Alternative history becoming too invasive?

[Khevenhuller]

Not saying that you are wrong, but most of those require peace with Britain (or at least Britain being beaten) before attacking the Soviet. In that case, it's not really WW2 as most people imagine it, more like an other alt-history scenario.

True, but as he said, it's not the game they are making.

I am usually left wondering what game they are making, as whatever answers I get to that question are very diffuse indeed.

As for: "not really WW2 as people imagine it" isn't that exactly what you should get with a sandbox game? My real interest is to look at plausible alternatives and where they may lead, which I would have thought is exactly what a thread looking at alt-history should encompass.

The trouble with PDX and HOI is that they want it to be a Sandbox game except when they don't. They want it to be historical, except when they don't. They have to apply successive sticking plasters to the game in order to make it rational and playable, but have set their face against looking at real choices that confronted leaders and should confront players and instead railroad them to a 1939 war with no political underpinning or objectives other than, as Dalwin pointed out, 'Total Victory'.

One of my favourite countries to play in this sort of game is Italy: the options, constraints and tough decisions are challenging and if you make a cock-up you do not have an industrial powerhouse, great leaders or a capable military to save you from your own folly. In HOI4 all that has been peeled back and Italy is deathly dull.

I am not even going to get into International Treaties, the League of Nations, the Non-Intervention committee and all the other stuff that could make the 1936 start a full game well before the shooting starts. Given that Germany stumbled into a European war in 1939, and that Britain had worked very hard to ensure Germany was isolated in 1939, why can't I play that game? Why can't I try to get myself into the best possible diplomatic position, divide my enemies and make a shooting war easier for myself if I can?

K

 

[Duke_Dave]

Well clearly not if we take this discussion as an account for it. Obviously this doesn't represent the entirety of the community but out of 133 people 78 of those agreed that the current implication of alternative history content recently presented by paradox is more invasive then it is adding to the game. Mainly because of implausibility of the scenarios and just the severity the scenarios bring to disjoint the game from the 2nd world war. in essence nearly 60 percent of the people that has participated in this discussion view it in the manner that is becoming too overbearing for those that wish for more effort in directing the aim for historic play. They choose to take on the challenge of emulating what World War 2 is and they are the company that takes pride in going into great detail in regards to strategy and choice. As you can see alot of people don't feel that way and I only hope to god that Paradox gets the message. Although the way the content designer laid it out he didn't either seem to grasp the request or are entirely dedicated to not fullfill or attempt the request, because its cheaper and easier to make alternative history fantasy then the plausible historic scenarios and events both for the focus tree and in game events/decisions.

I love history and knowing that we will get a restore the ottoman empire focus for Turkey makes me loose sleep because it is even bigger BS than Austria Hungary. But this game has sold a million copies.
This discussion is not very representative,
Because it attracts mostly people that agree with the headline.
I want the game to be more historical but that is not an alt-history vs factual history fight.
It's a fight were the section of the community that wants this must give constructive criticism on how this can be achieved.
Germany starting Barbarossa in winter 1940 is not alt-history it's buggy.
The struggle is to make the devs put more effort into fixing this and implementing new mechanics that help model historic accurate settings.
Playing gaming community identity politics isn't going to help this struggle.

 

[Khevenhuller]

It is not so complex. You don't make peace with someone who consistently breaks treaties and promises. It just makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense if the alternative is defeat and loss of Empire. In 1940 that was the scenario that Britain faced. When the lads came back from Dunkirk there were a total of 50 tanks in the country. The army had lost all of it's artillery, heavy equipment and vast amounts of supplies. Britain's only armoured division had been lost, and with a damp fizzle rather than a bang. Cabinet discussed peace with Germany for two days, and the Prits telegram plus the attempt to appease Mussolini show real attempts by the Appeasers gathered around Halifax and Butler to get out of the war. They were opposed by the Churchill faction and the Labour party members but it was by no means a foregone result that the war would have continued.

It would certainly have been a tough sell to the public, and the Ministry of Information would have had to go into overdrive to portray it as a sort of victory. There is more to it of course: both Churchill and Mussolini did not want peace in 1940, and Hitler was always of the opinion that Britain should have made peace in 1941 when 'both sides had triumphed over a latin power'. Churchill and Musso effectively torpedoed peace feelers in 1940 in a number of ways, and by 1941 Halifax had been packed off to be Ambassador in Washington and Butler had gone to Education. In effect, the British pro-war faction in the Cabinet had politically castrated the Appeasers to avoid a repeat of summer 1940 on the back of the victories of late 1940 and early 1941. Peace in 1940 would have been, as the late Alan Clark put it, 'little more than a liquidator's audit'.

