New soviet focus tree: feedback & thoughts

[CantGetNoSleep]

Here’s a bunch of feedback for the devs, I hope to get enough likes it might make it to their desk…:

1) The hist path is tedious button clicking that add nothing - if you really want it to take 595 days to do the great purge, then have fewer buttons that take longer with events in the course of them (the way the old one had 3 events). Honestly I cannot be bothered to keep clicking whilst doing micro in the SCW. It’s just a waste of time.

2) the alt history paths are useless: Stalin purges everyone always. What’s the point in having all these interesting advisors if there is very little ways to get them without having paranoia going to 100% and the CW starting. Yawn.

3) I get the idea you wanted to make the soviets very weak day 1 and get better over time, however… against a decent Germany player that means you’re losing a huge amount of land before you can ramp up and you’ve lost tons of people and factories. Where’s my decision to evacuate to the Urals? The current one is PATHETIC. It should be 30 CIVs, 100 MILs and 20 million people. That’s what actually happened as was largely done by the end of 1941. To do this here, you need to take 25 decision of 25pp each, or 625pp. Errr...

4) shorten the paths and costs of getting the Baltics and Bessarabia once Molotov Ribbentrop has been done to 35 days for all. The current one is again tedious as hell. Actually I liked the old mechanics better but whatever.

5) the Soviet debuffs are too much. 10% consumer goods, screwed up army, screwed up Air Force, best generals can be nerfed with daft RNG during the purge (whilst there’s zero chance of keeping your best field marshal), lessons of war can only be done after a year (good luck lasting a year in MP), and more. Yes the USSR had a lot of issues but this is too much. Sure it makes it an interesting (yet a bit tedious) challenge in single player but it ruins multiplayer. The number of MP games played (and lasting) has, as far as I can see, plummeted.

6) performance is a lot worse. The game becomes unplayable from late 1943/early 1944 on my PC whilst I used to be able to get to 1949 before it became an issue (ie it never was).

7) I like the trains, and supply, etc but the cost of rail (very cheap) vs hubs seems imbalanced. Everyone just ends up building transport planes. I don’t recall anyone supplying front line troops with planes in real life, but that’s the only thing that works / is cost effective in this version of the game. Hubs need to be cheaper perhaps at the cost of making railways more expensive.

8) air is too strong now. It was too weak before (no air Russia meta was silly) but now with just a small amount of CAS, unarmed men can defeat tank battalions. Hmm.

9) 4th research slot by mid 1938 at the earliest for the soviets is pretty harsh. All the meme stuff (Stalin’s buff, the national academies, etc) is all too late to be relevant.

10) as a final thought: I get the fact the idea was to force players to decide what to fix (air force or army, etc) and not be able to fix everything, which is fine, but I don’t think it’s implemented well. The purge is, as discussed before, tedious and takes forever and all the meme stuff you’ve clearly spent time doing - like the academies, like the Comintern, etc - are basically irrelevant as players won’t be able to do any of it until after defeating Germany and at that point what’s the point in bothering? In short too much meme and the hard choices players could make are in fact vapid. I would suggest instead actually giving players significant rewards if they do decide to go and fix a problem like the army or Air Force rather than just focus on the economy. Hard to balance, but more interesting.

To end on a positive note, thumbs up on tanks, officer Corps, and overall rebalancing of combat. Though air is a little too strong, my overall feeling on combat dynamics is very positive.

 

[Sarmatian]

Focus tree is too big and too bloated. Bigger is not always better.

You could easily trim down a good part of it. Like 1/3 of the foci could be removed/merged.

 

[Pale Blue]

Focus tree is too big and too bloated. Bigger is not always better.

You could easily trim down a good part of it. Like 1/3 of the foci could be removed/merged.

Yes La resistance started a trend of huge bloated focus trees and the following DLCs made it even worse. It's just too much to actually decide which focus to take is better. You are encouraged to do calculations outside the game to reach the goal you desire and prepare a fixed focus order instead of making intuitive desicions while playing.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Agreed: very user-unfriendly. Endless 35-day focuses that only give 25pp, ending up net negative (focus costs 1pp/day), exist simply to bloat the whole thing. Entire branch simply screaming "noob trap" by showering player with +5% CG "bonuses" in return for imaginary industrial improvements (spoiler: there are none worth the price in factories). There are a lot of -X%CG options, but a lot scattered in different branches or even hidden away in decisions. Purges are timed, and to make it worse: it's 175 days instead of 174, which forces you to check tooltip to make sure it will be available the day after you completed a previous focus...

