Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Sep 28, 2022

  20 euro is not worth it but for gods sake we're all gonna buy it anyway alright actually played the dlc now the new system for planes is messy and complicated, and honestly just a hassle to get done. especially considering a lot of nations have planes, but for some reason they can't produce the plane? feels like an overlook to me focus trees are meh. only really enjoyed switzerland
• gamedeal user

  Sep 28, 2022

  "We will charge them for new content and they will thank us for it!" -Mussolini
• gamedeal user

  Sep 28, 2022

  >Be Germany >Do all the work conquering Allies >Italy gets same war score while doing nothing
• gamedeal user

  Sep 28, 2022

  I would like to preface my little rant here with the mention that I have *never* left a non-joking review before, let alone a negative one. I just feel that this DLC is one of the worst paradox has released in it's latest generation of games. I have played EU4, Vic2, CK2 and 3, and Stellaris, and own the dlc for all of them except ck2. And I still believe this dlc is an utter joke and unworthy of your time, let alone money. Switzerland fash tree is horrible, completely boring and unplayable tree, you cannot join the axis until roughly 1941, and I was doing everything as soon as I could. You also cannot make your own division templates and are stuck with horrible pre-assigned ones. The fash Switzerland is an actually insulting spit in your face. But that pales in comparison to the new peace deals. Whoever at paradox decided that letting puppets participate in peace deals with their own war score should be fired immediately. I was playing as historical Japan, with a-historical ai. Russia went with the 2nd civil war, and I got lucky (i thought) where they even became my puppet. After struggling through the China war (manchu declared independence war halfway through), I got into the peace deal, excited to try the new features. I was taking the coastline, and planned on turning the rest into a puppet, before, along comes my puppet, Russia, and liberates roughly 80% of China to the CC clique, forcing me to burn my remaining score on turning roughly 5 of the remaining states into my puppet. I was so enraged by the utter waste of time how insulted I felt, that even though I was on non-ironman, and could fix it in 5 seconds using console commands, I came here to write this rant instead. The new features, embargoes, new peace deal options, are part of the update, not the DLC. But, there is nowhere on Steam that I can vent about these features other than here. The new air designer and combat is meh, I honestly prefer the older versions of hoi4 without the plane, tank and ship designers and other things added since La Resistance, but I do not know whether I am in the minority there, but I just cannot bring myself to enjoy the "complexity" that Paradox likes to add to perfectly fine mechanics. I overall do not enjoy this update and dlc, and do not recommend it. Rant over
• gamedeal user

  Sep 29, 2022

  The air designer is honestly extremely shallow and unworth the hype it had going for it. Every design is vague with tier 1-2-3 engines with nothing like turbochargers/superchargers, wing shapes, or oversized engines for unique aircraft. I can imagine after several playthroughs you will find yourself making the same optimal aircraft build each time. The Airwing size standardization to 100 planes is both ahistorical and handicapping to nations with smaller economies. No longer can you deploy 4 size 50 fighter wings to cover your country's 4 air zones but you will have to wait until you have 200 fighters just to to only be able cover 2 airzones at a time.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 29, 2022

  Bit pricey, Don't buy at full price, but I'm an idiot so i did. The focuses are pretty good, Ethiopia is kind of a joke but enjoyable. The plane designer is complicated, but like the tank and ships, with time it should be clearer For the people that are deciding on buying this, hold off for a few weeks. By then the bugs I encountered should have been fixed, and more tutorials on Youtube will pop up to help us with this DLC. Good DLC overall, not worth 29 bucks.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 30, 2022

  TLDR: - Basic medium airframe heavy fighters are best in slot. - New Focus trees not having similarity in effectiveness.' - DLC suffering from designer illness aka cheapest and most research efficient is best in slot. Just like in the tank designer and ship designer there is currently no incentive on researching newer airframes - Positives are: a) Big performance increase b) New air UI is decent(saves on a bit of carpal tunnel syndrome) c) Airwing management is more standardized. Overall average DLC at the same quality as the previous designers and I recommend just waiting for patches to see if they fix any of the issues I at least found potentially being unbalanced. As far as my testing has gone I have the following gripes at the moment: - Agility and Air speed on average is irrelevant according to comparisons I have made. - Air attack and defense are king. This along with the above point means that heavy fighters are best in slot. - Research efficiency also makes basic medium airframes the best with very good base range and good enough stats. - Naval bombers have to be heavy fighters because by default torpedo mounts take priority over bomb locks so whatever naval attack/naval targeting stat the bomb locks give is overwritten. So you basically want a heavy fighter with the cheapest machine guns and 2 torpedo mounts to achieve the same stats that you would have on a Naval Bomber 3 pre BBA. Difference is now you can achieve the same effect as a Naval Bomber 3 but with using just the basic airframe with the range of a tactical bomber with base range starting at 2000km. - CAS planes also follow the above theory accordingly. - Tactical bombers are more or less pointless to make since you invest too much IC for a bomb bay that doesn't do what tactical bombers used to do pre BBA which was long range support missions. Remember heavy fighters can do that now instead but cheaper. - I haven't really thoroughly tested strategic bombers but you can do some weird memes with 0 aluminium interwar strategic bombers. If you are wondering how just use the strategic materials module or whatever its called. It removes 3 aluminium from the base price of a heavy airframe. In theory basic heavy airframe strategic bombers can be fitted with 60 strategic bombing value while costing 2 rubber and 2 aluminium. IC cost was increased on the strategic bombers which can make them quite lucrative. This is as far as the new airplane designer is concerned and in general the issues that will arise in MP games. For some reason Ethiopia got the short end of the stick with focus tree design compared to Switzerland. More specifically Ethiopia is riddled with 70 day focuses through pretty much the entirety of its focus tree that don't give any actual rewards. Major example of that being the investments in the states after you win the war. There are 3 focuses which are all 70 days each. Each focus gives you access to decisions that allow you to improve various state modifiers on all your states. You have about 8 states (could be wrong on how many but enough to be painful) and you get 2 decisions per state and each decision takes 30 days to complete. This is a big issue since you can't take multiple decisions at once and you have to wait for each one to finish first every time. With some quick math you get to about 210 days to get access to the decisions and then 16 decisions that all last 30 days each. This means that you need a total of 480 + 210 = 690 days or 2 years for all those decisions to finish so you then can take the focus that also lasts another 70 days to get access to more than 11 factories the entire game. This of course is a problem if you are not doing a communist run because the communist path just gives you factories directly. The military path is ok but nothing special and I am just going to ignore the air and naval paths since by the time you get the industry necessary it will be closing in on the 1942s at which point AI already has bloated themselves with stupid amount of divisions to make any of this process fun. And that's all.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 30, 2022

