Where are the resources? (Once again asking for a custodian team)

[Selenter]

Well, based on the example of the last DLC, I can conclude that the developers will make global changes only if the game's reviews drop too much or if many players stop playing the game. And if the players play, the money comes, then why should they bother for you?

 

[Joshua Happytree]

I'm just waiting for Pikachus becoming recruitable units for the Imperial Japanese Army & Godzillas for the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Shh! Devs are reading! They may like the idea!

 

[Selenter]

As long as players continue to buy DLC and bring profit to the developers, then you continue to support the current development path. It all depends on you

 

[Brumes Wolf]

As long as players continue to buy DLC and bring profit to the developers, then you continue to support the current development path. It all depends on you

I'm sure the team just wants to deliver a good experience to as many of their users as possible, but as I've said in this thread it seems HOI is somehow very under resourced compared to its peers, or there is something at a higher level that causes these situations.
The premise of this DLC was mostly fine I guess, but its quite clear that the time allotted to it was not enough (which is strange given its limited scope). What is very worrying is the higher ups in the team claiming they had no idea things were this bad, which does raise many questions as to how that happens.

 

[Cornutus]

Calling it a politics simulator is quite generous given how little of the politics are even "simulated" in a meaningful way.

That's true.

But if I recall correctly, originally Alternative History focus trees were a feature of the "Death of Dishonor" DLC.

It was an experiment that revealed how much people wanted to do stuff like "Restore the Habsburgs" for important minors.

Ever since, that "politics cow" was milked to death.

Speaking of which the GoE DLC situation reminds me of the old joke:

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

AN EAST COAST CORPORATION
You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead, and hire an external consulting firm to investigate.

GoE was literally that cow dropping dead (will there be a consulting firm hired to investigate?).

If you want to milk the cow that way, you need to reengineer how you do it. Build a better shed, feed it better food, genetically modify that cow.

Barebones HOI4 just doesn't provide a good enough foundation for politics or diplomacy.

Refusal to take care of fundamentals and adapt a systematic approach is very much concerning.

Instead the game is migrating towards a collection of poorly integrated memes for the past 5 years. And disintegrating in the process.

While I liked national focuses initially I think the years have shown how rigid and shallow of a system it really is, still better than hard event based railroading, but not by much.

I don't think national focuses were meant to be abused the way they were. They were temporary placeholders in a lot of ways, to be replaced one day.

But then it seems they were found to be the lazy way of simulating everything.

And that's another thing: I get that HOI1 was an "Icebreaker" that required a lot of simplification as nobody knew how successful it would be.

But HOI4 is the 4th game in the series. it's almost 9 years old, and in a lot of ways it's still behind HOI2.

It's definitely a success, and has been for a number of years.

And yet it appears to still run with the design philosophy of a small experimental game with questionable potential.

I guess that could be the key difference between HOI and Stellaris or even the failed Imperator Rome.

 

[Brumes Wolf]

I guess in a way the game became too popular and attracted a lot of people that are more into the alt history story book stuff than the wargaming elements, and now the team has to continuously balance these 2 different groups (That each are made up of countless smaller groupings, all the way down).
Important to note this isn't meant as gatekeeping, HOI IV is also my first HOI game.

 

[ConstantineTheGreat]

a lot of ways it's still behind HOI2

I agree it's behind HoI 3 but I which features of DH/HoI 2 is it missing?

 

[Sietrin]

Compared to the other games, HoI feels extremely neglected. Stellaris anc CK brim with updates and innovation while HoI with each DLC feels more and more like a decaying corpse, very much like EU4 did (and even then EU fared way better). I almost all the time play mods so I didn't notice how junkier and junkier vanilla was becoming. At this point maybe we should urge the PDX to either stop the development completely and start anew with HoI5, or really make a major revision of all the content and mechanics we definetly deserved after the years of HoI being second sort game for developers attention

 

[Cornutus]

I agree it's behind HoI 3 but I which features of DH/HoI 2 is it missing?

1. Country customization based on politics.

HOI4 is completely trinary where "fascism, democracy and communism" are very limited.

