So if I enter variables into a formula and some days later enter some other variables into the same formula I have somehow changed the formula? Good to know, I knew my math professor was wrong!
People do not play games in precise, mathematical formulas. There are tanks in base HOI4 from the get-go that enable quick breakthroughs on the western front. There are not tanks from the get-go that enable quick-breakthroughs on the western front in the Great War mod. Sure, there are ways players can game their way into a breakthrough, but the change to the variables involved, both literally and in the sense of possible inputs, changes the meta of the combat on a scale that the player might as well be interacting with a different system.
As far as I'm concerned that could be any other reason.
If you genuinely believe that if a group of modders are going to turn their mod into a standalone game and the ability to create mechanics for it from the ground up rather than having to rely on preexisting limitations of the game they've modded doesn't factor into their decision, then I don't know what to say.
Every time I played I had perfect static frontlines on the western front while having at the same time less static ones at the estern front - as it's supposed to be for a WWI game. /edit: I admit, that the last time I played must have been around WtT or maybe MtG, so maybe they screwed it up in the meanwhile.
When I say the realities of trench warfare, I don't just mean how the frontlines form and shift over the duration of the war. I mean basic limitations of HOI4 that modders have had to bend over backwards to just jury-rig solutions. Division bloat with the way the division designer works encouraging larger and larger divisions as time goes on (something that actually does work well for WW1 but is completely ahistorical for WW2, and, regardless, is a sign of it needing an overhaul), the way casualties are tallied (with the greatest numbers being in encirclements and static fronts only providing comparable numbers with the usage of command points, something totally unsuited to the western front), the fact that there's not much use for a strategic reserve or that you can just keep drawing up active divisions without any economic penalty as long as you have the manpower, or just simply in how trenches are constructed.
And that's not even going into stuff like chemical warfare (excluded from HOI4 for obvious reasons), food shortages and mutinies, the shakeup and restructures of army commands that occurred in the first few months of WW1, most of naval warfare, white peaces and truces, revolutions and ethnic revolts, so on and so forth. Most of these, if they are handled in mods, have to be handled through events instead of mechanics. Saying that a total overhaul mod can model some of these issues so the base mechanics of HOI4 are suited to model all of them is just fallacious.
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