Other people, like yourself and those you have tagged, have done a better job than I ever could at justifying why message settings should still be around in all Paradox games. All I've ever really done is react with likes and agrees to these posts for years, but I figure I may as well give some personal perspective on why I think message settings would improve HOI4 (and all Paradox games) for me.
I'm a micro-heavy player. I rarely use the battleplanner, and do not make use of certain features like fleet templates or attaching planes to armies because not only do I feel the AI does a worse job at fighting and managing the war than I would, but I also find the micromanagement of my country and its armed forces
fun. I love not only coming up with the plans but also being the one to execute them to perfection. Because I micro so much, this means that as the game goes on there are more and more things to pay attention to and more opportunities to pause and think things through.
In the Paradox games that had message settings, I could tweak the notification settings to fit this playstyle. I would make it so the game would popup and pause whenever an army unit did something significant like take a province, enter battle, end a battle. When buildings or units were completed, I preferred the game to popup and pause. When events pop, I prefer them to pause. When an AI nation does something I find interesting enough to ponder, I want the game to popup and pause. The map is big, and a human can only be looking at one place at a time. Pausing and popping up when significant things happen puts the burden
on the game to keep me informed and give me room to think, rather than put the burden
on me to constantly be checking the map, other countries, my production queue, etc to see when there are things I need to tweak and react to. In turn, the ability to tinker with the message settings makes the game more fun for me.
A few examples of this in action in HOI4 for me:
- When a division is finished being recruited, it will at least cause a notification at the top of the screen that it isn't assigned to an army. This is good! I would prefer it to pause though.
- In contrast, the same does not occur when a ship is finished building. If you aren't constantly monitoring your reserve fleets, the ships will just sit there doing nothing and you won't know about it.
- I get around this by assigning all my ships to deploy to a single "training fleet" that is set to constantly exercise. This at least automates the ship gaining experience towards regular, but I still don't get notified when a ship in the fleet reaches the max experience level, so I have to constantly monitor that fleet. This creates a problem because exercising ships can get damaged, and if in the time between when a ship hits regular and when I check it the ship gets damaged, I now have to waste time and IC to repair the ship that I wouldn't have had to do if the game notified me that the ship was done training.
- Note that this training issue applies to armies as well, though is less impactful
- Adding to the above point, In peacetime, armies, planes, and ships finishing their training and just sitting there afterwards is fine, but in war I want to be notified when my units finish exercising because I want to make use of them as soon as I'm able. Not notifying me wastes the combat potential of the units until I notice they are done.
- You don't get notified of any of the things I listed above when it comes to the maneuvering of your units, and in a multi-front war these really come to a head. You don't get notified when losing or occupying provinces, nor do you get notified when divisions enter or exit combat. These were basic notifications in HOI2 and 3, and without them managing your ground wars is so much more tedious if you are microing them like me. You have to constantly pause, scan the map, and watch your troops progress or lose ground so that you can issue more orders. When only fighting a single front this is very manageable, but the more fronts you have the more time you have to spend scrolling the map and analyzing the current situation. I still have my fun, but it would certainly be better if there were settings to tweak to my liking.
- Similar to the army/ship building issue, buildings finishing not having a corresponding notification is annoying to me. A factory that isn't producing or constructing something is wasting IC, so I prefer notifications to tell me when a new building is built and/or there are free factories. The latter exists in HOI4 right now, but doesn't pause the game. This leaves me sometimes not noticing the "free factories" notification until a day has passed, wasting some IC.
The common thread in all of these examples is wasted potential. Units and buildings doing nothing, opportunities not being noticed, or a situation that required attention getting worse because the player didn't know about it. I feel like there has been a general sentiment from Paradox since 2016 that they'd like their games to not have to be paused and for players to be okay with this wasted potential for a few ticks, and so their notification systems have mostly been catered to those that agree with that. For people like me, these wasted opportunities are grating and make the game
worse. Changing my playstyle would lessen my fun more, so instead I soldier on and bear with it, but I won't ever stop yearning for the days of classic message settings.
HOI4 is still a ton of fun for me. I wouldn't be coming back to it every few months if it wasn't. But while playing I am often annoyed by the situations I laid out above and others like them, lamenting to myself that the notifications in HOI4 (and Stellaris, CK3, and Vic3 pre-1.2 for that matter) are not customizable to my particular playstyle. The game would be better for everyone if they could tweak the game's "information noise" to their liking.