  20 dollars for half baked ideas that dont add anything enjoyable to the game,i am honestly shocked how modders working for free can out preform you career game developers.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 30, 2022

  >Start game as Ethiopia >Hold out against Italy for 3+ years >Italy joins Germany >Germany declares war on me >I take focus to sue for peace with Italy >Italy accepts >Germany is not included in the focus scripting >Still at war with Germany >Germany calls Italy back into war with me 3 months later >?????? Paradox, how does this shit still happen? Does literally anyone play test their DLC? They have a Ethiopian war system that rewards Ethiopia the longer it stays in war against Italy with increasing maluses for Italy, but by the time you reach the end, Italy has already joined Germany and thus broken the focus that is supposed to end the war. If this is intended that you get dragged into the global world war, then why is the focus still available? And why does Italy accept peace? These silly inconsistencies and bugs are ALWAYS present with paradox DLC. And this is when playing the most main stream scenario one could think of, Ethiopia holds against Italy until the Ethiopian war system reaches the final stage. I ask again, did ANYONE play test this before release? Did anyone play Ethiopia? EDIT: Holy christ, the border gore. My first world war 2 conclusion resulted in a 'German Republic" in the West, a "Soviet occupation zone" of one province, a "East Germany" (also a soviet puppet?), and the German Reich with one province. Yes, with Hitler and all. Fascist Hungary also continued to exist in one single province. The Italian civil war that happens caused the new Italian state to become a puppet of mine, but the war conclusion then created another TWO Italian puppet states between the UK, and my ally the Soviets. Mongolia laid a claim on the Libyan province of Cyrenica. Wat? Honestly at this point, just hard code 10 different world war 2 outcomes, put them on a scale of 1-10, and pick the most appropriate one depending on the contributions of the allies and player.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 1, 2022

  Too too buggy Now the actual content of the DLC is solid imo such as all the new focus trees are farily good, the new addition of rewarding medals to commanders is cool , the changes on how you get generals now is neat and i find the plane designer stuff to be a-okay but the polish on the content is just too poor and i'm someone who tends to be more forgiving on HOI4 dlcs but this time it was too messy even for me. I still had some bits of fun but a lot of times i found myself so annoyed since every run thus far that i had has had a fair share of bugs. Here's a couple that come to my mind : -All planes regardless of how much CAS bombs you put into em' keep displaying 0 CAS power so you got no idea if it's simply failing to display the correct value or if it is actually just 0 CAS. -The Pope path in Italy sometimes doesn't work, you can get stuck in a loop where the event of him assuming leadership keeps happening but Emmanuel is actually still in charge -Civil wars can sometimes break your game and your save file gets marked with just a black flag, like it can't comprehend which exact nation you're playing as anymore when the civil war started. I had a civil war in one of my Italy runs and it lead to the game just spazzing out since somehow i had a 5 way civil war start briefly as Italy due to a sudden and abrupt plummit from 100% stability down to 10% in mere seconds (still not sure what happened there), followed by it instantly being over and only thing happening that most of my army got deleted and my whole navy was also gone. -If you go play Ethiopia, sometimes for no reason, regardless how well you're performing in the war it will just got "Nah screw you" and you die, i had instances of having 35% of my land in lockdown, melting Italians in the Ethiopian mountains, nothing but green bubbles and my lads in decent shape finally and suddenly i capitulate for no reason, even had it happened when i had 50% yet the amount I'd need to drop to capitulate is 15%. No event, no explanation why i suddenly dropped to 0% of my surrender limit despite the pasta men failing to push anymore and dying. -New Peace Conferences are a big big mess, the new additions of taking ships and demilitarising zones is neat but with how it works now, the map becomes a guaranteed 100% border gore mess, since way points are adjusted now, everyone, even the country with 0% contribution will be able to do something in the peace deal and the AI in general with the way it carves up land is also really bad, it was bad before but now it's a new kind of bad. So unless you're doing Ironman, download that player lead peace conference mod asap. Wait for patches and or sale, atm it still offers some new fun content but the bugs can get in the way a lot.