K

 

[kettyo]

It makes perfect sense if the alternative is defeat and loss of Empire. In 1940 that was the scenario that Britain faced. When the lads came back from Dunkirk there were a total of 50 tanks in the country. The army had lost all of it's artillery, heavy equipment and vast amounts of supplies. Britain's only armoured division had been lost, and with a damp fizzle rather than a bang. Cabinet discussed peace with Germany for two days, and the Prits telegram plus the attempt to appease Mussolini show real attempts by the Appeasers gathered around Halifax and Butler to get out of the war. They were opposed by the Churchill faction and the Labour party members but it was by no means a foregone result that the war would have continued.

It would certainly have been a tough sell to the public, and the Ministry of Information would have had to go into overdrive to portray it as a sort of victory. There is more to it of course: both Churchill and Mussolini did not want peace in 1940, and Hitler was always of the opinion that Britain should have made peace in 1941 when 'both sides had triumphed over a latin power'. Churchill and Musso effectively torpedoed peace feelers in 1940 in a number of ways, and by 1941 Halifax had been packed off to be Ambassador in Washington and Butler had gone to Education. In effect, the British pro-war faction in the Cabinet had politically castrated the Appeasers to avoid a repeat of summer 1940 on the back of the victories of late 1940 and early 1941. Peace in 1940 would have been, as the late Alan Clark put it, 'little more than a liquidator's audit'.

K

Yes that's true but the situation wasn't hopeless in any way. Another possibility when such a peace is reasonable if you face a bigger, more immediate threat from other direction. But this wasn't the case either.

 

[Khevenhuller]

Yes that's true but the situation wasn't hopeless in any way. Another possibility when such a peace is reasonable if you face a bigger, more immediate threat from other direction. But this wasn't the case either.

It felt hopeless to some, indeed a significant body of opinion in the mainstream of the Conservative party felt it looked really hopeless and Imperial preservation and Britain's global influence was at stake. The USA was staunchly isolationist, the USSR were communists and, in their eyes, it was better to do a deal with Hitler than to be saved by Stalin. Militarily the Luftwaffe looked like it was about to do to London what it had done to Warsaw and Rotterdam and with Italy to cope with as well it seemed to some a better option to cut a deal whilst they still could.

Now this, circling back a bit, would be a German victory. It is a plausible scenario, and far more realistic than 'Total Victory'. It is also plausible to think that the real target at Mers el Kebir in July 1940 was not the French fleet, but the hopes of the appeasers. By undertaking such a ruthless attack, the British proved they were going to fight on: a clear signal to Washington as well as the axis leadership. I think it is a severe weakness in HOI that operations, victories and defeats do not have a broader political impact.

K

 

[Bolshevik-]

Yes it is.

As long as the alternative history is plausible I don't have much problems with it. The wehrmacht has never been completely loyal to hitler and the nazi's even at the height of his power (hitler). Him being overthrown because he wanted to challenge the versailles treaty is very plausible. There is room for a proper debate here depending on what sources you want to believe.

In general I'm glad they're moving away from this hardcoded and railroaded WWII game. HoI 3 suffered immensly from this. The problem with this game is that PDX tried to satisfy 2 player bases and failing at both of them. the game is oversimplified to the extend that the game is hardly challenging, the AI is horrible as far as it can't use most of the systems present in the game and the systems it can use, it uses in the most arbitrary way that makes you want to pull your hair out and eat it.

Communist Japan is in my opinion not a plausible idea unless it is defeated by a Communist power.

 

[hkrommel]

The root of this argument is that alt-history content design is a large part of development time and cuts into development for more historicity in the game. This is fundamentally false,

You're fundamentally misunderstanding the argument. The argument is not that alt history is a majority of development time, it's that it's taking up a large portion of content development time which could be spent fixing the parts of the game that cry out for attention.

 

[Trevok]

So much THIS!

World War 2 was in no way shape or form a "close" war. The only conceivable win scenario for Germany was calling for peace after the fall of France.World War 3 would have shortly followed with the invasion of the Soviets by Germany. That would have been a much more balanced war.

Would it even be WW3 or just the Soviet German War?

