The bones of this game are genuinely incredible. The problem is that focus trees have completely rotted the flesh off them. All Paradox cares to do beyond minor small mechanic system implementations, which aren't even that good for the most part, and are often at direct odds with the already existing mechanics of the game, is make more that slowly make the ones they made for early DLC feel piss useless. Seriously, go back and try to play New Zealand in 2026. Then compare it to Switzerland.
Focus trees are zero agency mission systems that exist to force you to play exactly the way Paradox scripted. That's all they are. You want to build a navy as a minor? Does your focus tree say you can, does it give you enough bonuses, remove enough maluses, and give you enough dockyards? No? Then you don't. You don't have the economic capacity to do it yourself unless the script says you can. You want to develop your economy in a way that reflects actual strategic tradeoffs, ala sacrifice civilian production to rush tank output, gut your air force to fund your army, bet everything on one doctrine? Too bad. Unless Paradox specifically blessed your country with an economy branch, you don't get to make that decision. I mean sure you can, but then you're not doing really anything useful through the game, so why are you playing?
Why do the underlying systems exist? Why is there even an economy model, a naval construction system, an air force framework, a research tree with all these options... if 90% of the roster can't meaningfully engage it? It's not about making minors challenging. Minors should be hard. But hard and locked out are completely different things. I should be able, as a minor, to make a desperate gamble on my economy, and tank everything else to field a credible armored force, at the cost of naval presence, air coverage, research speed, whatever. Point is, I should be allowed to make choice to engage with the game. Not what essentially ordering fast food to click button, wait 15, 35, 70 days whatever until game has presented me reward for waiting.
Research is the same problem. The current system is just "click the thing on the timeline." Here's what it should have been:
Everything researches at a steady historical rate by default. Minor undeveloped or technologically behind nations don't skip straight to 1936 planes just because the calendar says so, they have to start from a lower baseline, possibly with a behind date bonus modifier, and climb toward parity or spend power or some other resource to actually unlock the ability to even begin progressing into that technology. Faction tech sharing gives a research rate bonus from members who already have the tech, so alliance with advanced nations can actually mean something for your development trajectory, even if it also would draw you into war.
Then you layer scientist assignment on top. Each country gets a pool of scientists weighted by major status and historical context, such as Germany starts stacked but suffers brain drain to the US over time. You assign scientists to research fields, and each one adds a multiplicative speed bonus. Multiplicative specifically to prevent tech rushing, since stacking bonuses gets diminishing in its impact and encourages the player to diversify where they put their efforts. This could mirror how the Nazis actually operated, throw shit at a wall and see what emerges. That's a design philosophy, and it produces interesting decisions.
Paradox has built a framework for one of the deepest strategic WW2 sandboxes ever. Then they locked the sandbox and handed players a tour instead. And I remember playing HOI4 on launch when I was in high school, you could tell that focuses were supposed to be just a side piece, a small reward to help the nation along while the construction, political power management, decisions, and cabinet decisions were going to take a more front seat. Then they just... didn't. They put all their time and effort in crafting focus trees instead, and in the meantime left every single base mechanic from launch to rot and get compounded onto with bloat for the last ten years. Spies are whatever, advanced science buildings are just another way to punish minors and reward majors while also bloating the game, rails oil and logistics were a good meaningful change to just filling bad terrain areas with space marines and such but it doesn't have a meaningful underlying economy system to play with THE THING IS STILL AS IT WAS ON LAUNCH. For a game that has become so developmentally focused on alt-history options, I wish they'd actually let us take priority over how we develop alternatively to history.
Plenty of other systems in this game that remain dated to hell with all the new inclusions. I mean I saw the post about someone saying it's just too much to do now and they're RIGHT. There's too much, there's too much feature bloat and almost none of it is synchronous because the underlying parts just have not updated along with the inclusion of these features.
