Make Africa and Middle East more important
- Thread starter KenanMilano
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Actually, does anyone think can the ecomonical value of Africa such as Agricultural product be represented by civil factory at all?
I would rather it is an actual resource. It would make the Atlantic wolfpacks more realistic as it almost ended up in starving the United Kingdom.
North Africa is very important, from the air bases in Morocco across to the Suez. Besides being a strait controlling access into the Med, Suez is also the gateway to Middle and Near East oil as @Secret Master pointed out and a back door to Russian Caucasus oil fields.
Unfortunately the maps and infrastructure of Sahara and Sub-Sahara are horribly modeled. It is difficult to see terrain and weather effects. Infrastructure doesn't prevent movement, it just hammers you with attrition. Bad enough as a player, but the AI doesn't know know to deal with it. There are few reasons to go beyond North Africa but the vanilla maps almost force you to do so. The benefit vs cost doesn't justify it. Mods like No Man's Land do a good job fixing this issue but PDS refuses to admit the design is a mistake.
Based on historical industry and the economic and production design of the game, sub-Sahara Africa is not and should not be that important. It was an isolated backwater of the war, the only excitement being the colonial war in Italian East Africa and the occasional squabble between the French. Sure would be nice if the ai would recognize that.
Unfortunately the maps and infrastructure of Sahara and Sub-Sahara are horribly modeled. It is difficult to see terrain and weather effects. Infrastructure doesn't prevent movement, it just hammers you with attrition. Bad enough as a player, but the AI doesn't know know to deal with it. There are few reasons to go beyond North Africa but the vanilla maps almost force you to do so. The benefit vs cost doesn't justify it. Mods like No Man's Land do a good job fixing this issue but PDS refuses to admit the design is a mistake.
Based on historical industry and the economic and production design of the game, sub-Sahara Africa is not and should not be that important. It was an isolated backwater of the war, the only excitement being the colonial war in Italian East Africa and the occasional squabble between the French. Sure would be nice if the ai would recognize that.
Agreed.
And there is hope.
Podcat's most recent twitter depicting radars demonstrates improved depiction of terrain.
Credit to GrowWinner's sharp eyes (and others who also noticed):
P.S Seems like hills textures were reworked and it looks nice
It seems that at least the hills are receiving some cartographical love.
...and there was much rejoicing.
This is often assumed but not actually completely true. During the war, mining and civilian industry actually expanded considerably in Africa, the former due to the loss of vital resources in the far east and the latter as a local measure in response to the rising cost of imported goods. However, this didn't really translate into an overall boost to the economy because most of the rewards went straight to Europe. There were also some of the first efforts at organised investment in African colonies.
Africa was also a greater source of manpower than is depicted in game. Hundreds of thousands of subsaharan African troops were raised during the war. The only reason more were not raised is that there was an enormous concern about the loyalty of Africans to their colonial masters. Still, many African colonies would be better represented as integrated puppets with extremely harsh manpower reducing ideas rather than the current system of direct rule which leaves them not only useless but a hassle to defend or fight over.
Last edited:
I would like to add that such an approach would add narrative, historical depth and display a degree of respect towards the people of those regions towards their identity and history.
Maybe some pop up events that would offer manpower for some points towards the independency of a state (even if that state does not exist before the peace deals).
Last edited:
I disagree. I don't see any point in making central africa important. Fighting in africa during the second world war took place in northern africa, and that's interesting enough. I'd like to see the sahara desert shut off so your northern troops don't have to cope with attacks from the sahara desert, e.g. as with Nomandsland Mod.
The rest is better left to south africas national focuses and role play.
Last edited:
Yes, sub-sahara Africa did contribute and begin to grow, but not appreciably in the timescale and with the resource model that HOI4 uses. Too much realism for little gain and likely unbalancing the game.
