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Germany was my first HoI2 game after playing Argentina in the Platinean War scenario to get familiar with the game mechanics in a smaller arena. It's only natural to try and turn history around rather than play as a historical victor and I was also intimidated by the naval aspects of playing as any major other than the USSR and Germany. Naturally, I ended up failing miserably at Sea Lion and put off Barbarossa so long the USSR jumped me first while I was farting around invading Republican Spain to get to Gibraltar and made it to Warsaw by the time I could put up any type of defense. Plus a lot of people like me probably watched a lot of the old history channel as kids where everything was about Nazis and a lot of the episodes were about events like Stalingrad, Dunkirk, Kursk, etc. and treated with the 'if this one thing had gone differently, the whole war goes differently' type of thing. Now if your first AAR/LP is about Germany and waxes poetic about the figures in Nazi Germany who fell short of being Satan incarnate, that's a better indicator. Also German flag avatars, of course.
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Apr 8, 2016 20:56
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The fact that the standard HoI equivalent of the CK2 advice for new players to start in Ireland is "play as Germany" helped turn me off HoI for the longest time, although when i finally did try HoI 3 it turns out I probably shouldn't have since it's a garbage game anyway. 
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Apr 8, 2016 21:00
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Empress Theonora posted:Axis playthroughs should end with receiving a death sentence at the Nuremberg trials imho. in real life
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Apr 8, 2016 21:02
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Empress Theonora posted:The fact that the standard HoI equivalent of the CK2 advice for new players to start in Ireland is "play as Germany" helped turn me off HoI for the longest time, although when i finally did try HoI 3 it turns out I probably shouldn't have since it's a garbage game anyway. Yeah it's really bad. I'd say the best nation to start out as is Republican Spain since it gives you relatively low-scale combat quickly. I'm gonna try to play as France first time through HoI4 though.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:04
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My first playthroughs will be France, Soviets, or Commie USA. Doubt I will ever play as Germany, it's just too disgusting.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:13
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Lolling at the fact the hoi4 menu has a link to a wiki.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:16
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Yeah, my first game will be France, I think, since that still has that historical counterfactual appeal of trying to outperform actual history. Plus if I gently caress up at least the end would come in the early game so my suffering wouldn't be prolonged. Then again a USA game might be less annoying in HoI IV than I would have assumed since it seems like they've really streamlined getting troops across the ocean.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:18
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According to the newest Stellaris stream, you can have you custom species appear in random games if you want, you can set it to all the time, or just a small chance.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:19
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I'll probably either do France, Italy, or my perennial favorite that I always come back to for some reason, Canada.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:21
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Empress Theonora posted:Yeah, my first game will be France, I think, since that still has that historical counterfactual appeal of trying to outperform actual history. Plus if I gently caress up at least the end would come in the early game so my suffering wouldn't be prolonged. I was thinking of the old HoI MP houserule I once played with - France gets to continue as the US if/when it falls to Germany. I'm planning on running that for my first HoI4 game.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:22
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ArchangeI posted:I was thinking of the old HoI MP houserule I once played with - France gets to continue as the US if/when it falls to Germany. I'm planning on running that for my first HoI4 game. Oh, that's pretty clever! A Good House Rule. edit: the Lafayette Clause
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Apr 8, 2016 21:23
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HoI3 had some thing about playing a government in exile, so France would still be able to contribute even after getting stomped by the Germans, didn't it? Will HoI4 have something like that or are you just out of the game if you get fully occupied early on?
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Apr 8, 2016 23:03
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Honestly Germany should be unplayable in HoI4 like the Pope in CKII.
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Apr 8, 2016 23:11
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Eskaton posted:I don't think any intelligent conservative completely throws out Marxism, especially when used as an analytical tool. That's not actually what King was saying, though. quote:"There is one man who can explain everything," said King, "and that man is Karl Marx." No assertion that he thought Marx was right, just that simulating Marx made a fun game. (Well, insofar as Vicky 2's economic system is fun...)
