 What's all this then? This is Hearts of Iron 4, a grand strategy game released in 2016 by Paradox Development Studio. It is currently the latest in that series, and has been continually developed and received new DLCs up to now, with more content still due to be released past the writing of this post. So what's this game about? Basically, this is a game all about World War 2. You pick a country and guide it from 1936 to 1948 (actual end date is flexible), making decisions, building nations and running wars along the way. If you've played other Paradox games, you have a basic idea of how this is going to go, though this game is more war-focused than, say, Crusader Kings 2 or such. If you haven't played a Paradox game, basically imagine yourself in control of the major facets of a country. You decide which direction your politics take, build your cabinet, you construct your nation's industry, you decide what weapons you build and what kind of an army, navy and air force you set up with those weapons, you trade resources with other nations, build alliances, spy on each other, all sorts of stuff you need to do to run a successful nation. As such, there's a lot of stuff to learn with this game. And what about the LP? Well, as I said, there's a lot of stuff to learn with this game. Furthermore, this game has an interesting multiplayer function where multiple people can play the same nation, with changes any player makes instantly being visible to all players. With that in mind, I decided to combine those two factors to create this LP. As such, here's who's part of this LP.  First, we have myself, TheMcD. I have about 1000 hours in this game, though a good part of that was probably spent in observer mode watching games with different mods develop because that interests me. Still, I have a fair amount of experience in this game, even if there are some parts I really don't know how to work optimally. I can get through games and win wars. Sometimes. I will be taking the role of teacher in this LP.  And for our second participant, we have Ibblebibble. As he describes his experience with this game himself: "I last played the game on release, and then played Italy and lost to Greece." Ibble will be taking the role of student in this LP. So together, we will be playing this game in co-op multiplayer and attempt to get through a Germany campaign while I teach Ibble to play the way I play. From there, we see how things go. Things might go great! Things might not go great. Hopefully, it will be entertaining either way. You said something about mods. Yeah, I'm using a few minor graphical mods I like and one multiplayer utility mod. Here's the list of mods I'm using. - Square Counters: Exactly what it says. Normally, counters that show units are rectangular in this game. But I come from HoI2, where counters were square. So I prefer it this way. - Universal Colored Puppets: This colors puppet states the same color as their overlord. It makes maps look a bit nicer when you can tell at a glance that a country is just a puppet. - WW's Map: This is just a map mod. I think it looks cleaner and nicer, so I use it. - No Forced Pause / Slowdown For MP Lag: There's an automatic slowdown with speed when somebody lags behind in multiplayer. Since this is just two people playing co-op and we're probably going to be frequently pausing to go over stuff anyway, I figure it's easier to disable the automatic slowdown and keep us in control of the speed. I don't think that's all the mods you're using. No, those are all the mods. Everything else is completely normal vanilla HoI4. Don't question it. Anything else? One more important note. Do not treat this LP as a comprehensive tutorial! You will be sorely disappointed if you do that. This LP will teach you to play my way. That is not necessarily a good thing. It will probably be enough to play the game, find some success, and have fun. But people who know the game better will probably tear their hair out at some things I say. Please don't get mad. I'm just kinda dumb.                   BGM List: quote:Episode 1: haircuts for men - когда зло господствует (Tracks 1 through 8) --------------------------------------------  What's all this then? This is Kaiserreich, the most popular mod (that doesn't just enhance the vanilla game) for Hearts of Iron 4. It started out life as a mod for Hearts of Iron 2 / Darkest Hour and has been in development for ages. What's it about? Kaiserreich is a mod that sets out to answer the question "How would WW2 look like if the Central Powers had won WW1?". And as a result, a lot of things are different, even if we end up seeing a lot of familiar faces. We go more into what's going on in the world of Kaiserreich in the first video before we make our choice of country: The Socialist Republic of Italy. How will this go? In this game, Ibble will be taking over as host and making more decisions while I take more of an advisory/guide/military commander position and go over some more things as to how playing a minor power in an alliance is different to playing a major power. Let's see what happens!           