Any minor can do anything. Yes, even build a nuke. The game is a ****ing mess. Italy is strong enough to conquer France, Yugoslavia and Egypt at the same time. Battleplan AI does not realize the army got additional divisions and leaves them inactive until you redo the battleplan. I have no way to gauge how the air campaign is going. Transport planes cannot be used to resupply troops or it's hidden somewhere.
The GUI is abysmal - why can't the tabs expand to full screen? Why does the national focus window not resize/zoom so I could see the whole tree in one glance instead of having to scroll sideways? It's actually very difficult to play historically because each focus takes exactly 70 days and some have ridiculous requirements, like Anschluss and the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty. The leaders are a mess too because in the government tab the bonuses are quite limited, meaning that you would prefer to switch them out depending on what you research but it costs 150-250 Fuhrer-mana for each switch so it isn't actually feasible. Would be better to have smaller bonuses that are more wider in effect.
As for generals, because a Field Marshall has no limit to the number of divisions they can command and the probability of getting a battle event is dependant on the leader skill level vis-a-vis the opponent, it's just best to have all of your divisions under your best leader and ignore the others. Oh and Rommel is available as a tank theorycrafter when the man never did any theoretical/doctrinal work but Guderian who wrote the ****ing book on tanks isn't? Both are skill 4 leaders as is von Manstein - most German generals seem to have been downgraded one or two skill points, where the generals of minors have gotten some serious upgrades. The Polish army was commanded by skill 4 general, whom I googled - turned out he had an utterly unremarkable WW2 career of leading a cavalry brigade but thanks to the Polish DLC, Pdox made him equal to the best German generals - meaning that since von Rundstedt was demoted to skill 3, the infantry battles are actually quite difficult - since the Polish guy is better, the defenders get the majority of battle events, meaning German advance is slow and tortuous. Oh and another nice piece - Panzergruppe Guderian had orders to push through to Warsaw from the north-west, south of Vistula. Well, he took his sweet time because the AI decided to leave all of his Panzer divisions to guard a 2-province encirclement near Poznan AND decided to cross Vistula from south-to-north, move one province east and then attack Warsaw from the north through ANOTHER river crossing. WHAT THE **** AI?! And micro-managing my divisions is impossible because there is no OOB and no notification of battles ending or units reaching their destination, not to mention the INSANE +50% combat efficiency bonus from the battleplans.
OH yeah and the auto-pause is a ****ing mutilated mess of what it was - before you could individually customize each type of message as either log, pop-up or pause - now you can't do any of that. Pop-up messages are hard coded and while you can make them pause the game, as soon as you click "ok" the game unpauses automatically! WHAT THE **** - when I get a message that national focus has been completed, I need to select a new one you retard game while the game is still paused and oh god try to do it manually if you get focus and research (or multiple researches) happening on the same day because you press space to pause but the other event had popped up and paused the game so you actually unpaused it and now it's running at full speed in the background without you realizing and since both focus and research are counted in individual days - FOR ****S SAKE.
And let's not get in to the ****ing 3D models of units. Tanks are tiny and easily lost in the OH SO PRETTY terrain, the soldier models for infantry are GIGANTIC, it's difficult to see exactly individual provinces because of how the ****ing map rolls along hills and weather effects. I'm so glad I get to listen to rain and see snowfall! Certainly worth losing clarity. Oh yeah and when war starts for good, the map is full of airplanes flying around which is yet again completely useless thing but surely makes my GPU work hard.
Who the **** decided that air units should not have default sizes? I have to manually change each air wing/squadron to a certain size, otherwise I have no idea if I've built enough planes for them or not. Not that it matters because air combat is a ****ing bar on a side-tab with numbers that don't seem to matter - like I have total air supremacy over northern france but that doesn't stop the French planes from flying in western germany because they are two different "air zones" or something.
I haven't even gotten to actual number crunching yet, but just like in Stellaris where dodge/evasion is broken and you can make corvettes that hardly ever get hit, you can make a tank division which is smaller and less supply-hog than an infantry division, with higher soft attack, enough hardness that it takes little damage and has a smaller combat width than an equally powerful infantry division, meaning you can stack at least 4 of them in any battle. Combine that with the braindead battle AI that does not exploit holes in lines, you could just make a few dozen infantry divisions to generally hold the line while your invincible tank divisions destroy everything in their path. How the **** did stuff like this pass through their QA testing AND the semi-public beta?!
So, Stellaris was clearly aimed as the 4X game for people who have never played 4X games and don't really like them, and HoI4 seems to be a war/strategy game for people who don't like war/strategy games.
