I might as well be playing the WW1 mod- offensive warfare is painful.

[Ironside121]

So as well all know, Tanks and Artillery have had their soft attack nerfed considerably- leading to more of a slog when doing an offensive. This has just made my games feel rather... boring.

Now I understand why it's been done, honestly. It makes warfare have a bit more back and forth, I noticed that as Japan facing the CUF. It was so much harder than it used to be- but I am on the highest difficulty. My main concern is how it's unbalanced a lot in the game.

Artillery has been nerfed too much- it's almost pointless now. A middle ground should be found. The soft attack it adds is horribly low. I know this was to throw off the whole 7/2-14/4 meta but now Art is just too cost inefficient. I'd rather just spam infantry if I can afford the manpower. We're still paying the same MIC values for much less attack- Support Art excluded. I would argue that this has completely thrown off the industrial balance of the game now.

And onto that topic- and infantry spam is now difficult to counter (don't say air superiority and CAS because that's the counter to everything). All you need to do now is inf spam and reinforce with air. The 7/2-14/4 was arguably the meta and was the main counter to inf spam(regardless of width). Now it just feels like numbers are the only things that matter- so nations like China and the Soviets benefit from this more than any other.

As for tanks.. I haven't used them too much so I'll keep my opinions to myself until I've actually played around a bit more. But I feel the arty nerf was much more of a game changer- they removed 15-30% of the soft attack AND some hidden values to reduce it further. They went too far in my opinion.

All in all.. I'm rather disappointed with Cornflakes and WTT.. It was supposed to be the turning point of HoI, recover from the buggy mess that was DoD and add some real depth to the game- but all we got was good ideas- thrown in messily(CoC) and the same buggy mess that feels barely playtested.. it's a pity, really.

 

[a_sophist]

I agree completely with your conclusion that soft attack nerfs make the game worse and make pure inf the no-brainer default template, but I'd say it's an exacerbation of an existing problem rather than a new one. Against AI in 1.4.2 you could conquer all of Eurasia and Africa as China with 10 width and no planes, and against humans China/Russia/Raj/France inf spam with planes was a very strong, if not the best, defense.

I think the trouble is that Paradox is trying to balance for too many scenarios at once. In 1.4.2 games with the typical factions the war in Europe was over by 1942 even without player intervention, and that's bad for a WWII game (and I think this is the primary reason for the nerf), but so is this slog. Then you have to account for alt-history paths which might result in a game without a world war, so you need limited conflicts that are also fulfilling from a time perspective. Then you have to account for the fact that the AI doesn't understand how to play the game well, so things that are OP in a player's hands aren't for most of the "participants" in the game. Then there's MP, which has already had threads dedicated to it. It's fundamentally an issue of trying to be all things to all people, which leads to a game that many are dissatisfied with in one way or another, and people turning to various mods that cater more specifically to their interests, whether it's alt-history like Kaiserreich, overhaul mods, and MP specific balance mods.