leaders so there is no confusion. I'm sure you've seen new players who don't know stuff about the war posting confused questions about historical events or decisions in HOI3. I think my favorite one was the guy who literally did not know whether Hitler was appeased at Munich or not.

I think the threat/neutrality system in HOI3 is pretty good in TFH; the problem is generally twofold with new players. 1) New players don't read the manual, so they whine that they can't DOW other countries as the US in 1936. 2) Feedback on the threat/neutrality system is kind of buried and minimal, so until you've played a few times, you may not even know if a particular action is threatening or not.
 
you can not play a truly historical game as the player is allowed to make decisions throughout the game which would not be historical unless he/she had every piece of historical data available and made every decision in the game based on that data, for example building exactly the right number of Spitfires as the UK in the time frame allowed, and if you were to make all decisions as per history it may as well be history lesson or documentary.
The great thing about HOI is that it gives you the chance to alter history, the problem I see is that we have hindsight so we know when the Germans are going to invade Poland therefore the player already has the advantage, I would much rather not have that set in stone but have events linked to threat/neutrality and have that uncertainty as to what will happen.
At the moment we build up our forces to counter what will happen according to our knowledge of history, what about as the Americans would say being caught with your pants down, as you have planned for Pearl harbour to happen but the Japanese decide to invade Pearl harbour in 1939 and use as staging post for invasion of USA well before you have built up your forces because you concentrating on other stuff such as infrastructure and doctrines.
Following the historical path makes the game to easy I would much prefer having to react to events that suddenly happen rather then know whats coming
 
wau123 said:
you can not play a truly historical game as the player is allowed to make decisions throughout the game which would not be historical unless he/she had every piece of historical data available and made every decision in the game based on that data, for example building exactly the right number of Spitfires as the UK in the time frame allowed, and if you were to make all decisions as per history it may as well be history lesson or documentary.
The great thing about HOI is that it gives you the chance to alter history, the problem I see is that we have hindsight so we know when the Germans are going to invade Poland therefore the player already has the advantage, I would much rather not have that set in stone but have events linked to threat/neutrality and have that uncertainty as to what will happen.
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That's how I feel about it. I think the French leadership problem is easy enough to represent by giving France bad generals and making their AI have poor tactics, I don't see the need to give them to nerf them to crazy degrees just to get the "historical outcome" when the whole point of HOI is that you can deviate from history.
 
With France vs Germany; the developers could make whichever doctrine tree the french start out on have slower land unit speed, order response and travel time lag under many conditions (like air attacks or poor national unity) and exacerbate that with poor commanders, who have the same problem. That would cripple an AI and a human opponent, right? And it wouldn't have to be unique to France.
 
Just about France in 40, they won battles but lost the war. An unnerfed France hoi3 would win 50/50, weather would be the key.

Stuff speaking, French and germans were on the same level, both sides had advantages and flaws. It all fell down to frontlines officers, which cant be translated here, we have too much controls and informations over the Battlefield.

Edit: then using the CGM start, I find my fun with a neutral France, even if I have to scrap the Maginot line usually. The "manpower crisis" gives in my opinion a good "downside" to the Ideal France you end up with. Beating down Allies / Comintern and Axis by yourself (and some allies / puppets) is rather funny.
 
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Cybvep said:
How so?
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I am not sure if he means Germany won or France won, but Germany did eventually loose the war, and France did make peace with Germany, thus loosing the war. So called Free France was a new nation, not the one who signed peace treaty with Germany, loosing that war.
In Wikipedia you can see very well who succeeded French Third Republic (who fought against Germans in 1940 and then made peace) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Third_Republic, it`s successors were Free France and Vichy France (mainly), then Provisional Government of the French Republic (combining former Vichy and Free France), then French Fourth Republic and then finally, modern day France without colonies (well, there are few islands in america), French Fifth Republic.
It really is the same nation tough, it is more like Eastern and Western Roman Empires, in reality Romans never saw their empire as split, it was just adminstered by different emperors.
 
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The issue is how the military doctrine is represented that is where people complain. With hindsight it is easy to say France had a decent army just poorly used the tools at their disposal. So to represent this the game includes the modifiers which effectively cripple the french forces. If you turn it off then France would be on par with Germany and the game would probably hit a stalemate on the border.

I like the game to remain historically plausible and have never played France in any of the HOI series as their downfall is the beginning of the game for me.

With HOI 3 we had the custom start option allowing us to redistribute the techs/froces how we wanted surely a slight expansion on this system with no cap on points you can spend would allow you to create a France that would not be so easily steam rollered. I think this would be an interesting option for a lot of people as you could create correct OOB for certain countries at certain dates and give yourself more of a chance at playing minors if you wished.
 
SpanglishEmpire said:
The issue is how the military doctrine is represented that is where people complain. With hindsight it is easy to say France had a decent army just poorly used the tools at their disposal. So to represent this the game includes the modifiers which effectively cripple the french forces. If you turn it off then France would be on par with Germany and the game would probably hit a stalemate on the border.

