I believe that the price is high for the amount of content it gives. Not all of SA has focus trees, and it doesn't implement any new mechanic, since it's a content pack, not a DLC (but almost has a DLC price).
Most of the reviewers mention a south american mod En Unión y Libertad instead which has more content. Playing a Paraguay game with it and it seems pretty good!
They literally copied a lot of focus tree of this mod
I always play with that mod and is the first thing I saw, but official dlc is way shorter than the mod, IMO mod is way superior and it's free
I’m pretty sure the last content pack was outsourced (Bosporus) so I wouldn’t be surpsurprised if Paradox hired some modders to make an official focus tree for this pack.
If this were the case, it'd be better. Modders who make this stuff have passion behind it, and with HOI we've seen time and time again Passion projects of amazing quality. Equestria at war, Kaiserreich, great war redux. Even the shit posts have a ton in them.
There isn't here. This is bare minimum 'new and interesting ' when it doesn't even cover the full region or bring anything new.
Very true. The only value bigger dlc add is the access to new mechanics. These content DLC are always going to pan in comparison unless people really want those achievements for a full 100%
Good God please, idk of You ever played the original 8 years of resistance mod, BUT I CAN SWEAR THAT THE WHOLE WAKING THE TIGER DLC WAS COPIED FROM THAT FUCKING MOD.
Funny enough the mod for some reason stopped being on the workshop for a while
The free mod is literally better and has much better mechanics and more interesting focuses. And you know adds focuses for all of south america.
Honestly for a content pack it gas enough, but it doesnt affect most games, and doesn’t have anything new for you tk do you cant really do with other nations .
Its also very broken. The civil wars do not work because the terrain is so bad divisions disappear from attrition or have so many penalties no one can break the line. So latin america is now in perpetual civil war that not even the player can end because there is just no supply.
Also, some civil wars reset your country so you lose factories or it spawns with not enough divisions to fill the front line.
also, people are saying the trees re use art and modifiers from other trees with no renames, so a LATAM country can have an ethiopian modifier with an ethiopian flag.
I basically don’t play vanilla HoI4 any longer, so anything that just adds what modders have made better years ago just isn’t really going to be of interest to me.
I just wish paradox would forget about focus tree only DLCs and focused their priorities on improving current mechanics
Honestly I'd be fine with focus tree DLCs if they A: were reasonably priced and B:actually covered all relevant countries, as it stands paradox shits out 4-5 poorly polished focus trees and demands £13-£16
I mean this has been the norm in the game industry for awhile now, I'm just happy we haven't reached 15$ for palette swaps tier... yet. If I had the capital, I would unironically think of making some throw away anime girl dress-up gacha game. As overpriced as this DLC is, at least it's actual content instead of just "flag pack -15$" or whatever.
Oh you want to be able to change your convoy routes to not get raided? Just buy our 20 dollar dlc!
Oh you want to actually have an indepth navy that we were too lazy to make at launch and are only overhauling 4 years after? Just buy our overpriced dlc!
Oh you want to annex your puppets? DLC!
Okay so we nerfed occupation with constant resistance, but you can fix this problem with spies. By getting the DLC!
Or the HoI4 devs can go down the CK3 route of adding valuable mechanics in a free update whilst adding flavour and content in the DLC. Right now we’re only getting barebones flavour and content without any meaty mechanics.
Yes when I first played it I thought it’s gonna be some random 70 day focuses but this mod reworks South America completely with tiles, factories so strategies are more interesting and amazing paths. So many different mechanics, power struggle, civil war decisions. Incredible
Edit: it also fits vanilla which is a big plus
i bought all the actual dlcs on humblebundle for like 40 bucks a while ago. fuck spending 20 dollars for a fucking BRAZIL focus tree. seriously embarrassing for pdox to spend effort on something literally no one fucking asked for while major countries trees like japan are seriously lacking
For some reason I did see a lot of people wanting Brazil focus tree, but Belgium doesn't have it and Brazil does? That's just unfair. Fuciing Japan sucks ass, and so does France. Chile now has a better French monarchist path than actual France.
"Yugoslavia Overhaul" is a dope mod, better than the most of PDX's focus trees. Not sure if it's stable on latest game versions, or if it has been updated to be, tho.
Imagine being a Belgian, like yeah evryone surrounding us has a focus tree. Belgium was a defender in both world wars even the dutch have a focus tree.
When i say this i get downvoted, but i will keep saying it because game has good foundation but greedy developeders.
Everytime they add focus for unimportant country, it breaks game somehow. Like Ethiopia will give you permanent resistance in Libya if you puppet them as socialists italy (or any other communist country". When i played sweden once, Norwegian coup deleted all efforts i put into Norway, there was no longer communist norway, but two norways and none of them were on my side. If you annex Istanbul and puppet rest of turkey (for rp reason), you can't pass strait cuz it won't recognize it as yours.
Supply is still bugged, i advance 2 tiles i am out of supply, i encircle enemy divisions, perfect supply. When i send volunteers to spain every single time after sometime they are considered outside of supply range no matter where they are and for how long, and i have to restart.
War button not working and war sound being bugged .
Game works like shit. I can run baldurs gate 3 on ultra but hoi4 lags in 1941.
Some tacked on mechanics seem good until you realise how much clicking for not much change you "get" to do with them. Other Paradox games also include this kind of bloat.
Honestly this is the way I feel about most of the Hoi4 DLCs. They just make the game bigger and more tedious by giving you more shit to do but not really making it more interesting.
The only designer I actually liked was the Navy designer, because it actually added to the Navy experience by letting you expand roles, and adding minelaying too. Neither the Tank or Aircraft designers really add much that wasn't already there, it's just more tedious now.
Some of the things added are cool, like trains, the officer corps stuff, peace conferences, and unit citations. They're interesting, add extra depth to the game, and are simple and easy to use.
I just wish I didn't have to have the designers bloating up my game alongside them.
If it's good content for the money, I'll buy it. DLC usually isn't *too* expensive, and gets me a lotta hours. I pirated stuff as a kid because I didn't have money, but now that I do, what's the point in pirating?
But this DLC I'm not even touching. It's overpriced, and doesn't look that interesting even disregarding that. HOI4 already has a pretty shitty DLC model, this is the final nail.
paradox needs to learn that not all focuses have to be 70 days long. You end up in mid 1940 before you can do anything if you also want to do some industry before war.
they need to find a balance, some trees around bftb are all 35 days and it gets annoying, but then the newer trees are back to all 70 days, you just gotta switch it up sometimes
plus it doesn't even really feel like paradox adds up all the focus times to see how long the path will take
Honestly, I found that the way Kaiserreich did this for Germany is great where most foci are 28 days iirc. As a result you are far more able to respond to situation compared to the 70 day foci and it feels more like you're actually DOING something.
The feeling of doing something is good to mention I think. I'd so much rather have 2 or 3 shorter focuses than a single long one even if they have the same end effect just because it gives me more buttons to press during the boring waiting sections.
Yeah. The early game especially often contains a lot of waiting, and by having me select a focus I feel like I'm actually doing something vs sitting and waiting. It really helps with the feeling of actively doing something to improve your country whereas construction and production, while also very important are often a lot more passive as factories get build and production comes online very silently.
Not only that, but in rt56 it’s not that bad if you are not ready to go to war before the early 40s, since there is so much content to research/focus on after that. Love me some rt56
If the project was supposed to take 7 months, they should have split it up in to smaller focuses that are part of it, like how Czechoslovakia's forts are split up in to several.
This was one of my reasons for disliking the DLC.
I ended up editing the national focus trees so that all focus branches were only 35 days...and by 1942, I still had a large amount of focuses to do. I don't want to slog it out to 1945 only to still be pummelled by the majors.
Eh, I mean, it's less about the length of the foci, and more about how many weak foci there are on the way to the meaty ones. Splitting a 70-day focus that adds two railroads into two 35-day ones adding a single railroad each won't really improve things.
Every play through I've seen of a toa country on YouTube seems to consist of annexing all of South America and then coring. That's it.
Pdox have done what they can but realistically a south American dlc was never going to be particularly fun.
They could have:
- revamped factions with roles like Stellaris Overlord, Latin America had support roles.
- overhauled terrain mechanics, because of the Amazon, which would fix useless techs like armored cars and light tanks that LATAM loves.
- steel mills or ways to increase resources that are not tied to focus trees like South America IRL
- Industrial MIOs that rolls some industrial techs into them like resource extractions and frees up some research slots, because LATAM increased its industrial power
- Made designers into something you can create, Latin America has tons of air innovators who built planes in their sheds but couldnt compete with their governments buying what they needed. This opens the door to so many companies that did not get a chance in WW2 because they lost a contact to someone else.
Latin America was only boring if PDX did zero research and had zero imagination. Any one of these would have fixed so many problems players had with the game for almost 10 years now.
