I hate how much reactionaryism is in this game

[Slaughter]

Couldn't agree more.

Also, isn't it ironic that the only major who SHOULD be an absolute monarchy: Japan... is "Fascist".

AFAIK Imperial Japan at the time wans't an absolute monarchy, it was, uh... kind of a mess honestly.

Am I the only one to appreciate the fact the OP's name is Kaiser Bismarck II, in a thread like this?

As we say in Brazil:

At last... the hypocrisy.

 

[kettyo]

It happens without MtG; not fixed since 1.6.2: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/hoi-4-usa-go-fascist-on-historical-1-62-6f7d.1166311/

Oh, i didn't know. Thanks.

 

[Vlad123]

View attachment 654347

If you can do the Byzantine Empire, Turan etc ... why not play the good "Nazi"? You help the countries occupied by you, you show yourself as a liberator against communism and plutocracy. Just as a communist you can be good against fascism and "bourgeois oligarchies". If PDX wants to do alternate history, let it be done totally. I as A.H. I did not persecute the Slavs, on the contrary I also formed a Polish government (with the exception of Danzig and Poznan which remained with me) with a Polish governor assisted by Hans Frank as emissary of the reich. (same thing in Ukrainian). I am universally loved everywhere in the occupied countries. What if the player wants to go to world war but "free the world from evil"? he must be able to. The advantage of RP via text (always strategic eh!) Is that you are much freer than you have scripted games (those who play DnD or any other RPG will agree with me). As mentioned in another thread, it would be great if there were some generic decisions to increase compilance at the cost of consumer goods. Or suppress the resistance at the cost of CP.

 

[balmung60]

You can't be a "good Nazi" because not doing the bad things they did would require having a completely different government run by completely different people following a different ideology. The Germans had no intentions of "liberating" anyone and Hitler literally wrote a book about what he wanted to do - conquer their lands and settle them with Germans.

If you want to go play "free the world from evil", set everyone to go fascist or communist or whatever ideology you find despicable, pick a country and make it the ideology you like, and go kick the first group's ass.

 

[Xerberous]

Yes, in your case I can certainly understand. Thanks.
If you don't mind me asking, how much do average Germans know about their country before the Nazis? Do they know who Otto Von Bismarck is and what he accomplished? Do they know about the Kingdom of Prussia and Frederick the Great?

Let me answer from the position of the political center, some left- or right-wing freaks will certainly see the things in a different way:

The early Prussia (let’s say 1618 to 1815) is seen in a historic-positive way. It is seen as the though-fighting "Crystal nucleus" of what later became Germany and one of the countries which largely contributed to what should later become the values of the western world; e. g. Prussia was the first country to abolish the use of torture and the first major power to introduce public education (for the real public, not only for the nobility).

“Middle Prussia” (1815 to Bismarck’s dismissal 1890) is seen as the time, where Bismarck did what needs to be done to finally create the German nation – if necessary, by “Iron and Blood”. Even those who criticize the militaristic Alignment of the Prussian state (Normal states have an army, in Prussia, the army has a state) recognize Bismarck’s and Helmuth von Moltke’s abilities to get things going in the intended way. Several of the Bismarck’s idea, e. g. several aspects of the German social welfare system are still in place.

The perception of “Late Prussia” (1890 to 1918) is a rather negative one, basically for the simple reason that no one likes “dumb” losers. Up to the same degree Bismarck was brilliant, Wilhelm II was not. He was totally overwhelmed by his duties and to make things worse, he didn’t recognize that he was overwhelmed. It’s more or less common understanding, that the “road to hell” for Germany in the first half of the 20th was first walked by Wilhelm II – of course not with Hitlers intentions and of course other effects contributed (Versailles is a nice example how to everything wrong when making a peace treaty) but the largest mistakes which finally lead to the Nazis rise of power were done by Wilhelm before and during WWI.

Again, this is of course not the opinion of everybody, but I think that most of the Germans who are interested in history will largely agree with these points.

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

AFAIK Imperial Japan at the time wans't an absolute monarchy, it was, uh... kind of a mess honestly

I think the Italian King had as much say in what the government would do as the tenno. ..

So this further proves that Absolute Monarchy was even more dead than i believed it was

I dunno... democracies don’t go on conquest sprees, communists do so more in a political sense - and isn’t every GSG ultimately a map painter? So the only “real” alternative to fascism, which in many cases was indeed inspired by glories of old, has to be monarchy?

I actually always had a feeling this was the main cause of Monarchist popularity.

Democracy is a meme and literaly unplayable.