At least, it has auto-hide enabled that makes navigation somewhat bearable, which might eventually become a full feature.

Yes La resistance started a trend of huge bloated focus trees and the following DLCs made it even worse. It's just too much to actually decide which focus to take is better. You are encouraged to do calculations outside the game to reach the goal you desire and prepare a fixed focus order instead of making intuitive desicions while playing.

Well, you know how it is:
"Look made a shiny new focus tree!"
"Ohhh! It's big!"
"Hey, we made an even bigger focus tree this time!"
"Cool!"
"...and even bigger tree!"
...
"...and a tree that takes petabyte of your disk space!"

Hopefully, enough people will get a message across before this becomes a problem.

 

[Casko]

Yes La resistance started a trend of huge bloated focus trees and the following DLCs made it even worse. It's just too much to actually decide which focus to take is better. You are encouraged to do calculations outside the game to reach the goal you desire and prepare a fixed focus order instead of making intuitive desicions while playing.

Atleast there is a silver lining of some of the focuses being 35 days.... Instead of all being 70 like with French focus tree, where you spend 70 days to get 5 points of Stability.

 

[Emoneh]

2) the alt history paths are useless: Stalin purges everyone always. What’s the point in having all these interesting advisors if there is very little ways to get them without having paranoia going to 100% and the CW starting. Yawn.

This is a pretty obvious mechanic. You can either prioritise saving the advisors or progressing the civil war without Stalin getting upset. It's a simple, effective risk-reward tradeoff. Do you just want the game to give you everything for free?

 

[Tulev]

Historical Soviet focus tree is beatiful. You can get 10 mils (!) from Tankograd. Like that. Instantly.
Finally Soviet is not a colossus from the beggining. Even with 5-year plan you can get your consumer goods to 0% quite easly. (5% propaganda, 5% industrial concern, 5% war bonds, politbiuro, collectivisation).
I am actually very happy how they make Soviet Union more historical accurate. Army is what left from the civil war and you shoot your best thinking guys (Tukhaczevsky, Blucher, Yegorov), because Stalin doesn't like them.

What can be improved:
R-M pact and demanding stuff from baltics, Finalnd and Romania. If you sign treaty you should be able to make demands without spending time on focuses.
Alt-communist branches. Focus for them (especially Right Opposition) should be shortened to 35-days. Trotsky is so easy that you can get 70% military support and end civil war before mid 38'.
Stalin Cult NEEDS nerfs.
I can agree that research slots are hidden very deeply in focus tree, which for major country is huge debuff. Maybe they should be a little bit (but only a little bit) easier to obtain.
End-game stuff for Trotsky and Bukharin - compare them to Stalin cult and they are not even worthy completing. Stalin has 35-day big buffs, while other get 70-day long minor buffs, which can be easly ignored.

 

[Iskulya]

I've played around a bit with all of the different possible combinations of the Soviet focus tree. I've talked about my impressions elsewhere a bit, but I'll say more here again. I'll break it down by section.

Stalinist

I know the decision to nerf the Soviet Union with a permanent consumer goods penalty and some others is controversial, but in some ways I think it was appropriate. It's kind of ridiculous that by Barbarossa you usually have a Soviet Union that has roughly the same industrial capacity as German with all of its occupied territory in Europe. Up to now, that needed to be the case because the Soviet Union would always fold like a house of cards if the Germans ever made it across the river line that goes from Kiev to Riga with a two non-river province gap.

There are definitely some things that seem... eyebrow raising, however, like having starting the third five year plan increase your consumer goods penalty. That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in my view.

There's some other issues. I feel like the 70 days focuses for The Center before Stalin's personality cult should be cut to 35. If you want to minimize paranoia and purge events, you have to stick to those focuses, but they take so long that it gives you very little leeway to doing anything else. Given the truly huge number of focuses the country has, and the amount of things you need to accomplish, this feels like a bit of a problem.

