My recent playthrough as Germany revealed a lot of issues with this game...

[MobiusTwo]

It's been awhile since I played Germany in vanilla HOI4, and with some new achievements, I felt it was a good time to play the "main country" of HOI4 again with the new NSB mechanics. I did have fun and got both of the achievements I was aiming for, but my enjoyment was diminished by a number of glitches and other issues in the game which ought to be fixed. Pictures are attached at the end of the post.

First is an issue that has plagued the game since the BOTF expansion, if memory serves. And that issue is that it is impossible to create Vichy France's historical borders thanks to changes in the shapes of France's provinces. The southwestern-most province of France was modified to accommodate the borders of the Basque Country releasable nation. I find it very frustrating that a releasable nation that would never realistically come into existence during the game's time period would be prioritized at the expense the historical borders established during WWII. All that needs to be done to fix this problem is switch one tile from one province to another.

Second is an issue that has been around for as long as I can remember. Setting up frontlines in North America has always been extremely wonky, since the Great Lakes, despite being impassible, are counted as part of the frontline. I couldn't tell you how many invasions of Canada or the United States have been screwed up because my troops decided not to defend actual areas where enemy soldiers can attack from. I feel this problem has only gotten worse since NSB, as evidenced by my second screenshot - Lake Superior is counted as Canadian territory that can be "defended" with a frontline, despite the fact that it poses no risk to my troops.

Third, peace deals continue to be a massive issue in HOI4. When I conquered the Soviet Union, I tried to puppet the country. Little did I know that Italy would somehow be able to make their own Russian puppet, with zero regard for sensible borders to boot! I believe that Italy's "Russian Empire" was the "actual" SOV tag, since it had Konstantin Rodzaevsky as its leader, and when I clicked the "return territory" button in an attempt to give my Russian holdings (the blotches of Russia that say "German Reich" to my puppet, they went to Italy's Russian Empire instead! Plus I didn't even get the option to give the land to my puppet! Perhaps worst of all is the fact that I did at least 90% of the actual work of capitulating the Soviet Union, but Italy is still allowed to mess everything up in the peace deal. Paradox, please, please fix peace deals, they ruin the fun of this game.

On a related note, I took some of Thrace, but I did not have the option to give the land back to Bulgaria, even though Bulgaria had claims/cores on the land. Why would this be? In the end I decided to puppet Greece in Thrace, but as you'll soon find out this was a problem too...​

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Puppets are extremely glitchy as well. I puppeted multiple nations over the course of the game and most of them caused nothing but trouble for me. When I puppeted Bulgaria, I soon realized that it was a communist country, which was very odd since they should be fascist to match Germany's ideology. Estonia-Finland and Greece (and Canada, for which I did not have a screenshot) had modifiers that continually gave them communist ideology boost, meaning that they would inevitably flip back to communism despite being my fascist puppets. Imagine playing the game for hours on end only to realize that your puppets are secretly undermining your ideology and might declare war on you or something! That's a possibility, since if puppets are not restricted to the master's ideology, who knows what other crazy shenanigans they can pull. The least that can be done here is removing any modifiers that boost ideology when a nation has been puppeted.

Of course, that wouldn't solve all the problems. If you ever puppet the British Raj or South Africa, those countries WILL always break out into a civil war at some point, meaning you have to station troops near them if you want to have hope of keeping order. The Raj had a civil war as my puppet in this game, but luckily, I was prepared for it and stationed troops in Sri Lanka to quickly intervene when it happened. Still, it shouldn't have happened in the first place...​

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Bonus issue: this did not happen in this game, but if a non-aligned nation puppets Greece, the puppet keeps the starting Greek leader who has a continual stability drain debuff. This means that your Greek puppet is guaranteed to have 0% stability in a matter of months. They should either get a generic leader who doesn't have that awful trait, or George II or something.​

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Finally, Japan seems to have gone a bit crazy in NSB. This was a weird game where Japan went communist (which is a totally nonsensical path that should not exist in the first place, but I digress) and joined a faction with the Soviet Union. The communists went to war with Puyi's Manchukuo. Every couple weeks throughout the years-long war, I was spammed with notifications about Japan and Manchukuo signing a white peace, and then Japan getting called into the war again. I suspect this was triggered by the fact that Japan had no territories in mainland Asia, which is supposed to happen if China wins a historical Sino-Japanese War, but this trigger should not be in effect if Japan is communist (even if the communist path is too nonsensical to exist in the first place). The problem was exacerbated once I puppeted Japan and returned the nation to fascism. I was at war with Manchukuo by this point and the Japan white peace thing kept firing. Strangely, I had the option to call Japan back into the war whenever this happened, but in a few days they would be guaranteed to sign a white peace with Manchukuo. The Chinese white peace trigger thing should not be in effect if Japan is a puppet.