BGM List: quote:Episode 1: Mario Golf --------------------------------------------  What's all this then? This is Equestria at War, one of the largest mods for Hearts of Iron 4. ...ponies? Yes, ponies. Also griffons. And more. So, what's it about? Well, as the name might imply, this is a mod set in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic universe. In a way. Most of the world here is basically made up by the mod creators, but it does use main characters from the show in some capacity. Except now it's World War 2. And, well, it's probably one of, if not the best mod made for Hearts of Iron 4. Everything in it just works, and there's a copious amount of content for basically every country you can see. While it doesn't go as crazy as some other mods on the custom mechanics and such, I would say it's the most polished experience you can have in Hearts of Iron 4 modding. So much like with Kaiserreich, we start out by going through the world the mod gives us before eventually settling on our choice: The Griffonian Empire.               BGM List: quote:Episode 1: 死夢VANITY - albums "diamond rush" and "eternal" --------------------------------------------  What's all this, then? This is the One Year War mod for Hearts of Iron 4. It's a Gundam mod. What's it about? Gundam. Universal Century Gundam, or so I'm told. Look, I don't know what the gently caress I'm talking about here. Ibble's the one that knows about Gundam, not me. I know there's Zeon, and there's an Earth Federation, and the point we start at Zeon has like half the world and I think I heard that that's when the original show starts or something (there are earlier bookmarks). And what makes the mod special? There's two main things. For one, there's the tech tree, which amongst other things has a whole bunch of different mobile suits and such to research, build and field. This comes with a whole bunch of different equipment. And the other thing is that there's space, which in HoI4 means that there's a part of the map that's just cut out and completely separated from the rest of the map apart from straits that go across the entire world. It's kind of a mess, actually. Is it any good? That's a complicated question. For now, suffice it to say that our time playing this mod will not last as long as Equestria at War.     BGM List: quote:Episode 1: haircuts for men - Solo Works Discography 1982~2016 --------------------------------------------  What's all this then? This is Red World, a mod with a quite simple premise: What if the Soviets won the Cold War? As such, in the year of 2010, the Soviets are on top of the world with the Warsaw Pact spanning most of Europe, and the USA collapsed and splintered into many different independent states. Anything else special? Not really. Red World is a pretty basic mod as far as mechanics are concerned, sticking pretty much entirely to vanilla and transplanting the research tree into the modern day pretty much unchanged, which is very handy. However, it has some very fun campaigns due to its premise. In this playthrough, we will be going through one of my favorite paths: John Foster's Union of American Soviet Socialist Republics. You'll see, things get fun on this path.              BGM List: quote:Episodes 1-13: Assorted Red Army Choir songs --------------------------------------------  What's all this then? This is Old World Blues, the Fallout mod. We have a larger, America-centric map with a lot more detail, a completely reworked tech tree, and a fuckton of content. Old World Blues is up there with Equestria At War in giving content to a whole bunch of different countries. Generally, if you know Fallout, you're going to recognize a lot of stuff, though since the devs need to fill an entire map, there is some stuff that's made up or extrapolated from, like, a single line in a Van Buren design doc or whatever. Still, the whole gang's here, from the NCR to the Legion to New Vegas, Vault City, Arroyo and more. Anything else we should know? Not particularly. There's a fair bit of stuff that is different, but not different enough to really throw you off. The first video will be an overview of the map and the factions, but we've already decided on playing as the Free Fighters, because a nation of luchadores is something we just have to go for. Luchadores? Yes.         BGM List: quote:Episodes 1-8: Assorted radio tracks from Fallout: New Vegas and mods, mixed together --------------------------------------------  What's all this then? This is No Step Back, the most recent DLC released for Hearts of Iron 4. It added focus trees for the Baltic countries, Poland and the Soviet Union, a rework of the officer and doctrine system, a tank designer, and a rework of the supply system. It also broke basically every mod. Fun times. Anything else? We're playing as the Soviets this time, and I'm going to be taking Ibble into account a bit more instead of running the show largely by myself. This may or may not end in disaster. Also, this is the final campaign of the LP. It's been a long while, and it's time to wrap it up.              