Issues with AI Germany is why Germany loses the war in 1941.

[podcat]

I would say Russia is putting up more of a fight than I'm used to

You are welcome. I did beat Russia last night, but it took till October of 1942 for them to capitulate. Even though I had encircled and destroyed about 100 or more divisions from Jul-December of 41, Russia just wouldn't give up and kept putting a wall of divisions for me to slowly grind down. Even when I got Russia down to 10%/10% the bastards annexed Tannu Tuva giving them back 1 more percent towards capitulation while I'm invading Sinkiang.

This also helps establish that AI Russia did not become OP in this patch

Reading your comments I can't really see how you come to that final conclusion. You are clearly saying that soviet is tougher to fight now.

All valid complaints in this thread, but the weak German AI has been a problem since release and i doubt its going to be changed any time soon, didnt you all see the post about HOI4 selling 500k copies? Podcat aint got time for fixing that shit now, he is busy snorting coke off a strippers arse in his limo while he comes up with ideas for all the dlc the game needs!

lol havent people been reading the dev diaries where we have said we are prioritizing bug fixing and a bigger patch over DLC making? Maybe I should have been clearer, but I'm pretty sure I mentioned it in 3 whole diaries. atm we are putting something like 70% of our resources into patch/free update work, which I suspect most other companies would find utterly insane. We are doing it because we care ourselves, more than you guys probably. I heard a great quote from a designer roundtable at GDC the other day where a guy said "the only person more upset about a bug in the game they just ran into and are venting on the forum is the guys who are working their asses off on the game fixing that bug". I'm always chocked when people don't seem to realize this.

Balance in HOI is always going to fluctuate and you will always need to use sliders to boost nations to tailor your experience better. Most people play germany by a vast margin, so we will usually opt for making their experience better when you have a tradeoff. If germany beat soviet union every time, but only because we made soviets weaker thats not very fun when playing germany. Also I am not sure that things have changed that much on the macro level. germany loses slightly earlier now to the stronger soviets but they have been losing to soviets on average in every patch since release basically. To give you an idea on what we aim for "average outcome"-balance wise before releasing patches (this is minimum 20 test games or so):
- Germany should beat france and poland by historical date 100% of the time
- Japan should not lose to china by 1940 in 80% of games (usually ends up being 100% though)
- If germany or its allies are getting invaded sufficiently they should be getting bogged down and start losing in russia in a majority of games. If allies are not pushing them in some way (bombing or whatnot) they should be winning vs soviets in a majority of runs.

I think germany's biggest problem atm vs soviets is front shuffling because its stops their momentum. This however has been a problem since 1.0 basically so its no easy fix. We have tried lots of minor attempts at tweaking, but its become clear that it need some significant rewrites to solve the problems for good. Thats stuff we are working on for 1.4
For 1.3.3 we had to pick between making soviet more of a pushover for german/axis players or have german ai have a tougher time vs soviets and thus making the allied experience potentially worse. I think prioritizing germany was better. especially since sliders will help shift chances about.