I'm sorry if this post comes off as an angry rant. It's not supposed to be one, since I enjoy playing this game, buying the DLC, and supporting the devs. However, I don't want to pretend that the game isn't perfect. I'd like to thank the devs for many hours of fun I have had with this game, but I'd also like to draw attention to some glaring glitches that detract from my enjoyment of the game.

Once again, pictures are attached at the end of this post. Let me know what you think in the comments!

 

[Jays298]

Same issue with puppeting. I think if you puppet in a peace treaty it needs to be your only action that turn.

 

[pro.gamer.69]

Plus I didn't even get the option to give the land to my puppet?

did you scroll down all the way in the "occupied territories" list to the "non-resisting territories" section? usually that's where you find any other countries whose land you occupy (i.e. communist china if you occupy a treaty port).

 

[vermicious knid]

Controlling India should be a nightmare for Germany, honestly. Unrest and civil wars/revolts is probably a good game result, even if the root cause is puppets being wonky. Huge puppets are too easy to administer in general...but that is just my opinion, obviously.

I think the problems with puppets and weird corner cases caused by althistory paths (like Communist Japan) are mostly because the national focus trees/events/decisions/ideas don't have exhaustive "in case of x do y" code included. In the case of an idea producing communist ideology drift you could include a line that removes it if the country is puppeted and the master isn't communist, for example. You might not want to if the idea if meant to represent there being a huge groundswell of popular communist sentiment...but that could be decided for each case. All million and a half of them. I know some mods throw in extra checks and AI weights, so it is definitely possible.

I don't know if this isn't done because the labor cost to do so is too much, that many extra lines of code would create too much potential for extra bugs, that many extra checks would slow the game down to a crawl, or some other reason that I haven't considered.

 

[goodcigar]

There's a small mod that fixes Vichy France's borders. There's also a puppet diplomacy mod I think.

 

[Glassius]

Imagine playing the game for hours on end only to realize that your puppets are secretly undermining your ideology and might declare war on you or something! That's a possibility, since if puppets are not restricted to the master's ideology, who knows what other crazy shenanigans they can pull. The least that can be done here is removing any modifiers that boost ideology when a nation has been puppeted.

I oppose, as this is historically accurate. German allies and puppets were constantly plotting against their master

The rest regarding provincies and strange modifiers when not predicted ideology is enforced is still valid IMHO.

 

[MobiusTwo]

Same issue with puppeting. I think if you puppet in a peace treaty it needs to be your only action that turn.

Rather than restricting puppeting like that, I'd like an ounce of sensibility regarding how puppeting works in peace deals. If I'm Germany and I click the "Puppet the United Kingdom" button, it'll often puppet the United Kingdom across half of Africa and a hundred tiny islands across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, but nowhere near actual England. Instead, I have to annex those myself and hope my allies don't ruin the peace deal by puppeting the UK themselves or creating bordergore on the British Isles (looking at you Italy). Why isn't there an option to choose where exactly you'd like to puppet a country?

Controlling India should be a nightmare for Germany, honestly. Unrest and civil wars/revolts is probably a good game result, even if the root cause is puppets being wonky. Huge puppets are too easy to administer in general...but that is just my opinion, obviously.

I think the problems with puppets and weird corner cases caused by althistory paths (like Communist Japan) are mostly because the national focus trees/events/decisions/ideas don't have exhaustive "in case of x do y" code included. In the case of an idea producing communist ideology drift you could include a line that removes it if the country is puppeted and the master isn't communist, for example. You might not want to if the idea if meant to represent there being a huge groundswell of popular communist sentiment...but that could be decided for each case. All million and a half of them. I know some mods throw in extra checks and AI weights, so it is definitely possible.

I don't know if this isn't done because the labor cost to do so is too much, that many extra lines of code would create too much potential for extra bugs, that many extra checks would slow the game down to a crawl, or some other reason that I haven't considered.

Okay you honestly bring up some really valid points. The British Raj caused a ton of trouble for the UK during WWII, and it stands to reason that it would cause even more trouble for a victorious Germany. However, this isn't TNO. In vanilla HOI4 puppets are supposed to do what you want when you want. If they want to change puppets to be more historically realistic, I'd be happy with that change. But as it stands right now, I'm not sure why exceptions are made for just India and South Africa.

