Focus trees are too complicated!

[Phleem]

I have a general problem with the giant complicated focus trees that are in HOI4: they are so complex that navigating them is like a mini game, but because they are the scaffolding for a giant WWII sim, to play out the alternatives takes many hours. At best, it makes me feel like I'm playing in a dumb way when I go down the "wrong" tree. At worse, when I want to play an alternative Germany or Russia where I'm not LARPing a mass murderer, it leads down a game path where I'm stuck in a dead end revolutionary war. So to prevent that, I want to understand how the civil war will work to get through it as fast as possible.

My initial intent was to post a request for "how to cheese German and Russian civil wars" to get pointers to the best way to quickly end these with a non-crippled nation, but as I thought more about it I realized that the fact I have to do this is really the problem. And that it is just a sub-problem of the whole idea of these mega focus trees that are full of wrong turns and dead ends.

So in addition to my general suggestion to Paradox to think about how they design focus trees, I will still ask here: Would someone please point me at a guide for how to get through the Russian focus tree with a non-Stalin leader as efficiently as possible.

 

[ShepherdOfCats]

Well, don't do what I did. I went the monarchist route and picked "the hands do".

Spoiler:

That one ends the paranoia mechanic and immediately starts the civil war, ready or not. And, I was not. LOL Fastest I've ever ctrl-alt-del an ironman game.

 

[cdub8d]

I am fine with high complexity. I play a lot of "complex" games. My problem with focus trees is that they don't really add much in the way of interesting decisions. On top of requiring tons of development time. Time that could have been spent on mechanics. Which there is a long list of mechanics that need work.

Over Hoi4's lifetime, I think they spent too much time on a bunch of superficial things that don't add much in the way of depth. Imagine instead of focus trees we got a editor similar to Hoi3's in TFH? You could customize your country and others to fit whatever scenario you wanted. Most of the console commands already exist for changing things. It would open tons of options for replayability. Hoi4 had a lot of potential but is imo a bit of a mess rn.

 

[Anna_Gein]

Imo the whole Focus tree thing went all of control for a while by now. It even invaded others games (aka EUIV & Imperator)

Initialy it felt like a brillant concept : It allowed both history accurate flow and alt history to happen at the same time. All while feeling much more natural, more organic to the gameplay compared to the traditional history railroad event triggered by date. I liked very much how the originals trees were including those majors trees remplaced since then.

However they do feel now far too invasive, far too complex now. They just got far too big period. Because they are too big and because you can no longer spy on other countries focus trees without limited spyings, the system feels disconnected from the main game. It is almost like there are too games at the same time : HoI4 and a card choice game through the focus trees.

Additionnaly they were more interesting when the historical deviation remained relatively small and so believable. Like Germnay coopting Danemark and Norway after a stronger Navy build up. Or UK making a stand in the Balkan rather than with Poland. etc

Now the game just don't make sense. Many reworked countries invariably implodes to civil war and the in-game world feels like one of these 1 region by faction mods for Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. You have like 4/6 wars at the same time by 39 before they eventually merge into the game WW2.

Long story short : I agree with OP, focus tress are to complicated.

 

[=XIII=Wedge]

Imo the whole Focus tree thing went all of control for a while by now. It even invaded others games (aka EUIV & Imperator)

Initialy it felt like a brillant concept : It allowed both history accurate flow and alt history to happen at the same time. All while feeling much more natural, more organic to the gameplay compared to the traditional history railroad event triggered by date. I liked very much how the originals trees were including those majors trees remplaced since then.

However they do feel now far too invasive, far too complex now. They just got far too big period. Because they are too big and because you can no longer spy on other countries focus trees without limited spyings, the system feels disconnected from the main game. It is almost like there are too games at the same time : HoI4 and a card choice game through the focus trees.

Additionnaly they were more interesting when the historical deviation remained relatively small and so believable. Like Germnay coopting Danemark and Norway after a stronger Navy build up. Or UK making a stand in the Balkan rather than with Poland. etc

Now the game just don't make sense. Many reworked countries invariably implodes to civil war and the in-game world feels like one of these 1 region by faction mods for Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. You have like 4/6 wars at the same time by 39 before they eventually merge into the game WW2.

Long story short : I agree with OP, focus tress are to complicated.

I disagree! Having large tree’s is fine provided they offer alternative choices at key points.

Most of the issues with trees are QoL UI related. E.g hide the non-chosen mutually exclusive path after a focus has completed. Only show the direct focuses in the selected path.

Add these as two checked options so you can still view and plan routes through the tree if desired.

Final QoL would be to drag focuses into priority list which would execute each one in turn provided the criteria was met, moving down a path to a target focus. If not possible then prompt the user to pick a focus as now.

 

[Ringwraith_JP]

I think the biggest problem is that there is no way to aid the player to make decisions. Let's say I wan't to play Mexico somewhat historically. I pretty much need a PhD in Mexican history to know the ins and outs of that tree. It is interesting, but some degree of hand holding is needed. Be it by highlighting the historical path, or providing historical date ranges for a specific NF.