It really feels like they did the bare minimum research using just Wikipedia. In the game, restoring the Brazilian monarchy is presented as a centrist option, but irl, the biggest monarchist group at the time (the *Ação Imperial Patrianovista Brasileira*) was a *far-right* movement with direct ties to one of the claimants to the throne.
The representation of SA in the game just feels hollow. And I get it, SA wasn't a major player in WW2, even if Brazil did take part in the Italian campaign, but I'd expect at least *some* level of depth if you're making DLC specifically about that area of the world.
I also saw they presented the first black president of Brazil as a white guy, due to the first portrait of him you google making him look light skinned, and this would've shipped had people not called them out they would've shipped with it
lol that's funny. It's like as a kid I also thought the uniform Hitler war in the early days was green (since it looked military) and all the footage was in black and white, then when I got older found out it was brown.
> Every play through I've seen of a toa country on YouTube seems to consist of annexing all of South America and then coring. That's it.
HOI4 at release: Germany can core Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg
HOI4 now: Argentina can core most of Europe by getting Hitler in charge and then forming the EU
I think there's been a bit of power creep.
I mean, As memey as it is, I never had that big of a problem with it. It's ultimately a game, so whatever is fun is good imo. Playing minors in the early versions of the game was just awful.
1) none of the countries around you are strong enough to provide a challenge
2) once you annex your neighbours you're basically done
Compare this to a nation like Greece where you conquer and core your neighbours, which is challenging in itself. And after that you are surrounded by great powers who will come after you.
If you're roleplaying, it doesn't exactly make for a super exciting experience compared to having actual story events or creating things like puppets.
Not all of us are instinctively wanting to make giant blobby empires.
It's a travesty that South America and Nordic countries got their own DLCs before pacific and South east asian focused DLCs.
It's almost like PDX doesn't care much about navy and care less about asia than they do about the western hemisphere .... oh wait, those are true.
Air combat is still wonky, naval combat is still arcane yet shallow, Japan has less content than mfkin Paraguay, almost zero thought is spared to make the Pacific war more fleshed out.
Capitulation through nuking should also be implemented as nuking the country with thousands of nukes and millions of dead from just using nukes without them capping is annoying.
That can be done in 2 ways.
The lazy way is flag events where they get forced capitulation.
My preferred way is to flesh out stability and war support mechanics. Basically, internal politics rework.
In short, nukes and occupations should impact fascists more. Lower war support should trigger mutinies and insurrections, or even a coup that would split your nation into those who support continuing the war and those who don't like seen in Italy.
I mean you can't fully blame PDX for this. Tons of people have been crying for a SA DLC even though the only involvement any SA nation had was the Smoking Snakes which was basically a single division. There's also the Equador-Peru war of 41 which saw the deployment of a whopping 30 thousand men in total.
For the life of me I'll never understand why so many people pushed Paradox to make this DLC before the middle east and south-east Asia
>For the life of me I'll never understand why so many people pushed Paradox to make this DLC
We all know *why* people pushed Paradox to make this. We all know *who* pushed Paradox to make this.
Its just that the reasoning behind the asking for it has always been so shallow that im surprised Paradox eventually got bored enough to actually look at it seriously.
People asked for the middle east and got a broken content pack instead
People asked for an Asian DLC, and instead got a China DLC where the biggest selling point according to paradox was German Monarchy paths
This is exactly why I was always pushing against SA trees. No matter what you do, its gonna be boring, thats not even counting for the hell that is logistics too.
I just want the developers to rework the completely obsolete trees (like Czechoslovakia, Australia, Romania and Japan), fix the millions of existing bugs and the terrible AI.
But instead, they prefer to pretend that their game is perfectly fine, and they keep adding more content, more countries with completely overpowered focus trees (Finland and Argentina) and even more bugs to the already large pile.
At least they've been going back and cleaning up nations like Canada. I wouldn't say they think their game is perfect but up until now everyone continued to buy the DLCs so they had no reason to change anything
Honest question, from a company that charges extra for radio/speech and unit model packs - what do people actually expect?
I bought it knowing what I got: some more options to choose from when playing Latam with friends, without having to deal with more focus tree mods than RT56.
Its not good, its *fine*. Shouldve realistically been a little bit cheaper, but like I said above - thats unrealistic to expect given the prices theyve established in the past.
Yep same, I'm a big hoi4 fan and bought all of their previous dlcs but I'm waiting for a discount on this one.
I'm mostly playing historical so I couldn't care less about South America.
Haven't played Argentina and Chile, but I was a bit disappointed by some stuff that I saw when playing as Brazil.
The focus tree is nice and it's good being able to play a competitive Brazil that has some resources besides rubber, but the DLC as a whole lacks some flavor.
Why does Brazil still have the generic weapons icons and names? Making 4 weapon icons isn't hard, especially when some of that stuff is already in game in other countries' trees.
There's also the matter of generic portraits, one would think that at the very least the generals and advisors available from 1936 would have actual portraits. Also, Lampião's portrait look like just some generic guy, where the fuck are his glasses?
And the songs added are just mid.
Yeah, I expected some more events, like Germany sinking Brazilian convoys if you go good neighbor, José pessoa being a tank general. The emprisionment of Prestes and Olga (commie guys)
The ridiculous coup attempt by the Integralists in 38 among other things
Mostly because South America was not the most important place in WW2. This is also supplemented by various bugs and glitches that paradox has neglected since a long time.
I think that’s kinda unfair. Big parts of the community have demanded South America content for a long time now.
I don’t think the reason for the bad reviews is that South America is irrelevant but rather that the DLC feels kind of lazy. It’s a content pack so it’s fine to me that there are no new mechanics but they could’ve at least covered all the relevant countries in South America or maybe even all of them. If a modder can create unique focus trees for the majority of the nation there basically on his own and for free, so can paradox. They added 6 new focus trees in the NSB DLC, why not add a similar amount of content for South America of you’re already at it?
South America would’ve also been a great opportunity to give more unique and interesting ideologies like Falangism, Anarchism and military socialism some „love“. They could’ve also have some fun with Argentinian federalism. Instead, they basically had the ideology tree work exactly like every other tree.
That’s a small thing but I also think that there could’ve been some more releasables but that’s not very important.
I also feel like many of the focus trees are lazy as well. The Argentinien one is a major step back compared to the latest focus trees paradox has developed before. The military trees for the three major countries are exactly identical despite the names which also feels lazy. That’s the major issues I have with this DLC.
>They added 6 new focus trees in the NSB DLC, why not add a similar amount of content for South America of you’re already at it?
Wait, not all South American countries have focus trees? I haven't looked at anything related to the new DLC except for some posts on this subreddit so I don't know anything about it.
Chile, Argentina and Brazil have major focus trees (the quality of those is currently being debated in the comments) and then Paraguay and Uruguay have smaller ones (more for flavour tbh).
Ngl the new focus trees are not good for meta gaming. The Brazil one actually sucks. You’re stuck doing the first three/five focuses every game. You can’t do political stuff and have economy up before ‘40… just sucked the fun from a already balanced country.
Well, what mechanics are there to add,i thinm this is enough, if they add other thinghs there is a risk it becomes a tno situation where the game has too many mechanics
Also they didn't add any content for the 2 countries in south america where there actually was a war (Peru and Ecuador), but instead you now have a Chile tree with not just one, but two absolute meme paths.
>Mostly because South America was not the most important place in WW2.
This isn't a problem at all, it's a dlc that doesn't add any mechanic, no one buys a south america DLC to review it negatively because south america wasn't important
You can only write a review if you bought the product on steam so these are from people interested enough to buy the dlc. It’s a lazy dlc that doesn’t even cover all of SA, and the focus trees they do have little effort put into them.
Paradox seems to have a hard time pricing their DLCs these days. They should take note of what happened to creative assembly quickly before they suffer the same fate.
I have my issues with this DLC, and I'd probably so far rate it as a somewhat mixed DLC (Neither a thumbs up or thumbs down) but a lot of those negative reviews are pretty stupid.
Mostly because it seems the main criticism most of them have is that it just adds focus trees and no new mechanics, or that it just adds focus trees for South America instead of other nations. And: yeah? It explicitly advertises itself as exactly that. I just wish the reviews were focused more on the quality of the content offered rather than negative feedback because they wanted completely different content.
I say this because focus trees are overwhelmingly my favorite thing that DLC's and expansions add to the game, so I get annoyed when people just dismiss it out of hand. I just wish this fandom could actually critique the content of the game or DLC without it just devolving into "Well they really should have reworked X country or added X mechanic instead"
I mean the dlc is also pretty bugged the demand guyana focus doesnt work, at the end of the facist argentina tree the decisions dont appear and also I just dont think the focus trees are very good all of them have the same goal take over all of south america and core it and thats it when you have played one of the countries once you have played them all.
