hoi4 reseach is unbalanced as hell and to spread out

[alexman]

not a single god damn nation can ever expand its reasearch to get every sideupgrade u never have enough mills to produce supportparts.
not in any god damn game over my 500 hours have i ever used military policefor supression. i never can afford to get engineers forcapture ratio etc. every time no matter what you play or how you plan you always leave the same 50% of the techtree untouched because its never worth it.

 

[Casko]

And This is a good thing.
You need things to be unbalanced to a certain extend for the game to be fun.

And, there's no point in researching everything unless you're a very specific nation, or have massive tech boost you can get. Even then, if you want to research in more meme way, or go for a gimmick run, you can go for it after you've invested in the key tech and focus elsewhere. Or with la Resistance, focus on stealing blueprints from another country to speed things up while your main research goes elsewhere.

 

[J1ffst3r]

Obviously it depends what nation you are playing but researching and supplying support companies are never usually a problem, especially for majors like Germany, usa, Soviet. Most minor nations can use things like Engis, logistics, signal. Depends on situation. I would agree MPs are rarely worth it, especially now you can ask for garrison support from allies. (Mps basically trade IC for manpower needed in garrisons) also maintenance companies are rarely ever worth it. Other than that I would say most support techs are useful in the right place. As the ai is crap at producing tanks I never bother with AT these days but that's a different problem.

 

[Vicar of Christ]

MP gives a nice defense boost for cheap... Don't think that it gets improved past the first upgrade so if you research strapped you can invest in one and done.

 

[desphorin]

The essence of strategy games is to make decisions given limited resources. I can never understand why people wanted to finish all focuses in the tree or to be able to research everything.

 

[homerCCCP]

And This is a good thing.
You need things to be unbalanced to a certain extend for the game to be fun.

And, there's no point in researching everything unless you're a very specific nation, or have massive tech boost you can get. Even then, if you want to research in more meme way, or go for a gimmick run, you can go for it after you've invested in the key tech and focus elsewhere. Or with la Resistance, focus on stealing blueprints from another country to speed things up while your main research goes elsewhere.

Yes, this is a good thing.
But it's becoming a bad thing when you research the same 50% of the tree in all of your games. In this case it's too repetitive. I think that's what OP's post is about. And to some extent I agree to this statement. Btw imo it's even worse for the Itelligence part. The first time I played LR I thought "Wow this spy agency thing is so cool". In the second game most mechanics already became annoying (especially when once again your spy got captured).

But back to the techtree: Beeing repetitive on the one side, you are also too fast in researching everything. You often don't have to make a choice, you just can research everything. That makes late game pretty boring.
The new ship tree from MtG is quite good in that aspect. You have many branches and choices and it also allows you to try a lot of different things. The only problem is that it ends in 1944, which again leads to late game problems.

The game timeline ends in 1947, so I expect all research trees to end earliest in 1950. I mean even in 1947 I expect to have the full game experience and the possibility to do ahistoric ahead of time research. Currently the only options are advnaced jet planes and ICBMs (without nukes).

So yes, I agree that there are some techs that could be better balanced as nobody would ever choose them, but especially the tech tree should be extended.

And if we are already talking about tech. Please nerf minors. It's a nice idea to make them playable and giving them the ability to have good equipment. But that could also be reached (and would feel much much much more realistic) through land lease and licenses. Those options should be buffed.
Lock minors behind some missing basic research or whatever.
It's annoying to have the stockpile flooded with 50 different variants of "infantry equipment 1".

So TL;DR:
1) Apply MtG tech tree granulation to other trees
2) Extend the tech timeframe for each tree
3) Rebalance some research options
4) Nerf research capabilities from minors.

 

[Mousetick]

You're saying that you can never research everything you need and that 50% of the technologies are not worth researching. Even as a minor nation you should be able to research close to 50% of all technologies over the course of a game. So what exactly is the problem?

What would be the point of a tech tree if every nation could research everything? Might as well give 1944 techs to all nations at the start of the game, and get rid of the tech tree.

As others have said, strategy is about making choices and planning ahead. Some nations have tougher choices to make due to limited resources/slots, which makes them even more interesting in strategic play.

