Paradox' policy to alternate history is actually very based; one guy (literally just one person) made a united Netherlands path in HOI4 called "Leo Belgicus" not because of any historical context but because he saw a painting with that name
They get paid for this btw
>picrel nothing of that is gonna help you unless you chad
Thats the reality we live in
Simple as
shut up you fricking loser im not sharing a board with you
>t. didn't take the shower
can you please PLEASE stop pissing in a bottle in the name of all that is holy?
I achieved those 3 focuses, but Get a GF is still locked. Is this a bug? What am I doing wrong?
>What am I doing wrong?
Playing trannie games
considering most alt his is just "feels about right" they seem to be doing a great job
This is why I avoid modern paraslop. There was once a time where HOI was lauded for being the most historically accurate WW2 sim on the market. HOI2 was great. Sadly, there are no more good historical GSG games that attempt to be historically accurate.
When the game first came out I was excited by the possibilities the decision trees opened up for exploring the might have beens of WW2. Then all the trees were filled with moronic shit, such as the hot take that only Spanish Anarchists are smart enough to use busses (public transport) to move people. Turns out the mechanical space for game design provides no benefit because the people making the focus trees refuse to engage with actual history.
The real issue is that it basically went from being a way to add scripting to the game that didn't rely on events to basically replacing diplomacy and politics altogether. You could do all kind of wacky shit in the original game, but it was generally handled outside the focuses like it should be.
>When the game first came out I was excited by the possibilities the decision trees
NTA, but as bland as they were I did think the system in it's original form had potential for easily allowing plausible alt history scenarios. There was some good stuff in the original batch. It helped that it actually felt balanced and turning historical focuses off didn't result in a total clusterfrick. At worst, France joined the Comintern/Axis or the war broke out over Czechoslovakia instead of Poland.
At some point, I think around the time they were allowing you to rebuild Austria Hungary, they kind of lost the plot.
unironically look at TNO. national focuses are unironically a good way of structuring a story in a GSG
Feel free to point at me and laugh, but in terms of game mechanics the focus tree can be built to provide a set of interesting choices to the player about how the nation should orient itself. Because it modifies the nation in an arbitrary way it can represent the incredibly varied conditions and situations the nations of the time faced, but because the tree is nation specific and remains the same during each play through history can remain consistent. For example if another nation has a focus in their focus tree that boosts their tank production you can't cheese the game by taking it, since it isn't in your tree. The problem is with the lack of discipline in implementing the focus trees, not in the game mechanics themselves. Or I guess technically speaking the huge variation in possible game states opened up by the various alt history combinations makes the AI break down, as focuses make assumptions that no longer remain valid.
the virgin althistory vs the chad historical fantasy
Focus trees & alt-history are two different questions. The problem with HOI4 is that it's a game that deeply unfit for alt-history: any scenario which involves pivoting, say, 1939 USSR to a czarist restoration within 2 years is moronic.
The right game for meme-alt-history was Victoria 3, or a game set during a similar time frame.
I fricking hate focus trees
you know what would improve focus trees? decisions that lock you out on a broken, fricked path that you cant un-frick just like in real life
as of now everything is a bonus, a plus that encourages nostalgic morons into reenacting their "what-if" idealized choices where if you wait enough time you will build your dreamlike evropa without brown people and stupid feminists (frick you mom) or become a transhuman utopia with genderfluid anarchist elves without taking into account contradictions, mistakes, compromises and social friction
like a butterfly effect that can cause a second great leap forward in your gameplay because you misread what was happening. catastrophes can be fun
The problem is that people will instead take it as a personal offense against their beliefs, or perhaps worse the modder does it to "own" one group or another.
In short, people take this far too seriously and do not know how to have fun.
Getting fricked out of nowhere isn't fun. Not everyone has a rape fetish like you
kaiserreich does this quite a bit where paths can just frick you over
the problem is it doesn't make for a fun game
It doesn't, it's generally used to make fun of le nazis xD
Focus trees would be better if they were split into three separate things: Political focuses, Military focuses and Industrial focuses. Each with its own trees and alternative options.
With game keeping in mind how you can bypass/autocomplete specific focuses for an alternative reward. Like having a focus that normally gives 3 factories instead giving you permanent production bonus if you haven't finished the focus by the time you have total 50 factories. Or even punishing you if you don't do specific focuses like doing historical Germany but just sitting and not doing “Danzig of War” and Poland gets conquered by someone else, resulting in debuff, stability hit etc.
All strategy games have to create false dichotomies and abstract currencies to be actual games with some balance.
I've not seen any serious proposal how to abstract and create false dichotomies in a way that it's not a focus tree.
People harp on sandbox vs railroaded but I'm more interested in actual implementation proposals and not vague general stances.