 

[Five_X]

You're fundamentally misunderstanding the argument. The argument is not that alt history is a majority of development time, it's that it's taking up a large portion of content development time which could be spent fixing the parts of the game that cry out for attention.

But it's not, as I noted in that same post but you cleverly cut out when quoting it. More to the point, I'm not sure you're sure what content design is. Content design doesn't fix anything in itself which needs fixing, namely gameplay mechanics in the largest part. Remind yourself that content design is only 1/6th to 1/7th of what gets done.

I'm sorry, but removing alt-history from HOI4 development isn't going to make the game better. It's not a cure-all or even a reliable medicine of any sort for improving HOI4; it's at the very most a placebo. It will make it worse for many people, satisfy some who simply dislike alt-history on principle, but not improve the game fundamentally and "[fix] the parts of the game that cry out for attention."

 

[Riftwalker]

on 'content' development, i believe they have people (like 1-3?) who specifically only deal with writing events and focuses(and bug fix them) and the research for them. so all references from paradox on content development are pretty much just that area of the game. so it seems that alt-history writing is probably the least time intensive of them all, since it's mostly fiction writing.

 

[Robosoldier1]

But it's not, as I noted in that same post but you cleverly cut out when quoting it. More to the point, I'm not sure you're sure what content design is. Content design doesn't fix anything in itself which needs fixing, namely gameplay mechanics in the largest part. Remind yourself that content design is only 1/6th to 1/7th of what gets done.

I'm sorry, but removing alt-history from HOI4 development isn't going to make the game better. It's not a cure-all or even a reliable medicine of any sort for improving HOI4; it's at the very most a placebo. It will make it worse for many people, satisfy some who simply dislike alt-history on principle, but not improve the game fundamentally and "[fix] the parts of the game that cry out for attention."

Again no one wants the entirety of alternative history eliminated from the content cycle. We simply want more consideration put into it that also involves the historical pathways that naturally could be integrated within the playthrough of the game. As they can be introduced based on circumstance, decisions by focuses, objectives reached with outcomes to be measured as well as applied, and so on and so forth. You measure it as 1/6th of the overall content while I measure it is 1 to 1 in importance in the fact that it greatly influences your choices based on the availability and thrill such a choice invokes. People obviously get a different form of interest compared to the plausible scenario and the fantasy one as one scratches the interest of people who want to dive deeper into the layers while the other kind is there in order to give an experience to many if no other title does in the situations they introduce. Which again is fine but when they exclude one form and fail to cultivate the other then it becomes an issue, although again it being a WW2 Grand strategy game not cultivating the historical options is far more egregious, but hey thats obviously my view of it.

 

[Meglok]

The game is supposed to allow for different events. We totally agree on this. But there are many non-sensical events we the players don't want to see after we hit the button for "historical game mode".

- Yugoslavia succeeded Hungary in being the main aggressor in the Balkans (pre 1.5). They shall stop DoWing Bulgaria in every game.
- USSR should stop DoWing Finland twice in every game, either puppeting or conquering the country.
- Slovakia should finally stop calling in Italy in every game, leading to an early Italian demise as they squander away their manpower and fleet against an enemy they would normally not take on their own.
- Germany should stop DoWing Norway in every game as long as it does not have any means to invade it.
- Germany should stop DoWing USSR in December '40 - the worst time to do this - in almost every game (almost as an exeption to always = they utterly failed in their winter offensive '39 !!! in the west).
- Japan should come to the idea of actually invading a spot of value (economic or strategic). They just let themselves be slaughtered at sea in every game.

I could continue... again...

I agree with your premise, but it depends upon the definition of "historical". Almost every one of these examples are due to errors in programming that are causing obvious ahistorical and illogical actions. We can hope they will all be cleaned up in 1.6, assuming people have bothered to submit bug reports on them. Until that time, we either have to live with them or mod them away ourselves.

Your logic is quite flawed and ignores how victory has been handled for decades for any serious strategic WWII war game. The flaw in your logic is the assumption that the only type of victory possible is total victory. I realize this is the easiest to program since it essentially requires programming nothing that handles victory in the larger sense.

Other games have always had it so that a victory for the Axis player(s) requires doing significantly better than history rather than requiring an actual victory to the war. To say that this precludes any strategy is a self indulgent stand at best.

Paradox does not do historical WWII games. Except perhaps for the tiny percentage of us for whom HOI4 is our first foray into the serious and who also prefer historical to sandbox, there is no real ground for complaint on this topic. We knew or at least should have known what we were getting into.