I like the game to remain historically plausible and have never played France in any of the HOI series as their downfall is the beginning of the game for me.

With HOI 3 we had the custom start option allowing us to redistribute the techs/froces how we wanted surely a slight expansion on this system with no cap on points you can spend would allow you to create a France that would not be so easily steam rollered. I think this would be an interesting option for a lot of people as you could create correct OOB for certain countries at certain dates and give yourself more of a chance at playing minors if you wished.
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You like the game to remain historically plausible. So give EVERYONE their historical OOBs. France should lose because it uses outdated doctrines and poor generals while Germany uses modern doctrines and better generals. If the player has too much direct control over frontline officers for this to work, well, take some of that control away. No leader was anywhere near as all-controlling as the HOI3 player. I agree that AI France should generally lose to AI Germany, but not because they have been gimped to oblivion to allow the game to run like history despite crappy ahistorical mechanics. Strangely, those players in favour of gimping France are not also in favour of gimping Germany so they inevitably lose the war as in history.

I have already made the point that all nations should not use the same AI all the time, because doctrines and strategies massively varied to the point where it would be just wrong to see France making armoured breakthroughs like Germany, or purged USSR behaving the same way as unpurged USSR. France AI should act slowly and sluggishly, spreading out its tanks along the line and moving much of its army into Belgium and being cut off. 1 AI for everyone just does not and cannot work, because, guess what, not everybody had the exact same ideas about how to fight a war. And the French ideas were outdated.

A different point: to stop the US declaring war in 1936, rather than having an arbitrary "neutrality" number, remember that a DOW has to come through Congress. The player must seek Congress's approval to declare war, and he will not get it except in extreme circumstances.
 
Why do people keep telling that France had more or less similar military to Germany, while in reality it was, in fact France+UK+Belgium+Nederlands more or less equal to Germany, that also had Italy on it`s side.

Also, I`m quite curious what do people that think that France should be able to fix it`s problems think of Italy doing the same, and the impact it could have on the game? In HOI3 you could win as France, but you also could do extremely well with Italy, even to a point of being the deciding factor of successful Barbarossa and capturing India and what not.
 
1alexey said:
Why do people keep telling that France had more or less similar military to Germany, while in reality it was, in fact France+UK+Belgium+Nederlands more or less equal to Germany, that also had Italy on it`s side.

Also, I`m quite curious what do people that think that France should be able to fix it`s problems think of Italy doing the same, and the impact it could have on the game? In HOI3 you could win as France, but you also could do extremely well with Italy, even to a point of being the deciding factor of successful Barbarossa and capturing India and what not.
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Did France not have more tanks than Germany? that were better designs just distributed poorly and used with a doctrine as a support vehicle.
 
Some parts of the French army was more modern that the German army, even some french tanks far outclassed the Germans. But the biggest failure of the French was the fact that they thought in WW1 terms in strategic and tactical sense. Static Defense with a gigantic fortress on the front line.

Whereas the Germans knew that they had limited equipment, limited time and limited resource. So they stopped thinking in static WWI terms and proceeded to include people like Rommel, Manstein and Guderian in the planning and execution of Fall Gelb. The Germans had the benefit of Hitler eventually listening or implementing their plans to some extend whereas the French main thinking of their Marshal Maurice Gamelin was more of Static Defense and put their weakest forces on the border with Belgium and their strongest forces at the fortress.

And when the Germans did attack, their combination of tanks focused on speed and the addition of the radio, allowed them to completely negate the effect of the superior French forces.
During this time the French were also very slow to react and still defended in terms of static defense. Only some generals like Charles de Gaulle tried to implement similair tactics like the Germans in his counterattacks and a more flexible defense, but at that time it was far too late.
 
SpanglishEmpire said:
Did France not have more tanks than Germany? that were better designs just distributed poorly and used with a doctrine as a support vehicle.
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Tank quality, has, very low impact on the overall quality of the army. First, tanks are not the most important component of even an armored division, second the tank firepower and armor is not that huge of the issue, far more importantly is how good the armor division is at using other means to suppress or destroy anti tank guns.
 
-Hiki- said:
Some parts of the French army was more modern that the German army, even some french tanks far outclassed the Germans. But the biggest failure of the French was the fact that they thought in WW1 terms in strategic and tactical sense. Static Defense with a gigantic fortress on the front line.

Whereas the Germans knew that they had limited equipment, limited time and limited resource. So they stopped thinking in static WWI terms and proceeded to include people like Rommel, Manstein and Guderian in the planning and execution of Fall Gelb. The Germans had the benefit of Hitler eventually listening or implementing their plans to some extend whereas the French main thinking of their Marshal Maurice Gamelin was more of Static Defense and put their weakest forces on the border with Belgium and their strongest forces at the fortress.

And when the Germans did attack, their combination of tanks focused on speed and the addition of the radio, allowed them to completely negate the effect of the superior French forces.
During this time the French were also very slow to react and still defended in terms of static defense. Only some generals like Charles de Gaulle tried to implement similair tactics like the Germans in his counterattacks and a more flexible defense, but at that time it was far too late.
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This is very true.
 
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