Hey i played, Hoi3 a lot, and did many many sessions with other players where all major nations were played, mostly I ended up playing as Soviet, Great Britain, Germany, Japan and USA, in that order, usually because no one else wanted the chaos of the Soviets. I'd like to discuss some things that bothered me with Hoi3, that i hope will be more historical and still balanced possibly even, better balanced in Hoi4.
This might be quite long, i've made the suggestions in cursive if you don't want to read my analysis of my gameplay in Hoi3.
Also, I base a lot of my knowledge of the eastern front on House and Glantz history books and lectures. And i make direct references to this one which i think has also been posted before.
If I don't make something clear please ask me to clarify, as English isn't my first language.
National Leaders
In Hoi3, there was a strange bias with leaders and negative modifiers. While i think it's perfectly reasonable to have bad ministers, it's not reasonable to have bad permanent head of states that give huge negative modifiers that you can't get rid of and doesn't make much sense. While I can't remember all the leaders of hoi 3, the most strange example is that Stalin gives minus 5% industry.
This makes no sense, if i recall correctly Stalin was the one who insisted on rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union, so why would he give a penalty to Industry?
Giving industrial penalties to communist leaders is like giving trade penalties to capitalist ones. It makes very little sense.
I'd suggest Stalin would give a penalty to international relations and diplomatic efforts for obvious reasons i find this much more historical.
In general i suggest that no national leader that can't be changed should be all bad, any national leader that is permanent should have as many benifits as penalties.
Soviet / German Balance
In Hoi3, the invasion of the Soviet Union felt very scripted to go right for the germans, and not usually for the right reasons. Obviously the purge hampered the Soviet Union's officer corps. However there was a lot more to it than that. The notion that Germany lost against the Soviets for the sole reason that Soviets had more troops and could make more mosin nagants and T-34s than Germany could shake a stick at is a false notion and not the most fun gameplay.
As for Technology, Soviets had extremely ahistorical tech in Hoi3, they didn't start with Airborne nor Marine infantry for example. Despite the fact that Soviet union invented Airborne infantry and established the still running VDV in 1930, 6 years before the game starts. They also never had good tank technology compared to Germany in Hoi3, despite that in 1941 Soviets heavily out-teched German tanks, which led to the creation of the next generation of German tanks, but they didn't have those in 1941.
For 1941, i think Soviet and Germany should have overall equal tech with each having advantages in some areas, germany being Air and Sea for example, while soviets having Infantry and Tanks. This makes a lot of sense as the Germans feared the initial Russian tanks, but destroyed the Soviet Airforce almost entirely. In no scenario i could find do the Russians even start off with heavy tank tech, even in the 1944 scenario.
The leaders in Hoi3, were also a bit dubious. With German generals having a higher overall starting ability and therefor also a higher cap, I find it hard to believe for example that Manstein or Model should have been a better generals than Rossokovsky, when Rossokovsky defeated them both and in Models case completely surprised and outwitted him during Bagration.
I suggest rather than pretending Soviets were technologically inferior or some other permanent penalty, the invasion of the Soviet Union can be made possible with other means in Hoi4.
Fire an Event in 1941, called the Soviet Army Reform, which gives them much better organized divisions, but reduces their organization by 50% from Summer of 1941 to December of 1941. This actually happened and according to House, a famous american historical was a major contribution to the success of Barbarossa, but is never really mentioned in popular media and games. Altenatively make it a focus that can only be made in 1941 or later.
The allies of Germany were basically useless in Hoi3, I think it should be important to have the more than a million extra men that the Germans got from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia and Italy to invade the Soviets. Making these nations have viable infantry divisions to help in the invasion would buff Germany indirectly.
It already looks like from the WWW that German is having a manpower and IC buff over Hoi3, so they can field their historical number of divisions more easily, which is good.
Don't make the purge about things it wasn't, remove a bunch of leaders/officers from the red army, that is already a big hit. The Soviet Army Reform will already acheive the Org hit needed.
If Germany needs and overall "german troops best troops buff" why not give them higher morale due to fanatical fighting from Hitler?