Democracy in France, Democracy in Spain and Democracy in the USA were extremely different.

I can't say sliders were the way to go (they were taken from EUIII), but that's certainly better than what HOI4 offers in terms of politics as of today.

Like there are warmongering democracies and pacifist autocratic regimes. But HOI4 brands them as either "Fascist, Communist or Democratic", requiring national foci to fill all gaps.

Partially they are simulated by your "laws" but the "Flavor" is lacking. Especially when it comes to "political right vs political left" and the inability to simulate differences between "Anarchists", "Military autocrats" & "Monarchists".

Getting an Orleanist as the King of France is great, but you don't really see how that changes the internal politics scene. No real narrative except "click and get this bonus".

(I actually just realized Kaiserreich's politics spectrum is actually from HOI2. LOL)


2. Battleplanner. For example, you could schedule attacks, order units to "support attacks from adjacent provinces", forgot how "support defense" worked.

In HOI4 it's all realtime.

You can't "preplan" your defenses or offensives and then go on the division designer for a few minutes. I have to constantly keep my eye out for what's going on on the frontline, and manually react to any movement the enemy makes.

The battleplanning system was originally a big selling point of HOI4, but let's be honest: it failed.

It's bad for offense (incapability to properly perform breakthroughs, requiring manual micro) and defense (I for example like making "high HP" and "high attack" divisions, where high HP divisions are cheap and can easily be last standed, while high-attack divisions inflict max damage and rotated by similar divisions from the rear).

It's good only for "checkers" where you use "uniform divisions" and simply need someone to automatically spread them out across a front. Once you get to "varying divisions" (some are tanks, some are marines, some are infantry divisions with artillery, some are infantry divisions of pure infantry), the whole battleplanner fails due to its inherent blindness that nobody solved.

3. Airbases are and air warfare.

HOI2 had airbases on a "province by province" basis. HOI4 has them on a "state basis" and created "airzones".

This creates a huge problem with ranges of aircraft: as because you have airbases in the center of a state, in a situation of a "split state" where half of it is owned by you and the other is owned by the enemy, your aircraft flying from the state next door may not have the range.

Which forces the developers to either inflate aircraft ranges compared to what's historic (causing plausibility issues) or start arbitrarily messing with airzones with the intention of "make some bigger, some smaller to make long-range fighters better in some places and worse in others".

Pretty much what you see with heavy fighters being suddenly effective in the Pacific but not in Western Europe.

Airzones themselves are a brilliant concept that removes a lot of micro, but the implementation and airbasing is a long-standing problem.


I am not in favor of copying HOI2, but honestly, HOI4 isn't really living up to being a "drastic improvement 10 years after the original".

 

[Sietrin]

Also let me share my personal frustration about the urban battle "rework". I really expected something important that would change the way those battles are played but no, just new tactics. Which points out to the bigger problem that the entire mechanic of tactics is disconnected from the rest of the game, there is very little what can be done about army tactics and for the most part one can be absolutely oblivious of their existence.
Same for many other mechanics which are at the very best only slightly integrated in the main game loop like spies or the entire naval system. Don't get me wrong, there are many good things and in general the developers made a good job to make new mechanics as non-invasive and non-disruptive as possible but in the same time they are just barely worth interacting with and the game turned into many separated systems like no special projects and spies interaction despite this being a possible big reason to make spies worth actively investing in. But in the same time, most special projects just aren't worth even looking at. There could've been so much more projects and they could be way more useful if only the game mechanics were all interconnected

 

[Brumes Wolf]

Also let me share my personal frustration about the urban battle "rework". I really expected something important that would change the way those battles are played but no, just new tactics. Which points out to the bigger problem that the entire mechanic of tactics is disconnected from the rest of the game, there is very little what can be done about army tactics and for the most part one can be absolutely oblivious of their existence.
Same for many other mechanics which are at the very best only slightly integrated in the main game loop like spies or the entire naval system. Don't get me wrong, there are many good things and in general the developers made a good job to make new mechanics as non-invasive and non-disruptive as possible but in the same time they are just barely worth interacting with and the game turned into many separated systems like no special projects and spies interaction despite this being a possible big reason to make spies worth actively investing in. But in the same time, most special projects just aren't worth even looking at. There could've been so much more projects and they could be way more useful if only the game mechanics were all interconnected