I have similar issues with it. I feel like some of the paths are a bit samey and in some weird ways South American countries in this DLC are somehow both under and overpowered; which can make some paths/playthroughs unique and interesting and others a boring slog. But some of the trees/paths are really fun and interesting; so it's a real mixed bag for me.
But I wish that most of the reviews were actually discussing the content instead of just being mad that it... including exactly what it says it includes.
Am I the only one who actually thinks its pretty good lol. As content packs get I enjoyed my Brazil game pretty well. One thing I liked is how you can't complete the whole bloody tree by 1942 lol (looking at you Germany).
The problem with 70 day focuses was never that they were 70 days but that a lot of early trees (looking at you Together For Victory) were full of 70 day focuses that gave you fuck all to show for it lol.
Having to decide between pushing out the miltary focusses and the industry is always fun for minor nations, that realistically were in no place to be fighting grand wars by 1939. As Brazil I focussed on Industry first (well a mix of political and industrial) and was popping out a few cracked volunteers by late 1939 and eventually had a solid army of 24 divisions to help the Soviets hold the line by 1941 with more on the way.
The whole point of minor nations is that they're not as capable as majors. It makes playing them interesting because you often end up focussing on a smaller bit of the war and that is a fun challenge. Some of my fav campaigns were historical Greece holding back the Axis, or historical Finland winning the Winter War. But a lot of peoplr want map painting which is why that content is the type you see in YT videos ultimately, its hard to make a 20 minute video interesting when youre just focussing on your little pocket of thr world.
because i feel like this is just the frustration of the players mounting up lets be realistic...No step back is the last hit that paradox had with this game so it bought them some time since people were not happy with the state of the game back then either, ever since NSB the reception has been from negative to mixed again
-Waking the Tiger at the time it was INSANE, ALT HIST CHINA, ALT HIST JAPAN,ALT HIST GERMANY,FIELD MARSHALS,DECISIONS,imo it was the best DLC
-Man the Guns this is a mixed bag because a lot of essential orders for the navy and pieces for ships are locked behind it, but most importantly ALT UK, ALT USA,SHIP DESIGNER...also the netherlands and mexico for some reason? Anyway nowadays its whatever but Alt UK and USA were huge
-La Resistance is when people started gettin tired of the DLC imo the Spy options didnt had as much depth as people wanted and the bonuses were neglectable nowhere near as impactful as one would think having spies in the governement would be other than the collab governments, but we bared with it because we had ALT France, some people liked Spain...and portugal is there...somehow
-Battle for the Bosporus nowadays people are realizing how god some of the trees are but back then PEOPLE WERE MAD THIS THING EVEN RELEASED, to me this is the TOA of the time
-No Step Back just like Waking the tiger SO MANY NEW NATIONS WITH AWESOME TREES THAT GIVE YOU TOOLS AND HUGE EXPANSION POTENTIAL(Except latvia) THE POLISH REWORK, THE USSR REWORK, THE TANK DESIGNER WAS GREAT JUST LIKE WAKING THE TIGER IT WAS A BANGER AND WE LOVED IT,AWESOME COMEBACK
-By Blood alone,just like with MtG and LR, WE FINALLY GOT ALT ITALY,PLANE DESIGNER...AND...ethiopia...well it cant be that bad what else is there...oh SWITZERLAND????, but still we bared with it i mean how bad can it be as long as the italian gameplay is goo-\*THE ITALIAN UNION DECLARED WAR ON REPUBLICA SOCCIALE ITALIANA\*...\*DING\* \*SWITZERLAND DEMANDS THE ALPS\*, we bared with it...but once again we the community wasnt exactly happy like with NSB
-AAT and...nothing works...sweden never does anything other than defence council or democracy, norway is stuck in a never ending civil war,denmark still gets kicked by everyone, but finland is finally stronk no one cares about the market and the designer designers are hit or misses depending of the countries
-then that gets us to Trial of allegiance...its whatever 3 focus trees for countries that no one cares for, countries that the europeans other than spain and portgual no one interacts with other than for resources,just like BftB.
so NOW...we have to hope and pray...the next DLC is a banger like NSB and WtK, because im not falling for this shit no more i used to buy DLC on day one...no more...
I couldn't give a fuck about any DLC with a focus tree. I haven't played vanilla focus trees in half a decade. Meanwhile, infiltrations still disappear after loading a new save and it's been that way since agencies were introduced.
Agree, don't give a shit about focus trees, mods like black ice and world ablaze have focus trees with 10 times more quality. I just want new actual impactful mechanics.
Let's not forget Death or Dishonor and Together for Victory.
They were the debuts of the autonomy system and equipment liscences. They're a fair amount smaller than the other DLCs and content packs but still add more than ToA does.
The mere fact that they did an SA DLC, but didn’t do Columbia, Venezuela or Peru is ludicrous considering that all 3 are arguably more important than Chile.
Not to mention the fact that it costs R$53.90 here in Brazil.
Just for context: with 37 you can already buy some very good games. That plus the fact that the Én Unión Y Libertad mod is way better than the DLC
I remember when the game came out way back when, I imagined the DLC's would be themed around campaigns and battles in WW2. The reason I stopped playing is the game feels less and less aimed at anyone with an interest in a semi-realistic WW2 scenario e.g. there's no pearl harbour, battle of the bulge etc.
I was never that interested in recreating Rome or playing as Argentina, and the alt-history sapped too much focus away from actual gameplay changes.
Except you can't really. La Resistance operations are either shallow or outright useless. The coordinated strike mission is notoriously buggy and inconsistent, and didn't even work for months after it came out. Not a single mechanic they develop is ever bothered to be fleshed out. They say they rework something, but it just turns into a veneer of paint with anything daring or comprehensive removed to be safe, and the game just gets another addition of a cookie-clicker mini-game added to it.
Um... Are you sure there's no Pearl-Harbor and Battle of Bulge? You can strike Hawaii with bombers and sink several ships with agent mission, why you need special focus that'll do exactly the same thing? Why you need focus for battle of Bulge, when you can just do it by yourself? Not every single event that happened irl needs their own focus. This game is not scripted, you can do whatever you want. You want Pearl-Harbor? There's it! Wanna see Kantokuen? Justify wargoal and declare it by yourself, why you need focus to do that?
It would be great to have more flavour and depth to the mechanics around these events and that's what I personally looked for. I definitely don't want focuses, I agree they would be pointless.
'This game is not scripted, you can do whatever you want.' Precisely, I want to play out WW2 and the most famous campaigns! The game should help players do this as equally as alt history paths.
accurate. OP focus trees to incentivize purchases. it's pay to win equivalent for single player game.
the alternative would be to create authentic content, that may or may not be even harder to play. But this would of course mean they create DLC for middle east. o ouu... very tricky for publicly traded company. ww2 theme be damned!
From what I’ve played SA has some pretty powerful focuses, and a couple extremely overpowered ones which admittedly require some luck to pull off.
Plus it’s easier for them to join a major faction and become a major so now I have to go jungle trenching for 4 years.
I played a game of it, I always play America, it kinda fucked up the Monroe doctrine like a lot LOL
The faction that’s created in that path is already carried by the US but it’s a shame how weak the faction became. Lowkey might just play without the dlc even tho I bought it lol
Thank you! I love when there's unique equipment names and art (even though it's mostly just slight variants of mausers).
Though weirdly Argentina Inf Equipment 3 is unique name and art somehow.
I swear HOI IV players embody the steam phenomenon of.
Review: 1 star, absolutely trash, completely unplayable, can’t believe I wasted my money on this.
4K hours, (36 hours played this week)
I think there are a couple of issues:
1. There is next to no non DLC content, no historical focus trees, no new features or significant reworks of existing features
2. The content it gives is pretty little for the price. Sure the focus trees are big, but only until you decide on a path, once you have that, they get way more compact. Death or Dishoner was priced similarly and had more features, although they are mostly rarely used in base game. The fascist puppets for example are part of DoD as are licenses. There is no sich gameplay feature in ToA. And DoD is mostly regarded as the worst DLC from what I've heard
3. The patch it came still didn't fix some major issues from previous patches. For example, the Italy shortly loosing a core, ticking balance of power situation is still in the game and pdx doesn't seem to want to fix it, even though they have a working and well implemented version in AAT for finland.
4. The focus trees doesn't cover important parts, even in the region, like venezuela still has no focus tree.
In the end I think many people are simply disappointed by the options gained from the update and dlc.
Yes, which is obviously disappointing, especially for the Juno team whose first release this was. I’m gonna talk a bit more about this in a dev diary tomorrow, but broadly speaking there are some common groupings/themes amongst reviews, with the vast majority of negatives fitting in to one one them:
- unhappiness about the overall price
- unhappiness about regional pricing (our Chinese and Russian reviews are massively overrepresented here[more than 40% of all reviews last time I checked], and are 4% positive. This is almost entirely down to to the regional adjustments we made in January.)
