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HOI4 Dev Diary - News from the Eastern Front

Hi everyone! It’s time to touch base and start talking about what we have been up to since we released 1.6.2. We have been both preparing to start on the next big expansion which will come together with the 1.8 “Husky” Update as well as working on various tasks for 1.7 ‘Hydra’ which is the next upcoming release. Let's jump in. Beware, it’s going to be pretty wordy!

1.7 ‘Hydra’
So first up, why 1.7? This is because we are now going 64-bit which will mean you can no longer run HOI4 on 32-bit, so we want to make it clear it is a different technical base. More on this next dev diary though.
We have also worked on some of the bugs that have popped up since then, most importantly front issues for Germany vs Soviets. This was something that was reported during 1.6.2 development, but as we dug into things it turned out to require a lot more work than we had planned. We made the decision to do it for 1.7, and instead of just fixing that particular issue we also reworked a bit of how fronts and the ai work. This is going to be what the diary will be about today!
Oh and because people will ask... we are not super far away from the 1.7 release. We plan to let you help test it in open beta soon (where soon means like “within a week” or thereabouts).


What’s new on the eastern front?
Operation Barbarossa, which is the German invasion of the Soviet Union, is one of the pivotal balance points in HOI4 (and in all the HOI games) together with the fall of the low countries, Poland and the Sino-Japanese war. After 1.6.2 we had Germany beating the Soviets a bit too easily, and in particular, players had too easy of a time doing it. This had a lot of different reasons. The primary one is that we spent a lot of time overhauling the German strategic and planning AI which has made it very consistent and strong. Additionally for the AI, being good at defending is a much harder job than being good at attacking. What wasn’t working properly was that when the Soviets finally fell, it was often due to an issue related to frontline stability. The Soviet AI would misprioritize this and move a large part of its front elsewhere, leaving a hole that the German AI would often exploit (which players also definitely did). It’s also not fun beating an AI when it makes such a critical mistake. This particular case was extremely random, but the front reaching Crimea was a common factor. At that point, a new front would open at the same time as the line became long enough to require multiple Army Groups to cover it, which was another weakness for the AI. A lot of those technical issues should now behave a lot better and we are consistently seeing much better performance from the Soviets. Although, they do still generally lose in the end, but this is mostly by design.

To explain why this is a good target, let’s look at our balance targets for Barbarossa:
  • The Axis pushes the Soviet line in slowly until the Soviets lose in 1945 unless the Allies secure a big landing and relieve the Soviets, at which point Germany should start losing with its forces split across the 2-3 fronts.
So why is this a good target?
  • As an Axis player, it means business as usual. You get to beat the Soviets, and the better we make the German AI (which does the heavy lifting), the more challenging we can make it for a player Germany and still retain the balance target.
  • As a Comintern player it means you need to defend, hold out, and push back Germany. Here, the stronger we can make the German AI, the more challenging it is for a Soviet player. So to keep our balance target we want to make the Soviet as tough as possible, but on their own, they need to break by ‘45.
  • As an Allied player, you have a bit of a race on your hands. A Germany that has beaten the Soviets will be a very difficult target, so you need to build up your strength and preferably strike when the German army is as extended, as it will get some solid landing points (ai is better at defending too now, so this is not always so easy). From a balance point, we need to make sure that the eastern front holds up long enough for you to get ready to do this. If the Soviets can push back the Germans on their own, there is no reason to play someone on the Allied side. If Germany beats the Soviet too fast, you will not have time to get involved (especially since the Allies are much more spread across the world and contains more minor nations we wanna make sure can make it to the party).
Hopefully, that clarifies how we think about stuff. At the moment the allies do ok in Africa, but pulling off consistent D-Day scale invasions is something we have as more of a long term goal we are working on. Invasion skill for the AI has improved a lot, but the AI has also gotten better at defending. We have thought out a long term plan to also tackle this, but it requires a lot more strategic planning on the side of the AI with respect to theaters, so it is something you will need to look forward to in the future :)

AI in Hearts of Iron is a very complex problem and something we will always be working on improving. It will never really be “done”. We are feeling a lot better about the eastern front now and shuffling issues there, but there is, of course, lots of work left to do everywhere. It won’t fix everything, but I hope it will feel a lot better when you get to try fighting the Soviets again in 1.7 :)

Tools
So while I am talking about AI, let's take a look at some of the tools we use to stay on top of the strategic situation and to help find relevant savegames, etc.

