MEFO bills OP

[stl3l9n]

I've been watching the recent WWW streams and I was kinda surprised when I saw that MEFO bills give you -20 consumer goods - it means that you don't need to build any civ facs and can easily get 150 mil factories by WW2. Germany in 1939 was outmatched by French and British forces, but with this amount of mil factories, you can just seemingly steamroll through France and Britain. I hope paradox reduces it to something reasonable like 10. I wonder what your opinions of this are?

 

[KalZakath]

If the mechanics all worked the same as they do now, probably, but I think they are adjusting a lot.

Watching the latest stream, it seemed as though Daniel was building quite a few civs - to speed up his later construction, though that could be specific to his strategy of going heavy into the armor side and producing a lot of refineries as well. Going to have to see how everything works together before really coming to a conclusion on this, but it does definitely have the potential of being OP.

 

[Secret Master]

you can just seemingly steamroll through France and Britain.

You don't steamroll them now?

 

[stl3l9n]

You don't steamroll them now?

I mean multiplayer, although I hope the new ai improvements might make it a bit harder. Anyway it still seems really OP anyway.

 

[Lord of Beer]

Its too hard to judge without more exploration of the feature, which they have not really been doing on the streams. For example, what exactly happens to it when Germany joins a war?

TBH, I'm a bit disappointed in the streams, they are being played like just HOI game #207, rather than actually exploring the new features and the impacts of them. The person playing is not really looking at the new focuses and decisions and how they work, etc.

Even better if the dev streamer could comment on the changes they are looking at and talk back to the audience on how they would impact the current meta!

Right now the person playing is struggling to win/play the game, let alone do the above. I'm sure they are a good QA worker, but they are quite mediocre at the game itself

I hope the Youtubers go into it when they start to have access to the build.

Same with War Support and stability, its not clear how it will actually work.

 

[Moishe Greenblatt]

Its ok if its OP in multiplayer then we can just ban it like strat bombers rather than actually having a balanced game XDXDXDXDXDXDXDDX

 

[Darth.]

I don't bother building civilian factories as Germany at game start. I just focus on military factories, military factories, and more military factories. Until I take Poland. Then I do infrastructure and radar as well as some air and naval bases in preparation for Barbarossa and Sea Lion. (When I'm playing the historical route of Poland > Belgium > France > UK and Russia.) It's ridiculously easy to crush Poland in a week and France in a couple of weeks to a month after declaring on Belgium and Luxembourg which itself takes 28 days via national focus iirc. So about two months plus a week to kill the sick men of Western Europe. After that you have plenty of time to organize your civilian industry and infrastructure and stuff.
Unless they've reduced the number of civilian factories Germany starts off with in 1936, MEFO shouldn't make a difference beyond giving you more civilian factories to trade with which is nice. Export focus maybe? I don't think it's as big a deal as you believe. At most you get 5 or so extra factories maximum. Definitely a fair bit, but not game breaking. Because if you build 150 mil factories by ww2 you'll be in a massive deficit resource wise unless you want to trade away all your civilian factories. Imo it just encourages you to build Infrastructure and radar and air and naval bases before ww2.

 

[astec]

I would disagree. When you enter a war the MEFO benefits disappear (just you don't get any sort of penalty). The side effect of this is that your civilian factory count will jump down because all of the sudden you have to pay for the military factories you built, making it difficult to import enough resources if you never built any additional civilian factories.

Smart players will always build a good amount of civilian factories lest their economies collapse due to lack of resources and construction.

 

[stl3l9n]

Its not just 5 factories - from the stream it looked something like 15-20 which is game breaking. It doesn't change single player (but might if we get good ai), but multiplayer is quite unbalanced (ban xdxdxdxd).

MEFO Bills should end the instant you are at war. Here is Hjalmar Schacht's testimony at the Nuremberg trials. As you can see, MEFO Bills ceased to be used in 38.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nuremberg-trial-defendants-hjalmar-schacht

Edit: if I remember right they had to stop in 38 because the system was close to collapse due to sheer size and the only thing that prevented it was the seizure of gold from the Czechs, Austrians, Poles and French + Nazi looting on an unprecedented scale. So there should be a MTTH on a collapse event with dire consequences that gets lower every time you renew + a reduction in the penalty from that event every time you capitulate or peacefully annex a country. The current free factory no consequences is as unrealistic as it is poorly balanced.

Yes, we should definitely get this and MEFO bills disappearing after you start war isn't good enough. If Germany hadn't gone to war, the economy could have collapsed, or something bad like that.