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Apr 8, 2016 23:17
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Drone posted:I'll probably either do France, Italy, or my perennial favorite that I always come back to for some reason, Canada. Canada's kinda fun. You have no army so you can specialize however you want! You also have no factories, or competent military leadership either, and low manpower, but I found you can do pretty good as a sub-hunting and armoured division nation.
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Apr 8, 2016 23:24
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Honestly Germany should be unplayable in HoI4 like the Pope in CKII. That would make for dull MP.
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Apr 8, 2016 23:35
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Looking forward to the fanatic purifier Nazi Earth race mod for Stellaris so we don't have to feel guilty about conquering Earth as cyborg slug people. 
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Apr 8, 2016 23:37
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quote:A slide from this portion of King's talk has been circulated widely online with no surrounding context. Many seem to assume that the talk was about how the games medium could best be leveraged to promulgate communism. Oh hey, I took this picture! It's kind of fun seeing the places it's turned up and what kind of things people think goes on at GDC. Yeah, the actual context of that was explaining how you could script the Victoria 2 AI to actually colonize Africa. Marx's analysis happens to make a very straightforward and systematic explanation for why imperialism happens, and so makes a good basis for gameplay.
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Apr 8, 2016 23:38
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Enjoy posted:No Holocaust mods allowed on the forums I'm guessing there's a fraction of the userbase that would agree with that because they seriously believe it never happened.
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Apr 8, 2016 23:39
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PleasingFungus posted:That's not actually what King was saying, though. It's the same way the Allen Dulles interpretation of the Cold War makes for a fun 2-player game in Twilight Struggle.
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Apr 8, 2016 23:39
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Doubt I will ever play as Germany, it's just too disgusting. Too bad for you, you miss the experience to lead the strongest army of ww2.
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Apr 9, 2016 00:16
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Imagine if people whined as much about playing the USA in Vicky 2 when we were at our most brutal and expansionist, or just about anyone in EU4, as much as people whined about the concept of playing Germany in HOi.
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Apr 9, 2016 00:21
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Larry Parrish posted:Imagine if people whined as much about playing the USA in Vicky 2 when we were at our most brutal and expansionist, or just about anyone in EU4, as much as people whined about the concept of playing Germany in HOi. We often do
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Apr 9, 2016 00:25
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Enjoy posted:We often do *Cites the multipage-spanning debate a couple years back about historical patterns of Westernization and how EU4 promulgated a Eurocentric bias with regards to cultural and historical depictions of nonWestern society*
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Apr 9, 2016 00:36
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EU4 and Vicky have those awful things pretty prominently displayed, and they're divorced enough from living memory that it isn't a touchy subject.
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Apr 9, 2016 00:38
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 dehumanize yourself and face to wargames
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Apr 9, 2016 00:49
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The other reason I think people enjoy playing as Germany, at least from my experience of HOI2 and its spin-offs is due to the fact that is you're actively being fed events buff your nation while also giving you easy access to amour/amour doctrine while finally forcing to take the initiative. I mean sure you can do some very crazy stuff but look at the main 'alternative' big nations (going by the 1936 start): UK: Endure low peacetime IC before being forced into war about 3 years later. You usually don't have very high IC even during wartime and you have a massive gulf of land to defend. Everything is quite defensive until a few years in. USA: Similar to a much lesser extent to Britain but with more IC to play with and a longer waiting time to mold the country how you want. Bouyed up by the fact that it is almost impossible to lose, easy nuke access and being able to take doctrines almost anywhere you want. France: Don't know much about this one but I assume it'd be a UK situation with more direct continental involvement. I have seen people do well as France and it seems its undoing is more due to the nature of the AI. USSR: Good IC that is constantly undercut by absolutely