As far as logistics go, I think that the devs need to add as much coding as is necessary to prevent the game from breaking the way it does. They announced there's going to be some sort of "maintenance team" to fix outstanding issues so they may be doing that already. If you're worried about game speed, I've heard from modders that the vanilla game is poorly-optimized and there's a lot of back end stuff that could be worked on to make the game faster, to say nothing of simple fixes like division limits.

did you scroll down all the way in the "occupied territories" list to the "non-resisting territories" section? usually that's where you find any other countries whose land you occupy (i.e. communist china if you occupy a treaty port).

Yep, I looked for Bulgaria and it just wasn't there. Maybe I need to double check but I'm pretty sure they were oddly absent from the list...

I oppose, as this is historically accurate. German allies and puppets were constantly plotting against their master

The rest regarding provincies and strange modifiers when not predicted ideology is enforced is still valid IMHO.

As I said before, this isn't TNO. Puppets in vanilla HOI4 aren't crazy levels of detailed like Reichskommissariat Moskowien, where you've got 10-20 different scheming actors each planning to take control when the colony collapses, each with their own focus trees in a future update. If we ever get that level of detail for the base game - great! But I highly doubt we'll get to that point, as it's been pretty well-established by now that puppets are supposed to be your "yes-men" and aren't supposed to be breaking your ironman saves with glitchy rebellions. So if we aren't going crazy detailed, I'd prefer for things to be simple but moreover consistent across all puppets. Does that make sense?

 

[Glassius]

So if we aren't going crazy detailed, I'd prefer for things to be simple but moreover consistent across all puppets. Does that make sense?

So you just said, that historical plausibility is ruining your gameplay I truly respect that level of being honest!

I have similar problem with Polish democratic peasant strike route. Focus allows you to take part in Spanish civil war, but earliest in October 1937, when it is unwinnable. It also allows to protect Chechoslovakia, but only after it looses Sudetenland. This is quite historically accurate, as Poland did not do of those, so player has no reason to do so

 

[MobiusTwo]

So you just said, that historical plausibility is ruining your gameplay I truly respect that level of being honest!

I have similar problem with Polish democratic peasant strike route. Focus allows you to take part in Spanish civil war, but earliest in October 1937, when it is unwinnable. It also allows to protect Chechislovakia, but only after it looses Sudetenland. This is quite historically accurate, as Poland did not do of those, so player has no reason to do so

As far as historical plausibility is concerned, I suspect that the resistance you face when you directly occupy territories is supposed to represent the unrest that would naturally follow Axis (or other hostile powers) occupation of other countries.

Unfortunately, the game as is currently designed does not really incentivize puppeting, since even though you don't have to deal with occupation, you have to worry about irritating glitches or wonky oversights in focus trees messing up your plans. For example, imagine you're playing as Romania or Bulgaria and conquer Greece. Unless you want a war with Italy, you must directly annex all of Greece because otherwise Italy will get a focus to justify a wargoal on the GRE tag.

What I'm trying to say is that having puppets that are guaranteed to break out into open rebellion against you or worse because the game's devs did not account for certain situations and therefore did not create checks in the coding to account for that is bad game design. If Germany could puppet the British Raj and then had to deal with special game mechanics, decisions, and focuses to prevent the colony from totally collapsing, I would have no problem with such a system. But that's not how the game works. Instead, your puppets can just randomly rebel against you without warning and screw up your ironman saves.

Likewise, say you're Germany again and you have a puppet in Croatia/Yugoslavia. If there was a communist support modifier to your puppet to represent Tito's partisans, that would be understandable - but there should also be ways to counter those negative effects so that your puppets aren't doomed to change ideology/collapse in a matter of months/years. Give us decisions to quell the rebellions somehow at the cost of equipment, political power, manpower, etc.

 

[Xinamon]

Imo, every new expansion makes the game more frustrating/worse every single time.

 

[MobiusTwo]

Imo, every new expansion makes the game more frustrating/worse every single time.

While I certainly understand your frustration, I would say it's a stretch to say that the game is worse as a result of these expansions.