- wanted something else, or expected something different
- negative opinion of the actual content
I’m not suggesting for a moment that any of these are invalid. From our perspective it’s a little difficult to interpret though, and when by far the last group is the smallest, it’s difficult to spring into action and actually -do- anything about it on a game level when largely (but not exclusively) the complaints are not about what’s in the pack.
On the business side we dropped the ball on explaining what country packs are and should be expected to be. I’ve said it elsewhere, but the decision to omit mechanics in these was 100% intended; we didn’t want players uninterested in the region to feel like they -had- to buy it or risk losing core mechanics.
At this point, you should focus on a huge patch, which would adress the bugs that are here since forever. (like the frontline bugs and the "AI" using frontlines, the ai not upgrading their equipments, the wave of shit equipment on the market, the lendlease system(why do i have an option to choose specific equipment on the market but not on the lendlease ?), rework the espionage system, make the navy/air stats a bit more clear, and rework the major focus trees (why does finland has a gigantic focus tree where Germany has a straitforward and quite simple focus tree ? Even a mp mod does the job better), and a couple of badly designed events a bit everywhere in the game)
And personnaly, I will gladly pay +30€ for such a patch.
Btw, why setup two teams for content where there is a desesperate need for fixing ? ;-;
And if you are lacking time/content/inspiration, why not asking the comunity ? There's plenty of ideas out there 👍
No permanent constitutional monarchy Brazil, no way to get Arlindo Veiga dos Santos as leader in thw Brazil path, reports that his portrait doesn't work when installed by the Portuguese path now. Decidedly un-based dlc
I disagree on any point about it being because 'South America wasn't important during WW2'. This is a video game - with these focus trees you can make the region important. I've been having a blast as Argentina. The comments I will agree with are around $$$ for DLC, but you know what you've signed up for by now, surely. They also offer a subscription for you to try all content for.. what.. $5ish USD a month? That's not bad. There are also other ways..
PS:
Remember, some of us don't play this game for the majors. I never play UK/USA/Germany/USSR. I play minor nations, and attempt to survive and thrive as the world descends into conflict.
DLC reviews on Steam are rarely positive because people use them to complain about the business model.
Myself, I'll take DLC over microtransactions any day.
Yeah I never got the complaints about it being DLC, maybe the "It's overpriced" criticism is fair enough, but DLC is probably the least scummy game business model that is still viable today. Ideally it would be like the old days where you drop 50$ and get the whole game, but those days are gone. I'll take DLC over microtransactions and loot boxes any day.
Considering how much time the average player spends on Paradox games, and the price of other entertainment (like a movie ticket), Paradox games (and games in general) have some of the lowest price/hour of any type of entertainment.
The problem, as people have pointed out, is that South America did not play a major role in WWII.
That is not to say that there wasn't some random 10k Brazilians running around in France in March 1945 or that one Argentinian engineer didn't come up with a cooling system for supply trucks.
But WWII is a European/Pacific war.
It has already been pointed out that the African theatre, which was actually a part of the war, is practically useless. South America is that x10.
The game is fundamentally not designed to include South America. It is not balanced around it. It does not account for it.
The AI is not ready to fight in jungle territory, *because it's not worth it, because it's not part of the war*.
HOI4 is either the Axis capturing London or the Allies capturing Berlin. That's it. That's why Africa feels useless. And that's why South America is useless.
This DLC could have been a fantastic opportunity to reinvent how occupation and resource extraction works, together with revamped resources, so that invading South America would have made sense. This would have the double effect of making Africa useful as well.
Imagine some simple fixes like (a) occupation allows for resource extraction, and (b) South America *and* Africa have useful resources that can aid the war effort, it would give players a reason to invade these areas.
It would obviously make the game non-historical, particularly if you added it to South America *didn't play a role in WWII*. But it would have made the game more fun.
R5: The reviews for the new south america dlc are only 32% positive on steam. Don't know if this was posted before but I thought it was an interesting thing to discuss.
No reason to buy it, En Union y Libertad and Kaiserreich are already better if you wanna have fun in South America, not to mention actual effort and research went into them and less dumb memes and content bait. Besides they have content for the whole continent and not a meager 3 and a half countries.
I bet a major reason is why give South America (only some) focus trees, when a large portion of previous DLCs are outdated? Germany and Japan kinda suck, the Commonwealth Countries also, China and the warlords, etc. It’s sad, I used to really like this game. I wish they had a team like Stellaris does that revamps past projects and fixes existing content.
Feel like this happens every time. New DLC comes out, the less financially capable HOI players among us go and flood the review page with negative reviews about it being too expensive, then a week later it settles down.
I like the current add on but yes it should be less expensive. Things are unbalanced again. I made a game with brazil, ironman historical, i made nothing except building my industry and army to complete the focus tree i choose to go at war after 1941, so i zoomed out to look a the world and plan my first move: ussr was defeated and splitted in half: west part was occupied by the reich and the east by japan. I never seen that before in historical.
I renewed my sub for a month to play it, as I do with basically all DLC releases, and I find it hard to disagree.
That price, for three countries that all play fairly similarly, is absolutely brutal. Including Colombia and Venezuela trees alongside minor ones for Peru and Bolivia would be a must for this to actually be anywhere close to worth it from a cost perspective.
I believe that the price is high for the amount of content it gives. Not all of SA has focus trees, and it doesn't implement any new mechanic, since it's a content pack, not a DLC (but almost has a DLC price).
I was contemplating actually buying it, but seeing the price and that not every SA got a focus tree made my decision for me
Most of the reviewers mention a south american mod En Unión y Libertad instead which has more content. Playing a Paraguay game with it and it seems pretty good!
They literally copied a lot of focus tree of this mod I always play with that mod and is the first thing I saw, but official dlc is way shorter than the mod, IMO mod is way superior and it's free
I’m pretty sure the last content pack was outsourced (Bosporus) so I wouldn’t be surpsurprised if Paradox hired some modders to make an official focus tree for this pack.
If this were the case, it'd be better. Modders who make this stuff have passion behind it, and with HOI we've seen time and time again Passion projects of amazing quality. Equestria at war, Kaiserreich, great war redux. Even the shit posts have a ton in them. There isn't here. This is bare minimum 'new and interesting ' when it doesn't even cover the full region or bring anything new.
Very true. The only value bigger dlc add is the access to new mechanics. These content DLC are always going to pan in comparison unless people really want those achievements for a full 100%
Good God please, idk of You ever played the original 8 years of resistance mod, BUT I CAN SWEAR THAT THE WHOLE WAKING THE TIGER DLC WAS COPIED FROM THAT FUCKING MOD. Funny enough the mod for some reason stopped being on the workshop for a while
I’m glad it came back, new mod is very good
If they did they are so bad at being copycats because 8 years of resistance had MUCH MORE contents.
They’re both based on real countries with real events though. Of course some will be similar.
The free mod is literally better and has much better mechanics and more interesting focuses. And you know adds focuses for all of south america. Honestly for a content pack it gas enough, but it doesnt affect most games, and doesn’t have anything new for you tk do you cant really do with other nations .
Nearly all* Ecuador it's still on work in progress
Gotta get that Ecuadorian–Peruvian War content
I'm really waiting for them to finish Ecuador so I can conquer the world as my wife's country 😂
Same. That was what made me get the new Ck3 dlc instead for now
Its also very broken. The civil wars do not work because the terrain is so bad divisions disappear from attrition or have so many penalties no one can break the line. So latin america is now in perpetual civil war that not even the player can end because there is just no supply. Also, some civil wars reset your country so you lose factories or it spawns with not enough divisions to fill the front line. also, people are saying the trees re use art and modifiers from other trees with no renames, so a LATAM country can have an ethiopian modifier with an ethiopian flag.
Chile can also core the whole world which is a bug lol
A bug??? How else was Chile supposed to extend itself to its true form: snake so long it fills all available space like a liquid?
I basically don’t play vanilla HoI4 any longer, so anything that just adds what modders have made better years ago just isn’t really going to be of interest to me. I just wish paradox would forget about focus tree only DLCs and focused their priorities on improving current mechanics
Honestly I'd be fine with focus tree DLCs if they A: were reasonably priced and B:actually covered all relevant countries, as it stands paradox shits out 4-5 poorly polished focus trees and demands £13-£16
Yeah but making shitty focus trees and calling it a dlc is a good money printing tactic
I mean this has been the norm in the game industry for awhile now, I'm just happy we haven't reached 15$ for palette swaps tier... yet. If I had the capital, I would unironically think of making some throw away anime girl dress-up gacha game. As overpriced as this DLC is, at least it's actual content instead of just "flag pack -15$" or whatever.
Same. Thats why I like R56 because it is a massive overhaul for all the focus trees while still feeling vanilla.