Trotskyist

I think this is by far the worst of all the different political focus branches you can take. The Communist civil wars are both very poor options, but Trotsky's post-civil war content is extremely weak. Alone, of the three different civil war focus branches you can take(Trotsky, Bukharin, White Army) Trotsky has absolutely no economic bonuses to help rebuild from the havoc of the civil war. He also has no kind of substantial bonuses at all. Not only does he not really have bonuses, you actually eat a permanent -10% political power debuff.

A lot of his civil war preparation focuses are not so great either. For instance, you have very little time if you want to try to align with Primakov and Tukhachevsky, because they both get killed off in a scripted purge event early in 1937.

As Trotsky it's not too difficult to get a decent amount of army support, but even still the Civil War is harder than the one for the White Army. For the Whites, you can get 2 military factories from the National Unification pre-civil war focus, and then another 4 immediately after the war starts from Aristocratic investments. It's not much, but it does make a difference, and a noticeable one between playing the different civil wars.

A lot of Trotsky's focuses feel really underwhelming.

Given that this comes immediately after the civil war, it's basically useless. I don't think it would be very overpowered if this was just made permanent, maybe with the attack being reduced to +10%. The Whites do have an advisor that gives t hem +15% against all majors.

All of these focuses feel really underwhelming. There's absolutely no reason to go down this path and balkanize yourself. It just weakens you. Furthermore, I'm really disappointed that there isn't an ability to integrate territory and eventually form a world socialist republic, like a communist equivalent to what Anarchist Spain has.

Bukharin

The overall concept of this branch is very promising, but unfortunately it falls flat. I feel like this should actually be the strongest path of all, but in some ways it is the least viable option. Although it has very powerful, relative to Trotsky, post-war economic bonuses, you have to survive the civil war first and Bukharin has a harder time getting army support.

I like the idea of being able to depose Stalin in a coup without a Civil War, but it needs to be made faster and easier. I think it was a mistake to basically make the civil war mandatory for this.

The assassination of Stalin is RNG based, and even if you infiltrate the NKVD it caps out at an 80% chance of success. I actually had to restart the campaign from the start FIVE times before I was able to get it o succeed even once. Most of the time Rykov and Bukharin get executed, which breaks the tree.

Even if the assassination does succeed, it takes too long to do and you still end up quite weakened compared to the Stalinist focus path, even without the civil war.

Both the Trotskyist and Right Opposition branches suffer from pacing in the length of the focuses of the civil war-prep content. They both also suffer from the fact that the Cooperation against Stalin and related focuses are basically useless because you have so little time to prepare to begin with, and they provide nothing to help you with your war for the most part.

Forget the support for POUM.. you don't have time for it! Very unfortunate decisions in regards to the balance and pacing of it all.

Some of Bukharin's focuses definitely need some tweaking as well.

1000 manpower a week for a year... after the civil war? Very useless, unfortunately!

-3% recruitable population for a research slot is a terrible trade. Should be much lower, maybe like -0.5% tops.

Monarchist

This is the only alternative to Stalin that I feel works well. In my experience, this is by far the easiest Civil War. It is only with the Monarchist civil war where you have the nationalist uprisings. When Ukraine rises up, it has about 40 divisions. This by itself is game changing and makes your job way easier!

I was able to to win this civil war in about 8 months, with a large surplus in my equipment types(except for tanks), versus 12 months for Trotsky and being 22k infantry equipment in the hole.

All the most aggravating things about the communist civil war you don't have to worry about. It doesn't matter how many people Stalin kills because your generals and advisors are all outside the country.

Unlike the communist alteratives to Stalin, you get access to a plethora of great advisors and national spirits. In fact, you can have a permanent -11% consumer goods penalty through Monarchist and fascist advisors, the church national spirit. The economy is definitely not the problem, and you end up far more powerful than if you went Trotskyist.

No real complaints except for one... well, two.

If you want to go fascist, you have to eat a HUGE stability penalty, half of your non-fascist support as a stability penalty. You don't really have a source of getting fascist support aside from an advisor who provides a meager +.1. I waited for two years after hiring him and still ate a 23% stability hit.

