Haven't played in a long long time because of feature bloat

[PanzerMan7]

It started with Man the Guns. I had to spend a ton of time on the ship designer for functionally the same gameplay as before (except carriers have been broken ever since).

Then the MEOs and the intelligence network stuff. Just a bunch of extra stuff to learn and click through. I'm sure there's something genuinely useful in there but it's all bloated.

I haven't even bothered with Gotterdamerung. Just more crap to click through.

I was addicted to this game back in 2016-2018. I wanted 2 things:

1. Autotrade. I'm expanding my military industry and need to constantly update my resource trades every friggen day. It's completely disgraceful that 9 years later this has not been implemented.
2. More battleplan options. I wanted the ability to tell the battleplanner stuff like "shift reinforcements here", "fall back over here", etc. It's sort of kind of possible with fallback lines but extremely clunky.

The game sells so I guess it's a success. To each's own but this bloated crap ain't mine

 

[KopiG]

It started with Man the Guns. I had to spend a ton of time on the ship designer for functionally the same gameplay as before (except carriers have been broken ever since).

Then the MEOs and the intelligence network stuff. Just a bunch of extra stuff to learn and click through. I'm sure there's something genuinely useful in there but it's all bloated.

I haven't even bothered with Gotterdamerung. Just more crap to click through.

Hmm I think the additions are fine.

I was addicted to this game back in 2016-2018. I wanted 2 things:

1. Autotrade. I'm expanding my military industry and need to constantly update my resource trades every friggen day. It's completely disgraceful that 9 years later this has not been implemented.

This I agree with, it can be extremely annoying. I also wanted this for a long time.

2. More battleplan options. I wanted the ability to tell the battleplanner stuff like "shift reinforcements here", "fall back over here", etc. It's sort of kind of possible with fallback lines but extremely clunky.

Yes I agree about the fallback part, it can be extremely wonky. About the more battleplan options not sure what am I missing. I can do everything I want at the moment. There is one issue tho with it, when you draw the plan the units do go way past it. It can be extremely annoying. Aslo there can be weird situation when your AI ally pushes and snakes but you dont really want to stretch the frontline and just hold the "original". This happens quite often which can be very problematic as well, hence drawing that fallback line is extremely wonky.

The game sells so I guess it's a success. To each's own but this bloated crap ain't mine

I kinda have to disagree about the bloated part. Imo these parts do have a purpose and funcionality in the game. Now we can argue to what extent and how well the AI can use them (well yes another big topic, sadly the answer is usually the AI just sux with it).

 

[blahmaster6k]

I think most people enjoy these "bloated" features. The designers for tanks and planes were some of the most requested features after the ship designer came out if I remember correctly. Evidently people obviously enjoyed the ship designer enough to request designers for tanks and planes. I personally really like all the customization possibilities the new features add.

As for the battle planner, once you get experienced enough at the game you tend to stop relying on it because you're good enough to micro your divisions yourself. Not to say there aren't issues with the battle planner, but if you're good enough at the game you won't be using the battle planner very much anyway.

I don't really understand the draw of playing a grand strategy game and then wanting to automate everything. Part of the fun of strategy games in general is micromanaging your units and economy. Granted there are different degrees of micromanagement required for different games (I would never want HoI3 OOB to make a return), but things like manual unit control and designing your own equipment are really nice avenues for min-maxing.

 

[stormsand9]

Well i'm sure if you just say its bloated but not offer any real criticism, it must be true. After all, you don't want to learn the new systems so you have no idea what the best parts of these new features are.

I like the navy designer, I like how I can retrofit early heavy ship hulls to have upgraded guns and be a real menace on the sea, or build specific light cruisers to kill enemy screens instead of generic 1936 design that does everything ship- I don't want floatplane catapults on my fighting ships I want more guns.

If you actually bother to learn to use the best MIO's for each country you are playing, you will powerspike very hard. Look at Italy- before AAT their best focus, "New Industrialisation program" gave northern designers huge bonus', like -10% infantry equipment production cost, -10% support equipment production cost, but you could only have one designer active at a time. with AAT, the focus instead gives all Northern designers an automatic +10% factory/dockyard output. That's insanely powerful compared to pre-AAT, especially when you do things like design your battleships using the raiding company for -surface visibility%, but build them using a battleship MIO because they build heavy ships faster.

But hey, since you don't want to learn, you would never know these things.

Autotrade though is of course a feature that we would all like added to the game. What you want from battleplanning sounds very convoluted to program in the game, but im not a progammers so i dont really know.

 

[MrMcQue]

I think most people enjoy these "bloated" features. The designers for tanks and planes were some of the most requested features after the ship designer came out if I remember correctly. Evidently people obviously enjoyed the ship designer enough to request designers for tanks and planes. I personally really like all the customization possibilities the new features add.

