From an engineering point-of-view, the National Focus trees are a good way to deal with various internal stuff like deciding to prioritize cruisers over battleships or fighters before bombers. However, as the game expands, the diplomatic and coercive parts of different NF trees will need a skyrocketing amount of design effort to ensure a fair degree of seamless interplay - something that's already questionable a mere two DLCs in.
Consider the relations between two countries. Who decides how the relations between the two develop in the focus tree model? There's two obvious choices:
1. One party (eg. the more "major" one) decides, and the other goes along with it
2. Both parties decide and there's a complex interplay of focuses / events determining the result
Option 1 is simple to implement and is satisfying as long as one is playing the deciding party, at least. Option 2, on the other hand, is very time-consuming to implement well - as seen in the fact that it's not really implemented well in currently existing focus trees.
The difficulty of option 2 arises from the fact that a good NF tree works sensibly regardless of what focuses the others take. A good example of a (soon-to-be) bad focus is the Polish Fascist branch: going Fascist to seek accommodation with Germany hardly makes sense if Germany just got rid of Fascism in a civil war like their upcoming focus tree enables them to! Other good examples are in the German Rhineland subtree as detailed in this post.
"But they can fix that," you might be saying. "Change the focus so it's only available if Germany is Fascist." And you'd be right, but that's exactly my point. Whenever they open a new way for things to develop in the NFs and events, the devs have a lot of new rails to consider and hammer down: the growth rate of options to consider is asymptotically exponential (where option 1 with a strict "minors vs majors" divide is only linear).
NF trees seemed like a good feature, almost flagship quality, for HoI 4. However, now I feel their creeping expansion to minor countries is slowly suffocating the real potential the game has; developing a sandbox may be hard, but it's even harder to develop a game with an exponential amount of rails while keeping each of the possible paths enjoyable. I strongly urge the devs of HoI 4 to avoid creeping NF trees to all countries and instead focus on other features and fixing the poor interplay in the existing trees, and start with a more flexible model when designing HoI V in the future. When adding new trees, they could also be designed (in the Chinese fashion) to offer less options in terms who to side with and compensate with other choices, to mitigate the complex interaction between the trees.
Consider the relations between two countries. Who decides how the relations between the two develop in the focus tree model? There's two obvious choices:
1. One party (eg. the more "major" one) decides, and the other goes along with it
2. Both parties decide and there's a complex interplay of focuses / events determining the result
Option 1 is simple to implement and is satisfying as long as one is playing the deciding party, at least. Option 2, on the other hand, is very time-consuming to implement well - as seen in the fact that it's not really implemented well in currently existing focus trees.
The difficulty of option 2 arises from the fact that a good NF tree works sensibly regardless of what focuses the others take. A good example of a (soon-to-be) bad focus is the Polish Fascist branch: going Fascist to seek accommodation with Germany hardly makes sense if Germany just got rid of Fascism in a civil war like their upcoming focus tree enables them to! Other good examples are in the German Rhineland subtree as detailed in this post.
"But they can fix that," you might be saying. "Change the focus so it's only available if Germany is Fascist." And you'd be right, but that's exactly my point. Whenever they open a new way for things to develop in the NFs and events, the devs have a lot of new rails to consider and hammer down: the growth rate of options to consider is asymptotically exponential (where option 1 with a strict "minors vs majors" divide is only linear).
NF trees seemed like a good feature, almost flagship quality, for HoI 4. However, now I feel their creeping expansion to minor countries is slowly suffocating the real potential the game has; developing a sandbox may be hard, but it's even harder to develop a game with an exponential amount of rails while keeping each of the possible paths enjoyable. I strongly urge the devs of HoI 4 to avoid creeping NF trees to all countries and instead focus on other features and fixing the poor interplay in the existing trees, and start with a more flexible model when designing HoI V in the future. When adding new trees, they could also be designed (in the Chinese fashion) to offer less options in terms who to side with and compensate with other choices, to mitigate the complex interaction between the trees.