Remove Soviet Defensive Buffs, Soviet Doctrine had forgotten to stress the importance of defence in thier deep battle doctrine, without the soviet defensive buffs, germany won't need their offensive buffs to overcome them, and the same can be accomplished with less events, modifiers and ahistorical ideas.
Japan, China and the United States
This theater felt very weird in Hoi3, it didn't have much love, for example even now if you start in 1938 scenario China starts out being a Japanese puppet, that's how little attention this got.
Both the Chinese and the Japanese were way to weak. The chinese more so, the AI japanese won over the AI chinese nearly 100% of the time, and i never met a Chinese player that could even stall me if i played Japan in Vanilla. It is reasonable that Japan cannot build a lot of ships as they didn't in ww2, but they had a huge army, and even in 1945, they had more than a million soldiers in Japan proper, and around 2 million i believe on the asian mainland. They should have the industry to make weapons for these.
China needs a lot of love aswell, while horribly out-teched they should stil have the ability to make a lot of infantry, and develop defensive infantry doctrines.
I find United States to be outragously easy to play in Hoi3. There were several things that United States could do to completely gimp Japan, like building costal forts on all their islands up to level 10, so that Japan could never take a single one. Not to mention the amount of doom stacks and technology they could have in 1941.
If United States had a competend player he could completely defeat japan in 1941, invade his mainland and so on.
In reality japan was able to hold off america while taking almost all of land around Indonesia and Malaysia, not to mention the american islands.
US still seems to be able to produce way to much stuff before 1941, in Hoi4 looking at the WWW US is able to make D-Day, Invasion of Japan and more troops other places at the same time, something they were not able to do even in 1944.
Japan should be able to have a bigger army, and also have focus trees that allow much better naval combat to outweigh initial size of US fleet. I believe atleast 1 focus for torpedos are already in place.
China should be able to have a bigger army, to hold off the Japanese for a lot longer. China was not a minor player in world war 2. But one of the nations that saw the most combat overall.
US should not be able to have doom stacks in 1941, invade mainland japan and do D-Day at the same time. I suggest making it so that US gets dissent or other negative events if they try to be interventionist before they are attacked. It took america 3 years of preparation after being attacked before they were ready to take on a weakened German Army, it should atleast take a little longer than a few days of them being in the war before they invade mainland Europe or Japan.
This might be quite long, i've made the suggestions in cursive if you don't want to read my analysis of my gameplay in Hoi3.
Also, I base a lot of my knowledge of the eastern front on House and Glantz history books and lectures. And i make direct references to this one which i think has also been posted before.
If I don't make something clear please ask me to clarify, as English isn't my first language.
National Leaders
In Hoi3, there was a strange bias with leaders and negative modifiers. While i think it's perfectly reasonable to have bad ministers, it's not reasonable to have bad permanent head of states that give huge negative modifiers that you can't get rid of and doesn't make much sense. While I can't remember all the leaders of hoi 3, the most strange example is that Stalin gives minus 5% industry.
This makes no sense, if i recall correctly Stalin was the one who insisted on rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union, so why would he give a penalty to Industry?
Giving industrial penalties to communist leaders is like giving trade penalties to capitalist ones. It makes very little sense.
I'd suggest Stalin would give a penalty to international relations and diplomatic efforts for obvious reasons i find this much more historical.
In general i suggest that no national leader that can't be changed should be all bad, any national leader that is permanent should have as many benifits as penalties.
Soviet / German Balance
In Hoi3, the invasion of the Soviet Union felt very scripted to go right for the germans, and not usually for the right reasons. Obviously the purge hampered the Soviet Union's officer corps. However there was a lot more to it than that. The notion that Germany lost against the Soviets for the sole reason that Soviets had more troops and could make more mosin nagants and T-34s than Germany could shake a stick at is a false notion and not the most fun gameplay.
As for Technology, Soviets had extremely ahistorical tech in Hoi3, they didn't start with Airborne nor Marine infantry for example. Despite the fact that Soviet union invented Airborne infantry and established the still running VDV in 1930, 6 years before the game starts. They also never had good tank technology compared to Germany in Hoi3, despite that in 1941 Soviets heavily out-teched German tanks, which led to the creation of the next generation of German tanks, but they didn't have those in 1941.