BGM List: quote:Episodes 1-13: Assorted radio tracks from the Hearts of Iron 4 soundtrack --------------------------------------------  What's all this then? This is Hololive of Iron. ...what? Yes. Anyway, long story short, this replaces a whole bunch of the vanilla map with countries run by Hololive characters. It's inherently very chaotic, with every Hololive country able to go fascist, communist, democratic or non-aligned, leading to very crazy alliances and clusterfuck wars. Ibble and I did this for April Fools Day, and we might revisit it if the mod gets an update.  BGM List: quote:Episode 1: The Vocaloid Jazz Sessions (Vol. 1 and a small part of Vol. 2) TheMcD fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jun 10, 2022 |
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Sep 28, 2020 13:19
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owo whats this
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Sep 28, 2020 14:10
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All artillery build or bust you cowards.
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Sep 28, 2020 15:29
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Video is still unlisted. Intentional? Also the game (and DLC) is on sale on Steam for about another hour and a half.
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Sep 28, 2020 16:30
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turol posted:Video is still unlisted. Intentional? Intentional. My YouTube channel used to be a place where I uploaded music from pinball machines and I accrued about 450 subscribers from that (note: Haven't uploaded anything in that regard in five years now, but still). When I started doing LP stuff, I made everything unlisted so I wouldn't spam those people with poo poo they weren't here for. And, well, it stuck. Call it a hot forums exclusive.
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Sep 28, 2020 16:35
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I can't believe literally all of society was gaslighting me. They tried to pass Charlie Chaplin off as Hitler, all these years. They even made fake documentaries and made up this whole narrative about Chaplin satirizing Hitler in his films, all so I wouldn't question it. Well, now I know the truth.
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Sep 28, 2020 16:41
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seems like i'm a little too drunk to actually pay attention to this video but it makes some really enjoyable background noise! i will probably try again another day when i'm sober
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Sep 29, 2020 02:07
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biosterous posted:seems like i'm a little too drunk to actually pay attention to this video but it makes some really enjoyable background noise! i will probably try again another day when i'm sober So between this and feedback on Discord that this first video was a chill experience, I'm getting the feeling that my trajectory so far is, like, a low rate Bob Ross with World War 2. I'm fine with this.
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Sep 29, 2020 15:41
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TheMcD posted:Bob Ross with World War 2.
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Sep 29, 2020 20:23
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Happy little
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Sep 29, 2020 23:36
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uwu
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Sep 30, 2020 08:18
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I demand naval warfare, cowards. Challenge British sea power. 
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Sep 30, 2020 14:35
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OutofSight posted:I demand naval warfare, cowards. Challenge British sea power. You'll get naval bombers and like it.
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Sep 30, 2020 14:55
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I suppose you could also do the Oppose Hitler focus down the road, since that would let you get to grips with the military system a lot sooner with the Civil War as a result. Will you be doing other nations later on? It'd be interesting to see how to do a democratic nation to try and prepare for the war, as opposed to Germany which obviously is set up to be the prime mover. The revised France might be an interesting thing to try.
