Putting the Band Back Together. The story of sh*tshow achievement

[ChainsawBlue 36]

Well done lol. Did you wait for Germany to go for Oppose Hitler or Hungary to choose Balanced Budget?

i too want to know this lol. Also want to know if OP went non historical for his sevres achievement

 

[Goodfontana]

Well done lol. Did you wait for Germany to go for Oppose Hitler or Hungary to choose Balanced Budget? How did you do it?

Waiting for Oppose Hitler is simply unfeasible, at the game start you don't have intel to see what Germany is doing, and even if they decided to go that route they might pick other focuses in the meantime, then you need to wait until the CW ends, then see if they go for the Kaiser, and then see if they go for Focus on the true enemy. It's just too much.

I kept restarting until Hungary chose Balanced budget, and kept playing in the hope they would manage to reform AH with Austria, so at least I could get the hardest part of the achievement, and then deal with whatever the non-historical madness threw at me. Some things I've noticed:

- When Hungary goes for Balanced budget, most times they will not get to the Austrian referendum (or war) before Germany goes for Anschsluss (assuming they chose the Habsburg king ofc)
- When they beeline the referendum, Austria always say no
- When they decide to go to war with Austria, they always lose (and then get Anschlussed along with Austria lol)

Given those circumstances, the only realistic scenario to make sure AH was at least reformed, was to make sure Hungary won the war against Austria, so I had to find a way to be able to send them volunteers and win the war for them. To that end, I noticed that in the fascist/communist path for Turkey there is a focus (Intervene in the spanish civil war) that will allow you to send volunteers, reducing the WT limits and increasing the number of divisions you can send.

I trained 30 units of fodder (to meet the requirement to send volunteers), and upgraded 8 of them to something competent, as well as build some planes. Won the war for Hungary and then kept going beelining the "Mediterranean Entente" with the idea to get Italy before they joined the Axis. Then kept going and got Bulgaria in the faction too, carved up Greece, got Portugal to join and sent volunteers to Falangist in Spain to win the war for them, and got them to join too. After that AH joined Axis when Germany did the first viena award and I ganged up on them, puppeted both, and got the achievement, while of course holding the line in the caucasus and keeping my navy in the Black Sea because the soviets decided it would be funny to manually justify and declare on me.

i too want to know this lol. Also want to know if OP went non historical for his sevres achievement

No, I've never gone non-historical for any achievement, and it bothers me a lot that I had to go into that madness to get an achievement because Paradox forced me to by making it impossible to obtain on historical. After all I've gone through, Hardly Anything Sèvres seems really easy (when the sheer amount of RNG that you can't do nothing about doesn't screw you that is)

 

[ChainsawBlue 36]

Waiting for Oppose Hitler is simply unfeasible, at the game start you don't have intel to see what Germany is doing, and even if they decided to go that route they might pick other focuses in the meantime, then you need to wait until the CW ends, then see if they go for the Kaiser, and then see if they go for Focus on the true enemy. It's just too much.

I kept restarting until Hungary chose Balanced budget, and kept playing in the hope they would manage to reform AH with Austria, so at least I could get the hardest part of the achievement, and then deal with whatever the non-historical madness threw at me. Some things I've noticed:

- When Hungary goes for Balanced budget, most times they will not get to the Austrian referendum (or war) before Germany goes for Anschsluss (assuming they chose the Habsburg king ofc)
- When they beeline the referendum, Austria always say no
- When they decide to go to war with Austria, they always lose (and then get Anschlussed along with Austria lol)

Given those circumstances, the only realistic scenario to make sure AH was at least reformed, was to make sure Hungary won the war against Austria, so I had to find a way to be able to send them volunteers and win the war for them. To that end, I noticed that in the fascist/communist path for Turkey there is a focus (Intervene in the spanish civil war) that will allow you to send volunteers, reducing the WT limits and increasing the number of divisions you can send.

I trained 30 units of fodder (to meet the requirement to send volunteers), and upgraded 8 of them to something competent, as well as build some planes. Won the war for Hungary and then kept going beelining the "Mediterranean Entente" with the idea to get Italy before they joined the Axis. Then kept going and got Bulgaria in the faction too, carved up Greece, got Portugal to join and sent volunteers to Falangist in Spain to win the war for them, and got them to join too. After that AH joined Axis when Germany did the first viena award and I ganged up on them, puppeted both, and got the achievement, while of course holding the line in the caucasus and keeping my navy in the Black Sea because the soviets decided it would be funny to manually justify and declare on me.




