Turkey seems very well done

[safe-keeper]

I just caved in and bought the country pack, because I keep coming back to Turkey in the Hearts of Iron games, and all I can say is, god, PDX is getting good at making immersive experiences for various countries.

I know very little of Turkish history, and found myself in the midst of terms and I knew nothing about, and found myself curious about. What or who are the Kemalists, for example. What does this law do? What can I do in regards to the Kurds? I had heard of Ataturk, of course, but I had no idea he lived during this time period, I thought he was somewhere in older/ancient history . Possibly got this impression because of the way he seems to be almost deified by the Turkisk people.

Either way, I felt so incredibly immersed in the experience, and the Turkish folk music really added to that. I have to admit it's not the kind of music I listen to regularly, but along with all the events, focuses, and decisions, it did so much to make me really feel like I was in charge of Turkey.

I know there's countries that badly need new focus trees, but I hope PDX at some point revisits old focus trees and updates them to bring them up to the quality of these new countries we're getting.

In fact I really like the idea of country packs in general, in part because they're a cheap way to get more ways to play the game, but also because, well, chances are smaller PDX will sneak in some fix to the game that should've been in a patch all along (I'm looking at you, blockable sea zones and neutral Vichy) .

 

[Nawolith]

Agreed.

I have read threads here, that ask for some time shaven off the focuses for the Ottoman Empire Restoration and a better explanation how to get there. But besides that i really agree with you: Immersion times 10!

 

[Jimmyfeellucky]

The thing is, when the Devs made the focus tree, they devised Turkey to join the war in 1945 historically.
So yeah those focuses take a long time to complete.

In my opinion, the Ottoman Empire path should give the player 3 choices based on time to act:

1. Early expansion into weaker nations before ww2 and suffer embargo from the allies and internal conflict. But better take land early or nothing later.

2. Go along with the Axis and roll over the middle east. In 1940, your internal politics may be stable enough to not cause much trouble. But your economy and military isn't well prepare for war similar to Italy.

3. Late game final boss with stable internal politics and strong economy and military. Unlike the USA, you declare war on everyone along with your own faction/puppet. I find Ottoman puppets Iran is kinda weird though.

Right now the Ottoman tree is so static and not give much of a choice.

 

[Harin]

I very much agree with the OP. There is so much to take in I quickly realized I was not going to be able to just scan over the focuses and know what was going on. Thankfully, with the way Turkey is presented, I am enjoying the learning curve. I have already re-started multiple games, just to see how different focus branches work. In past content, I usually find an obvious focus path and just finish the game. Here, I feel like there are more things to do and they are interesting enough, that I find myself playing with the focus tree and having fun with it.

 

[Iskulya]

On the subject of the Ottoman Empire focuses, here's what I think:

In my opinion, the Ottoman focuses should have a dedicated starting perhaps after "Fully Integrate the Banks", and starting this branch should start you down the path of the elections but with the events being locked in to the conservatives winning the election(while, conversely, the existing Democratic branch would lock you into a liberal democratic CHP).

I see a few advantages to this.

1. A lot of 'filler' focuses like the "Treaty of Sadabaad", "Assess our Future", "The Hatay Issue", and "Peace in the World" can be skipped and thus things will move along more quickly. The Hatay Issue isn't really necessary to the Ottomans because they already have a focus to demand the entirety of Syria and will be going to the war in the Middle East Anyway.

2. It is simpler to understand for the player, and does not rely on making the correct decisions in events.

3. It allows for the possibility of further incorporating "reactive focuses", I'll expand on this.

If the Ottoman focuses had their own dedicated branch available early on, one possible thing to consider would be making Germany 'react' to this by Opposing Hitler. Furthermore, if Rhineland has already been chosen, the fascist focuses could be disabled and Oppose Hitler bypassed and Germany loaded into the Revive the Kaiserreich focuses. This could work, as we have seen in Man the Guns that it is possible to disable the focuses from the AI's current branch of the focus tree and to bypass the requirements for the mutually exclusive ones and put them in a different part of the tree. We see this with the Loyalist revolt tags for monarchist Britain. When the UK goes monarchist, the dominions revolt and start taking independent democratic, fascist, or communist focuses. Upon instigating the revolt, the new tag switches back to the UK loyalist focuses.

Additionally, Hungary could be fast tracked into trying to reform Austria-Hungary, but this is optional since the Imperial German focuses allow AH to come into existence anyway.

In this scenario I would also recommend a very small revision to the Central Powers focuses for Germany: I would add a new focus which is mutually exclusive with Assassinate Mussolini, which allows the German player to assist in overthrowing the Turkish government and restoring the Sultanate and bringing them into the Central Powers.