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Oct 2, 2020 11:39
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Yvonmukluk posted:I suppose you could also do the Oppose Hitler focus down the road, since that would let you get to grips with the military system a lot sooner with the Civil War as a result. Well, we're going to play around with the military system with our volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. That should be enough for the basest basics and the war with Poland (or maybe the Czechs, depending on how that goes) should work for an actual war. I intend to stick with the historical path, by and large anyway. My intent for later campaigns, if this takes off, is to do different mods. I love playing different HoI4 mods. So maybe we could do Kaiserreich next, as the mechanics are still largely the same but with a different world to play around with. EDIT: Like, if you wanted to pin me down to something right now, the next planned campaign would be somewhere in China in Kaiserreich, since that's a really interesting region since the rework happened. TheMcD fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Oct 2, 2020 |
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Oct 2, 2020 11:50
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Hey, just a quick FYI: Ibble and I determined we're going to go for recording once every two weeks, starting next week. I will be shooting for having a video out every week. However, we can't record this week, and we only recorded that first video the first time, so the next session will be next weekend, and I'll see to it that I get the first video of that session edited and uploaded that weekend as well. So no video this weekend, next one should be next weekend.
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Oct 3, 2020 13:23
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Alright, I got it in in time! It's still this weekend for me! In this video, we add "WW2 factoid collection" to the list of things this LP is probably not going to be as we start letting time pass in the game and spend some time chatting about particular things we at least believe we know about WW2. Also, note that from now on, episodes will be coming from longer recording sessions (this first one went about 3 hours and 45 minutes), so there will be abrupt cuts at the end and videos will start in medias res apart from the first one of the session.
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Oct 11, 2020 22:17
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Who gets access to Garbo, aka Alaric, aka Juan Pujol García on their spies list? It would be funny for both Britain and Germany to get access but hard to make him both historical and a viable choice for the Germans. Historically he was a Catalan farmer who came out of the Spanish Civil War disgusted with both sides but proud of having served them without actually firing bullets. When World War II broke out he resolved to help Germany's enemies by acting as a spy...but he got turned down several times by the British. Undaunted, he made contact with the Abwehr under false pretenses to instead "spy" for them in England. Pujol never intended to actually carry this out, so he instead went to Lisbon and started bullshitting like mad. The utterly credulous Abwehr believed him despite in-hindsight hilarious errors like a (fake) Scottish contact who "would do anything for a litre of wine". Eventually, after the Kriegsmarine went running after an entire fictitious convoy, the British brought him on for real as part of the Double Cross system. (Every single Nazi spy who went to Britain got suborned in some way; Pujol was the only one who actively sought the Brits out from the start.) From then on Pujol (codenamed Garbo) was instrumental in the Allied intelligence apparatus, especially during the events of Operations Fortitude and Overlord. The Nazis believed him so completely that he kept a mix of 21 divisions out of Normandy from D-Day through August 1944.
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Oct 12, 2020 00:36
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Ah, intelligence agencies. Very expensive for smaller countries, and their effects are a bit subtle compared to just building more military factories. In my experience, their most valuable contribution is the actual intel on the enemy: Knowing what they produce, what their division templates look like, where their fleets are stationed and so on is impossible to get anywhere else, and highly valuable if a bit difficult to quantify. My usual order for upgrades is Cryptology Deparment first, since that takes a while to take effect and I want to get working on that straight away. Next comes a bit passive defense, followed by intel stuff and then whatever (usually cryptology upgrades). As for spy operations, Intel networks are quite useful on their own even without any other operations. As a warmongering nation like Germany, building up Collaberation during the early game in countries you inted to capitulate early like Poland and France can save you tons of equipment and manpower later on by indirectly reducing the resistance there much more efficiently than directly placing spies for that purpose. You'll still probably have to do so though as Germany, due to the sheer volume of occupied territory. Stealing blueprints is nice as a way to boost your research but I almost never use it myself. NGDBSS posted:Who gets access to Garbo, aka Alaric, aka Juan Pujol García on their spies list? It would be funny for both Britain and Germany to get access but hard to make him both historical and a viable choice for the Germans. He's a spy for Britain in-game, but has both British and German nationality (helping him blend in better in those countries) and the "Double Agent" trait. NeverHelm fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Oct 12, 2020 |
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Oct 12, 2020 12:05
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the anime portraits and music are a nice touch I'm not enough of a war history nerd to play this but I really appreciate the detail that goes into the speculative possible history aspects of all of this.