Every night we run several machines hands-off that record various data for us and lets us check whether we broke something, measure improvements, etc. Loading 30 savegames every morning and going over them is neither fun nor effective, so we have developed this awesome web tool that gives us a quick timeline and map to scan over:

Screenshot_1.jpg


Heat maps also make it easy to scan over time and see where the AI is distributing and focusing its units. This example below is highlighting the Japanese forces late 41:

Screenshot_9.jpg


Unit Controller for Players
So that was all about the AI, but we have also done underlying changes as well as UI that will affect you as a player.

A lot of players liked using primarily Army Group Orders for their armies so we have been doing various improvements there. For example, if you do not want to mess with individual army orders on a front you could already hit Shift-Click when setting up the frontline and it would simply keep all the units on the army group order. This is primarily how the AI handles big fronts now. If you do it this way as a player we have cut down a lot of the clutter you get by spreading multiple armies over the same area by having divisions without individual orders and part of an army group order to simply show and group on the map by using the Army Group color. As an example, this is an Army Group Frontline where each army is assigned a piece:

upload_2019-5-15_16-31-1.png

Now, if you are the kind of player who has a big front and wants to simplify things by giving it all over to the Army Group (Shift-Click to create the frontline) you will get this:
upload_2019-5-15_16-31-16.png


There are still 3 armies there, but because you didn’t care to assign a position we won't clutter things by showing that (this also work for garrisoning which is really nice for big areas). You can still select the individual armies as normal in the bottom bar and in the selection lists etc.

For players who prefer to keep control over where each army is assigned we have also made that easier in two important ways:
  • Each army front piece on an army group front must connect, so no holes are allowed. That among other things means that you only need to adjust one point (the connection point) if you want to adjust how much frontline each gets, rather than trying to adjust 2 points, sometimes while the front was moving and with the game unpaused :S
  • We have added controls to be able to change the order of the armies if you want to reshuffle that. The middle of each line when in Edit Mode will now show arrows which let you swap position for that piece of the frontline with its neighbors.
upload_2019-5-15_16-50-51.png


We have also increased saturation on all the rendering of plans on the map to make sure they are easier to see and to make sure they match their respective army colors better.

Next week we will be going over other bugfixes, balance and other changes so tune in then!
 
Thanks for the update @podcat !

The Germans had over 100k men stationed in Norway doing nothing the entire war.
Not quite nothing. British commando's raided the Norwegian coast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Commando_operations_during_the_Second_World_War
And once Finland had been defeated by the USSR the Soviets started to push into Northern Norway and Norwegian forces were sent to help them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_of_Finnmark#Deployment_of_Norwegian_Forces

From historic point of view declared goals are strange. The only chanse of Germany to win the War was blitzkrieg. USSR had more resourses, more territory, more soldiers and the same industry.
In my opinion, the eastern front should motivate Germany to form tank armies and try to break through it. Otherwise, USSR must slowly push Germany to Berlin and beyond.
In fact, by the time of the landing in Normandy, the war for Germany was already lost.
Well that is truth but part of it was down to Hitler's refusal to pull Gerrnan troops back from the eastern front to more defensible positions. If they had pulled back instead of over committing in areas like Stalingrad then Kursk (and leaving troops trapped in places like Crimea etc) the war would likely have lasted a lot longer. He kept issuing his no retreat order fortress orders that some commanders eventually ignored anyway, and they mostly ended up with German troops encircled as a result.
 
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Like I said, then why don't they balance the game in a way where Japan would defeat the USA in the Pacific in most games? It would be even more interesting from the gameplay perspective, would it not?

That's what's already happening frequently in the pacific war on the current patch when left to AI vs AI.

Japan often goes as far east as to take pearl harbour, and all of east/south Asia and the pacific alongside it.
 
Exactly, that is also one huge problem. We can't manually specify which units we want where, and neither does the battle planner do it automatically. Last time I tried out the battle planner with an army consisting of both mountaineers and tanks, the tanks got stuck up in the mountains while the mountaineers got killed on the plains... For defensive lines, this should be automatic, for offensive lines, it could be solved if we could specify a lot of small orders, but then the battle planner bugs out if you give it anything more complex than 2 stright lines.

