The new DLC break the previous one's

[Vicdessos]

At least to some extent.
I have been trying for 2 days to play Hungary => Austria-Hungary and i discovered that the last dlc's makes it pretty much impossible to play A-H as it used to be; most of the time preventing playing at all.
Here are some instances picturing my assumptions :
- Due to countries now having diplo relations malus when you have cores or claims on them; Tchecoslovaquia is permanently stuck at -200 diplo relations. Which makes the focus "integrate the railways" absolutely useless (3 infrastructures and +35 in diplo relations with Tchecoslovaquia)
- Tchecoslovaquia now refuses every time to be annexed by Hungary, even if you have much more troops than them (400k in 1938 against their 350k) due to the diplo malus. Sometimes (rarely) they accept to become a puppet, which is super long to integrate given the fact that you can't really mass produce as Hungary to send them equipments (although the special option 'go closer to kingdom of bohemia helps)
- Germany is completely bugged when it goes Democratic or Monarchist (every fucking time) in its relations with the Kingdom of Bohemia, screwing over Hungary. When it goes Monarchist, i have not been able to tell why but they get an event giving them Suddentenland (maybe its a feature that i don't know about but its absolutely atrocious to see the german empire taking the suddentenland when you have bohemia as a puppet and you own austria, moreover you can't say anything since your puppet is the one deciding to give; which makes me think that its not a thing that is supposed to happen). Another absolutely infuriating feature that i just discovered right now and that made me write this post is Democratic Germany with Kingdom of Bohemia. In my game, Germany did the "Danubian membership focus". This focus allowed my puppet (that i was close to integrate) to just break with me and become independant by joining Germany. Thanks to germany, i lost my puppet, its army of 200k and the richest part of the empire. This focus should not make your puppet state break away from you.

another interrogation i have :
- austria never got a positive referendum with my Hungary even though i had more troops, and they had a favourable opinion on me.
- Romania, whoever i chose as a mediator for the Transylvanian issue, never accepts it. The mediator never give me anything, even though i am in the same faction as the mediator and it likes me.
Those elements put into perspective with the fact that bohemia never accepts annexation, is it still possible to get at least one positive answer from anything or is everyone going to cockblock Hungary from doing anything interesting ?? It seems it is mostly AI blocking the player since i have seen a lot of games where A-H is formed by the AI. my assumption is that the AI is hardcoded to refuse the demands of the player (or at least it has a very low rate of accepting compearing to when an AI plays hungary)

 

[SAS]

When I play alt history I change the game rules so that the other nations don't take focus that would block mine.

 

[Herr B.]

When I play alt history I change the game rules so that the other nations don't take focus that would block mine.

It would still be better if Paradox wouldn't make this much scripting errors...

 

[FLUX2226]

Relations don't matter for Czechoslovakia, neither does it matter whether or not you've reintegrated the railways (both matter for Austria, however). Army size is also ignored. The only factors that affect Czechoslovakia agreeing to annexation are:

• Is Czechoslovakia in a faction? Small increase if no, small decrease if yes.
• Did Hungary cause more than 20% world tension? (At least that's how I understand the "threat > 20" check in the game files.) Is world tension 20% or higher? Small increase if yes.
• Has Germany started (completed also seems to count from my experience) Demand Sudetenland or Fate of Czechoslovakia? Huge increase if yes.

Each condition increases the chance to agree to annexation if it is met. Due to the relatively poor base chances, if you rush the focus (meaning only the faction condition is met in a historical game) they will only get annexed in 1 out if 3 times. I always try to meet all three conditions which gives me roughly a 90% chance to annex them and not ruin my run.

Austria's chances to agree are relatively high by default (70%), increased further by having >75 relations with them and by integrating the railways, up to a 95% success chance. Army size is, again, ignored. So them "always" saying no sounds awkward, but I always go for the war goal so I can't speak from experience. Did you reload the game if they said no? As far as I know, HoI4 has some measures to prevent save file rerolling. So if they say no and you load a save from a few days before the focus is completed, they will say no again. But don't quote me on that.

Transylvania is a weird case. With historical AI, Romania will never agree and they will always ask for mediation. After that it gets pretty complicated, but for Hungary the only thing that you can do to influence it is being in a faction with your mediator (relations are ignored). This should massively increase the chances that they'll back your claims. So unless you're pretty unlucky, something is off because I often get half of Transylvania without being in a faction.

You're somewhat right about hardcoded behavior regarding "player vs. AI" though, both Austria and Czechoslovakia have a modifier that makes them always get annexed if Hungary is an AI as well, while the player has to "work" to get good RNG.

Here's a slightly more detailed post I made in the past: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-prince-pure-monarchist.1412719/post-26843740

Edit: Threat-condition for Czechoslovakia

 

[Riukus]

To be honest there are a lot of weird puppet interactions in HOI4. Here are a few:
- If you puppeted Austria and in faction with Germany they got an event to be peacefully annexed by Germany (ideology not matter).
- If you have fashist Latvia as a puppet and you play as Poland they can endlessly boost fashist ideology in your country. Link for my bug report.
- If you have France as puppet and Greece has France as a supporter in war against Turkey. Then after their focus France will be at war against Turkey without you (its formal overlord).