No, I've never gone non-historical for any achievement, and it bothers me a lot that I had to go into that madness to get an achievement because Paradox forced me to by making it impossible to obtain on historical. After all I've gone through, Hardly Anything Sèvres seems really easy (when the sheer amount of RNG that you can't do nothing about doesn't screw you that is)

I'm currently attempting hardly any Sevres at the moment, and I've built a giant sub armada killing off a lot of allied ships, but it's currently 1943 and I managed to get all of north africa, yugo, greece, middle east etc. Not sure what to do might have to backstab Germany while they are dying to the USSR, which might make holding the line feasible. But then there is war score, and I'm worried that after they capitulate, the allies and USSR will just grab all of it. Then the Allies would land a billion divisions and massacre me. Decisions, decisions. Then again I do have pretty killer submarine fleet and decent ish standing army.

How did you go about doing it?

 

[Kapitalisti]

Reasonable for this DLC would be to get a refund along with an apology to the players. I've played HOI4 over 2,500 hours and this is the most screwed, lazy, untested and ridiculous DLC and content I've seen. It's not only that is broken beyond belief, is that the sheer amount of RNG bullsh*t they've included on it is a spit in the face to all the players who want to play a strategy game instead of a casino roulette, your decisions no longer matter, only what the random seed decides your game will be with you being unable to do anything to change it other than restarting a thousand times.

They should call this DLC "Roll the Dice and Hope it Doesn't Break". It's not the first DLC I buy, but it will certainly be the last.

I've never understood people who get so worked up over achievements. OK, so some achievements are basically roulette. So? It's not like they're core gameplay, I've always seen them as fun/funny extras and if some are nearly impossible to get and/or rely purely on luck it doesn't bother me.

Now I'm not belittling you nor dismissing your priorities but I have to ask you to consider if this is really as serious as you make it out to be.

 

[Goodfontana]

I've never understood people who get so worked up over achievements. OK, so some achievements are basically roulette. So? It's not like they're core gameplay, I've always seen them as fun/funny extras and if some are nearly impossible to get and/or rely purely on luck it doesn't bother me.

Now I'm not belittling you nor dismissing your priorities but I have to ask you to consider if this is really as serious as you make it out to be.

First of all, I appreciate at least someone bothers to offer a reply to it. I thank you for that.

I'm not mad because of the achievements, well not only, what I am mainly mad is at the fact that even for normal gameplay where you just want to have fun playing a STRATEGY game the weight of your decisions, your actions and your skill has been relegated to a more irrelevant place. Let me put some specific examples here about Turkey, since this post was about them:

- Want to subjugate Bulgaria? The outcome is predetermined by the random seed, not on your stability, army strength, alliances, ideology, no no, the seed decides

- Want to demand Syria from any flavor of French that owns it? Sorry, is predetermined by the seed, not due to them been in a bad spot, you having a massive army ready to go in their borders, you improving relations, applying diplomatic pressure or anything like that, no no, the seed decides.

- Do you want to focus your efforts on reducing the Kurd resistance via the decisions? Too bad, the outcome is predetermined by the seed and will always be the same no matter if you have a massive army or none, high stability or not, international support or not. Again, the seed decides.

- Do you want to demand Hatay from the French? Again, seed, or in the case of historical, guaranteed they'll give it to you.

I could mention more but I think I've made my point. As you can see, it's not about achievements, that I expect to be fixed, or the incredible amount of bugs on release that any player with a couple hundred hours in this game would've noticed in 1 test, is the fact that the direction this game is going is moving away from strategy and into the domain of luck.

With this DLC they have screwed beyond belief all those YouTubers that Paradox relies so much on to promote this game by making it literally impossible to make a guide for everyone else to follow, or at least give useful tips for you to apply when try your own strategy, because key elements are determined by a random seed.

I am perfectly ok with having to restart a game because I made mistakes, because the AI invaded me in a place I didn't expect, because I made poor choices when spending my PP, research or focuses, or because I used a wrong template or lost more men than I should have in a stupid attack. I am not okay having to restart a game 213 times because I got unlucky with what a random seed decided my game should be. That's not replayability, that is making this game no better than a slot machine.

So yes, in answer to your question, I consider this as serious as I make it to be. I want my decisions to matter. I want to play a strategy game, and that is what they've removed with this DLC.

 

[Telenil]

Speaking of achievements, how do you get, well, any of those where you have to personnally own the Balkans?