OK, I don't even use the battle planner most of the time, but I still have to ask..why on earth would you put Mountaineer divisions and armored divisions in the same army? I thought everybody kept armored divisions under their own separate command, am I the only one? And I would definitely not leave them spread out across the front line - you bunch them up and use them en masse to create decisive breakthroughs.
 
The Axis pushes the Soviet line in slowly until the Soviets lose in 1945 unless the Allies secure a big landing and relieve the Soviets, at which point Germany should start losing with its forces split across the 2-3 fronts.

Wait, why? Weren't the germans effectively stopped after Stalingrad and were pushed back after Kursk? Do you mean Italy is the big landing?
 
The biggest difference between Stalin and Hitler at least in the books I have read, is that the more things went wrong, the more Hitler took over. Stalin on the otherhand took more of back seat when things were going wrong, the STAVKA was really a committee between 1942-44 and Stalin was regularly talked out of different strategies by Zhukov, even shouted at.

In terms of books I only read two on this particular aspect, "Hitler - Eine Biographie" and "Stalin - Am Hof des roten Zaren". I came to the same conclusion, though. In terms of sheer ability to lead an army and to analyze strategic situations, Stalin was as inept as Hitler. But unlike Hitler, real life events brought Stalin to the point to accept his inability and to delegate certain powers to a few handpicked people he trusted. Hitler, however, just believed fate was on his side and cared little about making mistakes. Everytime one of his decisions blew up in his face, he blamed someone else and assumed even more control. He was also totally indifferent about losing people. Hitler probably cared as little about his own soldiers as he cared for the men opposing him.

What fascinates me the most about Hitler is that he always had the intention to go to war, yet he never actually bothered to prepare carefully. He screwed up the military buildup, he screwed up the economic buildup and he screwed up diplomacy. All by himself, because he did not trust anyone with the powers to do it. Not even at a time when he still was able to realize his own shortcomings on the subjects of war and economy. The Nazis couldn't even make their own industry produce in significant numbers, let alone those of occupied countries, because of their twisted economic policies and their inability to put winning the war before their toxic ideology.
 
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OK, I don't even use the battle planner most of the time, but I still have to ask..why on earth would you put Mountaineer divisions and armored divisions in the same army? I thought everybody kept armored divisions under their own separate command, am I the only one? And I would definitely not leave them spread out across the front line - you bunch them up and use them en masse to create decisive breakthroughs.
I usually put armored and mountaineer divisions in separate armies and manually set them up. The army switch and front adjustment buttons may allow me to use army groups more. It is an exciting change.
 
The North African Campaign was happening at the same time as Stalingrad. The North African Campaign resulted in the Axis losing almost 500,000 men. Maybe the 6th army wouldn't have been encircled if there was a few 100,000 more troops on the eastern front.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_Campaign

No offense but the italians wouldn't have made a difference. Why not make north Africa and Italy more competitive to make a balance point, and make the Allies eager to beat germany before the Soviets take too much territory?
 
Ah, finally another flame war over who defeated the nazis "in reality". As a german, to my mind, the Soviet Union deserves the greatest credit in terms of military warfare, the US deserves the greatest credit in terms of economical warfare, and the British deserve the most credit in terms of ideology and diplomacy. If you took any of the big three, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, out of the equation the war would have developed way more in Hitlers favour - allthough it remains disputable wether Germany could have won the scenario under different circumstances - with Hitler at the top of the chain of command in military, economy and diplomacy.

To my mind, Hitler himself also deserves a lot of credit for defeating Germany. Not only was he the guy who pulled the trigger on Hitler, he was also totally inept in terms of diplomacy, warfare and economy, and arrogant enough not to care the slightest way about that.