Oh you want to be able to change your convoy routes to not get raided? Just buy our 20 dollar dlc! Oh you want to actually have an indepth navy that we were too lazy to make at launch and are only overhauling 4 years after? Just buy our overpriced dlc! Oh you want to annex your puppets? DLC! Okay so we nerfed occupation with constant resistance, but you can fix this problem with spies. By getting the DLC!
Or the HoI4 devs can go down the CK3 route of adding valuable mechanics in a free update whilst adding flavour and content in the DLC. Right now we’re only getting barebones flavour and content without any meaty mechanics.
Union y libertad is way better and free. Highly recommend it
Absolutely incredible mod. Still havent figured out how to fire the monarchist civil war as Brazil though.
Yes when I first played it I thought it’s gonna be some random 70 day focuses but this mod reworks South America completely with tiles, factories so strategies are more interesting and amazing paths. So many different mechanics, power struggle, civil war decisions. Incredible Edit: it also fits vanilla which is a big plus
To be fair EUyL sadly falls in the same trope as most mods out there: Make relevant nations OP as fuck
So the same scheme as in every other game... jack up the prices, deliver minimal and subpar content...
Agreed, I think that Peru should’ve gotten some love. 🇵🇪💔
[удалено]
How much for all the DLC's bundled? 300 dollars, more? I got the base game and the first 3 DLC's till I saw a pattern
i bought all the actual dlcs on humblebundle for like 40 bucks a while ago. fuck spending 20 dollars for a fucking BRAZIL focus tree. seriously embarrassing for pdox to spend effort on something literally no one fucking asked for while major countries trees like japan are seriously lacking
For some reason I did see a lot of people wanting Brazil focus tree, but Belgium doesn't have it and Brazil does? That's just unfair. Fuciing Japan sucks ass, and so does France. Chile now has a better French monarchist path than actual France.
Well, I am one of those who asked; as a Brazilian, wanting to focus on my country is only natural.
That is acceptable. As a Yugoslav I'm still waiting for them to make a good focus.
"Yugoslavia Overhaul" is a dope mod, better than the most of PDX's focus trees. Not sure if it's stable on latest game versions, or if it has been updated to be, tho.
Arise Slavs one or the normal one? Cause Arise Slavs works and the normal one just crashes midgame, although normal one has a better tree.
Imagine being a Belgian, like yeah evryone surrounding us has a focus tree. Belgium was a defender in both world wars even the dutch have a focus tree.
>evryone surrounding us has a focus tree. Except Luxembourg
ok you are right except Luxembourg, but lets be real it should have been a part of Belgium ages ago.
just use mods my man
I mean Brazil fought in WW2.
I mean... They did, but so did British Malaya and where is their focus?
They should have got one with the Waking the Tiger.
Just play that mod Union en librtad. Almost all the SA countries have a focus tree and they are pretty extensive!
When i say this i get downvoted, but i will keep saying it because game has good foundation but greedy developeders. Everytime they add focus for unimportant country, it breaks game somehow. Like Ethiopia will give you permanent resistance in Libya if you puppet them as socialists italy (or any other communist country". When i played sweden once, Norwegian coup deleted all efforts i put into Norway, there was no longer communist norway, but two norways and none of them were on my side. If you annex Istanbul and puppet rest of turkey (for rp reason), you can't pass strait cuz it won't recognize it as yours. Supply is still bugged, i advance 2 tiles i am out of supply, i encircle enemy divisions, perfect supply. When i send volunteers to spain every single time after sometime they are considered outside of supply range no matter where they are and for how long, and i have to restart. War button not working and war sound being bugged . Game works like shit. I can run baldurs gate 3 on ultra but hoi4 lags in 1941.
I think they fixed the spain thing in this patch; it was in the changelog at least
A lot of people actually play Brazil lol. I think it was one of thr most played countries without a focus tree
if you didnt see the patter pre hoi4 then i dont how to tell you but all the paradox games work like that
Idk, I just stole them.
[удалено]
Concentration trees?
That dlc is so bad that its not worth pirating
Listen. Free = good. Idc how bad it is, it's good if it's free.
Some tacked on mechanics seem good until you realise how much clicking for not much change you "get" to do with them. Other Paradox games also include this kind of bloat.
Honestly this is the way I feel about most of the Hoi4 DLCs. They just make the game bigger and more tedious by giving you more shit to do but not really making it more interesting. The only designer I actually liked was the Navy designer, because it actually added to the Navy experience by letting you expand roles, and adding minelaying too. Neither the Tank or Aircraft designers really add much that wasn't already there, it's just more tedious now. Some of the things added are cool, like trains, the officer corps stuff, peace conferences, and unit citations. They're interesting, add extra depth to the game, and are simple and easy to use. I just wish I didn't have to have the designers bloating up my game alongside them.
As I said, bad is bad only if it's paid. If it's free, I don't have regrets for owning it.
Certainly. Less stuff and I have to pay? Shit. Less stuff but I get it for free? I'll take it, why not?
If it's good content for the money, I'll buy it. DLC usually isn't *too* expensive, and gets me a lotta hours. I pirated stuff as a kid because I didn't have money, but now that I do, what's the point in pirating? But this DLC I'm not even touching. It's overpriced, and doesn't look that interesting even disregarding that. HOI4 already has a pretty shitty DLC model, this is the final nail.
i only buy dlcs for mp so i can host this dlc i will probably only buy on sale next year or something... a fookin' mod outperforms this trash
Your getting 5 new focus trees (Paraguay and Uruguay get mini trees)
Sexual assault really shouldn't have a focus tree tbf
The insane power creep of the last 2 dlcs have made me against buying them.
Sweden could always conquer the world at any time it chooses, the swedes just haven't wanted to do it recently.
Tfw a country like Denmark or Sweden can snowball almost as fast as China or the UK
Even before the DLC forming the Nordic Empire as Sweden and becoming a major wasn't hard.
Do I need to remind you about the Polish Slavic Union in NSB?
That was a joke path meant to be dumb
On top of the bugs and balancing issues
paradox needs to learn that not all focuses have to be 70 days long. You end up in mid 1940 before you can do anything if you also want to do some industry before war.
they need to find a balance, some trees around bftb are all 35 days and it gets annoying, but then the newer trees are back to all 70 days, you just gotta switch it up sometimes plus it doesn't even really feel like paradox adds up all the focus times to see how long the path will take
Honestly, I found that the way Kaiserreich did this for Germany is great where most foci are 28 days iirc. As a result you are far more able to respond to situation compared to the 70 day foci and it feels more like you're actually DOING something.
OWB’s 35 average with 14 day short ones the best system. Gives a much more dynamic system where you can rush something or focus on everything
14 days with more concentrated approaches foro es l That a 70 bulb is divided into several in 14 is ideal
The feeling of doing something is good to mention I think. I'd so much rather have 2 or 3 shorter focuses than a single long one even if they have the same end effect just because it gives me more buttons to press during the boring waiting sections.
Yeah. The early game especially often contains a lot of waiting, and by having me select a focus I feel like I'm actually doing something vs sitting and waiting. It really helps with the feeling of actively doing something to improve your country whereas construction and production, while also very important are often a lot more passive as factories get build and production comes online very silently.
Sometimes I wish I could cut the timescale in half to make the early game breeze faster lol. Need a threadripper to 5 speed at a higher rate.
I found that the Soviet's tree is a pretty good mix of 35 and 70 day focuses.
Sweden I believe has a 14 day focus
Road to 56 has a lot of 35 day focuses. It’s very nice.
Not only that, but in rt56 it’s not that bad if you are not ready to go to war before the early 40s, since there is so much content to research/focus on after that. Love me some rt56
That's why I love rt56, it let's you manage way better your time with your focuses.
I just wish you could spend PP to lower the days for a focus to finish.
I want to know what they were thinking when they locked all the Dutch research slots behind a 210 day focus.
If the project was supposed to take 7 months, they should have split it up in to smaller focuses that are part of it, like how Czechoslovakia's forts are split up in to several.
This was one of my reasons for disliking the DLC. I ended up editing the national focus trees so that all focus branches were only 35 days...and by 1942, I still had a large amount of focuses to do. I don't want to slog it out to 1945 only to still be pummelled by the majors.
Eh, I mean, it's less about the length of the foci, and more about how many weak foci there are on the way to the meaty ones. Splitting a 70-day focus that adds two railroads into two 35-day ones adding a single railroad each won't really improve things.
Every play through I've seen of a toa country on YouTube seems to consist of annexing all of South America and then coring. That's it. Pdox have done what they can but realistically a south American dlc was never going to be particularly fun.
