Because I enjoyed CK 3 for what it is, I made the grave mistake of giving this a try. And HOLY SHIT what a pointless turd. I've never seen a game work so hard to make everything a fucking chore and an unending display of autism. Want to move a tank? Nope, must use some dysfunctional autoplanner shit.
1. You need to design tank. I could write better tank designer, but Paradox are bunch of idiots.
2. You design tank division. Division designer is actually acceptable and one of features that was designed before stream of DLCs.
3. You train tank division.
4. You deploy tank division.
5. If your division is deployed on location with path between division and target, you simply left click on division, then right click on target. Or better to province near target to prepare attack better.
IC? Replaced with an autistic system of pipelines and resources I'm pretty sure the devs themselves don't know how it works.
What pipelines and resources? You produce tanks, you need steel to produce tanks. When you need to produce both tanks and ships, you must choose how much steel you allocate to tanks, and how much to ships.
No steel, no ship. No Chromium, no advanced ships.
But most people found Paradox simplified system in Man the Guns DLC so much, they can ignore ships and use submarines, and some aircraft. (Or para.)
Ships? People on steam proudly claim they have like 1k hours in HOI4 and no clue how naval works.
It worked better before Man the Guns DLC that was supposed to improve naval combat and brought naval designer. Before DLC ship guns had range, thus Yamato BBE could fight Fletcher class DDT (or was it DD(ER)) at range of 20 km and Fletcher could have two choices. 1. Run as a group and dodging to efficient engagement range, and hope Japanese with theirs low ammo stores would run out of ammunition before they'd hit, and then JAPANESE WOULD BE SITTING DUCKS. 2. Bail out.
After Man the Guns, weapon ranges disappeared, and when there is not enough escorts, Fletchers can rain torpedoes at Japanese capital ships every 4 hours. (I didn't know US ships had so many reloads... to spend 24 hours every 4 hour to launch all torpedoes. But they can.) (With admiral skill, they can do it every 3 hours.)
Trade? No longer "you give me X, I give you Y" but rather something about your factories magically importing/exporting shit.
This was done for gamistic reasons to prevent Germans and Japanese to get around of resource scarcity.
Nowadays if they want more steel, they need to conquer steel producing area and repair infrastructure.
They CAN stockpile oil, when they build oil storage facilities.
Resources? No longer a handful, but now it's like 8990739048908 types. Fun? NO, must keep clicking a new "Focus" and research every 30 days or waste time I could be advancing. Everything has six trillion stats and zero explanation on any of them.
I didn't play latest DLC, but resources were:
Steel: Needed for ships and tanks and everything.
Tungsten: Needed for artillery, and medium tanks. And possibly even for jets.
Rubber: Needed for aircraft and trucks.
Aluminium: Needed for aircrafts and support equipment.
Chromium: Needed for anything big and advanced, especially MBT and top tier ships.
Oil: US have it, rest of the world don't or US owns it and blocks access, thus there is a war.
Steel
Japanese and Italians are fucked.)
Tungsten
Germans are fucked.)
Rubber: (Germany, UK, Italy, and Japanese are fucked.)
Aluminium: (Japanese are fucked.)
Apparently you need a PhD in Hearts of Cancer to disembark on a given enemy country. No simple way to tell planes to "bomb this shit right here" or boats to like "fuck this port here", nope. Need to figure out which one of the 90748907987r89475945790457 missions, groups and whatever-the-fuck
might (maybe) do what I want them to do. Simple and intuitive government system of HoI 2 replaced with "political power" fueled decisions that amount to "5% more awesome / 3% less cool". All generals have like 9047390478957 stats, but sadly it doesn't allow them to actually win a battle in less than 87 days. Yes, I remember all the 87-day long battles of WW II
This game is my new go-to definition of "complexity for the sake of complexity". There's no payoff to learning as the game isn't even a sandbox anymore, but rather some gay ass "alt history simulator" with preset routes to most nations via the focus thing. Oh, and shit like "Carlist spain", "deposing hitler" and "Romanov Russia" aren't alt history but fantasy. Stalin deposed by Romanovs? Might as well add a decision to "Become Viking Raiders" as Denmark.
I thought Denmark was taxing raiders.
