Germany still laughably easy game...

[Pzt_Kami]

Germany has definatly become harder than it was prior to LaR even in the hands of player(s). Since 1.9 I have yet to see germany wins the war when is under AI control.

If germany feels easy (and don't think so but anyway) it should be because it can be a good starting faction for new players to learn while playing (and enjoying) the game mechanics (especially now that Italy become even harder to play with). I'm agree with @Palaiologos ,If a player wants challenge then it can be achieved by increasing difficulty , game difficulty was always a thing since gaming born !

 

[mursolini]

I think the main reason Germany is OP is that oil still does not matter.

This is mainly because the civilian oil consumption is not simulated.
Historically, the European Axis required 20 mio tons of oil by 1941 and ran at a deficit of about 8 mio tons per year.

Only BICE simulates civilian oil consumption and nerfs Germany enough.

Germany is not OP. Player is, because player can fight at casualty rate of 5-15x to AI, on land, and 3-4x in air.
With that, essentially every war in which player doesn't face >20:1 odds in winnable, no matter the player country.
Considering you can convert occupied land into ~30%-60% as good land as your core, essentially WC is achievable with any state, as long as it can get initial momentum rolling.

Now, if paradox would increase base hard attack, put at least slight AA fire into every division and somewhat rebalance org regain and entrenchments, and re-do air system to make air superiority less of a one-sided slaughter, maybe player will fight at 2-5 times efficiency, and will find Italy or Romania challenging.

Isn't BICE more or less makes "challenge" by creating one-sided player restrictions and flat AI division buffs?

 

[wright1331]

I gather La Resistance was meant to make it harder for Germany to snowball, but with the Collaboration Government mission, it remains laughably easy I find. Doing nothing but CIVs and going pretty historical (Anschluss, Sudetenland and Poland at the right time), setting up 3 collaborations in France and Poland, I end 1939 controlling all of mainland Europe 220 owned civs, 120 owned mils, 20 docks (I've not not even done my own naval focus), and basically it's already game over. No one has a chance.

Is it me or are collaboration government overpowered? I would even be tempted to delay the invasion of Denmnark and Norway just so I can set up collaboration governments.

anyone in vanilla is a joke to play with, the entire game is to easy... get AI 4.0 if you want any sort of challenge.

 

[CantGetNoSleep]

Thank you all for the replies. I think the game mechanics are more fundamentally wrong - e.g.
- war economy is just better in every respect - there's zero downside to it, which is daft
- fascist government and focus trees are totally OP, particularly for minors
- Princes of terrors are a daft idea (the pop boost shouldn't happen)
- Land doctrines shouldn't have pop boosts
- Higher mobilisation laws don't do enough to debuff production - if 25% of your manpower is serving, that's 50% of all men, or nearly 100% of all men of fighting age, your production should be halved at least (after all bonuses are added)
- Free trade should be banned for anything but democracies
- Resources are badly allocated (Germany/UK too few, France too many, rest of world way too few), and the mechanics terrible

I'd like to see (perhaps for HOI5) more balance in decisions - e.g.
- civies ought to be easier to build under civilian economy, making the decision to switch trickier
- embargoes should be possible, allowing war declaration if a neutral nation is trading with your enemy (stop Iraq/Iran trading with Germany, Vichy/Sweden trading with Allies)
- France needs to be a lot harder to beat - it needs more starting mils, but perhaps a huge penalty to updating templates (e.g. apply the 4x mallus on land doctrines to template switches as well), but Allies other than the UK should probably be banned from sending troops there unless it holds out for a least a year
- Resources should be possible to prospect for - with some lands more "productive" than other. E.g. Bauxite (aluminium oxide) is 8% of the earth crust - you're never going to not be able to prospect for it, anywhere. However, some places have richer deposits, so these should be more rewarding.
- The XPs is silly. A useless general that sends millions of men to their death in barely successful attacks gets to level 10 in no time, a brilliant one who encircles huge number of troops and suffers very few losses gets almost none. The XPs should be based on enemy casualties inflicted.

anyone in vanilla is a joke to play with, the entire game is to easy... get AI 4.0 if you want any sort of challenge.

Downloaded the mod, I'll give it a shot, thanks.

 

[wright1331]

Thank you all for the replies. I think the game mechanics are more fundamentally wrong - e.g.
- war economy is just better in every respect - there's zero downside to it, which is daft
- fascist government and focus trees are totally OP, particularly for minors
- Princes of terrors are a daft idea (the pop boost shouldn't happen)
- Land doctrines shouldn't have pop boosts
- Higher mobilisation laws don't do enough to debuff production - if 25% of your manpower is serving, that's 50% of all men, or nearly 100% of all men of fighting age, your production should be halved at least (after all bonuses are added)
- Free trade should be banned for anything but democracies
- Resources are badly allocated (Germany/UK too few, France too many, rest of world way too few), and the mechanics terrible

I'd like to see (perhaps for HOI5) more balance in decisions - e.g.
- civies ought to be easier to build under civilian economy, making the decision to switch trickier
- embargoes should be possible, allowing war declaration if a neutral nation is trading with your enemy (stop Iraq/Iran trading with Germany, Vichy/Sweden trading with Allies)
- France needs to be a lot harder to beat - it needs more starting mils, but perhaps a huge penalty to updating templates (e.g. apply the 4x mallus on land doctrines to template switches as well), but Allies other than the UK should probably be banned from sending troops there unless it holds out for a least a year
- Resources should be possible to prospect for - with some lands more "productive" than other. E.g. Bauxite (aluminium oxide) is 8% of the earth crust - you're never going to not be able to prospect for it, anywhere. However, some places have richer deposits, so these should be more rewarding.
- The XPs is silly. A useless general that sends millions of men to their death in barely successful attacks gets to level 10 in no time, a brilliant one who encircles huge number of troops and suffers very few losses gets almost none. The XPs should be based on enemy casualties inflicted.


