Leaving out Finland is a joke.

[him_15]

Leaving Finland out is a pure sales strategy IMO.

 

[kaguravitro]

Leaving Finland out is a pure sales strategy IMO.

A bad one

 

[blahmaster6k]

A bad one

If it brings them more money, it's not a bad sales strategy, is it?

 

[HenricusRex]

I will refer both of you to these statistics. Someone already posted them in this thread but without a link, but I've included a link to the dev diary quote itself and also included a relevant sentence that extrapolates on the data and gives information into exactly how the DLC affected the popularity of the involved countries. I think the data agrees with my claims (it should, since I based my claims off of the data to begin with even if I did not refer to it explicitly).

While the statistics are from January 2021 (post BftB), Podcat does explain in the first sentence after the stats by exactly how much the popularity increased with the DLC.

Turkey post BftB increased in popularity by 60%, to 5.1%. Greece and Bulgaria increased by at least 100% in popularity, to 3% and 1.8% respectively.
This would put Turkey at 3.8175% popularity pre-BftB, and Greece and Bulgaria at 1.5% and 0.9% respectively. Turkey would be 7th with that number, Greece 17th. Those numbers are still in the range of top 20 list except for pre-BftB Bulgaria.

Finland is not on the list at all. Maybe Finland would have been 20th pre-bftb if Bulgaria pushed one country off of the list, assuming all other nations that were unchanged remained the same in popularity. But there's no way to know that, and it was lower than the other nations either way.

Also of note, none of the Scandinavian nations are in the top 20 at all. So it makes perfect sense to deploy BftB before a Scandinavia country pack.

Well the devil is in the details and you kind off advance my point as you mention the Scandinavian countries(which together with Finland make up the Nordic countries).

These countries are all awful to play right now. One of the reasons are little Manpower and a high amount of territory to defend with no mechanic to make territories unpassable.

Meanwhile Turkey was still very playable in generic.

My point is that to expect Finland to enjoy the same proportional increase as Turkey is a mistake. Instead one should do a thought experiment were you imagine Finland being more playable already in generic and then imagine what increase in gameplay it would enjoy from a dlc during those circumstances. Let's call the point of gameplay it reaches after the dlc: the DLC point(for lack of a better name).

Now let us go back to reality were Finland is awful to play in generic. Now if you release a dlc for Finland that both makes it playable(obviously) and gives it some nice dlc-content I think you would still reach this DLC point that we has in our thougt experiment.

If you just see the data it is reasonable to skip Finland, but if you see the statistics and try to see which hidden variables that are at work at which, observations then Finland might be a more attractive country for a dlc.

Of course right now I am also speculating and using subjective experiences and not even doing any calculations. Hope you do not mind. xD

However we might get an indication to whether I am right when the dlc content for the baltic countries are released, they are pretty awful in generic too. On the other hand Finland got the memes.

 

[blahmaster6k]

Well the devil is in the details and you kind off advance my point as you mention the Scandinavian countries(which together with Finland make up the Nordic countries).

These countries are all awful to play right now. One of the reasons are little Manpower and a high amount of territory to defend with no mechanic to make territories unpassable.

Meanwhile Turkey was still very playable in generic.

My point is that to expect Finland to enjoy the same proportional increase as Turkey is a mistake. Instead one should do a thought experiment were you imagine Finland being more playable already in generic and then imagine what increase in gameplay it would enjoy from a dlc during those circumstances. Let's call the point of gameplay it reaches after the dlc: the DLC point(for lack of a better name).

Now let us go back to reality were Finland is awful to play in generic. Now if you release a dlc for Finland that both makes it playable(obviously) and gives it some nice dlc-content I think you would still reach this DLC point that we has in our thougt experiment.

If you just see the data it is reasonable to skip Finland, but if you see the statistics and try to see which hidden variables that are at work at which, observations then Finland might be a more attractive country for a dlc.

Of course right now I am also speculating and using subjective experiences and not even doing any calculations. Hope you do not mind. xD

However we might get an indication to whether I am right when the dlc content for the baltic countries are released, they are pretty awful in generic too. On the other hand Finland got the memes.

Honestly, I expect hardly anyone will play the Baltics even after they get focus trees. If there are achievements I assume some will play once to get those, but I don't think they will prove very interesting or fun. The historical players aren't going to play them because they get annexed, and the meme players will probably still enjoy other memes like Byzantium more.

Finland will definitely gain popularity after they get a DLC, but doubling a low number is still a low number. Perhaps Finland's popularity will more than double, but I doubt it considering that "more than double" was the amount that Greece and Bulgaria increased by, and they were more popular to begin with. It is possible though.

I hope the devs do a great job on Finland when they get around to it, it certainly deserves a great tree. Nowhere have I said Finland shouldn't get a tree, I just think it's important to keep in mind the devs' reasons for the order they chose.