At first i was just really opposed with the addition of the plane designer. I still don't like it, think there is far too little wiggle room in what is viable in game (and was viable in real life) to make it worthwhile, and it was abstracted well enough with the original system. Still, i guess i can live with it now.

I don't really understand the draw of playing a grand strategy game and then wanting to automate everything. Part of the fun of strategy games in general is micromanaging your units and economy. Granted there are different degrees of micromanagement required for different games (I would never want HoI3 OOB to make a return), but things like manual unit control and designing your own equipment are really nice avenues for min-maxing.

I agree, although i liked the HoI3 OOB haha. The ideal game for me would be HoI 4 with the HoI 3 OOB, with all the HoI 3 Generals but in the HoI 4 art style. I guess i just feel satisfaction in pushing my little units around and ordering them in a pleasing and historically accurate way.

 

[William9113]

I see both sides. Certain mechanic additions could certainly be integrated better with existing systems (industrial concerns get a MIO like mechanic, armored cars and mech in the armor designer, special projects better integrated with technology, balance of power mechanics, spy networks and reconnaisance feeling better, etc).

However I think that the addition of MIO's, spy networks, and other bloatish content is still a net positive compared to simply not adding them. The game would be extremely boring if the only development was towards focus trees using existing mechanics.

Well i'm sure if you just say its bloated but not offer any real criticism, it must be true. After all, you don't want to learn the new systems so you have no idea what the best parts of these new features are.

To be fair, to say that something is so unintuitive and imposing as to be unapprochable is a valid criticism. If you don't know the MIO meta for example, it really is just an hour or so of analysis paralysis if you care to optimise and a bunch of button clicks if you don't.

The recent change introducing equipment presets is a good example of something that addresses this. Better tutorials and tooltips like Imperator had would also be good.

 

[marcelo r. r.]

with the incoming feature of save designes, the designers will be more smooth.

meanwhile i have to maintain this:

 

[KopiG]

I do have to add something. I absolutely undisputable hate this: you get enough MIO experience, you get a new trait, you upgrade your MIO and you have to MANUALLY change the production line. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy? Just so you can MISCLICK? Its just so extremely stupid. I want to automate that NOW if I choose to upgrade the deisgn. There is NO reason that the production line swap not to be automatic.

 

[Eruth]

It started with Man the Guns. I had to spend a ton of time on the ship designer for functionally the same gameplay as before (except carriers have been broken ever since).

Then the MEOs and the intelligence network stuff. Just a bunch of extra stuff to learn and click through. I'm sure there's something genuinely useful in there but it's all bloated.

I haven't even bothered with Gotterdamerung. Just more crap to click through.

I was addicted to this game back in 2016-2018. I wanted 2 things:

1. Autotrade. I'm expanding my military industry and need to constantly update my resource trades every friggen day. It's completely disgraceful that 9 years later this has not been implemented.
2. More battleplan options. I wanted the ability to tell the battleplanner stuff like "shift reinforcements here", "fall back over here", etc. It's sort of kind of possible with fallback lines but extremely clunky.

The game sells so I guess it's a success. To each's own but this bloated crap ain't mine

FYI, if you disable the relevant DLC the features will turn off; obv this means you also lose out on the focus trees (plus other, less annoying features from the DLC), but if you're not an achievement person you can get them back through mods. As for GDR, I've played a few games since then and I don't think any of the features (raids & projects) are necessary. If you're trying to make a super powerful meta build you'll need radar and flame tanks and whatever, but I've done my normal playthrough and won without them.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

2. More battleplan options. I wanted the ability to tell the battleplanner stuff like "shift reinforcements here", "fall back over here", etc. It's sort of kind of possible with fallback lines but extremely clunky.

this might be implemented after existing ones work. so very likely never!

 

[klopkr]

I also can't stand how much extra worthless clicking there is at the start of every campaign.

Anything like this, MIO's, designs, etc. needs to have an option to save presets before the campaign starts.
Once you've made the decision one time you basically make the same one every time. Just a waste of time.

I'm not against the customizability and depth, I'm against having to manually do a ton of clicking every game to set it up.

I often find myself even just ignoring these systems in some games because I'm not going for a particularly hard challenge and don't want to bother. That is a design failure imo.

 

[PanzerMan7]

I think most people enjoy these "bloated" features. The designers for tanks and planes were some of the most requested features after the ship designer came out if I remember correctly. Evidently people obviously enjoyed the ship designer enough to request designers for tanks and planes. I personally really like all the customization possibilities the new features add.