Hitler's arrogance and incompetence probably killed as many germans as the Red Army, the Royal Navy and the US Air Force combined, so when it comes to putting credit where its due, for me, it certainly is the austrian who is the most underappreciated in this whole equation.
You could make a case that the declaration of war on ~70% of the world is incompetent, but, during the war itself Hitler did relatively good (imo). Madman? yes, but not a idiot.
The best example is Hitler's choice of going to Caucasus for the petroleum. His generals wanted to go for Moscow because they thought that USSR would capitulate just like France did. Well, at least now, we can thanks Herr Halder for proving that you can't play chess on the Go board.
It's kind of funny that pretty much all german generals who became famous (Guderian, Manstein..) during and after the war, did so only because of bohemian corporal, whom they blamed for everything after the war. Woke up on wrong side of bed? Hitler's fault! 6th army didn't break out of Stalingrad pocket? Hitler's fault! (Paulus was sending pleas to retreat out of Stalingrad since day 1 he got encircled and even before, Manstein + Jeschonnek & co persuaded Hitler everytime that they can fight their way to the pocket and supply him from air..) Germany didn't win at Kursk? Hitler's fault! (Put anything that even mildly irritates you) was/is Hitler's fault!

And no, I'm not defending Hitler, he was a murderer and a really bad person, he threw Germany into the war that she couldn't win anyways, which already makes him a bad leader (and then add his policies about certain religious and ethnic groups, pillaging half of Europe etc...), but it makes me really disappointed that people believe in the lies that german generals wrote in their memoirs post-war.

tl;dr
Was Hitler one of the worst human beings to ever exist? Yes.
Was he a moron (after the war has started)? No.

please don't kill me for that
 
Historically, by the time D-Day happened, the USSR has already decisivly turned the tides. The USSR has already been outproducing Germany and outmatching Germany in fielded manpower and equipment for quite some time by that moment. After the Kursk battle of summer 1943 (almost a year prior to the D-Day!) Germany was not able to regain initiative and go into offence for the rest of the war even once.The D-Day only hastened the fall of Germany, but was in no way decisive to this outcome (well, it was decisive with respect to the zones of control distribution after the war).

Not that Germany wasn't already in a fair bit of trouble by this stage, but they did pull some experienced divisions off the Eastern Front that (as best I can recall - this is dirty, landy stuff that I don't read a lot about) would have been involved in response (or in anticipation of? Can't remember which, sorry) to the May 1943 Allied landings in Sicily, which didn't hurt the Soviets' chances.

However, I think it's a tad simplistic to say any one nation 'won' the war. It was a team effort, and it took six years and a lot of hard work by all players, with Britain, the US and the USSR all receiving key aid from each other. The USSR would have been in a much tighter spot if Germany could have single-mindedly focussed on it, so Britain just staying in the fight could be argued to be the difference. On the other hand, as others have noted, the material aid provided by the US was huge to both the USSR and Britain, and they also fielded large military forces of their own, so they could be argued to be the difference. Then, of course, the majority of the on-the-ground fighting against the Germany army was done by the USSR, so they could be argued to be the difference. All of those arguments would, from my angle, be wrong. In such a complex conflict, the idea that there is only 'one' difference between winning or losing is far, far too simplistic.

But if it wasn't, all those arguments would still be wrong - clearly it was Australia that single-handedly defeated Germany, Japan and Italy :D.
 
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You could make a case that the declaration of war on ~70% of the world is incompetent, but, during the war itself Hitler did relatively good (imo). Madman? yes, but not a idiot.
The best example is Hitler's choice of going to Caucasus for the petroleum. His generals wanted to go for Moscow because they thought that USSR would capitulate just like France did. Well, at least now, we can thanks Herr Halder for proving that you can't play chess on the Go board.
It's kind of funny that pretty much all german generals who became famous (Guderian, Manstein..) during and after the war, did so only because of bohemian corporal, whom they blamed for everything after the war. Woke up on wrong side of bed? Hitler's fault! 6th army didn't break out of Stalingrad pocket? Hitler's fault! (Paulus was sending pleas to retreat out of Stalingrad since day 1 he got encircled and even before, Manstein + Jeschonnek & co persuaded Hitler everytime that they can fight their way to the pocket and supply him from air..) Germany didn't win at Kursk? Hitler's fault! (Put anything that even mildly irritates you) was/is Hitler's fault!