 

[kaguravitro]

If it brings them more money, it's not a bad sales strategy, is it?

Paradox main leadership is going in the darkest. This is not an issue bad design from an isolate team, Rome was horrible, the eu get the most cursed dlc of history. In a point this will cut the strings and they will fade out in sales. I don't understand the happiness for Victoria 3, the game type doesn't fit in the mind of thedevelops actually. If we have opinion clashes with hoi iv what's with vic?

 

[blahmaster6k]

Paradox main leadership is going in the darkest. This is not an issue bad design from an isolate team, Rome was horrible, the eu get the most cursed dlc of history. In a point this will cut the strings and they will fade out in sales. I don't understand the happiness for Victoria 3, the game type doesn't fit in the mind of thedevelops actually. If we have opinion clashes with hoi iv what's with vic?

I don't play any of those games, and I don't think they are particularly relevant here.

 

[kaguravitro]

I don't play any of those games, and I don't think they are particularly relevant here.

Time developers are here, you didn't read the dev diary? It's very relevant. Hi team it's not and island. I world love have the podacst reich of one hundred years but is not the case

 

[Znail]

Well the devil is in the details and you kind off advance my point as you mention the Scandinavian countries(which together with Finland make up the Nordic countries).

These countries are all awful to play right now. One of the reasons are little Manpower and a high amount of territory to defend with no mechanic to make territories unpassable.

Meanwhile Turkey was still very playable in generic.

My point is that to expect Finland to enjoy the same proportional increase as Turkey is a mistake. Instead one should do a thought experiment were you imagine Finland being more playable already in generic and then imagine what increase in gameplay it would enjoy from a dlc during those circumstances. Let's call the point of gameplay it reaches after the dlc: the DLC point(for lack of a better name).

Now let us go back to reality were Finland is awful to play in generic. Now if you release a dlc for Finland that both makes it playable(obviously) and gives it some nice dlc-content I think you would still reach this DLC point that we has in our thougt experiment.

If you just see the data it is reasonable to skip Finland, but if you see the statistics and try to see which hidden variables that are at work at which, observations then Finland might be a more attractive country for a dlc.

Of course right now I am also speculating and using subjective experiences and not even doing any calculations. Hope you do not mind. xD

However we might get an indication to whether I am right when the dlc content for the baltic countries are released, they are pretty awful in generic too. On the other hand Finland got the memes.

Sweden is quite playable right now, as long as you don't follow history as you can't match that currently. Facist or Communist Sweden can take over the nordic countries and form the union.

 

[Ketchup & friends]

O.k. - do not consider this white knighting but:
'lying', 'too lazy' or 'too incompetent' goes a bit far as we do not exactly know about the workload they have nor have we the ability to read one's thoughts. You are just claiming to hold a 'truth' so I will take this not with a grain of salt, but with a whole 500g box. I think, we should be above ad hominen both versus fellow users AND officials/representatives. Just bad style venting your anger/frustration like that.

Let's just say that much of what PDX did in the last couple of months was one big disappointment.

The first of your two reasons, however, could indeed be a possibility. It is part of PDX's way of operating and making revenue: launch a decent game (or buy a decent IP) and produce DLCs and expansions over a long time period instead of creating many small games on short-term (with the risk of failing). You can read it all on their homepage - quite informative and transparent on that behalf. We might not like this way of generating revenue as we are on the paying side and not the shareholders but we have to get along with it or drop out of the franchise - I cannot see any other realistical option.

that's probably the most likely reason. But the devs should tell WHEN they plan to make that DLC. (e.g. later this year vs. 2024)

 

[BurningEGO]

The Swedish contribution to Finland during WW2.

 

[Harin]

View attachment 724940

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FOR THE MEMES! PERKELE!

And you never will! Oh, man that was funny. The bike was pretty cool, too.

 

[Jurpo]

a year or so ago. and BFTB was done first because people wanted turkey a lot more than scandinavia.

To summarize basically. there were lots of factors why it didnt really get added here

• Balancing barbarossa and land warfare and supply is a huge task. trying to make the winter war super cool at the same time would require superhuman powers so we didnt wanna do it at the same time
• generally with the way the winter war was it needs quite a lot of love to play well I think
• there are tons of cool stuff thats only doable when you combine it with rest of scandinavia and it was awkward to split it
• We felt Baltic states were harder to do separately with the part in soviet history so thats why we did that over scandinavia (also doing all of scandinavia isntead would be too much work)

Well, at least I can say that the supply system had to be overhauled first for the Finnish front to make any sense and railroads were definitely a key part of Winter War.

I understand why you're angry that Finland did not get included, but believe me, modeling Winter War is hard. It has not really so far worked in with any general purpose wargame mechanics. It has only worked with mechanics dedicated to Winter War. It certainly does not work with current HOI4 mechanics. It could plausibly work with the new mechanics, using the decision mechanics from La Resistance and the supply mechanics of this DLC.