Fascism and/or Communism have a lot of "ideological baggage" attached, and some people aren't willing to suspend their disbelief and fight for an ideology they fundamentally disagree with.

So this ultimately leaves Non-aligned as the only option to be imperialistic without attaching yourself to any polítical movement and its real life flaws, since "Monarchism" is completely apolitical strictly speaking.

This is why i believe Ideology sub-branches should get more attention and mechanics attached to it.

There should be a way of playing a more "muscular" democracy that could engage in imperialism while still being Democratic, joining the Allies and having elections.
This would make democracy far more appealing for players who want to map-paint.
The SPQR was a Republic afterall.

Likewise, there should be a way of being Communist without being a totalitarian state, there are like a dozen branches of Marxism, and most of them, at least in theory, denounce authority. Or maybe communism with some elements of market economy, like many examples in history.

Ideology is this game is meaningless, there is basically no difference between Fascism and Communism aside from joining the Axis or Comintern.
For a game set in the "Age of Ideology", they spent an awful amount of time worrying about bringing back obscure royal lines back in power and bloating the already meaningless Non-aligned "ideology" instead of developing their actual ideologies and making them minimally interesting besides faction-alignment.

 

[BlueAndGrey]

If you can do the Byzantine Empire, Turan etc ... why not play the good "Nazi"? You help the countries occupied by you, you show yourself as a liberator against communism and plutocracy. Just as a communist you can be good against fascism and "bourgeois oligarchies". If PDX wants to do alternate history, let it be done totally. I as A.H. I did not persecute the Slavs, on the contrary I also formed a Polish government (with the exception of Danzig and Poznan which remained with me) with a Polish governor assisted by Hans Frank as emissary of the reich. (same thing in Ukrainian). I am universally loved everywhere in the occupied countries. What if the player wants to go to world war but "free the world from evil"? he must be able to. The advantage of RP via text (always strategic eh!) Is that you are much freer than you have scripted games (those who play DnD or any other RPG will agree with me). As mentioned in another thread, it would be great if there were some generic decisions to increase compilance at the cost of consumer goods. Or suppress the resistance at the cost of CP.

Ok. Congrats on finding a path more implausible than communist Japan.

 

[Tsavong]

So this further proves that Absolute Monarchy was even more dead than i believed it was


I actually always had a feeling this was the main cause of Monarchist popularity.

Democracy is a meme and literaly unplayable.

Fascism and/or Communism have a lot of "ideological baggage" attached, and some people aren't willing to suspend their disbelief and fight for an ideology they fundamentally disagree with.



There should be a way of playing a more "muscular" democracy that could engage in imperialism while still being Democratic, joining the Allies and having elections.
This would make democracy far more appealing for players who want to map-paint.

A step in this dircetion would be to remove the wargoal restrictions for democracy. For example they could allow wars against any country with different ideology without them having created tension and remove the restriction completly when tension is 100% . That would make stuff like an democratic crusade possible where you conquer the world to enlighten it^^. ...
Actually i dont see a IRL reason either why demcoracy shouldnt be able to declare wars. They did that sometimes : USA - Spanish war for example. Of course they always claimed to be rightfully doing so. So no reason why a player should not be able to create a wargoal against another country claiming to want to "free the people" . Maybe that could involve spies to find out crimes of the targeted regime to make the population accept it. Or the option to fake documents about mass- destructional weapons.

 

[Ketchup & friends]

Clearly though, few players share my thoughts on this matter. Every DD which allows yet another country to go back in time is applauded, and the immense popularity of Kaiserreich and the Great War mod only further proves my point. I expect many to disagree with the sentiment expressed here.

These mods are more balanced than vanilla HoI IV which makes them better for competitive MP.

HOI 4, however, is a sandbox game with a WW2-theme to it.

That's not true. A real sandbox wouldn't have any focus trees and pre-scripted paths for AI.

 

[Dlin369]

A step in this dircetion would be to remove the wargoal restrictions for democracy. For example they could allow wars against any country with different ideology without them having created tension and remove the restriction completly when tension is 100% . That would make stuff like an democratic crusade possible where you conquer the world to enlighten it^^. ...
Actually i dont see a IRL reason either why demcoracy shouldnt be able to declare wars. They did that sometimes : USA - Spanish war for example. Of course they always claimed to be rightfully doing so. So no reason why a player should not be able to create a wargoal against another country claiming to want to "free the people" . Maybe that could involve spies to find out crimes of the targeted regime to make the population accept it. Or the option to fake documents about mass- destructional weapons.

I think it made sense in the beginning when democracies with democratic ideology were either status quo powers that were satisfied and didn’t want to go to war or very neutral states that didn’t want to go to war.

