Sucks that the people you're playing with are all like "pro mlg balance haxors" who only care about Hoi4. Hoi is the least interesting out of all the pdx games IMO, and you lose what fun there is entirely if you use the converter (thus deleting every interesting focus tree in the game in favour of "go fascist and start snowballing" simulator 2016)
I probably should have expected this after they justified conquering lands in CKII by talking about how much Iron it would give them in Hoi4, or with the eagerness they took the Azores & Iceland to immediately colonise :/
What fills me with less hope is that you're meme'ing, but the first advice they gave me was to end VicII as fascist so I can snowball in Hoi4...
I've got two other friends who would have used their Prussian and British strengths to give me absolute hell, utilizing localized superiority and the Russian diplomatic pivot to fuck me up from Eu4 to VicII, but their work schedules IRL are hellishly incompatible with mine. I don't want to press the point with them further because I do treasure our acquaintance but good Lord, there is no imagination at work, no lateral strategic planning going on. They will have the extended wealth of at least Italy, Germany, Poland, the Benelux, the Baltics, Scandinavia, France, Britain, North & South America, Africa at their fingertips and their grand strategy from EU4 to VicII to Hoi4 is to use console commands so that I have the same number of troops as the Prussian army and the same number of ships as the British navy. It makes them so transparently invincible that I can't believe they actually argue that to me under the pretence of competition :[
The more I think about it the less I even want to continue
*EDIT
I may do my homework. Git gud at Hoi4 and play as Democratic Tibet. Confound the meta and give it my best shot regardless