Downloaded the mod, I'll give it a shot, thanks.

if you enjoy HOI and just wish it was more of a challenge, I think you will be pleasantly surprised

 

[Djthegamer2002]

You know I wrote a similar post on the subredddit like 2 weeks ago and everyone just kinda blew me off. I think the big problem is the factory and tech systems require there to be buffs from other places because the ai will shit the bed hard without them. I was playing germany recently too and fucking steamrolled the entire world with ease. I had something like 45% percent attack in top of ciphers and things like barbarossa. I think that if we overhauled those systems like stellaris does all the time we might be able to set up a germany that plays out historically without massive op buffs.

 

[pheonicia]

And yet there are still lots of people who fail to even take out poland and france and a huge portion of the player base plays on easy and very easy difficulty. The difficulty and boost sliders exist for a reason, and if that isn't enough for you, there are mods. Complaining the game is "just too easy" is kind of a lame humblebrag.

Edit: Unfortunately the last stats on difficulty are still the 2 year old ones from waking the tiger, and it would be nice to get more recent ones. Nudge, nudge, @podcat .

HOI4 Dev Diary - 1.5.2 Update #3 and Telemetry!

Hi everyone! Today we'll be talking some more about the continued post release work as well as share some cool numbers we have gotten from our telemetry system about how people play. 1.5.2 Patch Work has continued on the patch and it should be...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[CantGetNoSleep]

Complaining the game is "just too easy" is kind of a lame humblebrag.

Not really, no, since I never play Germany. If you'd read my post properly, you would have seen that my #1 issue is that collaboration governments are OP.

difficulty and boost sliders exist for a reason

If you played France, the US, the Netherlands or anyone with serious issues to start off with, you'd quickly find that the decrease in PP from the sliders makes the game zero fun to play since you end up with negative PP building up every day, which makes it impossible to do anything. That's not challenging, it's tedious.

there are mods.

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact the game dynamics could be improved. I posted a whole list of ideas. I hope the designers look at the forum (I think they do from the changes I see) and therefore will take that on board.

 

[pheonicia]

Not really, no, since I never play Germany. If you'd read my post properly, you would have seen that my #1 issue is that collaboration governments are OP.



If you played France, the US, the Netherlands or anyone with serious issues to start off with, you'd quickly find that the decrease in PP from the sliders makes the game zero fun to play since you end up with negative PP building up every day, which makes it impossible to do anything. That's not challenging, it's tedious.


Yes, but that doesn't change the fact the game dynamics could be improved. I posted a whole list of ideas. I hope the designers look at the forum (I think they do from the changes I see) and therefore will take that on board.

I don't think any particular feature, including collaboration governments, make the game 'laughably easy', and claiming as much is a clear over exaggeration.

 

[CantGetNoSleep]

if you enjoy HOI and just wish it was more of a challenge, I think you will be pleasantly surprised

Just played my first game as France vs Germany, and ramped up the AI quite a bit (though not all the way I admit). YIKES - it's a challenge! Almost MP, but not quite as bad - the AI minmaxes quite well on templates, but still fumbles the economy a bit. Still, it really does make it fun and gets me to revisit my strategies and is a great testing ground for MP games I think. Thanks!

 

[wright1331]

Just played my first game as France vs Germany, and ramped up the AI quite a bit (though not all the way I admit). YIKES - it's a challenge! Almost MP, but not quite as bad - the AI minmaxes quite well on templates, but still fumbles the economy a bit. Still, it really does make it fun and gets me to revisit my strategies and is a great testing ground for MP games I think. Thanks!

The really nice thing about the mod is that you can set the templates to random. Meaning the modders have given each country a few different set of templates and they can randomly choose one and build the corresponding pieces to fill out the units. Unlike vanilla where the AI will uses one basic group of templates, and basically never build heavy or much medium armor.

 

[wright1331]

And yet there are still lots of people who fail to even take out poland and france and a huge portion of the player base plays on easy and very easy difficulty. The difficulty and boost sliders exist for a reason, and if that isn't enough for you, there are mods. Complaining the game is "just too easy" is kind of a lame humblebrag.

Edit: Unfortunately the last stats on difficulty are still the 2 year old ones from waking the tiger, and it would be nice to get more recent ones. Nudge, nudge, @podcat .

HOI4 Dev Diary - 1.5.2 Update #3 and Telemetry!

Hi everyone! Today we'll be talking some more about the continued post release work as well as share some cool numbers we have gotten from our telemetry system about how people play. 1.5.2 Patch Work has continued on the patch and it should be...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Maybe you should read and comprehend (seems you aren't very good at it), no one is bragging.
Some people just want more of a challenge while playing the game. Anyone with a year of playing this game i'm sure will find most challenges gone, and want to find different ways to make playing certain countries challenging again.