I'd bet that if you put 2 players of average and equal skill against each other, only 1 is not allowed to interact with the tactics system in any way that you would end up with a 50/50 win rate. It is a perfect example of an inconsequential mechanic you can completely forget about, I also have no idea what problem tactics were even meant to solve?
Calling something a urban combat rework when in reality it is nothing more than some balancing is pretty much lying.
But I can't seem to find anywhere where the team represented it as a rework, so that may just be the community hyping something up more than it should've been.

 

[Selenter]

Author, the reason is very simple. Even despite the shortcomings and bugs, the game makes a lot of money. Whether you like this fact or not, but people are not used to working if they already have a stable system that consistently brings in high profits. This can only be changed if players stop buying DLC, start criticizing the game en masse, etc. This is evident from the latest DLC. If players had not started criticizing the game en masse, it is very likely that no bug fixes would have been released or there would have been much fewer of them than there are now.

 

[Ossiv]

Author, the reason is very simple. Even despite the shortcomings and bugs, the game makes a lot of money. Whether you like this fact or not, but people are not used to working if they already have a stable system that consistently brings in high profits. This can only be changed if players stop buying DLC, start criticizing the game en masse, etc. This is evident from the latest DLC. If players had not started criticizing the game en masse, it is very likely that no bug fixes would have been released or there would have been much fewer of them than there are now.

If paying customers criticize a product, it is fixed. If customers stop buying a product, it is terminated. I like this game, I criticize, but I will also buy future DLCs.

 

[Selenter]

If you want more resources to be allocated to the game, then you must clearly show your dissatisfaction and interfere with the sales of the game and DLC in every possible way. Only in this case will the management of Paradox Interactive pay attention to you. And as I already said - if you buy the DLC, then you fully support the current course of the game. That is, you like this attitude towards you.

 

[Sietrin]

But I can't seem to find anywhere where the team represented it as a rework, so that may just be the community hyping something up more than it should've been.

I clearly remember the same time with announcing the GoE there was a mention by developers of some kind "urban warfare rework to better represent how bloody the urban warfare was", not only I noticed it and expected for the patch with the GoE to introduce it but nothing followed and only later I read on the forum that the entire thing are just additional tactics

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If you want more resources to be allocated to the game, then you must clearly show your dissatisfaction and interfere with the sales of the game and DLC in every possible way. Only in this case will the management of Paradox Interactive pay attention to you. And as I already said - if you buy the DLC, then you fully support the current course of the game. That is, you like this attitude towards you.

i think most players don't like the attitude, but rather don't care sufficiently to alter their buying behavior. practically anybody you talk to would like the ui elements to be better, but they still buy the dlc and play, so the devs don't care about that.

if i bring it up in discords or reddit or w/e, the general response is that the controls not working properly isn't a big deal. it's okay for your own capital to be out of supply for > 2 years, for focuses to lie (not just in recent dlc either), and to earn achievements and not receive them. players keep paying for it. they don't seem to like any of this stuff, but they are willing to tolerate it and pay.

this creates an odd interaction. if you want a quality product, it's better to stop buying in this context. however, players who want a hoi-4 like experience will defect from a boycott and buy more dlc given basically no alternative/competition. it is a very similar pattern to how ea has outright regressed madden over the years in many ways. people kept buying it, there's no competition (egregious in that case due to the nfl giving them exclusive deals)...it's strangled even as ea openly committed fraud via ultimate team.

in other genres where you can easily switch between games to get a comparable experience, these basic aspects of gameplay perform way better. it doesn't matter if you boot up fortnite or apex legends or w/e...there's always ymmv on mechanics, but basic things like the controls and tooltips actually work. the games do what they say. they are not overrun by hackers in mp. roguelikes, platformers...numerous other genres don't shovel the kind of meme shoddy quality we see in the strategy genre.

in contrast, civ 7 didn't quite match hoi 4's level of spectacularly terrible ui, but it certainly mailed that aspect of development in as well! strategy in general really struggles with this. eu 4 got way better, proving it's possible in context of a pdox game. civ 4 had legitimately average-ish ui, the only time it's ever happened in civ, but proved it is possible. starcraft 2 did a good job on the rts side of things. but these are exceptional, and aside from starcraft, still can't match the quality of contemporary games in other genres. why is strategy so uniquely terrible when it comes to quality of basic stuff?

