[Review] No Compromise, No Surrender

It's been about two weeks since the newest Hearts of Iron IV DLC has been released, and since I've already played most of the unique new content there is and have already gotten all the new achievements, I thought I could write up a more elaborate review about it. I will mostly combine my critique of the content from the DLC and the game update itself into one for simplicity's sake, but be aware that the actual DLC only includes the new faction system and new or reworked focus trees for Japan (alt-history branches only), Nationalist China, the Chinese Soviet Republic, the Philippines, Manchukuo, and the warlords, and three new special projects.

New Faction System

On the surface, the new faction system seems kinda nice. It's more in-depth; you can adjust a lot of faction rules, you can add war theaters to guide faction members, and you can get additional gameplay goals that could potentially give you more unique stuff to do in your game. However, there are a bunch of problems with this system. Firstly, it's kinda bugged, so a lot of one-state minors can get a lot of faction influence really easily by having easy-to accomplish goals, which results in having someone like Mandatory Palestine, Jordan, and/or Kuwait having the most influence in the entire allied faction. The system for taking over also doesn't check if you are independent or not, so theoretically if you got enough industry and fielded manpower, you could lead a faction as a puppet of someone else. The war theaters feature is also only really useful if you're the leader and only playing with the AI on your side since there's no way to change the theater if you aren't the initiator, and if the AI faction leader assigns you to one of the war theaters, they just wasted a slot on you since you aren't forced to do what they tell you to. A lot of the times the faction goals are also quite useless and only add minor bonuses or require you to either do stuff that you would have done anyway at some point or stuff that you would just never do because it's just a bother to do and/or wastes resources. Ultimately you come to the realization that, unless your goal is explicitly to take over the faction leadership, or you're playing someone like China that gets pretty useful bonuses depending on capitulation progress, you can almost completely ignore the system entirely. One of the few positive aspects is the shared faction research, shared espionage technologies, and the fact that you can actually add some of your research facilities to your shared faction research, which makes them complete special projects a bit faster. Another thing I found weird about the new faction system is that the USA and the Philippines basically join the Allies while still being in their own faction simultaneously somehow.

New Doctrine System

To me this felt quite a bit redundant, like something was changed just to change it. Instead of using your XP constantly to upgrade all your doctrines, you need mastery, which you can only gain through actually using your army/air force/navy while fighting or training. While you now have more available subdoctrines, the grand doctrine doesn't matter that much anymore in the grand scheme of things, and realistically there are only one or two really viable meta doctrines you would even use in most cases, making the whole change quite meaningless. My main problem with this system, though, is that you now have way too much XP banked than you could ever hope to use; it's now in a similar situation as it was before the No Step Back DLC, where late game there was almost no use for it since you only need it a couple of times when choosing the initial (sub-)doctrines and when changing division templates.

Coal

A lot of people were quite upset by the whole new coal system when it came out (similarly to when they introduced the resistance mechanics in La Résistance), but since Paradox rebalanced a lot of the problems in one of the latest patches, I find it overall to be not as bad as it may seem at first. It's actually a nice way to reduce the amount of factory greed, especially late game. The only really major change I'd like to see for it, which hasn't been addressed yet, is that, instead of having ALL owned factories use coal, it should only be applied to actually used factories. Especially in cases of late-game conquests, you tend to have a problem with having too many factories available that just eat up your energy without you even asking them to do that in the first place. I just don't want to put out another line of infantry equipment if I don't need it and don't have enough steel to produce it in the first place, and I also don't want to go all around my country to delete factories I don't need.

Reworked Naval Supremacy System

There isn't a lot to talk about with this point, really. If you have a big enough navy (compared to your foe, at least), the changes aren't really going to impact you most of the time, and if you don't have enough boats, you can still paradrop in most cases. I don't know why they added a 7-day preparation period to paratrooper operations, though, since it's just unnecessary waiting on your end.