I feel democracies should be able to justify wars over claims or cores at any war tension level, but war support should be a big deal and if they have a dlc around them they should be limited by domestic factions

 

[Vlad123]

One thing I ask is that there be more control over the compilance. If I am a player with a lot of free civilian industries (and I have saturated my slots, which happens very often unless you are the USSR / USA ...) I may want to use some of my civilian industries to "improve the compilance" in occupied countries. Either with decisions that consume civilians or with "buildings" with their own slots (such as infrastructure, AA etc). Now it is clear that we are talking about alternative history, but Italy, historically (in corsica and provence / savoy) did it, but did not get much results because it did it since 43 (and everyone knew there for the axis was over). But if he had done it since 40, they probably would have been much more pro-Italy.

 

[RELee]

Turning off historical focus is becoming more and more dangerous...

This is a concept that has eluded me for years now. Why would I buy a historical WW2 game and then turn right around and turn off the historical focus?

Maybe it's just the old fart in me...

 

[bitmode]

This is a concept that has eluded me for years now. Why would I buy a historical WW2 game and then turn right around and turn off the historical focus?

Because turning historical focus on enables (much more) hindsight. A historical choice should also have a historical amount of uncertainty in my opinion.

Also, depending on which definition fits the current topic at hand best, the devs will either say this is a WW2 game or this is a 30s/40s historical sandbox game:

sandbox = it will always be sandbox, but a more history like balance we will always strive for (read: I expect that if no major other differences happen that germany gets a nice distance into soviet. it doesnt mean that japan will never attack USSR, or that allies will attack in historical locations always or that spain will never join axis no matter what). I feel its very important that things can not be anticipated.

I wanted a more high level experience focusing less on micromanagement of battle and more on the buildup and planning aspects of WW2 (it’s not very sexy, but in my mind WW2 was won by logistical planning and war production, not heroics).

 

[Zauberelefant]

Because turning historical focus on enables (much more) hindsight. A historical choice should also have a historical amount of uncertainty in my opinion.

Also, depending on which definition fits the current topic at hand best, the devs will either say this is a WW2 game or this is a 30s/40s historical sandbox game:

Hold up, I think you're Missing a point here:

Post 1 is about what the game should be, post 2 is how im Game should work.

I don't see a rift between "wonder what would have happened if the Kaiser came back" and "railroads were important for logistics and air power proved decisive" for the 30/40 period.

Regardless of who ruled Germany the Tiger would have been a formidable tank. And supplying troops overseas would have been as hard as in real life.

 

[Duarte]

Regardless of who ruled Germany the Tiger would have been a formidable tank.

the issue with that statement, is that if Germany wasn't ruled by Hitler, they would, most likely not have built tiger, infact was Germany not ruled by hitler the intere german arsenal would have been significantly different, doubly so considering hoe the arm procurement depart became increasingly Nazified as time went on

 

[grommile]

For the United Kingdom, we have no way of knowing what might have happened had Edward VIII refused to abdicate.

The prospect of the king marrying a twice-divorced American was not popular. He had three options:

• abdicate and marry Wallis Simpson.
• not marry Wallis Simpson, and retain the crown and the semblance of political noninvolvement.
• marry Wallis Simpson, retain the crown, and thereby force his ministers whose advice he had just explicitly rejected to resign, causing a general election and violating the by then well-established implicit expectation that the monarch should not involve himself in politics.

That would have been a very messy election, and a very messy first year in office for whoever won it.

This is a concept that has eluded me for years now. Why would I buy a historical WW2 game and then turn right around and turn off the historical focus?

The game kind of explodes if a major under human control goes off-script while the AI is locked to historical mode.

 

[bitmode]

Post 1 is about what the game should be, post 2 is how im Game should work.

Post 2 says that a game mechanic should be emphasized based on the historical outcome of WW2. In an alt-history scenario where the BEF gets destroyed and the Allies offer a peace after the Fall of France, it could be argued that heroics did play a large role in the outcome. Or if the Pearl Harbor raid were much better planned and executed. (In both cases: if the game involved more elements to produce such an outcome). If you don't like that example, here are some others:

What’s new on the eastern front?
Operation Barbarossa [...] is one of the pivotal balance points in HOI4 (and in all the HOI games) together with the fall of the low countries, Poland and the Sino-Japanese war. [...] we are consistently seeing much better performance from the Soviets. Although, they do still generally lose in the end, but this is mostly by design.

