Can we talk about the Soviet Union nerfs?

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I think the issue with balancing the Soviet Union is that they were losing before they started winning. The developers have put a lot more emphasis on focuses to help the Soviets survive rather than hold. But they get a bunch of late-game buffs to allow the USSR to make a comeback and start driving the Germans back.
The problem is HoI4 doesn't work like real life, most of your military production in HoI4 will come pre-war, so if you are losing on the frontline, you fall further and further behind because you have to replace what you have lost and your opponent doesn't.
 
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I think the issue with balancing the Soviet Union is that they were losing before they started winning. The developers have put a lot more emphasis on focuses to help the Soviets survive rather than hold. But they get a bunch of late-game buffs to allow the USSR to make a comeback and start driving the Germans back.
The problem is HoI4 doesn't work like real life, most of your military production in HoI4 will come pre-war, so if you are losing on the frontline, you fall further and further behind because you have to replace what you have lost and your opponent doesn't.
The other issue is that the USSR's problem going into the war wasn't industry capacity, though that was a bit of an issue towards 1942 given the scope of the German occupation. The problem really was C3I, which HoI4 pretty much doesn't simulate.
 
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Okay, maybe I'm not getting something. I mentioned that this update seemed like a nerd to the USSR back in the Dec diary months ago, but I withheld judgement until I got to see the thing for itself. Now I've played a couple of Soviet Union games and I feel like I can say that the USSR has been seriously nerfed.

Because of these nerfs, the five year plan focuses, and the air force focuses, feel totally useless. The industrial tree actively makes your country worse, while the air force tree requires like a year of focuses to, as far as I can see, not even completely remove a crippling malus.

No planes Soviets was already the meta, the USSR already struggled to maintain industrial parity with Germany (both in MP). This just has made both of those problems worse, and given the USSR precious little in return. In fact, I really can't think of one thing that the new Soviet tree does better than the old one.

To top it all off, the German Barbarossa bonus appears to have been increased to a whopping +15% attack bonus. What's the point of fiddling around trying to optimize your army if the enemy is just going to get a massive attack bonus?

Someone help me see the light here, because I'm really having difficulty understanding the point of a lot of these nerfs.
Get gud. No honestly it's still very easy to win as SOV against fully buffed Germany and Italy.

In fact you have MANY routes to victory. You can go traditional route of removing the nerfs or even keep the nerfs and go with logistics and massive production. Have you even studied the NF tree?

A no plane meta is a really bad choice. Just watch your logistic system get bombed to the stone age. There is one possible solution where you only use armored trains.

But the bottom line is the Soviets have major issues early but easily overcome them. In fact it might be too easy to win with the Soviets now.
 
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u wot m8?
Just use mountaineers and keep microing, was pretty simple
Screenshot_367.jpg
 
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Get gud. No honestly it's still very easy to win as SOV against fully buffed Germany and Italy.

In fact you have MANY routes to victory. You can go traditional route of removing the nerfs or even keep the nerfs and go with logistics and massive production. Have you even studied the NF tree?

A no plane meta is a really bad choice. Just watch your logistic system get bombed to the stone age. There is one possible solution where you only use armored trains.

But the bottom line is the Soviets have major issues early but easily overcome them. In fact it might be too easy to win with the Soviets now.
I feel like I have to keep saying this but I have no doubt that the AI is beatable even on the hardest settings. I'm not complaining that the game against the AI is too hard. My complaints about strength are mostly oriented around MP where you're facing down five or six players. In that case a weakened Soviet Union, especially one that easily collapses without a very good player at the reigns, can easily ruin 6+ hour games for lobbies of 20 odd players. I have had that happen a lot, in fact I've found a Soviet collapse to be the most common way for random games to end and it's very disappointing, especially when you're not playing the Soviet Union.

The other issue I have is principally gameplay design oriented, where the industry tree and the air force tree are not very useful/seem like trap options. That's not about balance so much as it is about problematic game design because it creates an appearance of choice when actually one path is objectively better than the other, while at the same time locking players out of using the game systems.
 
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I just see no reason to take the Third Five Year Plan Focus, the rewards are not bad, but not good enough to invest 210+ days into the tree and receive +5% Consumer Goods Factories. You already receive nice industry buffs with other Foci. I think thats also the problem most players have with the tree right now, some Foci are just useless/too long.
70 days for besserabia? no thanks.
280+ days to fix your air force? doesnt feel good or rewarding.
70 days to send volunteers to china?(105 days with Comintern Focus) guess i will just send lend lease for a bit army xp.
1 year(!) of bad generals before you can take Lessons of War? The war is already over before you can take Order 227

Also pls buff AA or nerf CAS pls
 
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I just see no reason to take the Third Five Year Plan Focus, the rewards are not bad, but not good enough to invest 210+ days into the tree and receive +5% Consumer Goods Factories. You already receive nice industry buffs with other Foci. I think thats also the problem most players have with the tree right now, some Foci are just useless/too long.
70 days for besserabia? no thanks.
280+ days to fix your air force? doesnt feel good or rewarding.
70 days to send volunteers to china?(105 days with Comintern Focus) guess i will just send lend lease for a bit army xp.
1 year(!) of bad generals before you can take Lessons of War? The war is already over before you can take Order 227

Also pls buff AA or nerf CAS pls
It looks like that AA still kills lot of CAS, doesn't it?
 