 

[Ironside112]

I think the biggest problem is that there is no way to aid the player to make decisions. Let's say I wan't to play Mexico somewhat historically. I pretty much need a PhD in Mexican history to know the ins and outs of that tree. It is interesting, but some degree of hand holding is needed. Be it by highlighting the historical path, or providing historical date ranges for a specific NF.

If you're in desperate need for a historical filter, I've made one https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2504718554
Noted, it doesn't work at all on 1.11 at the moment (waiting for all the focuses to be fixed at the moment, then I'll update it)

 

[OllyOllyOxenFree]

Haha good joke

 

[Pale Blue]

My biggest issue is that the new huge trees don't offer any real desicion making. You basically have to do a certain focus order to manage the bazillion negative modifiers and stupid Minigames that are hidden in event chains or the desicions tab. Otherwise your country just implodes in a civil war.

Older trees are much better. If I want a civil war I actively need to take a focus for it like oppose Hitler or the unthinkable, it's not something that just happens because you didn't spent half an hour reading focuses. Or even better the game files because the tooltip of a focus simply reads "event X happens" or "unlocks desicion y" instead of the actual effect. New trees force you in civil war unless you take certain foci and options in the mini games before a certain date. It is incredibly opaque what you are supposed to do. One of my best examples is the Osman empire path that can't be taken unless you picked certain options in the previous political mini game. I shouldn't have to read an external guide for this because the game is super bad at telling you what happens if you take certain options.

 

[Iskulya]

The Russian Civil Wars are a major source of frustration for me, the communist ones at least, the moanrchist one feels about right. It's too hard and too much work.

What I mean by that is not that they're unwinnable(although they probably are nearly so for your average player), it's just that for the amount of work you have to put into it, it leaves you far too weakened to really stand much of a chance of coping against the German onslaught unless you're playing with historical off and the Germans just get bogged down doing stupid stuff on other fronts.

I don't think it's a problem with the focus tree being complicated, just not being balanced well. The level of complication does add another wrinkle to things: If you want the AI to do a certain path, then it's not able to. Try setting the Soviet AI to do the right opposition, the results are hilarious.

I remember when the civil war content was previewed to us ages ago, I thought to myself. "Wow... that's a whole lot of civil war preparation focuses. It's either going to be an incredibly easy war to win, and you can take all the focuses and there's no real choice or trade off to make; or it's going to be the opposite and be super punishing where you can't really pick much of anything." We got the latter. TBH I'd rather have it too easy than too hard. The German Civil War is a good example of this. It's easy and fun, and it doesn't cripple Germany. Even the AI can reliably do it.

I'm fine with the monarchist civil war being pretty difficult to come back from, as it really should be devastating, but what is actually the case in the game is that the Soviet monarchist path is the easiest civil war and also gets the most benefits to building back.

 

[coffeelingfine]

I don't get the appeal of huge focus trees or the focus trees in general. I'd rather actually play the game, not browsing the massive trees >_>

 

[Ilyasviel]

I don't like the trees either. They are too big and they force me to pause way too often. If you had one or two meaningful choices per year, it would be fine, but I hate how it forces me to stop playing every two months (or even every month with some trees). The latest ones are so big that even navigating through them is a chore. It would be fine if we could at least queue choices, so that way we could plan a path and not have to constantly come back to the menu. And while I'm at it, we should be able to queue research and intelligence upgrades. Those were all things we could do in hoi3 and it was much better that way.

 

[Askorti]

I think that Battle for Bosphorus set a very bad precedent in adding focus trees that are a whole minigame of their own. They are convoluted and difficult to follow. And the fact that they then also depend on outside mechanics like decisions means that you need several playthroughs to have the faintest idea of what to do to reach the goal you want.
As an example, I wanted to get the Ottoman Empire when playing as Turkey. It's pretty much completely impossible to do the first time you play because of all the different mechanics that are in play, while NONE of them gets proper explanation in-game.

Lets compare it with the German Empire. All it takes is: Oppose Hitler (makes perfect sense), secure the state (makes sense), restore the kaiserreich (makes sense), bring back the kaiser (makes sense). That's it. You have your German Empire, now you can go choose what to do from there.
None of these have any weird prerequisites that would be outside of your direct control. No weird hoops to jump through.

In my humble opinion in the effort to make things "engaging" they went just a few steps too far and made them tedious and convoluted. I'm afraid that this is a point where they should really... take a step back.

 

[blahmaster6k]

I don't like the trees either. They are too big and they force me to pause way too often. If you had one or two meaningful choices per year, it would be fine, but I hate how it forces me to stop playing every two months (or even every month with some trees). The latest ones are so big that even navigating through them is a chore. It would be fine if we could at least queue choices, so that way we could plan a path and not have to constantly come back to the menu. And while I'm at it, we should be able to queue research and intelligence upgrades. Those were all things we could do in hoi3 and it was much better that way.

I think the focus trees get a lot less time consuming to navigate the more games you play. Once you've played a few games with a country, you learn what it does and you know the general order you need to do things in so it just becomes "focus finished? click this other focus next" and you don't really have to dedicate any thinking to it at all except to check research timings to make sure you're going to get a research started before you unlock a bonus you want to save for a later tech that you're rushing.