It also seems weird that fascists can take the Third Rome focus because it makes them non-aligned. If this were to be kept, it would make more sense to make the Third Rome focus keep you as fascist if you already have gone fascist.

Other problem is that you are prevented from taking Pacify the Rim if you sold Vladivostok to the Japanese. This is significant because you are required to take that focus if you want to revolt against the Japanese. I've just noticed that from reading the requirements, the civil war, for me, is not hard enough to need selling Vladivostok. You can sell Sakhalin, but not Vladivostok.

Less of a 'review' here and more advice to people who may be reading. If you're going monarchist, it's a noob trap to focus on infiltrating the area over by Vladivostok. Instead, you should focus on going along the trans-siberian railroad to the west until you reach(and infiltrate) Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk. Then get the swampy siberian territory to the North and focus on filling out the rest of the far northern Siberian territory. It doesn't matter if the Soviets start with the area east of Chita. It's practically undefended and trivial to invade. It's much better to have a foothold right at the edge of the Ural mountains.

I also encountered a weird, and a pretty serious bug. After the Civil War, I moved my capital to Moscow. Because of shenanigans, later Germany puppeted Moscow and called them into the war without me noticing, they briefly occupied Chita before I sent troops to wipe them out, and when I retook it Chita became my capital again. This is a big issue because of how supplies are routed from your capital.

I had a real blast playing as monarchist Russia.



It's unfortunate that the Left and Right Opposition paths are so borked. I was looking forward to them, and still believe they have a lot of potential to be fun. Unfortunately, they're just more trouble than they're worth with the civil war being a PITA and more difficult than the monarchist Civil War, with all kinds of annoyances related to advisors, Bukharin's coup, and so on.

It's going to take some serious work rebalancing things, fixing bugs, and retouching some of the focuses for Trotsky and Bukharin to be fun and viable choices. Currently, they're very far from that and I recommend against playing them for now unless you're a masochist.

This is a pretty obvious mechanic. You can either prioritise saving the advisors or progressing the civil war without Stalin getting upset. It's a simple, effective risk-reward tradeoff. Do you just want the game to give you everything for free?

But it doesn't actually come out as being anything remotely approaching an effective trade. Additionally, if you're playing as the Right Opposition, a lot of people can be killed in the purge *anyway*, because Bukharin can't send sympathizers into exile like Trotsky can, not that anyone has time to take that focus of Trotsky's either. Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky can all be killed in the purge leaving you with nothing, not even a leader option and it literally breaks the focus tree since Bukharin or Rykov must be alive to progress.

The Civil War is crippling enough already. You really can't afford anything that subtracts from your ability to secure more territory and army support. The advisor stuff is useless for that and thus is non-viable. The civil war is on an incredibly tight schedule and especially given that these focuses are all 70 days each, they absolutely aren't worth taking aside possibly the first one that gives you 100 PP and Kalinin, Khrushchev, and Merkulov.

I don't think it's unreasonable that if you're going to have such a civil war, with Germany breathing down your neck all the while, that you can at least get some nice advisors. It's also worth noting that the monarchist path doesn't have such caveats. You get guaranteed access to a bunch of great advisors. and they can't be killed in the purge because they're already abroad. It's just one of the reasons the monarchist path is so superior to the Trotskyist and Rightist paths.

 

[CantGetNoSleep]

This is a pretty obvious mechanic. You can either prioritise saving the advisors or progressing the civil war without Stalin getting upset. It's a simple, effective risk-reward tradeoff. Do you just want the game to give you everything for free?

I disagree - it's a case of: either lose your advisors in the CW, or lose them in one of the purges (from focus tree or from paranoia). The only way I found to keep most advisors is to cheese it, which means you can win the CW by Dec 1936. But it's cheesy (not console commands, just cheesy).

 

[CantGetNoSleep]

@Iskulya Thanks - very helpful commentary. Just a few thoughts to add:

Stalinist

I know the decision to nerf the Soviet Union with a permanent consumer goods penalty and some others is controversial, but in some ways I think it was appropriate.

I don't know that the Soviets ever had a bigger eco than Germany. Sure, against the AI, but in MP, Germany typically had 1.5x the eco of the Soviets. And then it had Italy, Bulgaria (very boosted since DLC), Romania, Hungary and sometimes Finland on its side whilst the UK and allies would often as not die in Africa. It wasn't at all that easy to hold the Soviets, and if the allies didn't D-Day by late 41 early 42, you were dead.