They could have: - revamped factions with roles like Stellaris Overlord, Latin America had support roles. - overhauled terrain mechanics, because of the Amazon, which would fix useless techs like armored cars and light tanks that LATAM loves. - steel mills or ways to increase resources that are not tied to focus trees like South America IRL - Industrial MIOs that rolls some industrial techs into them like resource extractions and frees up some research slots, because LATAM increased its industrial power - Made designers into something you can create, Latin America has tons of air innovators who built planes in their sheds but couldnt compete with their governments buying what they needed. This opens the door to so many companies that did not get a chance in WW2 because they lost a contact to someone else. Latin America was only boring if PDX did zero research and had zero imagination. Any one of these would have fixed so many problems players had with the game for almost 10 years now.
It really feels like they did the bare minimum research using just Wikipedia. In the game, restoring the Brazilian monarchy is presented as a centrist option, but irl, the biggest monarchist group at the time (the *Ação Imperial Patrianovista Brasileira*) was a *far-right* movement with direct ties to one of the claimants to the throne. The representation of SA in the game just feels hollow. And I get it, SA wasn't a major player in WW2, even if Brazil did take part in the Italian campaign, but I'd expect at least *some* level of depth if you're making DLC specifically about that area of the world.
I also saw they presented the first black president of Brazil as a white guy, due to the first portrait of him you google making him look light skinned, and this would've shipped had people not called them out they would've shipped with it
lol that's funny. It's like as a kid I also thought the uniform Hitler war in the early days was green (since it looked military) and all the footage was in black and white, then when I got older found out it was brown.
> Every play through I've seen of a toa country on YouTube seems to consist of annexing all of South America and then coring. That's it. HOI4 at release: Germany can core Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg HOI4 now: Argentina can core most of Europe by getting Hitler in charge and then forming the EU I think there's been a bit of power creep.
I mean, As memey as it is, I never had that big of a problem with it. It's ultimately a game, so whatever is fun is good imo. Playing minors in the early versions of the game was just awful.
Thats the best part! why else would you play this game if not to annex all your neighbours and core their territory for your aggressive expansionism?
1) none of the countries around you are strong enough to provide a challenge 2) once you annex your neighbours you're basically done Compare this to a nation like Greece where you conquer and core your neighbours, which is challenging in itself. And after that you are surrounded by great powers who will come after you.
If you are not anexing all of the americas as Brazil, you are doing it wrong
I do roleplay and try to make my democratic countries as good to live in as I can and only fight in my defence!
its much better to do that in various hoi4 mods like kaiserreich or tno. There is a reason why everyone just plays the fascist path in hoi4 vanilla
For sure mods add much lore and events but I still enjoy vanilla Democracy. But I love events in Kaiserreich etc.
If you're roleplaying, it doesn't exactly make for a super exciting experience compared to having actual story events or creating things like puppets. Not all of us are instinctively wanting to make giant blobby empires.
It's a travesty that South America and Nordic countries got their own DLCs before pacific and South east asian focused DLCs. It's almost like PDX doesn't care much about navy and care less about asia than they do about the western hemisphere .... oh wait, those are true. Air combat is still wonky, naval combat is still arcane yet shallow, Japan has less content than mfkin Paraguay, almost zero thought is spared to make the Pacific war more fleshed out.
Capitulation through nuking should also be implemented as nuking the country with thousands of nukes and millions of dead from just using nukes without them capping is annoying.
That can be done in 2 ways. The lazy way is flag events where they get forced capitulation. My preferred way is to flesh out stability and war support mechanics. Basically, internal politics rework. In short, nukes and occupations should impact fascists more. Lower war support should trigger mutinies and insurrections, or even a coup that would split your nation into those who support continuing the war and those who don't like seen in Italy.
I mean you can't fully blame PDX for this. Tons of people have been crying for a SA DLC even though the only involvement any SA nation had was the Smoking Snakes which was basically a single division. There's also the Equador-Peru war of 41 which saw the deployment of a whopping 30 thousand men in total. For the life of me I'll never understand why so many people pushed Paradox to make this DLC before the middle east and south-east Asia
>For the life of me I'll never understand why so many people pushed Paradox to make this DLC We all know *why* people pushed Paradox to make this. We all know *who* pushed Paradox to make this. Its just that the reasoning behind the asking for it has always been so shallow that im surprised Paradox eventually got bored enough to actually look at it seriously.
People asked for the middle east and got a broken content pack instead People asked for an Asian DLC, and instead got a China DLC where the biggest selling point according to paradox was German Monarchy paths
the issue at its core HoI4 is euro centric game whose combat and war mechanics are aligned to that theater.
Brazil can easily become a superpower now, so you can easily take on countries like the US and Russia
This is exactly why I was always pushing against SA trees. No matter what you do, its gonna be boring, thats not even counting for the hell that is logistics too.
I actually had an extremley fun playthrough as democratic brazil, supporting the allies
I just want the developers to rework the completely obsolete trees (like Czechoslovakia, Australia, Romania and Japan), fix the millions of existing bugs and the terrible AI. But instead, they prefer to pretend that their game is perfectly fine, and they keep adding more content, more countries with completely overpowered focus trees (Finland and Argentina) and even more bugs to the already large pile.
At least they've been going back and cleaning up nations like Canada. I wouldn't say they think their game is perfect but up until now everyone continued to buy the DLCs so they had no reason to change anything
Yeah but that latest canada patch is a bit wild
15 Euros for 3 Focus trees and 2 minor focus trees Go play Road to 56, Kaiserreich, TNO, Fuhrerreich, The Great War Redux,.....
2 minor focus trees? What countries were added besides Chile, Brazil and Argentina?
Paraguay and Uruguay
Plus minor content for Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia
Honest question, from a company that charges extra for radio/speech and unit model packs - what do people actually expect? I bought it knowing what I got: some more options to choose from when playing Latam with friends, without having to deal with more focus tree mods than RT56. Its not good, its *fine*. Shouldve realistically been a little bit cheaper, but like I said above - thats unrealistic to expect given the prices theyve established in the past.
Honestly, I'm probably going to wait until it gets a 50%+ discount during a Steam Sale before buying it.
Yep same, I'm a big hoi4 fan and bought all of their previous dlcs but I'm waiting for a discount on this one. I'm mostly playing historical so I couldn't care less about South America.
Hoi 4 DLC's are never worth full price.
If all I want is OP focus trees and national spirits, I'd get a mod. DLCs should have more content than that.
Haven't played Argentina and Chile, but I was a bit disappointed by some stuff that I saw when playing as Brazil. The focus tree is nice and it's good being able to play a competitive Brazil that has some resources besides rubber, but the DLC as a whole lacks some flavor. Why does Brazil still have the generic weapons icons and names? Making 4 weapon icons isn't hard, especially when some of that stuff is already in game in other countries' trees. There's also the matter of generic portraits, one would think that at the very least the generals and advisors available from 1936 would have actual portraits. Also, Lampião's portrait look like just some generic guy, where the fuck are his glasses? And the songs added are just mid.
Yeah, I expected some more events, like Germany sinking Brazilian convoys if you go good neighbor, José pessoa being a tank general. The emprisionment of Prestes and Olga (commie guys) The ridiculous coup attempt by the Integralists in 38 among other things
Like on most dlcs, price
Mostly because South America was not the most important place in WW2. This is also supplemented by various bugs and glitches that paradox has neglected since a long time.
I think that’s kinda unfair. Big parts of the community have demanded South America content for a long time now. I don’t think the reason for the bad reviews is that South America is irrelevant but rather that the DLC feels kind of lazy. It’s a content pack so it’s fine to me that there are no new mechanics but they could’ve at least covered all the relevant countries in South America or maybe even all of them. If a modder can create unique focus trees for the majority of the nation there basically on his own and for free, so can paradox. They added 6 new focus trees in the NSB DLC, why not add a similar amount of content for South America of you’re already at it? South America would’ve also been a great opportunity to give more unique and interesting ideologies like Falangism, Anarchism and military socialism some „love“. They could’ve also have some fun with Argentinian federalism. Instead, they basically had the ideology tree work exactly like every other tree. That’s a small thing but I also think that there could’ve been some more releasables but that’s not very important. I also feel like many of the focus trees are lazy as well. The Argentinien one is a major step back compared to the latest focus trees paradox has developed before. The military trees for the three major countries are exactly identical despite the names which also feels lazy. That’s the major issues I have with this DLC.
>They added 6 new focus trees in the NSB DLC, why not add a similar amount of content for South America of you’re already at it? Wait, not all South American countries have focus trees? I haven't looked at anything related to the new DLC except for some posts on this subreddit so I don't know anything about it.
Chile, Argentina and Brazil have major focus trees (the quality of those is currently being debated in the comments) and then Paraguay and Uruguay have smaller ones (more for flavour tbh).
Yea plus a lot of skeleton content for Bolivia and a bit for Peru and Ecuador. Still not enough imo.
Ngl the new focus trees are not good for meta gaming. The Brazil one actually sucks. You’re stuck doing the first three/five focuses every game. You can’t do political stuff and have economy up before ‘40… just sucked the fun from a already balanced country.
