Story: Kaiserreich feels far more immersive than Vanilla because in Vanilla you're expected to know who these people are, why they are here, why one country has this ideology or these factories or this military. Kaiserreich isn't like that though, it's a deep story told through a game mod. Kaiserreich is essentially story driven, it's not like the base game at all, where the game is basically just a sandbox with minimal story outside your real life knowledge of World War II.
Gameplay: In Vanilla, even with ahistorical turned on, it mostly plays out in the same fashion with only minor differences. Kaiserreich's unpredictability, huge content and endless choices make it so great. The combination of the depth of majority of the countries available and the randomness makes it strange and different and more fun than Vanilla.
Long story short: Kaiserreich feels far more immersive than Vanilla because there's lore everywhere, focuses and events.
Which leads me to why I made this topic. I'm curious why can't Vanilla be more like Kaiserreich?
I previously made a topic where we discussed about more flavor vs more mechanics: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...e-immersion-department.1124899/#post-24812350 turns out the majority of Hearts of Iron 4 prefer more mechanics over flavor, but why can't we have both?
What Kaiserreich has that Vanilla doesn't have: Better represented state borders (regions), so many events, so many news (for lore), almost every leader and national idea has a description, a lot of nations have focus tress with a historical path but also alternative paths, unique portraits, even that small +20 Political Power during the national day with a news event that describes the significance of the national day adds more flavour, etc.
Of course you can't make Vanilla like Kaiserreich where something interesting happens in every part of the globe because you can't make up scenarios, but a lot of improvement can be made to make the nations feel more enjoyable. There's hardly a shortage of ideas, if you read the history of each country in World War II there's a lot that can be added in their focus tree in the historical path alone, let alone the fictional alternative paths.
Some players would think that adding more focus trees would make Vanilla feel less sandboxy, but the opposite happened in Kaiserreich. Because each Kaiserreich nation is so unique, has a different situation and has multiple choices, it feels that you have more choices than you would have with a generic Vanilla nation, and that is even with the limitations on factions and ideology that Kaiserreich has.
The devs claim that they only focus on the major nations because the players mostly play the major nations, 40% of the total games are with Germany, but could this be a confusion between causality and correlation? It is tempting to assume that this shows that players prefer Germany because it was the main combatant of the war, but could it be that players prefer Germany because it's one of the few nations with a lot going on? If you play for example Finland or Bulgaria (nations that could have an interesting focus tree) there's not much you can do and it feels rather boring.
I would play so much more Vanilla if it was presented like Kaiserreich, if the focuses were better written and the events came half as thick and fast. In Kaiserreich every country feels unique, in Vanilla only the countries with unique focus trees feel different in some way, and even those with unique focus trees feel close to generic.
Gameplay: In Vanilla, even with ahistorical turned on, it mostly plays out in the same fashion with only minor differences. Kaiserreich's unpredictability, huge content and endless choices make it so great. The combination of the depth of majority of the countries available and the randomness makes it strange and different and more fun than Vanilla.
Long story short: Kaiserreich feels far more immersive than Vanilla because there's lore everywhere, focuses and events.
Which leads me to why I made this topic. I'm curious why can't Vanilla be more like Kaiserreich?
I previously made a topic where we discussed about more flavor vs more mechanics: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...e-immersion-department.1124899/#post-24812350 turns out the majority of Hearts of Iron 4 prefer more mechanics over flavor, but why can't we have both?
What Kaiserreich has that Vanilla doesn't have: Better represented state borders (regions), so many events, so many news (for lore), almost every leader and national idea has a description, a lot of nations have focus tress with a historical path but also alternative paths, unique portraits, even that small +20 Political Power during the national day with a news event that describes the significance of the national day adds more flavour, etc.
Of course you can't make Vanilla like Kaiserreich where something interesting happens in every part of the globe because you can't make up scenarios, but a lot of improvement can be made to make the nations feel more enjoyable. There's hardly a shortage of ideas, if you read the history of each country in World War II there's a lot that can be added in their focus tree in the historical path alone, let alone the fictional alternative paths.
Some players would think that adding more focus trees would make Vanilla feel less sandboxy, but the opposite happened in Kaiserreich. Because each Kaiserreich nation is so unique, has a different situation and has multiple choices, it feels that you have more choices than you would have with a generic Vanilla nation, and that is even with the limitations on factions and ideology that Kaiserreich has.
The devs claim that they only focus on the major nations because the players mostly play the major nations, 40% of the total games are with Germany, but could this be a confusion between causality and correlation? It is tempting to assume that this shows that players prefer Germany because it was the main combatant of the war, but could it be that players prefer Germany because it's one of the few nations with a lot going on? If you play for example Finland or Bulgaria (nations that could have an interesting focus tree) there's not much you can do and it feels rather boring.
I would play so much more Vanilla if it was presented like Kaiserreich, if the focuses were better written and the events came half as thick and fast. In Kaiserreich every country feels unique, in Vanilla only the countries with unique focus trees feel different in some way, and even those with unique focus trees feel close to generic.
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