 

[Secret Master]

have enough mills to produce supportparts.

Assuming you mean that you never have enough MIC to produce support equipment, I am forced to conclude you need to rethink production or templates. Unlike tanks, planes, artillery, AA guns, and AT guns, support equipment never goes out of style.

It should be easy to have a support equipment production line going the entire game at maximum efficiency. Hell, putting MIC on support equipment early is fine. It's not like support equipment built in 1937 will be out of date in 1941.

Unlike other things, I'm never worried about support equipment in a vanilla SP game.

every time no matter what you play or how you plan you always leave the same 50% of the techtree untouched because its never worth it.

I wouldn't say 50% of the tree.

There's about 20% of the tree I never use. I'd say about 30-40% of the tree is situational or worth delaying until later. The 20% that I never use often relate to things I consider weirdly balanced or useless in the context of the historical style of wars I fight.

 

[Mousetick]

But it's becoming a bad thing when you research the same 50% of the tree in all of your games. In this case it's too repetitive.

No matter how one coats it, HOI 4 like other Paradox grand-strategy games, but especially HOI 4, is at its core a spreadsheet where the only long-term strategic goal is to make the numbers go up, higher than your opponents in order to crush them. It's a game of optimization basically, to try to make the numbers go the highest as fast as possible. There are many layers of details, systems and controls interconnected by complex formulas - but ultimately it's still a spreadsheet where A wins over B if A is greater than B in terms of numbers, quantitatively and/or qualitatively speaking. Which is why there are so many HOI 4 discussions about the optimal research path, the optimal doctrine, the optimal national focus path, the optimal division template, the optimal factory build, the optimal fleet composition, the optimal ship design and so on and so forth...

So even if the research tree were extended in time, or made more granular, there would still be an optimal subset of technologies to research. Unless the tree were perfectly balanced so that alternative research paths were equally potent, which would be ideal in a pure asymetrical strategy game - but very very hard to achieve given the already high number of technologies, and the need to be somewhat realistic and historical.

The new ship tree from MtG is quite good in that aspect. You have many branches and choices and it also allows you to try a lot of different things.

Making the technology choices more granular and divergent would be more interesting for the human players indeed, but harder for the AI players. The more choices the AI has to make, the more incapable it becomes. It's already not very competent in its current state, I'm affraid it would get worse. I don't have MtG, but aren't players regularly complaining that with MtG the AI doesn't upgrade its ship designs, and continues to build the designs it starts with, without reffitting the existing ships, or something like that?

 

[Anaraxes]

No matter how one coats it, HOI 4 like other Paradox grand-strategy games, but especially HOI 4, is at its core a spreadsheet where the only long-term strategic goal is to make the numbers go up, higher than your opponents in order to crush them. It's a game of optimization basically, to try to make the numbers go the highest as fast as possible.

That's true of all games. Welcome to game theory and A* search algorithms. It's not unique to Paradox, and if you find that it's a flaw, then you're in the wrong hobby.

Your point entails of lot of additional assumptions. Personally, I don't worry too much about minimaxing everything, because I also value fun. I might go research something just to see how it does in experimental fashion, even if I already suspect (or have proven mathematically) that's it's not the most cost-effective choice. There's not only one goal of play, and there's not only one way to get there. There might be only one best way to reach some one specific goal -- though mathematically that doesn't have to be the case -- but even if so, you have to make a lot of assumptions about goals and an entire vector of costs and values in order to declare "you can only do X or you're Doing It Wrong".

The chief cause of a player feeling like they do the same thing in every game is that they choose to do the same thing in every game. That's at least as much a function of player mindset as it is of game algorithms.

 

[homerCCCP]

No matter how one coats it, HOI 4 like other Paradox grand-strategy games, but especially HOI 4, is at its core a spreadsheet where the only long-term strategic goal is to make the numbers go up, higher than your opponents in order to crush them. It's a game of optimization basically, to try to make the numbers go the highest as fast as possible. There are many layers of details, systems and controls interconnected by complex formulas - but ultimately it's still a spreadsheet where A wins over B if A is greater than B in terms of numbers, quantitatively and/or qualitatively speaking. Which is why there are so many HOI 4 discussions about the optimal research path, the optimal doctrine, the optimal national focus path, the optimal division template, the optimal factory build, the optimal fleet composition, the optimal ship design and so on and so forth...

