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[mainiac]

Dont you know?  In WWII US marines targeted the guys with the katana's first.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Dont you know?  In WWII US marines targeted the guys with the katana's first.

My grandfather was killed by a weeb, I'll be killed by a weeb, and my grandchildren will be killed by more weebs still.

[mainiac]

TBH, I never even played Germany.  They are so OP I just dont see any challenge.  The hard difficulty setting doesn't really increase the difficulty of anyone but France (who is starving for PP points).

Is it that bad? I was looking forward to a grueling air war against Britain and the US. I guess boosting Germany is needed if you ever want them to take France in the course of a normal game.

The problem with Germany is that essentially they played very well in summer of 1940 and you can't simulate that in the game.  There was the secret sauce important factor.  Their weird wunderwaffen were never important.  The technological differences for their equipment were mostly a wash.  The only time their tactics looked amazing was when they hit the completely disorganized and unprepared soviets.  The thing that is important about Germany is that at the operational level they had every damn thing possible break exactly the right way for them in 1940.  If the French had acted slightly differently or the Germans had acted slightly differently WWII would have been anti climatic.  We'd be sitting in this armchair general thread discussing if the Entente-Germany war might have gone differently if Italy had helped out Germany in 1939.  Germany wasn't a juggernaut, it was an underdog.


So to have things be realistic the game needs to be unbalanced.  If France and Germany play equally well, Germany should usually lose.  Paradox didn't want to make that game.  It would make a fun game for France and would be fun as Germany for good players but would be boring as hell everyone else.  So they instead made Germany have more military factories then France and Britain combined and made it so that France never gets any cash carry.  Instead of Germany the underdog, Germany can just clobber it's way through with brute force.  And when that's done Germany now has all those military factories plus the ones it took from France and the Low Countries.  Germany is now more powerful then the US.

So there is just no challenge.  The game hands Germany victory against France when that victory was actually very difficult to achieve.  And at that point Germany has such ridiculously overpower resources that they have already won.  Hitler wanted to make Germany the most powerful nation on earth.  In the game that's achieved in 1940.

[NullForceOmega]

Afaik the katanas are only folded 'cos that's how oldtimeyjaps made steel.

Their steel was shit, as in it was hard to make it into a sword, not that the finished product was bad, and the easiest way to get it right was folding, IIRC. Europeans did the same thing in early middle ages with like Ulfberhts and stuff, albeit details vary.

THIS IS A LIE.  Japanese iron deposits are some of the highest grade on Earth.  Source:  My wife is a geologist(BS)/chemist(BS)/geochemist(MS)/Soil and crop science(pending PhD).  I'm done giving a damn about what anyone says about the sword or the smiths but I will not tolerate this kind of willful ignorance.

[Loud Whispers]

You shouldn't expect Paradox to know how to balance games

Instead of trying to make AI balanced by being smarter, they try to make AI balanced by making them far more powerful with cheats

[mainiac]

Afaik the katanas are only folded 'cos that's how oldtimeyjaps made steel.

Their steel was shit, as in it was hard to make it into a sword, not that the finished product was bad, and the easiest way to get it right was folding, IIRC. Europeans did the same thing in early middle ages with like Ulfberhts and stuff, albeit details vary.

THIS IS A LIE.  Japanese iron deposits are some of the highest grade on Earth.  Source:  My wife is a geologist(BS)/chemist(BS)/geochemist(MS)/Soil and crop science(pending PhD).  I'm done giving a damn about what anyone says about the sword or the smiths but I will not tolerate this kind of willful ignorance.

This is surprising to me because I have seen many mentions of the opposite over the years.  Questions:

1) When you say they are high grade, are the high grade deposits ones that would have been accessible to pre-industrial japan?
2) Do you know where people would have gotten the idea that the opposite is true? (Seeing as it is so common.)
3) Why did Japan use techniques that are associated with low grade iron like excessive folding?

[NullForceOmega]

1) the purity of the deposits is extremely high, having very low (almost trace) levels of intermixing/contaminants, there are very few deposits, but they have been worked since before the shogunate was originally established, I don't have the dates on hand and I don't trust wiki as this has become a stupidly charged topic.

2) the mistake appears to be based on the fact that the largest deposits of iron (I am aware of) in SE Asia are in China, and their iron is massively contaminated with sulpher, or arsenic or whatever, it's really incredibly bad metal.  Edit: I should clarify, some iron deposits are contaminated with sulpher, some with arsenic, and the rest with a weird slurry of assorted metals etc.

2) availability, Japanese (sword)smiths were directly mandated by the emperor, and were allowed only a specific amount of ore in their lifetime.  So they developed the technique to minimize the amount used while maximizing its functionality.  There are a few incidences where the emperor (typically under direction of the Shogun) increased the allotment for wartime usage.

[mainiac]

Sounds legit to me.

[Sheb]

Any suggestion for a nice challenge then mainiac?

[mainiac]

Any suggestion for a nice challenge then mainiac?

Poland and Gaunxi are fun but after that there are no more worlds to conquer, Alexander.

[Loud Whispers]

You can always play spehss 4x

[mainiac]

You can always play spehss 4x

You can even play one of the countless mods that let you be space nazi germany.

[Sergarr]

Any suggestion for a nice challenge then mainiac?

Poland and Gaunxi are fun but after that there are no more worlds to conquer, Alexander.

Ryukyu only, no save/loading, final destination

[mainiac]

Not in the game?

[Tack]

Afaik the katanas are only folded 'cos that's how oldtimeyjaps made steel.

Their steel was shit, as in it was hard to make it into a sword, not that the finished product was bad, and the easiest way to get it right was folding, IIRC.

I'm done giving a damn about what anyone says about the sword or the smiths but I will not tolerate this kind of willful ignorance.

Hot damn son. We're all (armchair) scholars here. You teach, I'll listen.
AFAIK and IIRC are both "don't take my word as canon" addendums.