The historical outcome of the historical Eastern front is a pivotal balance point the AI gets designed around. The fall of the Low Countries is taken as a necessity because missing sandbox features (like conditional peace) would stop the game dead in its tracks if Germany can not take them in a frontal assault. Bugs (or shortcomings) of the AI get addressed in a priority order that maintain those historical balance points to the detriment of the more general, sandbox case.

When it comes for ww2 history vs alt history content we probably spend 3x the resources on history stuff despite only about 50% of people play in a historical way

It is a matter of interpretation which things count as alt-history and which as historical, but the point remains that 3x the resources are spent on "history stuff" compared to sandbox stuff.

In all three of these examples the starting point is not a solid 30s/40s sandbox which then happens to be able to produce the historical flow of events as one of its logical conclusions. But instead the historical outcomes serve as a scaffold for sandboxy drapes around it.

I did not intend to warm up the good ol' history-vs-alt-history bashing, I just wanted to illustrate why hoi4 can imho not clearly be called "a historical WW2 game" while it of course has many important aspects of one. In my opinion there appears to be no clear design vision what hoi4 is supposed to be.

 

[Zauberelefant]

Post 2 says that a game mechanic should be emphasized based on the historical outcome of WW2. In an alt-history scenario where the BEF gets destroyed and the Allies offer a peace after the Fall of France, it could be argued that heroics did play a large role in the outcome. Or if the Pearl Harbor raid were much better planned and executed. (In both cases: if the game involved more elements to produce such an outcome). If you don't like that example, here are some others:

The historical outcome of the historical Eastern front is a pivotal balance point the AI gets designed around. The fall of the Low Countries is taken as a necessity because missing sandbox features (like conditional peace) would stop the game dead in its tracks if Germany can not take them in a frontal assault. Bugs (or shortcomings) of the AI get addressed in a priority order that maintain those historical balance points to the detriment of the more general, sandbox case.

It is a matter of interpretation which things count as alt-history and which as historical, but the point remains that 3x the resources are spent on "history stuff" compared to sandbox stuff.

In all three of these examples the starting point is not a solid 30s/40s sandbox which then happens to be able to produce the historical flow of events as one of its logical conclusions. But instead the historical outcomes serve as a scaffold for sandboxy drapes around it.

I did not intend to warm up the good ol' history-vs-alt-history bashing, I just wanted to illustrate why hoi4 can imho not clearly be called "a historical WW2 game" while it of course has many important aspects of one. In my opinion there appears to be no clear design vision what hoi4 is supposed to be.

Fun. with ww2 flavour. I think that's the essential vision.
I cannot in good faith dismiss your points, I suspect it comes down to opinion, ultimately.

 

[KubiG37]

This is a concept that has eluded me for years now. Why would I buy a historical WW2 game and then turn right around and turn off the historical focus?

Maybe it's just the old fart in me...

The number one for me probably is my number of my ingame hours.
I did everything I ever wanted to try in this game, several times possibly. The basic historical game is long exhausted for me.

I want other countries to do something different, unexpected, to play more reactively and be less railroaded. More like when you play EU 4 with its dynamic and engaging diplomacy.

The problem is however, that unlike in EU 4, where AIs are guided by a complex diplomacy system that is very adaptable and reactive to actions other countries take (including what happened in the past), all these extra alt-historic paths in HoI 4 are full of wargoals, that the AI just randomly picks, without any "background" or a "reason". Just AI_will_do = something.

This AI is a minor. This democratic Wargoal focus just happened to be in their line of available focuses.
This AI doesn't care you improved relations with them. It doesn't care you've helped them with LL and volunteers in their previous war and saved them from annexation probably. Or that you're friend with their faction leader. Or that your alliance is twice as powerful as theirs.
The minor AI guy suddenly has a wargoal to attack another state that happens to be your subject. So it's war then.

The Bosphorus DLC is just terrible in this regard (and full of issues, and the AIs don't even stay within their presets), and will be probably the only one I'll be turning off completely if I want at least semi-historical gameplay.

 

[Alpha2518]

AFAIK Imperial Japan at the time wans't an absolute monarchy, it was, uh... kind of a mess honestl

Actually it was a mixed-constitutional absolute monarchy. The branches of government and monarch did have roles. However these roles were not always as clear cut and meant Japan got into a lot situations that they shouldn't have been in. For example the Prime Ministers could not control the military and when they did try to get a hold of them they would tell the PMs that they answer only to the emperor. Which is also constitutionally at the time, correct. Or in situations where the Emperor has all this absolute power, he did, but doesn't use it. Probably because their is an unwritten ethos of restraint that you don't understand or pick up on unless you culturally understand as a Japanese person would at the time and this ethos is as binding as a clear cut constitution.