I do think Paradox could still have fit Finland to this DLC instead of the Baltics, but without Finland, there would be much less demand for the Scandinavia DLC later. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark would not be interestring enough without FInland. I believe this is the second big reason for omitting Finland from No Retreat.

 

[Jurpo]

Well they did support the German supply lines in the Continuation War

Several points to take away from this:

1) because a bunch of turkish players wanted Turanic memes in the game more than Scandinavia, Finland couldn't be included in the DLC with it's primary antagonist The Soviet Union (why was Finland ever grouped together with the Scandics in the first place!?).

2) because a conflict, which intrinsically contains aspects important to the Soviet Union (defensive warfare, winter warfare, guerilla / ranger style warfare) is hard to do, it is better to skip it in favor of Scandi countries, for whom only one (maybe...) that aspect is even remotely important in this time period historically

3) there are cool things to be done with Finland that need the other Scandi countries, which makes it more important to delay (for the fifth year now...), rather than to include her into the expansion with the country she had actual cool stuff to do with historically

Finland is now hobbled by being included together with Sweden for some arbitrary reason (cool content = Kalmar Union of 1938?). The game is five years old, and by this decision it will likely be at least one more year before we see what was so important with the Finnish ties to 30's and 40's Scandies that caused her to be ignored for all this time.

It makes sense if you think like a Swede.

You see, Finland is needed to make Sweden interesting to play. That's the mental model here, not that Sweden is needed to make Finland interesting.

In a Swedish mental model, Sweden was torn between supporting its Nordic neighbors and appeasing Germans and Soviets.

Finland was desperately trying to be counted as a Scandinavian (or Nordic) country and form a defensive alliance with Sweden, and was denied. The fact it is that Sweden's military strategy was (and still is) defending Sweden to the last Finn standing. Sweden didn't rush to help Norway or Denmark, either. There was no Nordic military alliance, but there could have been if Sweden had chosen a doctrine of supporting its neighbors.

But what if Sweden had supported Finland? Would Germany have invaded Norway if Sweden had not chosen to appease the Germans and the Soviets? The fact that Sweden AI might make different choices would make the Soviet player think twice. But surely there would have been also dire political consequences to Sweden: a large loss of political power and stability, for example.

 

[Fulmen]

But what if Sweden had supported Finland?

It's been said that Sweden by its reluctance to support Finland during the Moscow negotiations in autumn 1939 "let" the Winter War happen, implying that Stalin would not have gone ahead if Finland had had Sweden's backing. I'm tempted to disagree with this. Sweden had driven her military to the ground in the 1920s and it was in an abysmal state; the Swedes were one of the last European nations to begin rearming, really even just starting in 1939 or thereabouts. Meanwhile Stalin thought Finland would be a cakewalk and the Red Army would be parading in Helsinki in 2-3 weeks after the invasion had begun. I doubt the barely trained and equipped Swedish military played a major factor in his calculations. How Swedish intervention might have tied to the big players; Germany, England and France, might have been another matter. But again, he expected Finland to be occupied by the Red Army in a matter of weeks, which likely would have removed Sweden out of the war anyway.

Would Germany have invaded Norway if Sweden had not chosen to appease the Germans and the Soviets?

Most likely.

 

[BurningEGO]

But what if Sweden had supported Finland? Would Germany have invaded Norway if Sweden had not chosen to appease the Germans and the Soviets? The fact that Sweden AI might make different choices would make the Soviet player think twice. But surely there would have been also dire political consequences to Sweden: a large loss of political power and stability, for example.

Most likely.

What if Norway (maybe even Denmark) and Sweden were fighting the USSR together with Finland? That might have been a different story, or were the Germans bent on conquering Norway regardless? Denmark probably would have been conquered anyway because of the straits, but native people might have a better view on the matter.

 

[Ninaran]

A bad one

Doubt it. They've noticed that, no matter the backlash they get on here, their game will sell gloriously. Especially with meme focuses. We have to accept that we, the people wanting a WW2 GSG instead of a Meme GSG set during WW2, are the minority.

 

[Torakka]

Yeah, I can live with us not getting a Finland focus tree, but it's pretty fucked up if the continuation war doesn't get added at all.

This is, as far as I know, the latest comment from Paradox regarding the continuation war.

 

[Spartanlemur]

This is, as far as I know, the latest comment from Paradox regarding the continuation war.

But Finland DoWing the USSR isn't going to ensure balance on that front (as Arheo mentioned), which naturally leads into the need for Finland to be given full attention.

 

[fr-rein]

If there still will be Finland to DoW USSR by the time Barbarossa starts and not annexed/turned into a puppet.