And no, I'm not defending Hitler, he was a murderer and a really bad person, he threw Germany into the war that she couldn't win anyways, which already makes him a bad leader (and then add his policies about certain religious and ethnic groups, pillaging half of Europe etc...), but it makes me really disappointed that people believe in the lies that german generals wrote in their memoirs post-war.

tl;dr
Was Hitler one of the worst human beings to ever exist? Yes.
Was he a moron (after the war has started)? No.

please don't kill me for that

Hitler certainly was not a moron. He lived in a hotel for the homeless for years. But when he died, he had assumed total control of the third (or second?) biggest industrialized nation in the world, and it literally took the entire rest of the world 6 years to bring him down. In certain aspects, Hitler had an almost demonic intellect. What I'm saying here is that there is a lot of stuff which was already obvious in the 30s and which he cared little about. Just to give you one of many examples about what I am talking here: in the mid 1930s, if a company wanted to buy a spare tire for one of its trucks and it did not bribe the Nazi in charge in time, it had to buy an entire new truck. The companies then detached the tires and sold the truck for spare parts. That was due to the "Vierjahresplan", which stated that rubber is a luxury (it had to be imported). The idea was to bolster their own synthetic rubber plants.

Which they did not have build yet.

Hitler even bragged about his economic policies, regulary. He forbit industry to invest in new tools because that would have curbed jobs. He also subsidized small farmers, allthough there was a lack of professional farmers already in '33. Because of ideological reasons, he prevented farmers switching to mechanized farming. These two measures decreased Germanys manpower pool massively because she needed way more men working in factories in farms. Hitler also refused to integrate women into the workplace.

There are many, many more examples and all of them were already obvious in the 1930s. Hitlers ambition simply was way beyond his skills, and he was too vain and too arrogant to look for the people who had these skills. Germany had plenty of them, though (just like Italy had enough fine men who could have changed a lot)
 
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Hitler certainly was not a moron. He lived in a hotel for the homeless for years. But when he died, he had assumed total control of the third (or second?) biggest industrialized nation in the world, and it literally took the entire rest of the world 6 years to bring him down. In certain aspects, Hitler had an almost demonic intellect. What I'm saying here is that there is a lot of stuff which was already obvious in the 30s and which he cared little about. Just to give you one of many examples about what I am talking here: in the mid 1930s, if a company wanted to buy a spare tire for one of its trucks and it did not bribe the Nazi in charge in time, it had to buy an entire new truck. The companies then detached the tires and sold the truck for spare parts. That was due to the "Vierjahresplan", which stated that rubber is a luxury (it had to be imported). The idea was to bolster their own synthetic rubber plants.

Which they did not have build yet.

Hitler even bragged about his economic policies, regulary. He forbit industry to invest in new tools because that would have curbed jobs. He also subsidized small farmers, allthough there was a lack of professional farmers already in '33. Because of ideological reasons, he prevented farmers switching to mechanized farming. These two measures decreased Germanys manpower pool massively because she needed way more men working in factories in farms. Hitler also refused to integrate women into the workplace.

There are many, many more examples and all of them were already obvious in the 1930s. Hitlers ambition simply was way beyond his skills, and he was too vain and too arrogant to look for the people who had these skills. Germany had plenty of them, though (just like Italy had enough fine men who could have changed a lot)
Fair enough, I agree.
When I was reading your first post I thought you're one of the "WeHrMaChT dId NoThInG wRoNg", "it was all Hitler's fault" types.
Well, I guess I'm sorry for thinking you're one. :-;

Now about economical 'third way', I agree it's very wasteful when talking only in economic sense, but Mussolini and Hitler didn't think of it in this way. Nevertheless, it's offtopic so it's time to stop I think. If you want talk more about this you can PM me.
 
Hitler's arrogance and incompetence probably killed as many germans as the Red Army, the Royal Navy and the US Air Force combined

German generals made more than enough bad decisions on their own to lose the war even before you consider Hitler's intervention. Germany wasn't outmanned on the eastern front after Kursk any more than 4:1 even locally -- the reality was that the Soviets simply got better at combined arms warfare than the Germans.

One of the most frustrating [but understandable given it's usually someone trying to sell a book] historical revisionist tropes is the "myth of If Only Hitler Wasn't The Leader" twaddle. Outside of Rundstedt [who certainly made his own errors and embellished etc] the German leaders regularly committed armor piecemeal, didn't bother to define/focus on/exploit a schwerpunkt.. and that's just when looking at multiple sources to get a good picture of daily localized attacks just to capture a couple dozen miles.