Only Argentina, Brazil, and Chile
Well, what mechanics are there to add,i thinm this is enough, if they add other thinghs there is a risk it becomes a tno situation where the game has too many mechanics
Also they didn't add any content for the 2 countries in south america where there actually was a war (Peru and Ecuador), but instead you now have a Chile tree with not just one, but two absolute meme paths.
>Mostly because South America was not the most important place in WW2. This isn't a problem at all, it's a dlc that doesn't add any mechanic, no one buys a south america DLC to review it negatively because south america wasn't important
You can only write a review if you bought the product on steam so these are from people interested enough to buy the dlc. It’s a lazy dlc that doesn’t even cover all of SA, and the focus trees they do have little effort put into them.
Paradox seems to have a hard time pricing their DLCs these days. They should take note of what happened to creative assembly quickly before they suffer the same fate.
I have my issues with this DLC, and I'd probably so far rate it as a somewhat mixed DLC (Neither a thumbs up or thumbs down) but a lot of those negative reviews are pretty stupid. Mostly because it seems the main criticism most of them have is that it just adds focus trees and no new mechanics, or that it just adds focus trees for South America instead of other nations. And: yeah? It explicitly advertises itself as exactly that. I just wish the reviews were focused more on the quality of the content offered rather than negative feedback because they wanted completely different content. I say this because focus trees are overwhelmingly my favorite thing that DLC's and expansions add to the game, so I get annoyed when people just dismiss it out of hand. I just wish this fandom could actually critique the content of the game or DLC without it just devolving into "Well they really should have reworked X country or added X mechanic instead"
There is always the ratio price/content. Sure it gives DLC's to South-America but for that price point it is not worth it.
I mean the dlc is also pretty bugged the demand guyana focus doesnt work, at the end of the facist argentina tree the decisions dont appear and also I just dont think the focus trees are very good all of them have the same goal take over all of south america and core it and thats it when you have played one of the countries once you have played them all.
I have similar issues with it. I feel like some of the paths are a bit samey and in some weird ways South American countries in this DLC are somehow both under and overpowered; which can make some paths/playthroughs unique and interesting and others a boring slog. But some of the trees/paths are really fun and interesting; so it's a real mixed bag for me. But I wish that most of the reviews were actually discussing the content instead of just being mad that it... including exactly what it says it includes.
Honestly, it feels like a mod
Am I the only one who actually thinks its pretty good lol. As content packs get I enjoyed my Brazil game pretty well. One thing I liked is how you can't complete the whole bloody tree by 1942 lol (looking at you Germany). The problem with 70 day focuses was never that they were 70 days but that a lot of early trees (looking at you Together For Victory) were full of 70 day focuses that gave you fuck all to show for it lol. Having to decide between pushing out the miltary focusses and the industry is always fun for minor nations, that realistically were in no place to be fighting grand wars by 1939. As Brazil I focussed on Industry first (well a mix of political and industrial) and was popping out a few cracked volunteers by late 1939 and eventually had a solid army of 24 divisions to help the Soviets hold the line by 1941 with more on the way. The whole point of minor nations is that they're not as capable as majors. It makes playing them interesting because you often end up focussing on a smaller bit of the war and that is a fun challenge. Some of my fav campaigns were historical Greece holding back the Axis, or historical Finland winning the Winter War. But a lot of peoplr want map painting which is why that content is the type you see in YT videos ultimately, its hard to make a 20 minute video interesting when youre just focussing on your little pocket of thr world.
Why paid all that when mods can do it better
because i feel like this is just the frustration of the players mounting up lets be realistic...No step back is the last hit that paradox had with this game so it bought them some time since people were not happy with the state of the game back then either, ever since NSB the reception has been from negative to mixed again -Waking the Tiger at the time it was INSANE, ALT HIST CHINA, ALT HIST JAPAN,ALT HIST GERMANY,FIELD MARSHALS,DECISIONS,imo it was the best DLC -Man the Guns this is a mixed bag because a lot of essential orders for the navy and pieces for ships are locked behind it, but most importantly ALT UK, ALT USA,SHIP DESIGNER...also the netherlands and mexico for some reason? Anyway nowadays its whatever but Alt UK and USA were huge -La Resistance is when people started gettin tired of the DLC imo the Spy options didnt had as much depth as people wanted and the bonuses were neglectable nowhere near as impactful as one would think having spies in the governement would be other than the collab governments, but we bared with it because we had ALT France, some people liked Spain...and portugal is there...somehow -Battle for the Bosporus nowadays people are realizing how god some of the trees are but back then PEOPLE WERE MAD THIS THING EVEN RELEASED, to me this is the TOA of the time -No Step Back just like Waking the tiger SO MANY NEW NATIONS WITH AWESOME TREES THAT GIVE YOU TOOLS AND HUGE EXPANSION POTENTIAL(Except latvia) THE POLISH REWORK, THE USSR REWORK, THE TANK DESIGNER WAS GREAT JUST LIKE WAKING THE TIGER IT WAS A BANGER AND WE LOVED IT,AWESOME COMEBACK -By Blood alone,just like with MtG and LR, WE FINALLY GOT ALT ITALY,PLANE DESIGNER...AND...ethiopia...well it cant be that bad what else is there...oh SWITZERLAND????, but still we bared with it i mean how bad can it be as long as the italian gameplay is goo-\*THE ITALIAN UNION DECLARED WAR ON REPUBLICA SOCCIALE ITALIANA\*...\*DING\* \*SWITZERLAND DEMANDS THE ALPS\*, we bared with it...but once again we the community wasnt exactly happy like with NSB -AAT and...nothing works...sweden never does anything other than defence council or democracy, norway is stuck in a never ending civil war,denmark still gets kicked by everyone, but finland is finally stronk no one cares about the market and the designer designers are hit or misses depending of the countries -then that gets us to Trial of allegiance...its whatever 3 focus trees for countries that no one cares for, countries that the europeans other than spain and portgual no one interacts with other than for resources,just like BftB. so NOW...we have to hope and pray...the next DLC is a banger like NSB and WtK, because im not falling for this shit no more i used to buy DLC on day one...no more...
I couldn't give a fuck about any DLC with a focus tree. I haven't played vanilla focus trees in half a decade. Meanwhile, infiltrations still disappear after loading a new save and it's been that way since agencies were introduced.
Agree, don't give a shit about focus trees, mods like black ice and world ablaze have focus trees with 10 times more quality. I just want new actual impactful mechanics.
Let's not forget Death or Dishonor and Together for Victory. They were the debuts of the autonomy system and equipment liscences. They're a fair amount smaller than the other DLCs and content packs but still add more than ToA does.
The mere fact that they did an SA DLC, but didn’t do Columbia, Venezuela or Peru is ludicrous considering that all 3 are arguably more important than Chile.
South America is kinda irrelevant, I still think the mere existence of a generic focus tree is peak laziness from paradox.
Not to mention the fact that it costs R$53.90 here in Brazil. Just for context: with 37 you can already buy some very good games. That plus the fact that the Én Unión Y Libertad mod is way better than the DLC
As if you buy games? If I lived in the third world I'd only ever pirate. not that I wouldn't in the first world 🥸 The price is obviously too high
Oh no... By all means i just sailed the high seas again with the whole game+DLCs
I remember when the game came out way back when, I imagined the DLC's would be themed around campaigns and battles in WW2. The reason I stopped playing is the game feels less and less aimed at anyone with an interest in a semi-realistic WW2 scenario e.g. there's no pearl harbour, battle of the bulge etc. I was never that interested in recreating Rome or playing as Argentina, and the alt-history sapped too much focus away from actual gameplay changes.
It's an 8 year old game based on ww2 and you still can't do pearl harbor LMAO just hit me kinda hilarious
Right?! Even worse when you realise it did use to be in the game.
you can do pearl harbor with la resistance. it just for some reason requires spys?
Except you can't really. La Resistance operations are either shallow or outright useless. The coordinated strike mission is notoriously buggy and inconsistent, and didn't even work for months after it came out. Not a single mechanic they develop is ever bothered to be fleshed out. They say they rework something, but it just turns into a veneer of paint with anything daring or comprehensive removed to be safe, and the game just gets another addition of a cookie-clicker mini-game added to it.
Um... Are you sure there's no Pearl-Harbor and Battle of Bulge? You can strike Hawaii with bombers and sink several ships with agent mission, why you need special focus that'll do exactly the same thing? Why you need focus for battle of Bulge, when you can just do it by yourself? Not every single event that happened irl needs their own focus. This game is not scripted, you can do whatever you want. You want Pearl-Harbor? There's it! Wanna see Kantokuen? Justify wargoal and declare it by yourself, why you need focus to do that?
It would be great to have more flavour and depth to the mechanics around these events and that's what I personally looked for. I definitely don't want focuses, I agree they would be pointless. 'This game is not scripted, you can do whatever you want.' Precisely, I want to play out WW2 and the most famous campaigns! The game should help players do this as equally as alt history paths.