Japanese Focus Tree

The Japanese focus tree is quite a mixed bag, and there are a lot of logical problems with some of the content. While at its core still pretty fun, the historical branch of the focus tree basically forces you to go to war with China and the Allies at some point in the game. The best way I have found to deal with this is just to delay the war with China as much as possible, declare war on Britain manually, take Malaya and India, and then go straight onto Britain itself. China will join the Allies at some point anyway if you prevent the United Front from living longer than a few weeks, and defeating the USA after all of that is trivial. The "monarchist" path seems unnecessarily LARPy for a vanilla HoI4 path. They also, for some reason, chose to still have the option for a "shogunate" (Paradox doesn't actually know what that means or how a shogun even gets to power in the first place or why the last shogun with actual power in Japan abdicated in favor of the emperor) type of government. The democratic branch is mind-numbingly boring; after the conclusion of the civil war, you either go right back to invading China and Manchuria (unless they randomly attack the Soviets and die, like they did in my game on historical), or you just help Britain defeat the Axis with one less major on their side to help. This branch of the focus tree also has one of the more common problems of just randomly being able to do stuff in the thirties that just shouldn't be possible in the pre-war era, like building the Shinkansen or forming the LDP for some reason. You also just get way too much political power, and you have an easily exploitable way to gain infinite civilian factories from the Allies. The Communist branch is certainly a lot more fun than the old one, and you even have two different flavors this time, with one being more of a straight-on declaration of war on non-communist nations in Asia and the Allies and the other being kind of similar to Germany's Volkskommissariate branch. The one thing I really dislike about this tree, though, is the unnecessary addition of a "secret" (it has a dedicated achievement, and every YouTuber already knows about it) meme path for the Nichiren Buddhist Seno'o Girou that has you invade countries for a formable nation with a pacifist as a leader. Overall, I think it's still a fairly fun nation to play if you play your cards right.

Nationalist Chinese Focus Tree

The Kuomintang are in the fortunate position of being interesting by being a challenging but rewarding nation to play even without regarding the focus tree at all, so you'll at least have fun playing as them in most cases. The path choices themselves also aren't too bad. You either go a more historical route with Chiang Kai-Shek or Wang Jingwei, in which you slowly annex all the warlords through the puppet system, or you could go the path of the fascist blue shirts under Dai Li and declare war on the individual warlords (which is actually pretty hard on historical), or even go a democratic way with a few presidents to choose from (I haven't fully played this path, but the integration decisions seem painfully slow since the warlords need a certain amount of democratic support first for you to ask them to become your puppet). One of the main things I dislike about the restructuring of the Chinese content is that they got rid of the unique army reform system for them and replaced it with a need to go down a good amount of foci (that are structured similarly to the "Plan East" and "Plan West" trees of Poland) to get rid of the debuffs. It seems to me that this was just done to artificially inflate the amount of content you actually get out of this tree since most of the political branches are kind of short if you look at them in isolation. In general, China is still fun to play for the most part; it's just that a lot of the political paths feel kind of hollow due to this issue.

Communist Chinese Focus Tree

The new PRC tree is definitely more in-depth than the old one, with the drawback of making you much weaker early game since you have barely any industry and can't really pick off weaker warlords in the north or west of China anymore, both due to your army and industry debuffs and increased justification time. You also have a couple more options to choose from for who can lead the Communist Party; even the option for a temporary diarchy is available. This country is also the only instance in this DLC of having a (very easily manageable) balance of power. Late game you get a lot more bonuses that are supposed to help you defeat the Kuomintang after you kick out Japan from the mainland. It's also nice that you at least get the option to get whatever treaty ports foreign powers own in China without a war, though if they refuse, you can't really do anything about it without declaring war. One of the main things that bugs me is that you can get locked out of certain things, such as your army tree, for a good amount of time if you aren't at war at the right moment and that there are still a lot of 70-day foci that give you fairly little for the time spent on them. You also get way too much political power mid- to late game (if you stack enough modifiers, about 3.00 per day), which I guess you are supposed to be putting towards creating resistance cells in lands occupied by Japan, but most of them don't really do much. The only other thing you can really spend your points on is the infiltration of Chinese core states, and the only thing that does is flip those states to your control once you go to war with them without any added benefits. I also don't get why, instead of having a full democratic branch for the tree, you can just randomly flip democratic with a singular 70-day focus at the end of your tree AFTER your current leader has pretty much solidified his power over the government. After reunification, there also isn't really that much to do anymore besides declaring on the allies, being bold enough to invade Russia through Siberia, or defeating Japan a second time if they still exist, which is generally also a problem with more or less all the other Chinas as well. In general, the PRC is just kind of painful to play for most of the game; if you just want a quickly powerful communist China, just play without NCNS.