The game is fun but let's please stop with the nonsense about the reality of the war.
 
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German generals made more than enough bad decisions on their own to lose the war even before you consider Hitler's intervention. Germany wasn't outmanned on the eastern front after Kursk much more than 1.4:1 even locally -- the reality was that the Soviets simply got better at combined arms warfare than the Germans.

One of the most frustrating [but understandable given it's usually someone trying to sell a book] historical revisionist tropes is the "myth of If Only Hitler Wasn't The Leader" twaddle. Outside of Rundstedt [who certainly made his own errors and embellished etc] the German leaders regularly committed armor piecemeal, didn't bother to define/focus on/exploit a schwerpunkt.. and that's just when looking at multiple sources to get a good picture of daily localized attacks just to capture a couple dozen miles.

The game is fun but let's please stop with the nonsense about the reality of the war.

The reason why I wrote that sentence is because I am aware of how Hitler actually "prepared" the war (spoiler alert: he did not). That incompetence and arrogance I talked about did not start in 39. It became a massive problem already in 33. While it sure remains debatable if early Moscow would have been better than wrecking Kiev or going for the caucasus was smarter than attempting to seize Moscow a second time, its not debatable that there was no holistic approach in the german war preparations. The armaments industry was a dumpster fire, the heavy industry was a dumpster fire, the situation in the agricultural sector was outright horrid. Germany was lacking coal. Coal, ffs. Germany could have flooded the industry of occupied France with coal and hence gained an important source of aluminum as well as other war materials. Germany had and still has today massive coal deposits. None of that did happen. Due to Hitler. He is personally at fault here.

Also, I do not consider the Wehrmacht to be superior to any other allied army. Neither the equipment, nor the doctrines, nor the fighting spirit, and certainly not the quality of the generals staff or the officers in general. The Wehrmacht pulled off two stunts, the first being the Sichelschnitt, the second being launching Barbarossa while the Red Army was reorganizing. Before that and after that was nothing special and in no way superior to anything
 
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Not that Germany wasn't already in a fair bit of trouble by this stage, but they did pull some experienced divisions off the Eastern Front that (as best I can recall - this is dirty, landy stuff) would have been involved in in response (or in anticipation of? Can't remember which, sorry) to the May 1943 Allied landings in Sicily, which didn't hurt the Soviets' chances.

However, I think it's a tad simplistic to say any one nation 'won' the war. It was a team effort, and it took six years and a lot of hard work by all players, with Britain, the US and the USSR all receiving key aid from each other. The USSR would have been in a much tighter spot if Germany could have single-mindedly focussed on it, so Britain just staying in the fight could be argued to be the difference. On the other hand, as others have noted, the material aid provided by the US was huge to both the USSR and Britain, and they also fielded large military forces of their own, so they could be argued to be the difference. Then, of course, the majority of the on-the-ground fighting against the Germany army was done by the USSR, so they could be argued to be the difference. All of those arguments would, from my angle, be wrong. In such a complex conflict, the idea that there is only 'one' difference between winning or losing is far, far too simplistic.

But if it wasn't, all those arguments would still be wrong - clearly it was Australia that single-handedly defeated Germany, Japan and Italy :D.

I'm not saying that USSR singlehandedly won the war, obviously it was a team effort, and all parts of the team aiding each other was crucial. I'm specifically saying that having this:
  • The Axis pushes the Soviet line in slowly until the Soviets lose in 1945 unless the Allies secure a big landing and relieve the Soviets, at which point Germany should start losing with its forces split across the 2-3 fronts.
as the balancing target is just wrong; don't you agree? Allies securing a big landing historically was not the decisive factor, so it shouldn't be the decisive factor in the game as well.

That's what's already happening frequently in the pacific war on the current patch when left to AI vs AI.

Japan often goes as far east as to take pearl harbour, and all of east/south Asia and the pacific alongside it.

But does Japan go as far east as to take California, in most games? That's what I'm talking about.
 
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as the balancing target is just wrong; don't you agree? Allies securing a big landing historically was not the decisive factor, so it shouldn't be the decisive factor in the game as well.