My first thought would be to quickly conquer a minor or two, join the USSR against the Axis, and then pray I can puppet everything before the USSR does and/or I can join the Allies later. That is not a great plan; it is made even worse by the fact that 1) the Allies guarantee most of the Balkans nations in the early game, and get them in their factions midgame, 2) Germany gets a wargoal against Yugoslavia before it goes for the Soviet and loves to annex, and 3) the Soviet get Bessarabia from Romania.

Am I supposed to beat all three factions starting as Bulgaria, or what?

Got my answer in this thread: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/bulgaria-is-insane.1437926/

You can turn Romania and Greece communist before 1941 by bringing the communist support over 70% (rather than the 50% one might expect), which involves lots of spies and "destabilize" decisions. Get them into your faction via focus, then the only faction left to fight is the Axis.

 

[Cpt.Cross]

I think the achievement just shows that the Devs don't play the game. Yea sounds great on paper getting the original Central powers back but the reality is this will not happen. It will never happen because the Devs made it this way. Oppose Hitler is purposefully a very slim chance.

Achievements don't matter, but if they are going to include them, they should be a worthy challenge or something fun to do. Preferably both. But they should definitely not be about sinking hours of time restarting so that hours played stats are inflated for the shareholders.

 

[Marcin6669]

I find the way for this, thanks for Goodfontana give me a idea, but this requires millions restart.
1. Restart until Hungary take Balanced Budget, and watch every focus they take until Habsburg.
2. In meantime you are going for Intervene in the spanish civil war and fascist way.
3. Have 30 units for ability to send volunteers and help win Hungary war with Austria.
4. When they finally do this, justify war goal agaist them, and join to Axis.
5. Beat them with Germany, they will probably annex most of Austria and Hungary, but take one province and release Austria-Hungary as puppet.
6. Achievement get!

Of course I have problem with join Germany to war, and in meantime Austria-Hungary take Czechoslovakia, but I do it.

 

[Oahkoah]

This achievement is actually more broken than you imagine.

Firstly, the Turkish focus Press the Austro-Hungarian Claims while providing unaligned support is actually broken because the decision to form Austria-Hungary is still only visible if GERMANY has done the Rekindle Imperialist Sentiment focus. Yup, Turkey's focus doesn't actually unlock the decision.

So you either need Germany to do Return of the Kaiser, Netherlands to go Neutral (causes Germany to flip monarchist), or Hungary to go monarchist. Turkey has no say in the matter

 

[ChainsawBlue 36]

This achievement is actually more broken than you imagine.

Firstly, the Turkish focus Press the Austro-Hungarian Claims while providing unaligned support is actually broken because the decision to form Austria-Hungary is still only visible if GERMANY has done the Rekindle Imperialist Sentiment focus. Yup, Turkey's focus doesn't actually unlock the decision.

So you either need Germany to do Return of the Kaiser, Netherlands to go Neutral (causes Germany to flip monarchist), or Hungary to go monarchist. Turkey has no say in the matter

I think they will definitely change how this works in a future patch. Hopefully it comes soon.

 

[hamze2011]

The achievement to puppet Romania, Italy and USSR is bugged. Also, the achievement to form arabia with 30 camerly divisions is bugged. And I've sene complaints about the achievement finnish him, apparently you need the most warscore, except that warscore is a broken function. Even if you deal many times more casualties than your allies, you'll still be behind.

Then there's this thread's achievement. I didn't even try, I know I'll have to restart of the game up to dozens of hundreds of times to get it. It's not worth it, I don't know if they test these achievements.

The bulgarian achievements are all working. Prussia of the Balkans was the most fun one, it was fun taking on Romania and Yugoslavia simultaneously, and alone, as Bulgaria. Was also a race against time, if I waited too much then Germany would declare on Yugoslavia and they'd join the allies.

Apparently for the Finnish him achievement, you can take the states that are neighboring your country, after the peace deal you can release the Soviet Union as a free country in those states and then declare war on them and defeat them (also the allies won't guarantee them cuz they are communist).
Haven't tested out this method myself tho, so it might not work.

 

[LetaBot]

Apparently for the Finnish him achievement, you can take the states that are neighboring your country, after the peace deal you can release the Soviet Union as a free country in those states and then declare war on them and defeat them (also the allies won't guarantee them cuz they are communist).
Haven't tested out this method myself tho, so it might not work.

I have tested this method, and it indeed works.