As for the battle planner, once you get experienced enough at the game you tend to stop relying on it because you're good enough to micro your divisions yourself. Not to say there aren't issues with the battle planner, but if you're good enough at the game you won't be using the battle planner very much anyway.

I don't really understand the draw of playing a grand strategy game and then wanting to automate everything. Part of the fun of strategy games in general is micromanaging your units and economy. Granted there are different degrees of micromanagement required for different games (I would never want HoI3 OOB to make a return), but things like manual unit control and designing your own equipment are really nice avenues for min-maxing.

I actually really liked the tank designer and don't mind the plane designer. The plane designer is simple, intuitive, and gives you some good options. The tank designer while very expansive is fine because it's well implemented and tanks are such a core part of the game. Planes too. Ships just aren't in the same way and the whole thing is a complicated meta to learn. Learning one complicated one for tanks and one simple one for planes is okay. The game should be deep.

But it's too much.

I always did my own micro because I couldn't trust the AI to handle it. FFS they still haven't fixed retreat-locking on the AI. It's really disgraceful.

 

[PanzerMan7]

I also can't stand how much extra worthless clicking there is at the start of every campaign.

Anything like this, MIO's, designs, etc. needs to have an option to save presets before the campaign starts.
Once you've made the decision one time you basically make the same one every time. Just a waste of time.

I'm not against the customizability and depth, I'm against having to manually do a ton of clicking every game to set it up.

I often find myself even just ignoring these systems in some games because I'm not going for a particularly hard challenge and don't want to bother. That is a design failure imo.

I just stopped playing. I even stopped buying DLC

 

[billcorr]

I also can't stand how much extra worthless clicking there is at the start of every campaign.

This is a good point.

We customers each could recommend 1 or 2 ways for Paradox to re-design the game to reduce worthless clicking.

I'm serious...there are numerous times when I think to myself, "Why is this game designed this way? Why do I have to click so much?"

@PDX_Per (HOI4 customer liaison officer), if you would, please let your Paradox colleagues know that there are at least two people (3 -- if you count the Shih Tzu of Wisdom) who think "requiring less clicks is a more elegant game design."

 

[Cornutus]

I would argue feature bloat is good when it's meaningful and well-implemented.

The idea behind a tank designer and air designer was great and long overdue.

The implementation was horrible, especially with the air designer.

Playing with the air designer isn't that different from playing without it.

You don't have to make meaningful choices, there's no immersion, there's no connection to reality.

Stuff that could have been added to the air designer:
1.Fighters in 1930-1945 had a huge rise in the effectiveness of radio.

A) Japanese fighters barely used radio because their radios were hampered by aircraft engine impulses. Their best way of using the radio was Morse-code signals.
B) Soviet fighters were mostly equipped with "receiving" radios, but not "transmitting" radios, where they could hear but not talk.
C) American fighter radios on the other end had both receipt and transmission capabilities with minimal noise pollution.

That made each of the 3 variants very different in combat effectiveness, mostly on the operational level (aka, even if you saw enemy aircraft, you couldn't let your buddies know of it. Especially if you are flying as a team at different altitutdes).

2. No distinguishment between liquid and air-cooled engines. You add an air-designer, ok, don't make it a cookie-cutter "click here and here" give it a reason to exist. At least give balanced tradeoffs.

MIOs are in a somewhat similar boat. Lots of potential that was completely unused, it's basically a placeholder of what the mechanic could be.

Now when we talk of the infantry equipment designer being potentially added: it's a wonderful idea, but just adding clicks and not representing say that German and British infantry had different strengths , And same can be said of any other future mechanic for HOI4.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

Soviet fighters were mostly equipped with "receiving" radios, but not "transmitting" radios, where they could hear but not talk.

Source? AFAIK that's not true. In the beginning of the war they either had normal trancieving stations or didn't have them at all. Starting from 1942 mostly all fighters had radios. The situation you describe was impossible simply because there were no receive-only stations developed or produced. I can only suspect such a myth might have been born because fighters that had no radios were directed from the ground with air-ground signalling panels. Same if the ground observers didn't have radios for some reason. It's a kind of one-way communication but it's not radio.

 

[Lamartine]

I don't really understand the draw of playing a grand strategy game and then wanting to automate everything. Part of the fun of strategy games in general is micromanaging your units and economy

I think it's legitimate to want the option of automating some systems in a grand strategy game. The operative phrase there is Grand Strategy, it's not Minor Strategy or Tactics. Churchill was making grand strategic decisions during WWII, he wasn't reviewing the blueprints of the Spitfire unless he asked for it explicitly.

IMO the great joy of HOI4 is to study the mechanics to find the strategy that you want to pursue. The implementation of the strategy doesn't necessarily need to fall to the player.