Ah, I get your point. Sorry, been a big week, brain's not quite what it could be (and, to be fair, even at it's best it leaves something to be desired!) In terms of this approach, I think that reading that literally as the only way the Allies can limit Germany would be a bit narrow. The USSR has the manpower that if the Allies went hells bells with lend-lease, while undertaking a large strategic bombing campaign, I personally would like that to be sufficient for the USSR to get the edge (as well as requiring the threat of Allied landings to tie down significant forces away from the Eastern Front). As a single-player USA, I'm fairly confident that this is likely to be possible once the USSR's front management problems are dealt with, although whether the AI would be up for this or not is another question. It's also just my 2 cents, and I could well be wrong :).
 
Not sure how I feel about Germany being able to steamroll the Soviets by design. I don't suppose complaining this close to the patch will matter much. My concern is that the allies will never be able to launch successful invasions of Europe. This is currently the case and the DD acknowledges as much. We're basically still going to see Germany steamroll the Soviets 10 times out of 10 assuming the player does not directly intervene to save them.
 
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But does Japan go as far east as to take California, in most games? That's what I'm talking about.
You specifically said "in the pacific". If that's what you meant, it wasn't spelt out very clearly.

Regardless, whether the AI has the strategic ability to execute on a land invasion of continental North America afterwards is a bit of a different topic to that.
 
You specifically said "in the pacific". If that's what you meant, it wasn't spelt out very clearly.

Regardless, whether the AI has the strategic ability to execute on a land invasion of continental North America afterwards is a bit of a different topic to that.

Yeah, sorry, I thought I was more specific in my orginal comment. Anyway, while as of current patch I often see the US taking some blows initially, they usually can successfully fight back in the Pacific after a while, which I wouldn't call a "defeat". What I mean by "Japan defeating the USA in the Pacific" is a crushing, final defeat where they can't fight back later, which doesn't really happen.
 
All of this back and forth, with everybody throwing around their versions of history are all well and good and all. Just keep in mind that it is almost assuredly true that nobody typing any of this was alive at that time, and any that may have been were not old enough to be in a position of authority, such that they'd really be "in the know". So all of these opinions are really dependent on who you've read, who you've read LATELY, how much of it stuck, and the biases you filtered it through as you were reading. We can all claim to be experts all we want all day, but none of us really have any kind of first hand knowledge what we're talking about, so keep that in mind.

And yes, that includes me. I know more about WW2 than anybody I know in my personal circle because I've read a LOT on it, but I don't pretend to have anything other than a second, third, or fourth-hand view of it. The closest I have to real information is that my father had two uncles at Pearl Harbor, USS Utah. They have both since passed on, but I did talk to them a little bit about it. Mostly they didn't want to talk about it, just like most veterans. But none of that means a hill of beans here, and I don't pretend that it does.

Back in the actual game terms, I think podcat's goal is roughly about right for what I want to see in the game. I want AI Germany to slowly and VERY NARROWLY beat AI USSR, absent any player involvement. Maybe not every single time, but the majority of them. I know good and well, as do most of the rest of you, that this is not 100% historically accurate, but it makes for a better game, and at the end of the day, that's what we're talking about. A game. I want it to mostly reflect the realities of the time period, I want the equipment to act the way it should, and I want the battles to be bloody and hard fought. But I also want a compelling game that forces me to have an impact on the final outcome. And no, that doesn't mean helping decide if the Iron Curtain falls at Warsaw or Strasbourg, but the actual outcome of the war. Hell if we're going for historically accurate, the US by itself dwarfs the production of the Axis forces combined, but that makes for a really lame game. I don't want a really lame game.

That said, if you don't like that view, Paradox has already given you the tools to change it. Before the game starts, you can set power sliders for all of the majors. If you want to make it so the Soviets eventually win, all you'd have to do is bump them up a notch or two on the slider. There are also mods which do a fantastic job of tailoring the game to a multitude of personal tastes. Or, you know, play the game in such a way that YOU matter in determining the outcome of the war. That's what I want. I want to play the Soviets and know that I have to do better than the AI to actually win. And if I'm the Germans, I want to know that I still want to do better than the AI, because even if I defeat the Soviets, I will still have my hands full with the Western Allies, and I'll need some manpower left to actually handle that.

You may now return to your pissing matches and flame wars. Thank you.
 
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