It is however, I agree, the best commie tree.

Trotskyist

I think this is by far the worst of all the different political focus branches you can take.

Yup, it's pretty underwhelming.

Bukharin

The overall concept of this branch is very promising, but unfortunately it falls flat.

I agree with everything you say here. I just played it (cheesing it, finishing the CW in Dec 1936) and you missed the absolute worst part of the tree, the NEP:

15% consumer goods sounds okay and there's a focus that gives you another -5% so you get rid of most of the 5 year plan nonsense, but -15% construction speed? Are you kidding me? That's so much worse than war eco (20% consumer goods, +20% MIL build speed), which you can take the minute you have enough PP when the CW kicks off. And you can't ever get off it! And there's a focus later that adds another 5% debuff - it's just silly.

Monarchist

This is the only alternative to Stalin that I feel works well.

Thanks for all the feedback on that one, I probably have to try it then. Of the commie tree, the only one that's any good is Stalin, and even that's rubbish and takes 2.5 years to fully complete.

Honestly, if they wanted to nerf the Soviets day 1, just give them fewer CIVs - it'd be a lot easier, and wouldn't be a weight around the Soviet shoulders forever.

 

[FlinzP]

When focuses start to look like german train maps, it often means there are problems. To me focuses are something that controls pace of the game and provides some alternative choices. When you cannot touch most of the avaiable focuses before late game, it starts losing point.

I always liked focus tree that Germany got as good example. Relativly straight and simple, some choices but doable in a good time. It also offers some alternative paths so there is that. Sure you almost never go navy route but still the option remains.

As soviets? Even as playing "historical" there are so much to go through. First you have to deal with the purge and early economy. By the time war begins you have barely done anything. How could you have when you have been trying to reach research slots, some important focuses and prepare defenses. What I don't get is why some nice focuses take 35 days to get done but some weak ones you just have to get through are 70 day of "grind".

Non historical focus branches should have methods to "save" some advisors or give new ones.

 

[Casko]

one way to fix the bunch of those 35 day focuses, that are a net negative for PP, is to simply change them to give you 50 or 55 instead of 35 PP.
This way you can wriggle around abit more with various PP sinks you're given with the new update.

 

[Paul.Ketcham]

I will point out that by going Right Opposition and not preparing for a civil war, I was able to both get the coup to succeed twice fairly early (Summer 1937, with Stalin dead around May) and avoid dealing with a purge of ANY of my generals (which was a bit lucky, since there's a decent chance of an accusation removing one randomly; that said, the main problem is losing your good field marshals). I still lost a ton of advisors, but I feel that this is fairly-normal and historically accurate (the first target of the purge are going to be the political opposition, after all); I just preferred there were a way of choosing what you were going to risk losing, rather than it being mostly RNG (since going for someone like Rykov requires dice rolls, and the bulk of the early purges are specifically of advisors).

Having the option for a post-coup restoration of "democracy" (to get the Left Opposition advisors) also seems fair, since it's 210 days-worth of time spent in the focus tree just for their sake (in case you preserved the military at the expense of your advisors).

 

[Tisifoni12]

Initial attempt and three re-boots and I'm getting the hang of the focus tree and the political decisions.

It's not a smorgasbord of options as you have to concentrate on a couple of the 'sub-trees'

 

[Infryndiira]

Initial attempt and three re-boots and I'm getting the hang of the focus tree and the political decisions.

It's not a smorgasbord of options as you have to concentrate on a couple of the 'sub-trees'

I am very much of the same opinion.

For the Historical tree, I tend to focus mainly on the right-hand focuses of The Centre, speeding my way to the conclusion of the Purges while splicing off during the 175-day cooldown periods to unlock Agitprop and Komsomol first, followed by a quick dip into Comintern and the Spanish Civil War focus (for the passive army experience) and then unlocking the prerequisites of the Second Five-Year Plan and PCDI.