savage dissent events while (iirc) your troops are coded not to be as effective for a good while. You have to fight the greatest defensive action at all ,though it is made up by the fact you also can conduct a completely continental offensive if you survive. Japan/Italy: These two ,like Germany are actively engaging but don't really have the overall quality of Germany and to be honest, if you are complaining about Germany being a top pick despite disgusting historical issues then these two nations are just sidestepping the issue. Now I understand a few of those nations have options to take part in earlier wars (China, SCW) but look at Germany. You are spoonfed options that almost always buff you, give you territory and more units to play with. While you cannot completely change the course of your army and doctrine, you can make some interesting alternatives. After that you then get to be actively engaging. First Poland, then the Low Countries before France, potentially Britain and then the USSR. There isn't really a period where you are sitting around waiting to be attacked or holding off in some brave defence. You IC is strong, your troops are (at least initially) excellent quality and as mentioned earlier, you have easy access to amour which s a lot more fun to people then standard INF. tldr: Germany gives you free poo poo, actively makes you attack people with cool tanks and planes instead of being defensive. Engaging for newbies.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:30
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Well yeah dude. It's completely obvious why people want to play Germany more than other nations, but people in this thread act like it's buying a signed copy of Mein Kampf off of Ebay while jerking off in a Waffen-SS uniform People play Germany because it's the strongest nation that is on the offence instead of the defense, and because they get to be the big man on campus until the Allies are finally unshackled by events
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Apr 9, 2016 01:52
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SkySteak posted:The other reason I think people enjoy playing as Germany, at least from my experience of HOI2 and its spin-offs is due to the fact that is you're actively being fed events buff your nation while also giving you easy access to amour/amour doctrine while finally forcing to take the initiative. I mean sure you can do some very crazy stuff but look at the main 'alternative' big nations (going by the 1936 start): Speaking of that. Uranium really should be a strategic resource. In 1940 the only known sources of Uranium were Colorado, Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Belgian Congo. In fact many people engaged in the Manhattan Project actually thought that they had exhausted most of the known supplies they had access to. Developing nukes should be more difficult than just developing the tech and building the reactors, it should also require you to gain access to the resource. Which would make it more difficult for Germany to obtain them as they would only have access to the limited deposits in Czechoslovakia, though today there is mining in Russia, Ukraine and Central Asia as well so one might be justified in adding limited uranium deposits to later significant uranium deposits.
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Apr 9, 2016 02:01
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I'm glad Larry Parrish has once again showed up to tell us that narrative doesn't exist, signs signify nothing, and games that situate themselves in historical contexts say nothing about history.
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Apr 9, 2016 02:29
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Randarkman posted:Speaking of that. Uranium really should be a strategic resource. In 1940 the only known sources of Uranium were Colorado, Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Belgian Congo. In fact many people engaged in the Manhattan Project actually thought that they had exhausted most of the known supplies they had access to. Maybe have those extra deposits only appear once you reach a certain level of nuclear tech research? I'm not super familiar with the Manhattan project and the early history of nuclear technology, but I think part of the issue they had with developing the first nukes was that at the time they only knew how to do it with U-235, which only makes up about 1% of all Uranium, while modern developments allow it to be done with U-238 as well (actually having just looked it up, it's not that we can fission U-238 but rather that we know how to transmute it into Plutonium which is naturally fissile like U-235) . I think that was discovered well after the end of WW2, but since it's a game it's not unreasonable to include post-war development as possible research at the tail end of the tree that most people are unlikely to unlock but is there if you really want to pour research into it.
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Apr 9, 2016 02:46
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DrSunshine posted:*Cites the multipage-spanning debate a couple years back about historical patterns of Westernization and how EU4 promulgated a Eurocentric bias with regards to cultural and historical depictions of nonWestern society* Which EU4 is doing again after actually being decent for a change. It sucks.