That being said, the above argument about the futility of attempting a serious historical design for WWII on a strategic level is spurious and unhelpful to the current debate. It is in fact more or less irrelevant except for the source. The fact that this attitude stems from someone so high up in the project is a bit disconcerting.

I have to agree. I read through the post by @Archangel85 and I can kind of see what he was trying to say, but what was said was, as you noted, disconcerting.

A WWII GSG can not be "historical", if by historical you mean the game exactly follows history. That would be beyond boring, play France 1940 if you doubt me. The question is how far will the game deviate from the historical path and how you define ahistorical.

There are many points during the war where critical decisions could have changed if not the outcome, certainly the duration and whether a participant remained in the war. But to say that no matter what the Axis did or chose to do it was going to lose is ignoring what we now know about critical decisions made by both sides during the war. Sure, Japan is going to lose to the US, if they were in a war by themselves. But if the UK had flipped governments after losing the entire BEF at Dunkirk and pulled out of the war? The picture changes.

I agree that a sliding set of "victory conditions" would be far better than the binary total victory or total defeat would be better. Almost every game I played prior to computers had a sliding set of conditions based upon whether you either survived past historical dates, knocked out your opponents before or after historical dates, or how many VPs or objectives you controlled at a point in time. This should not be difficult to program as it is based upon known static points in time for each nation.

 

[Magnificent Genius]

I'm a bit late to the party, but I'm going to add my two cents to the ahistorical/historical comparison, from a viewpoint that I haven't seen expressed.

I love history. I have a bookcase full of history books. That being said, I love the ahistorical stuff a lot, too. Even the completely batshit stuff.

I'll tell you why. Because it's fun. Plausibility be ****ed. Qing restoration? Fun. Why? Because Puyi was the last Qing Emperor, and that's all the reason I need. Habsburgs returning to power? Fun.

A focus for Anastasia(real or fake) restoring the Monarchy in Russia would also be fun. This being a game, I do believe that is the primary goal.

 

[Robosoldier1]

I'm a bit late to the party, but I'm going to add my two cents to the ahistorical/historical comparison, from a viewpoint that I haven't seen expressed.

I love history. I have a bookcase full of history books. That being said, I love the ahistorical stuff a lot, too. Even the completely batshit stuff.

I'll tell you why. Because it's fun. Plausibility be ****ed. Qing restoration? Fun. Why? Because Puyi was the last Qing Emperor, and that's all the reason I need. Habsburgs returning to power? Fun.

A focus for Anastasia(real or fake) restoring the Monarchy in Russia would also be fun. This being a game, I do believe that is the primary goal.

Ya? Why then do you presume people who prefer historically plausible scenarios aren't also seeking the thrill of fun? Why do you and other people believe the ludicrousness of the Qing restoration derives more enjoyment then actually getting to play out a more indepth analysis and platform that encompasses the 2nd world war? Why do people also always seem to try and disassociate the point of our objection in that were just being stingy historians? Again I ask whats wrong with people wanting to get more WW2 at an obvious designed WW2 game? Its strange to me to get such stiff resistance on something I think we all would want to see developed to its peak potential and to the receive the respect and dedication it deserves to accomplish it.

Think of it like this, its the equivalent of a Madden game prioritizing the element of "in-game stadium fan interaction" instead of making the base design more involved with actually playing out a professional American football game. Its just like why? Sure it is defiantly something that adds to it, but its not what I'm here for. I came for a fun game that encompasses WW2, If I wanted to play a segment of history that involves alot of the long dead empires Paradox keeps bringing back Id just go play Europa as it fits within that time period. Or hell Id advocate for a WW1 iteration of the game, since people seem to clearly want something associated to that.

 

[Ironside121]

Do Paradox have any information on what paths/trees are taken the most?

As someone who wants a mostly historical game (up until the turning points of the war like D-Day and Barbarossa, at least) I do enjoy these alt-history things, they can make for an enjoyable campaign. But to be honest.. modders are doing them 10x better than Paradox have been. The RT56 China Tree was so much more fun than the one PDX added in the last DLC, the RT56 Germany tree was much more fun to use than the one PDX added. The Czech tree applies too.

Now when you divide things up like this into separate routes, you're making the main historical tree less fleshed out because they're clearly matching the size of the alt-history trees. The new trees you added for the historical route could've been twice as big, and sometimes twice as interesting, but they're not. They're not necessarily bad, like I liked the new German industry tree, for example, but so many things could've been better.