• Together For Victory added the autonomy system, which is definitely a game improvement, but also gave us some of the worst focus trees in the game (looking at Canada, India, and South Africa especially) that have become even more dated with every subsequent expansion.
• Death or Dishonor was a solid expansion in my opinion, but the focus trees have become a bit dated and could use some polish.
• Waking The Tiger was probably the strongest expansion the game has seen, but Germany's focus tree is a bit short, Japan's is way too short, and China and Japan have some glitchy interactions with each other that have been unaddressed since 2018.
• Man The Guns had some decent focus trees (with the exception of the United States, in my opinion), but the "meat" of the expansion - the naval stuff, is very confusing to me and more often than not has no effect on 90% of games I play.
• La Resistance is arguably the weakest expansion, because even though its focus trees are pretty good (France could use a bit of polish) and the resistance mechanics handle snowballing much more realistically, the spy system is frustrating because you never have nearly enough spies (and they're always getting kidnapped) and requires far too much micromanagement compared to the rest of the game.
• Battle For The Bosporus adds some decent focus trees in my opinion, with the only weak one being Turkey, because it tends to be glitchy and unclear. By the time you finally get around to doing anything, WWII is halfway over.
• No Step Back is easily the best expansion since WTT. Great focus trees (albeit a bit of DLC power-tripping) and mechanics that were much-needed to improve the land combat. The AI needs to be improved to handle it better though.

I'm hopeful that the new "maintenance team" they announced for this game will do its job well and fix the issues I know you are referring to in your comment.

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

*snip*

Very much agree with that, both Waking the Tiger and No Step Back are easily the best DLCs out there content-wise, bought those two without any discount and hasn't regretted that so far, in fact i have so much blast with them combined despite there were a few disturbances because of other DLCs' contents. But i believe those two can be improved much more to ensure good RP-ing and replayability potentials, just not as much as the old DLCs who needs them more obviously.

 

[CroarmyZG]

Every couple weeks throughout the years-long war, I was spammed with notifications about Japan and Manchukuo signing a white peace, and then Japan getting called into the war again.

There are no words that describe how much i hate this. To me it happens on daily interval not weekly if ai puppets manchuko. So non stop notification that Qing china joned war and then white peace in same secound.

Also in newest patch i got some wierd glitch where i cant join some wars, or cant call anybody in my war it is gamebreaking in multiplayer.

 

[MobiusTwo]

There are no words that describe how much i hate this. To me it happens on daily interval not weekly if ai puppets manchuko. So non stop notification that Qing china joned war and then white peace in same secound.

Also in newest patch i got some wierd glitch where i cant join some wars, or cant call anybody in my war it is gamebreaking in multiplayer.

Yes, the Japan-China peace treaty glitch is very frustrating! It's unfortunate that the game often breaks in non-historical playthroughs.

As far as the second glitch you report here is concerned - I have gotten that one too. My Russian puppet in my Germany game was not joining the war against Manchukuo, despite me calling them in. The button to call them in was still there and I could kept pressing it but it wouldn't do anything. Restarting the game fixes the issue (the same way to fix paratroopers and naval invasions not working), but you're right - in multiplayer, that would definitely be gamebreaking.

 

[Kosaki MacTavish]

Yes, the Japan-China peace treaty glitch is very frustrating! It's unfortunate that the game often breaks in non-historical playthroughs.

As far as the second glitch you report here is concerned - I have gotten that one too. My Russian puppet in my Germany game was not joining the war against Manchukuo, despite me calling them in. The button to call them in was still there and I could kept pressing it but it wouldn't do anything. Restarting the game fixes the issue (the same way to fix paratroopers and naval invasions not working), but you're right - in multiplayer, that would definitely be gamebreaking.

Open your war screen, if Russia has already joined a war and not in another, you can click on that other war and call Russia in.

I have that bug too when i as Estonia -> Nordic Empire wants to conquer what's left of the Comintern (Tuva and Mongolia). I called Russia on Mongolia's war but can't call them in Tuva's, opened the war screen and noticed the problem, there were two separate wars of mine with Russia called in on Mongolia's but not on Tuva's. Then i proceed to call Russia into Tuva's war and both wars merged.

 

[vermicious knid]

Speaking of issues with the game...had my current playthrough ruined by the anti-order 66 functionality last night. I'm playing Germany, Had gone the Anti-Soviet pact route. Japan and Turkey were both in the pact and fighting the USSR with me. I'm using EAI with Soviet cranked to the max so I'm 2 years into an absolutely grinding nailbiter of a war.

...and then Japan attacked the Allies. I sort of expected it to happen because Japan was set to go historic. No big deal, we aren't in the same faction and I won't be pulled in. What I didn't expect were my armies in the USSR being suddenly teleported back to Germany. I backed up a few months...and it happened again. No idea why this happened in this particular case, but game over.

 

[Ketchup & friends]

Most of these issues exist because the devs focus on a single region and a few countries and their focus tree. Other things are left without updates (e.g. North America and Japan weren't touched since WTT). And when they do, they tend to prioritize memes over historical accuracy.