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Focus trees as a mechanic should not reappear in HOI5

Danny5072 · 2025-03-04T12:10:35+00:00

1) Focus trees are inherently casual and unchallenging, contradictory to the spirit of high-end strategy genre. In general we expect any games to reward players for sound, well-informed and competent decisions, and punish them for rash, lazy, or unattentive decisions. That's how more experienced players outperform less experienced ones. In strategy games that consists of either strategical (duh) or tactical decisions. On an example of a HOI4-type WW2 war-centered grand strategy: what kind of war materiel should I focus on in production? what regions should I prioritize construction in? when do I need to lay down a new warship for it to be ready for war? actually, when do I go to war? who do I attack first? what theatre will be the priority? and, on a tactical level, where do I order my units and how do I make best use of their capabilities? Focus trees do not provide any strategic depth to the player's decision-making and require very little planning. Generally speaking, focuses reward the player for doing nothing, i. e. give rewards when the player hasn't achieved anything or demonstrated any skillful decision-making. The only level of strategy with focus trees is to think in what order you want them completed (I'll give them that) but essentially you're choosing which free rewards to get, which is a game design principle straight out of autobattler mobile games whose brainrot ads YouTube spams you with. There are better alternatives within the Paradox game series to the focus trees. HOI4 focuses, EU4 missions, and Vic3 journal entries are obviously the brainchildren of the same initial premise. However, the latter two usually set objectives for the player to complete and then give the reward. It creates a natural sense of not only progression but achievement, and gratifies the player in a much more justifiable manner. Some power creep has hit EU4 missions for sure but they don't allow small nations to balloon out of any reasonable premises: expansion opportunities provided by them (such as with permanent claims) are still limited by other game mechanics such as OE and AE and the ability to, well, win wars over a long time period; tall gameplay opportunities are also limited by the player's ability to funnel mana and ducats into the development. While in HOI4 Uruguay has an economy the size of Italy by mid game. 2) Focus trees enable and incentivize spaghetti code and parasitic game design. I'm referring to a phenomenon where tucking something away in a focus (or developing a one-off feature to code a specific focus) is more convenient for the developer (leaving no surprises when that is the route chosen for new content) which in the long term creates a pool of disunited and asymmetrical game mechanics for different nations. National focuses as such become a half-baked bandaid solution for a whole array of features that the game wants to represent but has no mechanics to do so. Here are some instances where this is observable: there is no unified coring or claiming mechanic, each nation has a unique coring mechanism (sometimes several) which are all actuated through selecting the respective focuses; the same applies to formable nations and especially the 'diplomatically formable' nations diplomatic mechanics are really shallow, each instance of 'demand land' in the game (of which there are now very many) has to be coded separately for an event that is called by a focus instead of a symmetrical and generalized political system there is a unique political mechanic for nearly any country with political content (Bulgaria has the factions, Italy and Finland have balance of power, Germany has the Inner Circle, USA has the parliament, Soviets have the paranoia, etc.) even the arms trading/donating (which DO have generalized mechanics in the game - market and lend-lease) is sometimes still represented by focuses that spawn equipment from nowhere at no cost for the supposed donor A recent example of parasitic game design here is the 'contested ownership' mechanic from the last DLC. It was created specifically for the needs of Reichskommissariats, specifically to solve a problem that a rework of German focus tree created. It will likely not be revisited again for any other instance. It will not lead to a broader rework of puppets or occupations, or consequences of acquiring land mid-war. And I bet some of you failed to immediately remember what this 'contested ownership' even is. The problem here is not merely that countries have an abundance of asymmetrical content. After all we want that sweet 'national flavor' don't we, especially considering that HOI4 moved towards more of a roleplay approach rather than railroaded WW2 wargame simulation (and HOI5 will too, I presume). The problem is that focus trees necessarily make said 'national flavor' the overwhelming (if not the only) development priority. This is a faulty set of incentives; the outcome is - making a new focus tree for a new nation is considered progress in the game development, while older bugs (see the equipment tags) and outdated mechanics (navy) may receive no attention for years. Besides, this is inconvenient for the players (certain aspects of the game just need to be remembered by heart for each different focus tree), prone to bugs and nonsense outcomes (as it's not plausible to recheck all new focuses against all previous content to ensure it won't be broken), and susceptible to all kinds of clutter ('an artist knows that they achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away' - are we sure that HOI4 really needs all these 'air focuses' to give a '100% bonus to medium bomber tech'?). 3) Focuses are an unnecessary chore and a click-heavy interaction, and designing them otherwise would make them pointless. The player has to click focuses all the time to make best use of the system. They also have to spend time in the focus window to read and plan the focuses unless they know the tree by heart, and this window needs to be visited much more often than say a EU4 mission tree or Vic3 journal, making it a significant interruption in gameplay. This is a lot of player attention for a mechanic that doesn't actually contribute to the bread and butter of the game - the thing you're supposed to be doing the most - which is fighting wars. How many times did it happen to you that you're locked in microing an encirclement and now this huge notification appears suggesting you to go pick a focus for some 10% buff or a research bonus to trucks? And you do it because it's suboptimal not to? This is fixable with queueing focuses or having some sort of automation setting, but implementing either of that would be contradictory to the whole narrative point of focuses (to provide content and immersion) and would be a recognition of developer's failure at making focus trees a compelling mechanic to be involved with. If we're making focus trees automatizable then it's not functionally different from automatically receiving rewards at a steady pace. Which a) bad in itself (see point 1), b) is not merely comparable to how construction and production mechanics work in HOI4 (after all you queue factories for them to be built later) but would actually replace them in particular instances (for focuses that give you industry). Why have several systems to do the same thing?

Thread starter Danny5072
Start date Mar 4, 2025

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Arheo

Game Director - Hearts of Iron

Paradox Staff

51 Badges

Mar 6, 2025

I couldn't find my old comment on this so I'll try and paraphrase from memory: I think focus trees are our best, worst mechanic. I won't wax lyrical on reasons as most of them are included here, but they're incredibly polarizing from a design perspective.

If we ever make a HoI5, and if it ever included focus trees, they'd be rather different I'm sure.

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