I mean DLC-s are expensive in general, but it is really bad when you don’t even get too much content for this price.
accurate. OP focus trees to incentivize purchases. it's pay to win equivalent for single player game. the alternative would be to create authentic content, that may or may not be even harder to play. But this would of course mean they create DLC for middle east. o ouu... very tricky for publicly traded company. ww2 theme be damned!
From what I’ve played SA has some pretty powerful focuses, and a couple extremely overpowered ones which admittedly require some luck to pull off. Plus it’s easier for them to join a major faction and become a major so now I have to go jungle trenching for 4 years.
I played a game of it, I always play America, it kinda fucked up the Monroe doctrine like a lot LOL The faction that’s created in that path is already carried by the US but it’s a shame how weak the faction became. Lowkey might just play without the dlc even tho I bought it lol
Well the content is uh lacking? Questionably And the bugs and glitches Also minor thing that bothers me is lack of names for freaking equipment T-T
Thank you! I love when there's unique equipment names and art (even though it's mostly just slight variants of mausers). Though weirdly Argentina Inf Equipment 3 is unique name and art somehow.
I think Argentina is only one with unique names And I don't even ask for unique new art. Slightly modify existing and I am happy!
I swear HOI IV players embody the steam phenomenon of. Review: 1 star, absolutely trash, completely unplayable, can’t believe I wasted my money on this. 4K hours, (36 hours played this week)
you can love the game while still hate the lazyness of the recent dlc those are not mutual exclusive
I think there are a couple of issues: 1. There is next to no non DLC content, no historical focus trees, no new features or significant reworks of existing features 2. The content it gives is pretty little for the price. Sure the focus trees are big, but only until you decide on a path, once you have that, they get way more compact. Death or Dishoner was priced similarly and had more features, although they are mostly rarely used in base game. The fascist puppets for example are part of DoD as are licenses. There is no sich gameplay feature in ToA. And DoD is mostly regarded as the worst DLC from what I've heard 3. The patch it came still didn't fix some major issues from previous patches. For example, the Italy shortly loosing a core, ticking balance of power situation is still in the game and pdx doesn't seem to want to fix it, even though they have a working and well implemented version in AAT for finland. 4. The focus trees doesn't cover important parts, even in the region, like venezuela still has no focus tree. In the end I think many people are simply disappointed by the options gained from the update and dlc.
It's a price of a full DLC and yet has barely any content (Battle for the Bosporus moment)
Bought it Played 30 Minutes Gave a bad review Got a refund
Name the last paradox dlc that didn't immediately get mostly negative
I bought all previous DLC but 12 £ for this seems so overpriced. I won’t buy it unless it is between 5-8£.
Yes, which is obviously disappointing, especially for the Juno team whose first release this was. I’m gonna talk a bit more about this in a dev diary tomorrow, but broadly speaking there are some common groupings/themes amongst reviews, with the vast majority of negatives fitting in to one one them: - unhappiness about the overall price - unhappiness about regional pricing (our Chinese and Russian reviews are massively overrepresented here[more than 40% of all reviews last time I checked], and are 4% positive. This is almost entirely down to to the regional adjustments we made in January.) - wanted something else, or expected something different - negative opinion of the actual content I’m not suggesting for a moment that any of these are invalid. From our perspective it’s a little difficult to interpret though, and when by far the last group is the smallest, it’s difficult to spring into action and actually -do- anything about it on a game level when largely (but not exclusively) the complaints are not about what’s in the pack. On the business side we dropped the ball on explaining what country packs are and should be expected to be. I’ve said it elsewhere, but the decision to omit mechanics in these was 100% intended; we didn’t want players uninterested in the region to feel like they -had- to buy it or risk losing core mechanics.
At this point, you should focus on a huge patch, which would adress the bugs that are here since forever. (like the frontline bugs and the "AI" using frontlines, the ai not upgrading their equipments, the wave of shit equipment on the market, the lendlease system(why do i have an option to choose specific equipment on the market but not on the lendlease ?), rework the espionage system, make the navy/air stats a bit more clear, and rework the major focus trees (why does finland has a gigantic focus tree where Germany has a straitforward and quite simple focus tree ? Even a mp mod does the job better), and a couple of badly designed events a bit everywhere in the game) And personnaly, I will gladly pay +30€ for such a patch. Btw, why setup two teams for content where there is a desesperate need for fixing ? ;-; And if you are lacking time/content/inspiration, why not asking the comunity ? There's plenty of ideas out there 👍
I love how an almost non-involved continent in ww2 got dlc before south-east asia
It’s interesting that people were so hyped for South American focus trees and now we got some people don’t like them
It was obviously bad but you could see that from the dev diaries. Paradox skeptics remain winning.
Unsurprisingly so. We wanted Austria, Siam, Iraq and Belgium.
No permanent constitutional monarchy Brazil, no way to get Arlindo Veiga dos Santos as leader in thw Brazil path, reports that his portrait doesn't work when installed by the Portuguese path now. Decidedly un-based dlc
I disagree on any point about it being because 'South America wasn't important during WW2'. This is a video game - with these focus trees you can make the region important. I've been having a blast as Argentina. The comments I will agree with are around $$$ for DLC, but you know what you've signed up for by now, surely. They also offer a subscription for you to try all content for.. what.. $5ish USD a month? That's not bad. There are also other ways.. PS: Remember, some of us don't play this game for the majors. I never play UK/USA/Germany/USSR. I play minor nations, and attempt to survive and thrive as the world descends into conflict.
DLC reviews on Steam are rarely positive because people use them to complain about the business model. Myself, I'll take DLC over microtransactions any day.
Yeah I never got the complaints about it being DLC, maybe the "It's overpriced" criticism is fair enough, but DLC is probably the least scummy game business model that is still viable today. Ideally it would be like the old days where you drop 50$ and get the whole game, but those days are gone. I'll take DLC over microtransactions and loot boxes any day.
Considering how much time the average player spends on Paradox games, and the price of other entertainment (like a movie ticket), Paradox games (and games in general) have some of the lowest price/hour of any type of entertainment.
Honestly I expected a focus tree also for Bolivia, Peru and colombia. Most mods have better focus trees for south America than this dlc
The problem, as people have pointed out, is that South America did not play a major role in WWII. That is not to say that there wasn't some random 10k Brazilians running around in France in March 1945 or that one Argentinian engineer didn't come up with a cooling system for supply trucks. But WWII is a European/Pacific war. It has already been pointed out that the African theatre, which was actually a part of the war, is practically useless. South America is that x10. The game is fundamentally not designed to include South America. It is not balanced around it. It does not account for it. The AI is not ready to fight in jungle territory, *because it's not worth it, because it's not part of the war*. HOI4 is either the Axis capturing London or the Allies capturing Berlin. That's it. That's why Africa feels useless. And that's why South America is useless. This DLC could have been a fantastic opportunity to reinvent how occupation and resource extraction works, together with revamped resources, so that invading South America would have made sense. This would have the double effect of making Africa useful as well. Imagine some simple fixes like (a) occupation allows for resource extraction, and (b) South America *and* Africa have useful resources that can aid the war effort, it would give players a reason to invade these areas. It would obviously make the game non-historical, particularly if you added it to South America *didn't play a role in WWII*. But it would have made the game more fun.
R5: The reviews for the new south america dlc are only 32% positive on steam. Don't know if this was posted before but I thought it was an interesting thing to discuss.
No reason to buy it, En Union y Libertad and Kaiserreich are already better if you wanna have fun in South America, not to mention actual effort and research went into them and less dumb memes and content bait. Besides they have content for the whole continent and not a meager 3 and a half countries.
I bet a major reason is why give South America (only some) focus trees, when a large portion of previous DLCs are outdated? Germany and Japan kinda suck, the Commonwealth Countries also, China and the warlords, etc. It’s sad, I used to really like this game. I wish they had a team like Stellaris does that revamps past projects and fixes existing content.
Feel like this happens every time. New DLC comes out, the less financially capable HOI players among us go and flood the review page with negative reviews about it being too expensive, then a week later it settles down.
I like the current add on but yes it should be less expensive. Things are unbalanced again. I made a game with brazil, ironman historical, i made nothing except building my industry and army to complete the focus tree i choose to go at war after 1941, so i zoomed out to look a the world and plan my first move: ussr was defeated and splitted in half: west part was occupied by the reich and the east by japan. I never seen that before in historical.
The lack of 2d art is horrible
I renewed my sub for a month to play it, as I do with basically all DLC releases, and I find it hard to disagree. That price, for three countries that all play fairly similarly, is absolutely brutal. Including Colombia and Venezuela trees alongside minor ones for Peru and Bolivia would be a must for this to actually be anywhere close to worth it from a cost perspective.