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So I am curious, given that I never play MP.
What is a typical Axis force that an MP SOV can expect around the start of Barbarossa in 1941?
And what will the remaining Allies contribute at that time?
 
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So I am curious, given that I never play MP.
What is a typical Axis force that an MP SOV can expect around the start of Barbarossa in 1941?
And what will the remaining Allies contribute at that time?
Been a while so these numbers might not be current but I've seen something like 20-30-ish 40w heavy tank divisions, ~10,000 airframes, assorted mechanized and marine forces from Bulgaria and Romania, probably around 130 infantry divisions? Something in that ballpark, more or less depending on how the allies and Germany play I guess. As for allied forces it's so variable it's hard to say but they usually can't D-Day until like 1943.
 
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i actually enjoy the Soviets now. I find I get pushed back to Moscow before the tide begins to turn. Tends to make things very tense indeed. I play with the Germany slider set to maximum.

Best strategy I find is scorched earth with suicidal bombings of logistics.

Previous Soviet games were frankly boring for me. The Axis would crash into the border, die by the millions and i’d roll into Berlin in early 1943 at the latest.

I don’t think the Soviets being unprepared in 1941 is a negative tbh. They weren’t prepared IRL.

I haven’t played as Germany so I don’t know how the AI deals with the new Soviets.
 
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Yeah I've intervened in the SCW three times, once with light tanks, once with mountaineers, and once with medium tanks and Spain got rolled all three times. I'm not that bad of a player so something has changed.

So far I've ran three NSB SOV runs and won in Spain all three times. The third time I didn't even lend-lease Spain (PDX massively nerfed XP from LL, which is probably for the best). It's pretty easy against the AI.
 
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i actually enjoy the Soviets now. I find I get pushed back to Moscow before the tide begins to turn. Tends to make things very tense indeed. I play with the Germany slider set to maximum.

Best strategy I find is scorched earth with suicidal bombings of logistics.

Previous Soviet games were frankly boring for me. The Axis would crash into the border, die by the millions and i’d roll into Berlin in early 1943 at the latest.

I don’t think the Soviets being unprepared in 1941 is a negative tbh. They weren’t prepared IRL.

I haven’t played as Germany so I don’t know how the AI deals with the new Soviets.

I'm... okish.. with all of that. But doesn't it result in over-egged Allied gains?
 
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I don’t think the Soviets being unprepared in 1941 is a negative tbh. They weren’t prepared IRL.

Then again, they did have 26k tanks, some 10k armoured cars and circa 35k military aircraft in June 1941, and very large amounts already in January 1936.

Pre-NSB SOV lacked 78% of its tank park on 1.1.1936. Now for some bizarre reason PDX decreased their tank count even further. It's bizarre, because if the basis for the exclusion of most of the tank park is that they were early 1930s models, then why even bother having the techs in the game, and stranger still, why give SOV variants such as the T-27? Early T-26 models for instance clearly had far more combat value than the T-27, yet thousands of T-26s are omitted from the starting scenarios.
 
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Then again, they did have 26k tanks, some 10k armoured cars and circa 35k military aircraft in June 1941, and very large amounts already in January 1936.

Pre-NSB SOV lacked 78% of its tank park on 1.1.1936. Now for some bizarre reason PDX decreased their tank count even further. It's bizarre, because if the basis for the exclusion of most of the tank park is that they were early 1930s models, then why even bother having the techs in the game, and stranger still, why give SOV variants such as the T-27? Early T-26 models for instance clearly had far more combat value than the T-27, yet thousands of T-26s are omitted from the starting scenarios.
The basis for the exclusion was clearly the intention of creating a specific experience of Barbarossa. A lot of mods have done similar things - I recall playing one that gave the Germans a +75% attack bonus which was very annoying.

I feel very strongly that the vanilla experience should not rely on such artificial crutches.
 
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I feel like I have to keep saying this but I have no doubt that the AI is beatable even on the hardest settings. I'm not complaining that the game against the AI is too hard. My complaints about strength are mostly oriented around MP where you're facing down five or six players. In that case a weakened Soviet Union, especially one that easily collapses without a very good player at the reigns, can easily ruin 6+ hour games for lobbies of 20 odd players. I have had that happen a lot, in fact I've found a Soviet collapse to be the most common way for random games to end and it's very disappointing, especially when you're not playing the Soviet Union.

The other issue I have is principally gameplay design oriented, where the industry tree and the air force tree are not very useful/seem like trap options. That's not about balance so much as it is about problematic game design because it creates an appearance of choice when actually one path is objectively better than the other, while at the same time locking players out of using the game systems.

And either the allies suck in those MP games or the SOV player is just not up to it. The nerfs are not that big a deal if you really study the NF tree and do a proper plan.
 
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