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Apr 9, 2016 03:59
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Randarkman posted:Speaking of that. Uranium really should be a strategic resource. In 1940 the only known sources of Uranium were Colorado, Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Belgian Congo. In fact many people engaged in the Manhattan Project actually thought that they had exhausted most of the known supplies they had access to. I get what you're going at, but I don't know if it's a good idea to add in a separate type of resource that only ~5 to 6 countries will ever get the opportunity to need for a very niche (if extremely powerful) type of production. Based on what's on the HOI4 wiki, having access to strategic resources just greatly speeds up mass production of units reliant on that resource rather than enabling / disabling production. Seeing that the total number of nuclear bombs created during WWII was 3 (I think?), I don't know if there would be a point to adding Uranium if it worked like the other strategic resources. If the dev diary is still up to date, then nuclear bombs can be slowly churned out with a speed that's based on the total number of Reactors a country has, and is further modified by national ideas. If to make an atomic bomb you need Uranium to speed up production and there's a heavy industrial buy-in and major powers are naturally faster at it, then I personally think that it becomes a bit too complex from a game standpoint for a super-weapon which a player should only see very sparingly within the game to begin with. As for the whole "what country will you play as first in HOI4?" question, I'm thinking of trying Republican Spain or Allied-faction Romania to get acquainted with the basic mechanics, then maybe either  or Nationalist China for a huge frontline war.
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Apr 9, 2016 04:09
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Empress Theonora posted:I'm glad Larry Parrish has once again showed up to tell us that narrative doesn't exist, signs signify nothing, and games that situate themselves in historical contexts say nothing about history.
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Apr 9, 2016 04:37
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I intend to play as Germany when HoI drops. Hell, I may even play them several times, attempting different stratagems and tactics against the Allied forces.
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Apr 9, 2016 04:41
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Strudel Man posted:Handwringing about it is immensely tedious and unpleasant. To you but really who cares what you think.
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Apr 9, 2016 04:50
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Fuligin posted:I intend to play as Germany when HoI drops. Hell, I may even play them several times, attempting different stratagems and tactics against the Allied forces.
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Apr 9, 2016 05:01
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I will never get people's obsession with controlling what topics the threads are allowed to discuss.
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Apr 9, 2016 05:09
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Maybe have those extra deposits only appear once you reach a certain level of nuclear tech research? I'm not super familiar with the Manhattan project and the early history of nuclear technology, but I think part of the issue they had with developing the first nukes was that at the time they only knew how to do it with U-235, which only makes up about 1% of all Uranium, while modern developments allow it to be done with U-238 as well (actually having just looked it up, it's not that we can fission U-238 but rather that we know how to transmute it into Plutonium which is naturally fissile like U-235) . I think that was discovered well after the end of WW2, but since it's a game it's not unreasonable to include post-war development as possible research at the tail end of the tree that most people are unlikely to unlock but is there if you really want to pour research into it. You make plutonium with U-238, you need U-235 for a nuclear reaction in a fission reactor as U-238 won't fission if bombarded with neutrons but rather undergo beta decay into Pu-239 or Pu-238. However in order to get enough of those neutrons to produce plutonium you need a self-sustained nuclear reaction, so you still need U-235. The problem of course is that U-235 is found only in very small quantities in natural uranium ores, usually about 0.7%, which is not a high enough concentration to sustain a nuclear reaction (ideally you want each fission to produce enough neutrons to ensure that those neutrons will be absorbed by more than one U-235 nucleus that will undergo fission), that is why you need to enrich Uranium. This essentially involves using some method (usually today a gas centrifuge) to reduce the amount of U-238 in the uranium fuel, this requires a lot of effort, technology and infrastructure. A large part of the Manhattan Project therefore was about acquiring enough uranium ore (and separating the uranium from that ore) and building the machines that could enrich it so that they had uranium fuel with a useful concentration of U-235, you need something like a 20% concentration of U-235 to run a normal water- or gas-moderated reactor, 1-2% if using heavy water as a moderator (a moderator is a medium used