I suspect that PDS might get around to an African DLC where they convert Africa into actual colonies etc etc. But it will have to be done carefully because the manpower that would give the Allies would be very unbalancing. There were indigenous troops raised in both East and West Africa. For the most part they were poorly equipped and kept "at home" or used as labor battalions. Notable campaigns were the Italian East African, the invasions of Syria and Madagascar, and a few divisions served in Burma from 1943 onwards. Not enough to justify unlocking vast pools of manpower for Allied gameplay.
if we make more difficulty for locked axis countrys from importing overseas the importance of africa will skyrocket.
Right now countrys like italy, hungary etc can have easy acess to the market outside, something that was impossible in real life.
other way is increasing the importance of chromium to also use them on planes. Specially 1944 models and jet planes.
Right now countrys like italy, hungary etc can have easy acess to the market outside, something that was impossible in real life.
other way is increasing the importance of chromium to also use them on planes. Specially 1944 models and jet planes.
Not really, no. They expanded, true enough, and that was certainly important in the context of local economies. In the MUCH larger context of the outcome of WWII, it doesn't even rise to the level of a footnote. That is why nobody was willing to fight over it, especially under the conditions prevailing in the region. The cost of deploying and sustaining modern forces in that region far, FAR outweighed any near-term benefits that could be derived even from total victory. The cost to fight there was simply far higher than even the most optimistic estimate of possible rewards.
Almost all of which stayed there., and none of which were ever trained and equipped into modern formations, not even at the battalion level. So again, they were irrelevant in the larger context under discussion, namely this game's depiction of WWII grand strategy. Except for a few who were transported to the Far East, where they also had almost no effect on the larger war, nearly all the manpower recruited in sub-Saharan Africa stayed there, guarding colonial possession that no other nation in the War was even interested in fighting over. And they were guarding them not from enemy nations but from the local populace, for the most part. They were little more than colonial garrisons intended to keep the local colonial populations in line. At the first sign a real war breaking out in their home territories, they would have ditched their uniforms and gone home to take care of their families, and rightly so since they were totally untrained and unequipped for that kind of fighting.
Unfortunately you are running into the "historical is God" crowd where gameplay doesn't matter as long as they can have a sterile and repetitive ww2 experience every time.
Nonsense. Sometimes suggestions are raised on the grounds of "realism" that in fact lack any realistic application in the context of the game. Other times they are raised out of a desire to impose hyper-realism upon what is supposed to be a game, not a re-enactment. There is no "sterlie and reptitive ww2 experience" in this game, nothing even remotely resembling it. In fact, that is one of the chief complaints and one of the chief reason people keep proposing things like this, i.e. because they want to transform this game into precisely that.
In SP Africa is a mess. The AI does not respect the desert away from the coast, so they come flying out of the sands like dervishes - forcing you to go into the Sahara. Secondly, once the allies have their home countries occupied they all set up shop in Africa. So for the rest of the war you either have to go into Africa and take all that GB and Free France Africa or deal with their invasions year after year. Have you seen Africa in a 45 game? It's ridiculous. Troops from 15 nations wandering around the desert.
Horse biscuits. @Pro_Consul is correct. Yes, history should have some bearing on a game based upon history. But a suggestion that adds "realism" with little to no benefit or even worse hurts gameplay is a bad suggestion. Nothing wrong with throwing out an idea to see what people think, even if it is a bad one. Done that myself a few times. Just don't die on your sword supporting it once others point out it's flaws.
This I can agree on. Dumbing down industry for the casuals has hurt Africa and other spots across the globe. I wouldn't mind a food and a clothing resource. Gotta feed and dress your soldiers right?
Black Ice already has uniforms as equipment but no resource is needed for it other than production.
As an example Italian Somaliland was a major producer of sugar (though most of it wasn't exported), along with producing bananas and cotton.
That is an argument for leaving it out, not putting it in. Put simply, if it didn't make a difference in the war, it should probably be left out. And if it was strictly local or regional to boot, it definitely should be left out. Last I checked my history books, no power in WWII fought any campaigns to seize enemy sugar cane, banana, or cotton plantations.
Can the value of Afrcia agricultural product be integrated into civilian factory? Which means adding more civil factory to the various states of Africa, increasing it's importance.