 

[shepherd352]

I followed the method Bitt3rSteel used in a YouTube a few weeks back (invade Netherlands and use East Indies manpower to build enough divisions). I had over 60 divisions (about 1/3 were 40 width). I easily held against the SU and started to attack when the SU moved forces to the German border . I took Moscow before Germany could get it but couldn't get to Stalingrad. I blocked German advance further East but the war ended before that mattered. I had the largest war score. I followed the advice so that I would be able to release a small SU (and destroy it quickly) but it gave me the achievement at the end of the Peace Conference. If you get the highest war score, you may not need anything more.

 

[Big Willy Wilson]

Wait a minute, I might sound dumb, but I think I may have thought of a way to get this achievement. I will try it and update you all to let you know about my progress. It just might take a minute.

Here's the strat:

Play as Germany, go for Oppose Hitler, do all the alt hist focuses yada yada and form Austria-Hungary with the focus

Invade Turkey at some point and annex them (maybe bum rush the allies beforehand to avoid the Anglo-Turkish Agreement on Historical), release them as a puppet and play as them.

BOOM. Turkey is in the Central Powers faction with Germany and Austria Hungary. I think that counts. I hope this thread is still relatively active as it may help some folks.



EDIT: IT DOESN'T WORK

 

[Rashie]

Wait a minute, I might sound dumb, but I think I may have thought of a way to get this achievement. I will try it and update you all to let you know about my progress. It just might take a minute.

Here's the strat:

Play as Germany, go for Oppose Hitler, do all the alt hist focuses yada yada and form Austria-Hungary with the focus

Invade Turkey at some point and annex them (maybe bum rush the allies beforehand to avoid the Anglo-Turkish Agreement on Historical), release them as a puppet and play as them.

BOOM. Turkey is in the Central Powers faction with Germany and Austria Hungary. I think that counts. I hope this thread is still relatively active as it may help some folks.

As far as I can tell from the game files, this achievement requires you to start as Turkey on 1936 to be available, cause of the original_tag = TUR.

were_putting_the_band_back_together = {
    id = 123
    
    possible = {
        is_ironman = yes
        difficulty > 1
        has_start_date < 1936.01.02
        has_any_custom_difficulty_setting = no
        game_rules_allow_achievements = yes
        original_tag = TUR
    }
    
    happened = {
        custom_trigger_tooltip = {
            tooltip = were_putting_the_band_back_together_tt
            is_in_faction_with = GER
            any_allied_country = {
                has_cosmetic_tag = HUN_EMPIRE
            }
        }
    }
}

 

[Aeroclub]

Just did the achievement. Restarted until Hungary went Balanced Budget, then when Germany declared on them for Sudeten, joined the war, won, and puppeted them.

 

[LogOutGames]

The easiest way for Paradox to fix this issue would be to simply make choosing a country's national focus path using the game rules option not disable achievements.

 

[Aeroclub]

The easiest way for Paradox to fix this issue would be to simply make choosing a country's national focus path using the game rules option not disable achievements.

This.
The way it's done atm is ridiculous. I would understand if turning historical off disabled the achievements altogether, but that's not the case...So now, if the achievements are achievable through ahistorical scenarios, why can't we just choose these scenarios before the start instead of rerolling a million times?

 

[Big Willy Wilson]

As far as I can tell from the game files, this achievement requires you to start as Turkey on 1936 to be available, cause of the original_tag = TUR.

were_putting_the_band_back_together = {
    id = 123
  
    possible = {
        is_ironman = yes
        difficulty > 1
        has_start_date < 1936.01.02
        has_any_custom_difficulty_setting = no
        game_rules_allow_achievements = yes
        original_tag = TUR
    }
  
    happened = {
        custom_trigger_tooltip = {
            tooltip = were_putting_the_band_back_together_tt
            is_in_faction_with = GER
            any_allied_country = {
                has_cosmetic_tag = HUN_EMPIRE
            }
        }
    }
}

Wow, I just wasted 5 or so hours of my life conquering Asia (because peace deals in this game make sense) just to annex Turkey. I spent $10 just to suffer for a bugged achievement. What a fool I was to think that it would work. I really I thought I had a stroke of genius. Thank you for this, it would saved me a lot of time had I read it.

 

[pheonicia]

Wow, I just wasted 5 or so hours of my life conquering Asia (because peace deals in this game make sense) just to annex Turkey. I spent $10 just to suffer for a bugged achievement. What a fool I was to think that it would work. I really I thought I had a stroke of genius. Thank you for this, it would saved me a lot of time had I read it.

While I understand your frustration, why didn't you check the achievement browser on game start? That should have told you that you weren't eligible.