to slow neutrons in a reactor down so that a collision with a nucleus resulting in capture is more likely), and for nuclear weapons you need to enrich it to something like 90%. For plutonium production you essentially need a uranium reactor, preferably one with a decent concentration of U-238 in the fuel since that is what makes plutonium. However you also need to be able to remove the uranium fuel rods which are HIGHLY radioactive and very dangerous to handle, and preferably do it rather soon because if left too long in the reactor too much of the plutonium will capture netrons becoming Pu-240 which is extremely unstable and essentially useless for making a nuclear weapon. Then you need to separate the plutonium from the spent fuel rods, which is also very dangerous for the same reasons above unless you are willing to wait some years for most of the highly unstable stuff to decay to insignificance (plutonium makes up most of the long-lived nuclear isotopes found in nuclear waste). But yeah get enough plutonium 239 together, some 10-12kg and do a bunch of complicated stuff involving an imploding structure, neutron reflectors and other stuff and you have yourself a bomb without having to do as much of that difficult and expensive uranium mining and enriching. The techniques used to make the plutonium bombs were really advanced and likely people were unsure if it would work, which is why I guess they tested a plutonium bomb in the Trinity test and, Little Boy (the uranium bomb) was essentially dropped blind (because the science was clear on that one and the mechanics of the bomb itself weren't as essential as in Fat Man). I don't know too much about the German nuclear program other than that they tried to acquire heavy water from Norwegian hydro plants for it, this probably means they were trying to make plutonium, which makes sense given the limited uranium deposits they had at hand. I think I've read that their program seems to have concluded that they would not be able to feasibly make a bomb and that it was concentrated on making a reactor (you can run a fission reactor on Pu-239) that would power an electric submarine or something (which also would be an interesting benefit from researching and developing nuclear reactors in HoI4, that is improving your submarines). Spiderfist Island posted:I get what you're going at, but I don't know if it's a good idea to add in a separate type of resource that only ~5 to 6 countries will ever get the opportunity to need for a very niche (if extremely powerful) type of production. Based on what's on the HOI4 wiki, having access to strategic resources just greatly speeds up mass production of units reliant on that resource rather than enabling / disabling production. Seeing that the total number of nuclear bombs created during WWII was 3 (I think?), I don't know if there would be a point to adding Uranium if it worked like the other strategic resources. If the dev diary is still up to date, then nuclear bombs can be slowly churned out with a speed that's based on the total number of Reactors a country has, and is further modified by national ideas. If to make an atomic bomb you need Uranium to speed up production and there's a heavy industrial buy-in and major powers are naturally faster at it, then I personally think that it becomes a bit too complex from a game standpoint for a super-weapon which a player should only see very sparingly within the game to begin with. Yeah, I guess you're right  I guess some way around it would be to give countries a modifier or something indicating that they have access to significant uranium deposits, which would reduce the time needed to produce nukes from any nuclear reactors they have (or base this on those countries controlling states that, at the time, were known to have this), and possibly allow any members of their same faction enjoy this benefit as well. Nuke edit: Most nukes made since WWII have used plutonium because the whole implosion trigger design worked and that meant that you could make bombs using alot less uranium than what would be the case if you had to make uranium bombs which would be very wasteful in the cost of mining massive quantities of uranium ore and then enriching it all to weapons grade which. Having worked out the mechanics of plutonium bombs all you really have to do is find an acceptably safe way to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, it also means you could secretly make bombs by extracting the plutonium from research reactors or power plants (though that is somewhat more difficult as the fuel rods will need to stay in the reactor for a while otherwise you are going to get much less power for the fuel you use and it will be much more costly to run it for producing electricity) Nuke edit2: Little Boy used about 64kg of uranium, enriched to an average of about 80%, you'd need to enrich something like 7000kg of natural uranium to get that, and then you have to consider that the actual concentration of extractable uranium in uranium ores is very small, often less than 0.1%. So you have to mine, extract and enrich quite alot to make a uranium bomb, something like 5000 to 10 000 tons. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 05:56
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CharlestheHammer posted:I will never get people's obsession with controlling what topics the threads are allowed to discuss. and yet, I never see you in GBS
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Apr 9, 2016 06:16
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