In this way, we have a real possibility of recreating WW1 without being forced to use game rules. It also avoids the potentially OP situation of having Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, AND the Ottomans in the Central Powers together. It also gives Ottoman players some allies to give them more of a fighting chance. For many players, going it alone as the Ottomans is too difficult to be fun.

I have a lot to say on Turkey and the new focus trees in general, but that is better left to another post.

 

[TalyonUngol]

On the subject of the Ottoman Empire focuses, here's what I think:

In my opinion, the Ottoman focuses should have a dedicated starting perhaps after "Fully Integrate the Banks", and starting this branch should start you down the path of the elections but with the events being locked in to the conservatives winning the election(while, conversely, the existing Democratic branch would lock you into a liberal democratic CHP).

I see a few advantages to this.

1. A lot of 'filler' focuses like the "Treaty of Sadabaad", "Assess our Future", "The Hatay Issue", and "Peace in the World" can be skipped and thus things will move along more quickly. The Hatay Issue isn't really necessary to the Ottomans because they already have a focus to demand the entirety of Syria and will be going to the war in the Middle East Anyway.

2. It is simpler to understand for the player, and does not rely on making the correct decisions in events.

3. It allows for the possibility of further incorporating "reactive focuses", I'll expand on this.

If the Ottoman focuses had their own dedicated branch available early on, one possible thing to consider would be making Germany 'react' to this by Opposing Hitler. Furthermore, if Rhineland has already been chosen, the fascist focuses could be disabled and Oppose Hitler bypassed and Germany loaded into the Revive the Kaiserreich focuses. This could work, as we have seen in Man the Guns that it is possible to disable the focuses from the AI's current branch of the focus tree and to bypass the requirements for the mutually exclusive ones and put them in a different part of the tree. We see this with the Loyalist revolt tags for monarchist Britain. When the UK goes monarchist, the dominions revolt and start taking independent democratic, fascist, or communist focuses. Upon instigating the revolt, the new tag switches back to the UK loyalist focuses.

Additionally, Hungary could be fast tracked into trying to reform Austria-Hungary, but this is optional since the Imperial German focuses allow AH to come into existence anyway.

In this scenario I would also recommend a very small revision to the Central Powers focuses for Germany: I would add a new focus which is mutually exclusive with Assassinate Mussolini, which allows the German player to assist in overthrowing the Turkish government and restoring the Sultanate and bringing them into the Central Powers.

In this way, we have a real possibility of recreating WW1 without being forced to use game rules. It also avoids the potentially OP situation of having Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, AND the Ottomans in the Central Powers together. It also gives Ottoman players some allies to give them more of a fighting chance. For many players, going it alone as the Ottomans is too difficult to be fun.

I have a lot to say on Turkey and the new focus trees in general, but that is better left to another post.

I honestly like the size of the tree, its just the amount of 70 day focuses that give you barely anything is a bit much. I like how much effort they put in and the immersion, but again, this is alot.

 

[safe-keeper]

I very much agree with the OP. There is so much to take in I quickly realized I was not going to be able to just scan over the focuses and know what was going on. Thankfully, with the way Turkey is presented, I am enjoying the learning curve. I have already re-started multiple games, just to see how different focus branches work. In past content, I usually find an obvious focus path and just finish the game. Here, I feel like there are more things to do and they are interesting enough, that I find myself playing with the focus tree and having fun with it.

I too gave up on getting an overview of the focus tree, and just went focus by focus, without thinking ahead too much. I'm thinking the devs should maybe put some descriptions or labels for each focus group or something, like "this focus path does this", and "this focus path does that". The focus names and icons themselves often make it fairly clear what a focus does, and what a path does, but it still gets a bit overwhelming with big focus trees, like the one for Turkey.

Also, the text descriptions are nice, but often I find they lean more towards flavour text than a clear description of what the focus actually does. Which is both good and bad, as it's better for immersion, but makes it a bit confusing in some cases.

Also, it'd still be nice to have a "historical path" you could turn on to see an approximation of what the most correct historical sequence of focii would be.

 

[Duke_Dave]

In my fanboy opinion Turkey is solid the Ottoman tree is the worst in the game, way too long to reach, I couldn't recruit new troops since Kurdistan was sucking up so many resources. Therefore also didn't get either Syria or Bulgaria since I am too weak.

 

[Iskulya]

You need to approach the issue another way, then. I think way too many people approach Kurdistan with the idea of having their cake and eating it. If you just leave the occupation policy on civilian administration to boost up compliance, you will lose all your manpower. On the other hand, if you switch it to martial law you will basically lose less than 10k manpower in all over 3 years. When the Kurdish states have the modifiers that boost the resistance target up, it's extremely foolish to use a light occupation law. You should stick it on martial law until you gain access to the special reconciliation occupation law. This hugely reduces garrison size requirements and garrison damage, and provides tremendous compliance gain to the point that it will take less than a year to boost compliance from near zero to the 70% required to integrate it.