 

[Selenter]

i think most players don't like the attitude, but rather don't care sufficiently to alter their buying behavior. practically anybody you talk to would like the ui elements to be better, but they still buy the dlc and play, so the devs don't care about that.

if i bring it up in discords or reddit or w/e, the general response is that the controls not working properly isn't a big deal. it's okay for your own capital to be out of supply for > 2 years, for focuses to lie (not just in recent dlc either), and to earn achievements and not receive them. players keep paying for it. they don't seem to like any of this stuff, but they are willing to tolerate it and pay.

this creates an odd interaction. if you want a quality product, it's better to stop buying in this context. however, players who want a hoi-4 like experience will defect from a boycott and buy more dlc given basically no alternative/competition. it is a very similar pattern to how ea has outright regressed madden over the years in many ways. people kept buying it, there's no competition (egregious in that case due to the nfl giving them exclusive deals)...it's strangled even as ea openly committed fraud via ultimate team.

in other genres where you can easily switch between games to get a comparable experience, these basic aspects of gameplay perform way better. it doesn't matter if you boot up fortnite or apex legends or w/e...there's always ymmv on mechanics, but basic things like the controls and tooltips actually work. the games do what they say. they are not overrun by hackers in mp. roguelikes, platformers...numerous other genres don't shovel the kind of meme shoddy quality we see in the strategy genre.

in contrast, civ 7 didn't quite match hoi 4's level of spectacularly terrible ui, but it certainly mailed that aspect of development in as well! strategy in general really struggles with this. eu 4 got way better, proving it's possible in context of a pdox game. civ 4 had legitimately average-ish ui, the only time it's ever happened in civ, but proved it is possible. starcraft 2 did a good job on the rts side of things. but these are exceptional, and aside from starcraft, still can't match the quality of contemporary games in other genres. why is strategy so uniquely terrible when it comes to quality of basic stuff?

Very accurate. Hoi4 players complain about bugs, lack of content, etc., but do nothing to defend their interests. I see that 40 thousand players play Hoi4 every day. Just think about how much money that is from each player, not even taking into account the DLC. Why bother and create something revolutionary if there is already a lot of money from patient players? Well, yes, they will grumble about something on the forum, but they will still buy the new DLC.

So as I already said, you can complain about content and bugs on the forums as much as you want, but it will not affect anything until you start taking real action.

 

[Sietrin]

Very accurate. Hoi4 players complain about bugs, lack of content, etc., but do nothing to defend their interests. I see that 40 thousand players play Hoi4 every day. Just think about how much money that is from each player, not even taking into account the DLC. Why bother and create something revolutionary if there is already a lot of money from patient players? Well, yes, they will grumble about something on the forum, but they will still buy the new DLC.

So as I already said, you can complain about content and bugs on the forums as much as you want, but it will not affect anything until you start taking real action.

Only partially true, I know many people that in the past were buying everything hoi and recently stopped buying anything at all because of the deep dissatisfaction with the state of the game

 

[Selenter]

The latest DLC is one of the few examples where players really started to stand up for their interests and flushed the game's reviews down the toilet. And there are real results. The 3rd major patch fix has already been released.

If you want the developers to continue to delight you with updates and bug fixes at this pace, then you should regularly destroy the game's reviews and boycott sales.

 

[Ossiv]

If you want more resources to be allocated to the game, then you must clearly show your dissatisfaction and interfere with the sales of the game and DLC in every possible way. Only in this case will the management of Paradox Interactive pay attention to you. And as I already said - if you buy the DLC, then you fully support the current course of the game. That is, you like this attitude towards you.

We just got a new patch with many changes that I like. I will continue buying new content, the devs did respond to us. Up to you how you think of it.