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Oct 13, 2020 01:40
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TheMcD posted:My intent for later campaigns, if this takes off, is to do different mods. I love playing different HoI4 mods. So maybe we could do Kaiserreich next, as the mechanics are still largely the same but with a different world to play around with. That said, looking forward to a complete newbie learning the game as it is nowadays. I've been playing for 500 hours and still feel like I'm learning constantly.
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Oct 13, 2020 09:21
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NeverHelm posted:Ah, intelligence agencies. Very expensive for smaller countries, and their effects are a bit subtle compared to just building more military factories. In my experience, their most valuable contribution is the actual intel on the enemy: Knowing what they produce, what their division templates look like, where their fleets are stationed and so on is impossible to get anywhere else, and highly valuable if a bit difficult to quantify. I'm going to try and make more use of spies in this game than I usually do, and yeah, collab governments is probably going to be what I'll try to do eventually because the occupation stuff wasn't fun in my practice game. NeverHelm posted:He's a spy for Britain in-game, but has both British and German nationality (helping him blend in better in those countries) and the "Double Agent" trait. I was wondering how that was going to work, since there is a double agent system in game, but it'd be kind of a dick move to have a spy in Germany's pool that was just guaranteed to go double agent on you. I suppose him just showing up in Britain's pool is appropriate. Lynneth posted:I dare you to do EAW eventually. It's legitimately one of the highest-quality mods I played to date, alongside goddamn Kaiserreich. You don't need to dare me on that. EaW is absolutely on my shortlist for mods I want to do (alongside Kaiserreich, Kaiserredux and Old World Blues) because yes, it is amazing. Lynneth posted:That said, looking forward to a complete newbie learning the game as it is nowadays. I've been playing for 500 hours and still feel like I'm learning constantly. I bring this up in an episode yet to be posted, but I only learned that you can manually support attacks by holding CTRL and right-clicking the battle indicator after I was about 800 hours in. Sometimes, you just never learn something until someone specifically brings it up. starbucks hermit posted:the anime portraits and music are a nice touch I do wonder if I'm eventually going to run out of music in my collection that is appropriate for what I want to go for, but I should probably be good for a while. And yeah, while there are some faults with the alt-history approach that HoI4 goes for, one perk is that a ton of different stuff can happen. I played a practice game as Germany after the first video just to see if I could still get through the Soviets without too much trouble, and things went radically different compared to what the save I'm running with Ibble is turning out as.
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Oct 14, 2020 08:00
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Alright, now that I have some episodes ready, I will be establishing a schedule - I'll post a new episode every Friday evening. And with that... This time, we have a bit of a lull as we wait for the Spanish Civil War to kick off, so Ibble gets to look around the world and check out all the places he's been in his life, and then we start prepping for the Spanish Civil War.
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Oct 16, 2020 19:12
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New video! This time, we start messing around in the Spanish Civil War and find ourselves going over basic military stuff with our two tank divisions.
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Oct 23, 2020 20:49
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TheMcD posted:New video! I assume that you just need to continue to capture territory until the other group capitulates. Do you intend to focus your efforts on Spain for now? And how long will it likely take before the enemy is defeated?
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Oct 26, 2020 08:37
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starbucks hermit posted:I assume that you just need to continue to capture territory until the other group capitulates. Do you intend to focus your efforts on Spain for now? And how long will it likely take before the enemy is defeated? Yeah, basically, the war ends after we capture enough victory points (which are specific important provinces that have major cities and such). We're going to focus on Spain mainly for lack of something else to really focus on. Those tanks and planes weren't going to be doing anything if we weren't loving around in Spain. And if you don't mind a minor spoiler: The next two episodes will be the rest of the Spanish Civil War. So that's how long it'll take until the war is finished.
