I've been thinking about the economics in the game and I can't help but feel that the rate of economic growth is completely unrealistic. It is not uncommon for a nation to double or triple its CIV count in a few years leading up to the war, via focuses or by manually building them. I get that CIVs are an abstraction of multiple things, currency, GDP, industrial capability, none of those things however grow at that pace in that short of time. Having a country's economy grow at 10% per year IRL is considered an economic boom and the economic growth in game completely dwarfs that.
MICs are a bit more realistic, since military output does explode as a nation mobilizes, however this usually comes at the expense of the civilian sector, as factories are converted to military use. Obviously in game nobody does this, as outright building MICs is way too cheap compared to converting CIVs. It makes no sense that converting a factory from say, making civilian to military trucks should cost over half of building it from the ground up.
Clearly then, increasing factory build costs will improve the realism and thus the quality of the game. Perhaps also tweaking some numbers like starting factory count, or MIC output in order to maintain the balance of the game will also be required. However, I also get the feeling that this may not necessarily make the game more fun. To a large extent it reduces the impact a player's decisions can have on the economy and eliminates the need to optimize a strategy to get "x factories by 1939". There are players in the community, myself among them, who want HOI to be a realistic WW2 simulator, but also players who want it to be more of a game, with cheese strategies and formable nations. Clearly Paradox has taken a middle ground while developing the game, however I am curious to see how the community would respond to this change.
MICs are a bit more realistic, since military output does explode as a nation mobilizes, however this usually comes at the expense of the civilian sector, as factories are converted to military use. Obviously in game nobody does this, as outright building MICs is way too cheap compared to converting CIVs. It makes no sense that converting a factory from say, making civilian to military trucks should cost over half of building it from the ground up.
Clearly then, increasing factory build costs will improve the realism and thus the quality of the game. Perhaps also tweaking some numbers like starting factory count, or MIC output in order to maintain the balance of the game will also be required. However, I also get the feeling that this may not necessarily make the game more fun. To a large extent it reduces the impact a player's decisions can have on the economy and eliminates the need to optimize a strategy to get "x factories by 1939". There are players in the community, myself among them, who want HOI to be a realistic WW2 simulator, but also players who want it to be more of a game, with cheese strategies and formable nations. Clearly Paradox has taken a middle ground while developing the game, however I am curious to see how the community would respond to this change.
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