You don't even need to use the counter-insurgency decisions at that point. The reconciliation occupation law is so powerful that it makes it unnecessary, more so given that the counter-insurgency decision is way too unreliable and probably hurts you more than it helps.



One of the biggest issues with Turkey right now is the lack of a fifth research slot. The one additional research slot it has access to comes very late, and if you're playing Ottomans, *extremely* late if you even manage to get it at all. Aside from testing things out to see how they work, I will not be playing it until the research slot situation is remedied.

It's pretty frustrating because Turkey has the potential industry and the resources to play around with all the big toys: planes, ships, and tanks, but because you will be stuck with 3 research slots until 1941 or 42, and then be stuck at 4 the rest of the game, you will pretty much have to sacrifice ever having 2 out of those 3 categories.

With that said, there's a LOT of things that went right with Turkey's design. It is extremely fleshed out with events and such, I noticed that you even gain different prime minister advisors automatically based on your government politics.

It's also nice that instead of being shackled to the Allies, Axis, and Comintern, you are offered an alternative to each. If you don't want to go allies, or if you want to stay Democratic and the allies no longer exist, you could just make the Balkan Entente. If you are fascist and don't want to join the Axis or if the axis doesn't exist at all, you can make try to make a Mediterranean Entente with Italy, Spain, and Portugal. If you are communist and don't want to join the Comintern, you can make the anti-Bolshevik bloc.

As if that wasn't enough, each of these faction joining/creation focuses are further fleshed out with focuses that provide bonuses or opportunities that synergize with the theme of that choice. If you join the Axis, you can focus on the Eastern Front and gain bonuses to attrition, or you could focus on the Middle Eastern theater and support the Golden Square. All of the other choices are similarly fleshed out with appropriate thematic focus and bonuses that are appropriate to your strategic choice. Very well done.

I would contrast this to Greece. For those that don't know, @Buzz! designed both Greece and Turkey, but did Greece first. There is a definite maturation of design that is noticed in moving from the Greek to the Turkish focus tree. A few of Greece's political paths don't have alternatives, or even any option at all in one case.

The Venezalist path is quite fun, but it's not hard to have achieved the Megali Idea before the end of 1938. What are we supposed to do after that, though? There's no focus to join the Allies, or an alternative to it. I suppose we are expected to manually join the Allies after being attacked, but it would have been nice to have seen some additional focuses fleshing out Greece's relationship to the Allies after Megali, or an alternative choice for alliance. Similarly, if the Axis doesn't exist, then you're pretty much SOL as far as focuses go if you went fascist as Greece.

The Turkish tree in comparison always provides extremely fleshed out alternatives to all of the 'conventional' choices(Axis, Allies, Comintern). Additionally, most Greek political paths are somewhat lacking in terms of long term goals, which the Turkish tree has in spades not even counting the fun Turanist branch at the very end(which was also a really nice addition. It wasn't needed, but it being there made the tree that much better and complete.).

I do like Greece's tree, but you can definitely tell that the Turkish tree was a very significant step forward. The experience Buzz gained in working on Greece definitely shows when you compare the two.

 

[safe-keeper]

Oh, and I like the way the trees don't give you things for free anymore. In the earlier trees, you complete a focus and factories just magically pop into existence out of nowhere. Now you need to take a focus, then spend political points, then wait 150 days or whatever it was before the new factories become available to you. So much more immersive.

 

[TalyonUngol]

Oh, and I like the way the trees don't give you things for free anymore. In the earlier trees, you complete a focus and factories just magically pop into existence out of nowhere. Now you need to take a focus, then spend political points, then wait 150 days or whatever it was before the new factories become available to you. So much more immersive.

True but now its just a waste of 70 days thats better used somewhere else as well as better use of PP which is a scarce commodity for the smaller nations and usually, the gain of factories is not worth the PP or time spent. You mean I get one factory every 90 days for 25-75 PP? Wonderful. I rather just spend 70 days and gain 120 PP. Not to mention, it requires you to spend even more PP and lose PP per month in order to get relations up with these nations as Turkey because everyone around you has negative thoughts about ya.

All in all... just not worth it. The reward is not worth the price.

 

[Nawolith]

Oh, and I like the way the trees don't give you things for free anymore. In the earlier trees, you complete a focus and factories just magically pop into existence out of nowhere. Now you need to take a focus, then spend political points, then wait 150 days or whatever it was before the new factories become available to you. So much more immersive.

*Cough* Puppeting iraq and iran as ottomans just because they joined your faction without them having an option to say no, becasue they were stupid enough to join your faction earlier*cough*

But yeah, i like the stuff too!