Also there are some weird things with land. Like if you enable decolonisation at game rules to play Morocco for example. The northern part of your country will be snatched by Spain via an event in the civil war because there is no Spanish civil war scenario without north africa.

So if you decide to play alternate history you need to know all possibilities and how to solve them. And yes lots of things will be broken after major DLC and never repaired. May be at the end of HOI4 support circle, similar to what happened to EU4 now, or what happened to CK2.

 

[Herr B.]

So if you decide to play alternate history you need to know all possibilities and how to solve them. And yes lots of things will be broken after major DLC and never repaired. May be at the end of HOI4 support circle, similar to what happened to EU4 now, or what happened to CK2.

This is NOT the end of the HOI4 support cycle, or at least it shoudn't. Most mods have far more complex scenarios (like Kaiserreich: ten different path for pretty much every country on earth).

The point that PDX is oblivious about is that they need to THINK about the consequences of adding certain content. You can see in KR how they pulled this off: The two main antagonists (France/Britain and Germany) CANNOT change ideology*, for good reason (for the game to progress).

If PDX wants to add alt-hist content, I'm all for it, but they need to make sure that it doesn't break the game. For example, the SU should only have the three communist path, non of which should have a civil war (to keep the SU strong). The SU switching to non-aligned/fashist breaks literally every other focus tree in the game.

As a side note, PDX would be well advised to disable faction joining (as literally ALL mods have done), but they seem to clinch to a broken system for no other reason than that they don't want to admit it's broken.

Spoiler

* in the sense that Frace needs to stay lefist and Germany needs to stay with the Kaiser

 

[Riukus]

This is NOT the end of the HOI4 support cycle, or at least it shoudn't. Most mods have far more complex scenarios (like Kaiserreich: ten different path for pretty much every country on earth).

It is actually what I said. HOI4 is not near its end and all fixing and polishing will be at the end. Like in EU4 now.

Also it not matter for the topic but my favorite game in KR was as France who completely ignore Germans. On other hand AI France in mod is almost suicidal. Usually it declare war and then get declared by Allies remnants and it all gone. That's why if I play Britain I usually leave France to it misery ang go other path.

 

[Iskulya]

Indeed, it's been the case for a while that even a very rudimentary testing for incompatibilities between focus trees is something that hasn't been done, to say nothing of bugs, balance, and playability issues.

It's truly quite sloppy(and that is putting it mildly) for content that we are paying money for. The fact that a lot of these issues have persisted for years without being fixed also is discouraging. If some of these issues have already been around for 3 or 4 years, how many more years will we have to wait for them to be fixed?

I don't get it. Why emphasize alt-history so much when its buggy, poorly balanced, and, in many cases, outright broken. What's the point? I admit that my patience has reached its limit. I don't see a point in bothering with the game or in ever buying more content unless there's a genuine effort to address some of these problems, some of which are extremely long standing and have been reported as bugs or issues and are hardly unknown... Granted, I did put like 2.5k hours into it over the years, but yeah, NSB was a big enough disappointment to me that I called it quits there.. got my money's worth out of this game at least, but I won't be spending any more time on it until there's changes and old, paid content is finally fixed up and made into a better state. At this point I see buying any more DLC for this game as just rewarding Paradox's bad policy on leaving their DLCs half-finished and in a borderline beta state.

5.5 years of this is quite long enough, there's no excuse for it anymore.

 

[Herr B.]

It is actually what I said. HOI4 is not near its end and all fixing and polishing will be at the end. Like in EU4 now.

Sorry, I misread your post.

Also it not matter for the topic but my favorite game in KR was as France who completely ignore Germans. On other hand AI France in mod is almost suicidal. Usually it declare war and then get declared by Allies remnants and it all gone. That's why if I play Britain I usually leave France to it misery ang go other path.

Interesting. For me, it's pretty even between France and Germany coming out on top. And what path for Britain do you go? I thought they have no non-commy path?

@Iskulya I would recommend you check out the major mods. They don't have these issues (I play mostly Kaiserreich and Equestria at War, to excellent mods with almost no scripting errors).

 

[Riukus]

Interesting. For me, it's pretty even between France and Germany coming out on top. And what path for Britain do you go? I thought they have no non-commy path?

There is a path to resurrect UK. It actually really fun.

UPD. After reading reddit I realised they removed the path a year ago or so. Sorry I don't know about it. And shame for modders.

 

[Herr B.]

UPD. After reading reddit I realised they removed the path a year ago or so. Sorry I don't know about it. And shame for modders.

Yeah, that was why I was confused.

I can understand it, because balancing. And UoB has already three pretty different path to choose from, even if they are all commy. For normal UK you need to play Canada.