 

[CrazyZombie]

MEFO Bills should end the instant you are at war. Here is Hjalmar Schacht's testimony at the Nuremberg trials. As you can see, MEFO Bills ceased to be used in 38.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nuremberg-trial-defendants-hjalmar-schacht

Edit: if I remember right they had to stop in 38 because the system was close to collapse due to sheer size and the only thing that prevented it was the seizure of gold from the Czechs, Austrians, Poles and French + Nazi looting on an unprecedented scale. So there should be a MTTH on a collapse event with dire consequences that gets lower every time you renew + a reduction in the penalty from that event every time you capitulate or peacefully annex a country. The current free factory no consequences is as unrealistic as it is poorly balanced.

Wrong. Germany was paying interest for bills until 1943. And they couldn't refuse.
All German annexations and gatherings, gifted by Paris and London before 1939, were only delaying the crush of the debt bubble. And it was the internal debt, so, nothing close to refuse paying back, until things started to go really bad.

 

[stl3l9n]

Yeah, I've changed my mind but we can all still agree that we need to nerf them if they stay at 20.

 

[Fulmen]

MEFO bills being OP is something that got noticed by the multiplayer community as soon as they first got shown to us months ago. PDX has of course, as usual, ignored MP balance issues and continued catering to the SP crowd.

A competent Germany will already have the biggest CIC base in the game in 1940, possibly slightly behind Russia if the Allies are stupid enough to cuck themselves by trading too heavily with the Russians instead of each other. Either way Germany needed a nerf, not a buff.

Thankfully we can mod the game.

 

[CrazyZombie]

Yeah, I've changed my mind but we can all still agree that we need to nerf them if they stay at 20.

You don't need to nerf MEFO. PDX just should add such effect, that if you don't pay the debt for the bills, you just switch off all you economy and reduce factory production, building speed, research and so on. Immediate economic collapse.

 

[stl3l9n]

MEFO bills being OP is something that got noticed by the multiplayer community as soon as they first got shown to us months ago. PDX has of course, as usual, ignored MP balance issues and continued catering to the SP crowd.

A competent Germany will already have the biggest CIC base in the game in 1940, possibly slightly behind Russia if the Allies are stupid enough to cuck themselves by trading too heavily with the Russians instead of each other. Either way Germany needed a nerf, not a buff.

Thankfully we can mod the game.

I agree, in fact the MEFO bills could've been a nerf if they were properly implemented (ie a nerf to the amount of civs in 1936, and you need MEFO bills to be competitive, but the debt could be killer if you don't conquer enough). I don't see how it was good for SP though - almost everyone in SP wants the game to be harder (for Germany) and not OP.

You don't need to nerf MEFO. PDX just should add such effect, that if you don't pay the debt for the bills, you just switch off all you economy and reduce factory production, building speed, research and so on. Immediate economic collapse.

This could be another option for nerfing MEFO (it is a nerf, just not direct), but it's more work for the devs, while a reduction to -10% ~ could easily be done by waking the tiger.

 

[CrazyZombie]

I agree, in fact the MEFO bills could've been a nerf if they were properly implemented (ie a nerf to the amount of civs in 1936, and you need MEFO bills to be competitive, but the debt could be killer if you don't conquer enough). I don't see how it was good for SP though - almost everyone in SP wants the game to be harder (for Germany) and not OP.


This could be another option for nerfing MEFO (it is a nerf, just not direct), but it's more work for the devs, while a reduction to -10% ~ could easily be done by waking the tiger.

It is not a nerf. It is historical feature, that makes German HOI4 gameplay a bit more realistic. Without it MEFO shouldn't be in game at all - because that would be already too wehraboo decision.

 

[Ksyr]

Its too hard to judge without more exploration of the feature, which they have not really been doing on the streams. For example, what exactly happens to it when Germany joins a war?

TBH, I'm a bit disappointed in the streams, they are being played like just HOI game #207, rather than actually exploring the new features and the impacts of them. The person playing is not really looking at the new focuses and decisions and how they work, etc.

Same with War Support and stability, its not clear how it will actually work.

Maybe they do this on purpose since it's in in beta and may not have final values. I suppose most of the balancing is done late when all the features are in place. Imagine how many more "X is OP, Y sucks" threads we would have if the streams delved deeper into the early numbers.

 

[Fulmen]

Maybe they do this on purpose since it's in in beta and may not have final values. I suppose most of the balancing is done late when all the features are in place.

I can say from experience that that's highly doubtful. What we see now are likely final or very close to final release version figures. They might be toned down in future patches though.

 

[Secret Master]

Please don't post records from the Nuremburg Trials that reference genocide or the Holocaust, even if you are trying to reference economic history.

Thread closed.