I've played 5 alt-history campaigns in total with PDX trees, and none compared to mods, and as such I refuse to use the PDX DLC trees over the modders.

I prefer my games 99% accurate up to the important parts of the war where things could've gone either way, and that's where alt history can be really cool for me. Dunkirk, Stalingrad, D-Day, Pearl Harbour. All could've gone differently and had greater impacts than we could ever know, and there are arguments about changing the result won't change a lot, but in history you can never be truly sure.

All personal opinion of course.

 

[Khevenhuller]

I'll tell you why. Because it's fun. Plausibility be ****ed. Qing restoration? Fun. Why? Because Puyi was the last Qing Emperor, and that's all the reason I need. Habsburgs returning to power? Fun.

The alternative approach would be: you want fantasy, go play with some elves...

Games are about immersion, excellent fantasy like LoR are just the same. Tolkien spent years re-reading and editing to make sure that the internal consistencies of ME hung together and did not jar the reader out of being drawn into that world. The fantasy aspects of HOI seem bolted on and not engaging and must take up time and resources that are better spent elsewhere. Before leaping off into the wild blue yonder it would be comforting to know that the basics were right and there was a credible basis from which to develop.

But, as i said earlier, PDX do not seem able to decide whether they want a strategy game in a WW2 skin, or a WW2 strategy game.

K

 

[Telenil]

Ya? Why then do you presume people who prefer historically plausible scenarios aren't also seeking the thrill of fun? Why do you and other people believe the ludicrousness of the Qing restoration derives more enjoyment then actually getting to play out a more indepth analysis and platform that encompasses the 2nd world war? Why do people also always seem to try and disassociate the point of our objection in that were just being stingy historians? Again I ask whats wrong with people wanting to get more WW2 at an obvious designed WW2 game? Its strange to me to get such stiff resistance on something I think we all would want to see developed to its peak potential and to the receive the respect and dedication it deserves to accomplish it.

It should be pretty clear that not everyone wants that. What are the most popular mods? Is it Black Ice, for additionnal equipment types and complexity? Is it one that adds start dates for more historical scenarios? No, it's Kaiserreich, full of leftist civil wars and balkanized nations, and Millenium Dawn, which I think recently added a Monarchist path for the 2018 US. It's fairly obvious that the average player, as opposed to forum posters, is happy with the sort of light-hearted alt-history CK2 or EU4 are known for. Podcat has said on several occasions that the dev team did not expect this before release, and only saw it when they looked at the data, which is probably why the game may sometimes feel like it's trying to do two different things.

What's wrong with wanting more WW2? Nothing. I would be fine with that. And as long as I get my historical focuses, and the mechanics are based on the actual WW2, there is also nothing wrong with someone enjoying his 1943 Byzantine Empire. It appears more players are interested in the latter, which is perhaps not that surprising when a happy mess of borders and nations is the default state in other Paradox games.

 

[Linred]

Not sure how you can say that. Almost everything you mentioned is in HoI4. You may not agree with the way they represent it, but it is there.

I say they are not really represented because even if game features bear the same name or are closely named after the aforementioned military elements, they are present in such an abstracted way (or none at all) that none of the key determinants of those elements is represented in the game.

 

[SnowHawkKiller]

I want plausible alt history, which is what the game can do VERY well. Y'know like France backing the Czechs, or the UK invading Scandinavia to cut the Germans trade. They were plausible.


Japan becoming Communist?
USA having a second Civil War (hinted at in the trailer for the next DLC) is highly damn unlikely.

Please god no.

Even on historical these things still have a chance of happening. I don't like it because there may be a small chance, but soon there's going to be so many possible 10% chances of an alt tree being chosen(as we are getting more) that one will happen in a game, and derail it.

All I want is just ONE more option where we can have 100% historical options, and it'll be fine. What we have now is non-historical, 90% historical, and nothing else. Just give me the 100% one damnit

Sounds to me like you don't understand the way National Focus trees are programmed. On historical mode there is a zero percent chance of any alt history focuses being chosen. In the game files the AI has a literal list of focuses that it takes in a specified order for historical mode. Also many decisions have a modifier if the game is historical and there's values set for the probability if its histoircal

 

[Archangel85]

Do Paradox have any information on what paths/trees are taken the most?

Yes, and the ahistorical options are at least as popular as the historical ones. I think Hungary has a 70/30 split between people going ahistoric/historic. Restoring Austria-Hungary is really, really, really popular.