For example, I found it extremely satisfying to study strategies for getting the USA out of the depression by juggling the communist advisor and going part socialist. The actual implementation of the strategy was a slog. You needed to set reminders to start focus X on day Y or else you'd soft lock yourself out of the Neutrality Act and you needed to run civilian spy missions to milk PP but there's no alert for completed operations so you needed to babysit the espionage menu but then you also need to tab over to the politics menu or else you forget to fire the communist advisor and while you're doing that you need to stop improving relations with China because now they're high enough to send the attaché but the production menu is nagging you because there's a new MIO design but you're waiting for the next research slot to unlock Gun III and you wonder if FDR ever had to spend the war personally spinning this many plates.

It would be great to just say - Yeah, I've chosen my strategy, go implement it. Alert me if something goes wrong and needs fixing. But I don't want to be personally responsible for micromanaging the implementation of something I already set the direction for at game start.

 

[Joshua Happytree]

I don't really understand the draw of playing a grand strategy game and then wanting to automate everything.

there's no alert for completed operations so you needed to babysit the espionage menu but then you also need to tab over to the politics menu or else you forget to fire the communist advisor and while you're doing that you need to stop improving relations with China because now they're high enough to send the attaché but the production menu is nagging you because there's a new MIO design but you're waiting for the next research slot to unlock Gun III and you wonder if FDR ever had to spend the war personally spinning this many plates.

I fully agree that UI, lack of configurable notification system, lack of queueing in most mechanics really sucks and takes away the fun from the game. But if one simply wants to play a less sofisticated GSG one can always go for TW or CIV. E.g. I don't want the game to auto-trade for me with whoever. I carefully select trade partners to boost their industry to either take it over after capping or help them in their wars.

 

[Cornutus]

Source? AFAIK that's not true. In the beginning of the war they either had normal trancieving stations or didn't have them at all. Starting from 1942 mostly all fighters had radios. The situation you describe was impossible simply because there were no receive-only stations developed or produced. I can only suspect such a myth might have been born because fighters that had no radios were directed from the ground with air-ground signalling panels. Same if the ground observers didn't have radios for some reason. It's a kind of one-way communication but it's not radio.

We're talking about Soviet aircraft having just receivers but not transmitters?

It was mentioned in a variety of sources. I definitely recall Mark Solonin mentioning it regarding certain Yak-3 series in 1944.

As well Gennadiy Serov + Mikhail Timin's documentary series of shows "How Soviet Fighters fought in (Year)" mentioned something similar IIRC. I would have to go through about 30+ videos a couple of hours each, to find exactly where. I definitely do recall them mentioning how in a lot of orders "the squadron commander must have a working radio transmitter while pilots must have working receivers" implying that pilots may not have transmitters.


EDIT: Found it. 29:00 minute here:

https://vkvideo.ru/video-163055852_456239941

"From Oct 1, 1942, all Soviet aircraft must have receivers RSI-4, and every third aircraft must have a transmitter as per the Government Committee of Defense order"

Afterwards when Soviet aircraft officially went from 3-plane formations to 2-plane formations, "Every second fighter must have a transmitter"


Also you see it here regarding the Yak-3 fighter AFTER WW2 ENDED:
А.С. Москалев: По-прежнему не удавалось наладить производство достаточного количества радиостанций так, чтобы каж¬дый самолет оснащался приемником и передатчиком. Все самолеты оборудовались приемниками, а передатчики имелись лишь на каждой второй машине."

A.S. Moskalev: It was still not possible to set up production of a sufficient number of radio stations so that each aircraft would be equipped with a receiver and transmitter. All aircraft were equipped with receivers, but transmitters were only available on every second fighter." Later "

 

[Joshua Happytree]

A.S. Moskalev: It was still not possible to set up production of a sufficient number of radio stations so that each aircraft would be equipped with a receiver and transmitter. All aircraft were equipped with receivers, but transmitters were only available on every second fighter."

You can google and this sentence is not from Moskalev's memoirs, it's a statement from certain Sergey Ivanov's pulp-fiction about Yakovlev fighters. Pulp-fiction because it's a run away text published in 2001 yet with no sources to any bold statements he makes. And that is understandable as he "wrote" 194, I repeat, 194 "books" on anything WWII historyish. Can you imagine, it's about one book per months. Though he probably doesn't "write" them himself.

I would have to go through about 30+ videos a couple of hours each, to find exactly where.

You need no more than two minutes to find the list of all aircraft radios designed and built in USSR in 30s and 40s, including where and when they were designed and produced, what aircraft used them etc.

PS Don't trust everything random guys are saying on the Internet if it's not backed up by original sources, especially blah-blah-blah in pulp-fiction YT vids.