For 1941, i think Soviet and Germany should have overall equal tech with each having advantages in some areas, germany being Air and Sea for example, while soviets having Infantry and Tanks. This makes a lot of sense as the Germans feared the initial Russian tanks, but destroyed the Soviet Airforce almost entirely. In no scenario i could find do the Russians even start off with heavy tank tech, even in the 1944 scenario.
The leaders in Hoi3, were also a bit dubious. With German generals having a higher overall starting ability and therefor also a higher cap, I find it hard to believe for example that Manstein or Model should have been a better generals than Rossokovsky, when Rossokovsky defeated them both and in Models case completely surprised and outwitted him during Bagration.
I suggest rather than pretending Soviets were technologically inferior or some other permanent penalty, the invasion of the Soviet Union can be made possible with other means in Hoi4.
Fire an Event in 1941, called the Soviet Army Reform, which gives them much better organized divisions, but reduces their organization by 50% from Summer of 1941 to December of 1941. This actually happened and according to House, a famous american historical was a major contribution to the success of Barbarossa, but is never really mentioned in popular media and games. Altenatively make it a focus that can only be made in 1941 or later.
The allies of Germany were basically useless in Hoi3, I think it should be important to have the more than a million extra men that the Germans got from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia and Italy to invade the Soviets. Making these nations have viable infantry divisions to help in the invasion would buff Germany indirectly.
It already looks like from the WWW that German is having a manpower and IC buff over Hoi3, so they can field their historical number of divisions more easily, which is good.
Don't make the purge about things it wasn't, remove a bunch of leaders/officers from the red army, that is already a big hit. The Soviet Army Reform will already acheive the Org hit needed.
If Germany needs and overall "german troops best troops buff" why not give them higher morale due to fanatical fighting from Hitler?
Remove Soviet Defensive Buffs, Soviet Doctrine had forgotten to stress the importance of defence in thier deep battle doctrine, without the soviet defensive buffs, germany won't need their offensive buffs to overcome them, and the same can be accomplished with less events, modifiers and ahistorical ideas.
Japan, China and the United States
This theater felt very weird in Hoi3, it didn't have much love, for example even now if you start in 1938 scenario China starts out being a Japanese puppet, that's how little attention this got.
Both the Chinese and the Japanese were way to weak. The chinese more so, the AI japanese won over the AI chinese nearly 100% of the time, and i never met a Chinese player that could even stall me if i played Japan in Vanilla. It is reasonable that Japan cannot build a lot of ships as they didn't in ww2, but they had a huge army, and even in 1945, they had more than a million soldiers in Japan proper, and around 2 million i believe on the asian mainland. They should have the industry to make weapons for these.
China needs a lot of love aswell, while horribly out-teched they should stil have the ability to make a lot of infantry, and develop defensive infantry doctrines.
I find United States to be outragously easy to play in Hoi3. There were several things that United States could do to completely gimp Japan, like building costal forts on all their islands up to level 10, so that Japan could never take a single one. Not to mention the amount of doom stacks and technology they could have in 1941.
If United States had a competend player he could completely defeat japan in 1941, invade his mainland and so on.
In reality japan was able to hold off america while taking almost all of land around Indonesia and Malaysia, not to mention the american islands.
US still seems to be able to produce way to much stuff before 1941, in Hoi4 looking at the WWW US is able to make D-Day, Invasion of Japan and more troops other places at the same time, something they were not able to do even in 1944.
Japan should be able to have a bigger army, and also have focus trees that allow much better naval combat to outweigh initial size of US fleet. I believe atleast 1 focus for torpedos are already in place.
China should be able to have a bigger army, to hold off the Japanese for a lot longer. China was not a minor player in world war 2. But one of the nations that saw the most combat overall.
US should not be able to have doom stacks in 1941, invade mainland japan and do D-Day at the same time. I suggest making it so that US gets dissent or other negative events if they try to be interventionist before they are attacked. It took america 3 years of preparation after being attacked before they were ready to take on a weakened German Army, it should atleast take a little longer than a few days of them being in the war before they invade mainland Europe or Japan.
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