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Oct 26, 2020 18:43
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New video! This time, we have a lot more happening in the Spanish Civil War. We play around with the espionage system, let our tanks roll on the plains of Spain, and remilitarize the Rheinland. Also, stay tuned for the surprise ending!
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Oct 30, 2020 16:20
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My old laptop can't run HOI4, but I still waste time on HOI3 just to play out the Spanish Civil War every now and again. Now I'm on the edge of my seat for whatever the hell this universe churning up.
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Oct 31, 2020 06:55
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"poo poo's kinda fuckin' hosed." Yeah, that looks about right for a giant crazy multiple-faction mess at the end there.
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Oct 31, 2020 09:20
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What is with your oil reserves bouncing around so much every week? You went from 100 days to 250 and then 4 years at one point.
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Oct 31, 2020 17:23
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Scalding Coffee posted:What is with your oil reserves bouncing around so much every week? You went from 100 days to 250 and then 4 years at one point. Oil reserves are calculated based on current usage. It's supposed to tell you "with usage the way it is right now, you have X amount of time left before you run out". Since we're currently using fairly low amounts (we have like 200 planes in the air and two tank divisions rolling around, compared to thousands of planes and like 40+ tank and motorized divisions rolling around by the time we hit Barbarossa) and we have a low oil production, small changes in use (so like our tank divisions stopping in a province to regain their organization) can cause drastic changes in the time remaining.
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Oct 31, 2020 17:27
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I'm a little surprised you guys didn't do the Victoria run, it's sort of the go-to gimmick run for Germany.
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Oct 31, 2020 18:14
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wiegieman posted:I'm a little surprised you guys didn't do the Victoria run, it's sort of the go-to gimmick run for Germany. Well, I wanted the first run to be the most vanilla, standard thing possible. And for this game, that's standard historical Germany. If I wanted memes, I'd play Kaiserredux. We might play Kaiserredux down the line.
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Nov 1, 2020 15:31
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So what's the plan at this point? Do you need to take care of the other three factions now? And in a military fashion (as opposed to diplomatically)?
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Nov 2, 2020 21:49
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starbucks hermit posted:So what's the plan at this point? Do you need to take care of the other three factions now? And in a military fashion (as opposed to diplomatically)? Yeah. Basically, the way it works - at least in vanilla - is that once you see the "X has declared war on Y" popup, it's war and it will be war until one side gets beaten so bad they surrender. There are no separate peace deals or something like that. The SCW is now a four-way slugfest that goes until only one is left standing.
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Nov 3, 2020 08:56
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New video! This time in our Spanish Civil War adventures, we get ourselves in a bit of a pickle.
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Nov 6, 2020 16:18
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Is this the kind of game where objectives are more important than flat out destroying enemy forces? Oh wow, that is a lot of DLC for the game and the reviews are crapping all over them. Scalding Coffee fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 18:51
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Scalding Coffee posted:Is this the kind of game where objectives are more important than flat out destroying enemy forces? Taking objectives gets the enemy to capitulate, but encircling and destroying their army makes it a lot easier to get to them. Paradox DLCs always get review bombed.
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Nov 6, 2020 19:16
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Scalding Coffee posted:Is this the kind of game where objectives are more important than flat out destroying enemy forces? Paradox dlcs get reviewed poorly because lots of people have issue with the patches that come out with the dlc or feel like the dlc should be free. Steam reviews are terrible for paradox games because of this, and you're better off asking either here or in the hoi4 thread (or appropriate paradox game thread) in games if youre looking to buy dlc.
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Nov 6, 2020 21:18
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TheMcD posted:gently caress the battle plan. Cuz I see a hole and I'm going to use it. Phrasing! I tried some games as Germany and bounced pretty hard off HoI4 after getting my rear end kicked. I'm currently playing the new patch of Stellaris but will try this game again after watching some more of your LP. Maybe I can actually figure out how it works.
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Nov 7, 2020 00:20
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