This should cover the period of the game into late 1938; after that I tend to go for the Gosproyektsroy tree (culminating in the fourth research slot as a priority), working my way down for Tankograd, and eventually commit time to start the Red Army and Soviet Airforce penalty removals as the game progresses into the 1940s. On a historical run, I try to deal with the Baltic States, Finland and Romania between 1939 and 1940.

If there's spare time I consider picking options like NKVD Primacy and the Third Five-Year Plan, though that last one especially is comparatively lower-priority. I admittedly neglect the Cult of Personality Tree, though if there's an opportune moment for a Stalin bonus (or even a previously neglected Presidium bonus) I'll consider taking it, depending on the global developments at the time.

The focus priority changes a lot on non-historical runs, as it's very common to see Germany in civil war, or even Turkey giving you the opportunity for a 1936 war over the militarisation of the Turkish Straits (which may pit you in conflict against Romania and Turkey; easy way to farm commander and army experience, even with the start-of-game equipment shortages). In such a scenario it's not uncommon to see yourself leading the scoreboard in terms of world tension generation, at least for a while. You might also get good opportunities to seize Manchuria if Japan faces a civil war, but all this will delay your possible expansion in West Byelorussia, West Ukraine, the Baltic States and Finland.

 

[sdplissken]

Focus tree is too big and too bloated. Bigger is not always better.

You could easily trim down a good part of it. Like 1/3 of the foci could be removed/merged.

You mean purged

 

[Dryhad]

I have so far only tried the Right Opposition path but my take is that it is supposed to be difficult to get going, that you are not supposed to be able to do everything at once, and that this is a good idea in principle. There are a few tweaks I would suggest:

1. The branch should still be completable if both Bukharin and Rykov get purged. I feel like this must just be an oversight, the equivalent part of the Left Opposition doesn't require Smirnov or anyone else, and the civil war event itself has provision for promoting a random commander to country leader if none of the political leaders are available. Probably the simplest solution is to remove the requirement that Rykov be active from Administrative Reform but if it is truly deemed so narratively important that Rykov be responsible for such reforms, then bypass conditions or even a third focus at this point are also options.

2. NKVD purges should be more deterministic. Because the coup is reliant on who is the head of the NKVD, it's highly sensitive to RNG of when the NKVD head is put on trial. At present, such a thing is merely a random possibility from an administrative purge, which itself is a random possibility when a mini-purge event is fired. Thus, depending on how many NKVD purges you roll and how quickly you roll them, the coup can range from quite easy (and slightly anticlimactic) to literally impossible purely on the weight of RNG. My proposed solution would be to have the NKVD purges scheduled on or around the historical dates and only if the player choses not to purge would the event become possible to roll randomly.

3. Is it me, or is Ryutin not worth it? It's a 70 day focus to free him, raising paranoia by 20, and he still costs 150 to hire as an advisor which you can only do after the civil war fires. His effects aren't terrible but it's a lot of effort to go through for one intelligence-oriented advisor. Compare to the similarly placed Zinovyevites, which gets you two better-than-silent-workhorses either of which can also be country leader if you want. I feel like at least Liberate Ryutin should be a 35 day focus but I'm open to the notion that I'm just bad at evaluating intelligence modifiers and Ryutin is actually busted.

 

[Qwerlancer]

In brief the new Soviet focus tree is too long. From my current SOV playthrough I cannot complete all focus before 1955.

After the great purge, I finished the army part by 1944 and the airforce part by 1946. However in that moment the game is practically over.

 

[Crecer13]

This is a pretty obvious mechanic. You can either prioritise saving the advisors or progressing the civil war without Stalin getting upset. It's a simple, effective risk-reward tradeoff. Do you just want the game to give you everything for free?

This is precisely what Bukharin makes sense - to sacrifice economic development in exchange for retaining generals, admirals, and advisers. Which doesn't work. You get a ton of debuffs, you close off a part of the industrial tree for yourself, and you get a full Purge. Bukharin's branch literally makes no sense, the Stalin branch is better. If you go along the Stalin branch, you lose only a few advisers / generals / admirals and get a ton of buffs for production, etc

 

[Tisifoni12]

I used to run out of focuses that I could and wanted to do and resort to 'increased aircraft production'; now it's desperately grab a focus here or there that seems most vital between the socuses that comprise the Stalin tree

I may be about to re-boot for like the seventh time