So even if the research tree were extended in time, or made more granular, there would still be an optimal subset of technologies to research. Unless the tree were perfectly balanced so that alternative research paths were equally potent, which would be ideal in a pure asymetrical strategy game - but very very hard to achieve given the already high number of technologies, and the need to be somewhat realistic and historical.


Making the technology choices more granular and divergent would be more interesting for the human players indeed, but harder for the AI players. The more choices the AI has to make, the more incapable it becomes. It's already not very competent in its current state, I'm affraid it would get worse. I don't have MtG, but aren't players regularly complaining that with MtG the AI doesn't upgrade its ship designs, and continues to build the designs it starts with, without reffitting the existing ships, or something like that?

This is true, but you also have to keep in mind that tech does not exist in a vacuum. A different situation and environment might lead to a different optimization strategy.
A minor will require different tech than a major. If you want to fight in difficult terrain you will need different tech than in plains.
To a huge extent it is already true in HOI IV.

But anyway no matter how you put it, the decision making which you defend in your previous post is also in my POV a core part of the game.
However if you argue in favor of decision making you cannot defend at the same time a research game that is most of the time the same (Well it actually isn't, just in late game and that's what I complain about).
And about these techs that are never used: Yes it's true that players will always find an optimal strategy. But as said above, depending on the situation, I think everything could feel a niche.
As I said imo the naval tree is a good example of how it can be done. Just that it runs out of options in late game as it surprisingly ends in 1944.

Anyway I fully agree that having more options is hard to manage for the AI.

 

[Mousetick]

That's true of all games. Welcome to game theory and A* search algorithms. It's not unique to Paradox, and if you find that it's a flaw, then you're in the wrong hobby.

Where did I say that it's a flaw?

Your point entails of lot of additional assumptions.
...
you have to make a lot of assumptions about goals and an entire vector of costs and values in order to declare "you can only do X or you're Doing It Wrong".

Where did I state that you can only do X or do it wrong? I think you're reading too much into my comments.

The point I was trying to make is that the overarching strategy in HOI 4 is optimization to be better faster than your opponents. Which naturally lends players to seek optimal paths towards success, and to consider other options "not worth it". Some HOI 4 players enjoy learning the systems, peeling off all the layers, micro-managing and experimenting. Others, whom I suspect might be in the majority but I admit it's a very biased view, just want to skip all that and go straight to the "meta" in order to conquer the world. Those optimal paths create repetition in gameplay because there is no randomness and the opponents in HOI 4 are symetrical: they all have access to the same technologies, doctrines, gear, etc as the player. And so all that being considered, making a bigger, richer, more branching technology tree will not significantly change how players handle technological research.

The chief cause of a player feeling like they do the same thing in every game is that they choose to do the same thing in every game. That's at least as much a function of player mindset as it is of game algorithms.

Yes that's a good point. My comments are reflecting on the reasons why players choose to do the same thing in every game.

 

[master_templar]

not in any god damn game over my 500 hours have i ever used military policefor supression.

I will give you that one.
Maybe I just don't play for long enough after I have captured enemy territory?
I guess I could extract more IC but I never really need it.

 

[Mousetick]

This is true, but you also have to keep in mind that tech does not exist in a vacuum.
...

Thank you for your reply, with which I agree to some extent.

Yes I think you're right about prioritizing different technologies for different situations. However, depending on the country being played, we still end up with an optimal path for that specific country. And there are not many different situations: it's always the same map, the same countries, the same factions, the same focus trees, the same resources. So we have a limited set of "scenarios" if you wish, a set of recipes or paths to follow, each for a given starting situation. The decision-making comes down to selecting the right script. Other than that, there is little decision-making from a strategic point of view.

Yes I argue in favor of decision-making as a fundamental feature of strategy games. But I don't "defend at the same time a research game that is most of the time the same". I simply infer that the game inherently leads to a repeatable research game. I'm not saying whether it's good or bad, or that I'm in favor or against it - simply that's the way it is.