 

[cnwi]

It's pretty much completely impossible to do the first time you play because of all the different mechanics that are in play, while NONE of them gets proper explanation in-game.

A major issue is that the "minigames" mechanics added by the newer focus trees... aren't even that good. They're very repetitive from one focus tree to the other, and their gameplay loop is tedious, usually relying on clicking some decisions that cost PP in a specific order.

 

[Medu Salem]

I am fine with the alternative history stuff.

The thing I am not fine with anymore for quite a while already is the graphical representation of the huge trees.

There simply is way too much stuff going on and if you don't play a country all the time knowing from memory which route to follow you easily get lost in the sheer amount of paths.

I know you can search for stuff... yet for some countries still it's screaming "IN YOUR FACE! LOOK HOW BIG I AM! EVEN IF YOU WILL NEVER PICK 80% OF THE FOCI!"



So in my opinion what should or needs to be done better for a future sequel eventually (since I doubt it's going to make it to HoI4) is probably a dynamic focus tree instead of a static one.

Where the number of items on the screen gets culled down if you pick mutually exclusive paths (dynamically removing stuff you can't pick anymore), so it gets more streamlined the further down you go the tree.

That or only display foci up until a fork in the path and only once you picked one of the mutual exclusive options then display the next bunch of foci until there is another fork.


Such a dynamic tree would even allow for new foci to pop up if the conditions are met through events or what other countries did.

And it would probably totally remove the problem of having to double or even triple some of the foci which are mutual to several paths but only happens because of the 2-dimensional representation and trying to avoid having to cross over paths horizontally.


At least there should be some way to reduce the amount of stuff displayed on the Focus screen at any given time to the bare necessary... basically to the stuff you actually still CAN do, instead of everything... even the stuff you can't do anymore because they are mutual exclusive.

 

[AlextheSwift]

I have a general problem with the giant complicated focus trees that are in HOI4: they are so complex that navigating them is like a mini game, but because they are the scaffolding for a giant WWII sim, to play out the alternatives takes many hours. At best, it makes me feel like I'm playing in a dumb way when I go down the "wrong" tree. At worse, when I want to play an alternative Germany or Russia where I'm not LARPing a mass murderer, it leads down a game path where I'm stuck in a dead end revolutionary war. So to prevent that, I want to understand how the civil war will work to get through it as fast as possible.

My initial intent was to post a request for "how to cheese German and Russian civil wars" to get pointers to the best way to quickly end these with a non-crippled nation, but as I thought more about it I realized that the fact I have to do this is really the problem. And that it is just a sub-problem of the whole idea of these mega focus trees that are full of wrong turns and dead ends.

So in addition to my general suggestion to Paradox to think about how they design focus trees, I will still ask here: Would someone please point me at a guide for how to get through the Russian focus tree with a non-Stalin leader as efficiently as possible.

I understand your sentiment and miss the times when the focus trees were smaller and easier to understand.

Bigger doesn't necessarly mean better.

I think the developers got the idea of bigger focus trees from Kaiserreich. But in Kaiserreich, even the biggest focus trees can be easily understood just by looking at them.

While in Hearts of Iron 4, want to form the Ottoman Empire? good luck learning how to do that just by looking at the focus tree, no searching for it online.

 

[Hoi Neuling]

Phleem, they are pretty easy.

1. You have to choose what Part you will go (A-Historical [normaly 3 Ways] or Historical)

2a. If you choose A-Historical you have in 99% the Choise between: Monarch, Democratic, Fashist or Communism; there you have to cancel the Historical-Hook for the AI too and choose in the advanced Options what way the AI-Countrys have to go or you let do the AI-Countrys choose automatically

2b. The only exception I have seen is Russia (Sowjetunion): there you have the Choisse between Monarch or 4 Communism-Variants (Stalins Way, Trotzkis Way, an Outlaw-Communism-Way or an Communsim-Religion-Way)

3. If you choos Historical, there are Historical-Mods (Dates, Speeches and 4 to 5 more) for the Base-Game with DLCs, which let the AI do the Historical Way with the 70-Days and lesser 35-Days-Focusses. And in the Guides are the historical Way up to September 1939 for all done Countrys.

You only have to choose what Way you wanna go and esp. for the Historical is a big Service there.

 

[TempestM]

Well, don't do what I did. I went the monarchist route and picked "the hands do".

Spoiler:

That one ends the paranoia mechanic and immediately starts the civil war, ready or not. And, I was not. LOL Fastest I've ever ctrl-alt-del an ironman game.

Literally says "2nd Russian Civil War", what did you expect?

 

[Feltan]

Well, perhaps I am speaking for the minority of players, but I actually like big and complex focus trees. As I see it, the gain to the game is a bit of randomness and a creeping feeling that you don't know every option you can take ..... like real life when you think about it.

This might be a multi-player versus single player thing too. I can see in multi-player this being a drag to speed and planning every nuance down to the fraction of a second. Single players probably are more likely to enjoy the immersive depth and complexity.

This player would vote to keep making them more complex and deep. They add a real-life backdrop to the game, and you learn something new almost every time you play a game.

Regards,
Feltan