Warlord/Manchurian/RNC Focus Trees

One of the most disappointing aspects of the DLC for me personally, since I really enjoy playing as warlords in mods such as Kaiserreich or Autumn Begonia. Neither the warlords nor Manchukuo got a fully unique new focus tree. The latter only got a few minor changes and some short alt-history paths, while most of the warlords have the same shared, minorly expanded, tree with only a few very short unique foci for about half of the warlords. Mengjiang/Mengkukuo didn't get any kind of tree and only received some national spirits and a shared formable with Mongolia; a similar thing happened to Tibet. The only kind of exciting warlord tree is the one for the anti-communist North-Western Army in Shaanxi under the command of Zhang Xueliang that lets you reform the Beiyang Government if you manage to defeat the PRC (which is pretty easy if you rush the war and bait the AI out of their starting territory). Reorganized Nationalist China's tree is also a bit meh since there are only a few unique focuses that give kind of meaningless buffs, and they also share part of the tree that warlords get once they lay their claim on China.

Philippines Focus Tree

I don't know where to even start with this one since it's such a mess. You have to wait until about 1940 until you can actually do anything meaningful since you are a puppet of America, and your entire industry gets pretty huge debuffs that, while historically maybe somewhat accurate, are pretty bad from a gameplay perspective since you can't really do a lot against them early game. In general, the industrial portion of the tree feels really generic overall, and there aren't a lot of references to specific projects the Philippines did during that time. After talking to an actual Filipino guy I know, he told me about the enormous amount of historical inaccuracies with the tree, especially those of the alt-history branches. I also really dislike how this country got TWO memey LARP paths: another one of those "secret" ones where MacArthur can get in charge and you just get bonuses to nuke-related stuff, and then a Spanish monarch path under King Juan that can theoretically core all of Spanish-America and Spain itself for some reason. They also put one of the most annoying achievements to complete there, where you have to WAIT until the mid-1950s doing special projects just so you can fire off a single nuke from a submarine, aka the worst 4 hours of my life. In general, this country also isn't that interesting to play past doing the achievements, and half of the alt-history paths lead to the same war goals and formable. I also don't really get why half the allied minors that capitulated to the Axis at some point during the war have to have their own tree to do for the duration of the occupation. This feels like it was mostly just done so the AI can do a little bit of somewhat meaningful stuff in terms of weakening the potential Japanese puppet state of the Second Philippine Republic, since there's a fairly limited amount of fun to be had while waiting to be liberated by the allies near the end of the war on historical.

Achievements, Bugs and Other Stuff

Most of the achievements this time were quite easy and/or boring, as seen by the fact that I have already completed all of them even though it's only been two weeks since the DLC's release and I haven't even played the game every day since then. I also had basically no game where there wasn't some kind of (often game-breaking) major bug. A lot of the time when playing on Ironman, I had my save just irreparably break and constantly crash on me, and I resorted to copying my save games every in-game year or so just so I wouldn't lose hours of progress because of something that wasn't my fault. Most commonly I encountered this while playing on non-historical. Even though there have already been quite a lot of hotfixes, barely any of the bugs I have discovered have been fixed yet. Granted, I haven't actually told Paradox about any of these bugs directly, but for a DLC this pricey, it's unacceptable for there to be so many game-breaking bugs on release. I was also disappointed by the fact that they have barely used the balance of power system; it's only found in the early stages of the PRC's tree and is quite easy to beat. They could have just utilized it for the Japanese faction management system, but they chose to do another custom GUI for it instead. There are also a few new unnecessary releasables with no content. GFX-wise most of the new icons are okay, but the shitty AI-generated portraits just disgust me to even look at a lot of the time since they look so incredibly bad. Some changes that I do like are the ability to get air base access and to actually have a micro mode intended by the developers. There were also massive reductions of generated world tension when finishing a peace deal, which is nice for countries that expand a lot during the early or mid-game but fairly bad for democracies and a lot of non-aligned nations in the late game since you actually get down to zero percent world tension if the war concludes in a more or less historical way, so you can't manually justify on anyone anymore. I haven't really played around that much with the new/reworked Ranger Special Forces yet, but they seem decent. Finally, the few special projects that have been added are, as most of them already were, quite useless, and you generally don't have to bother with them at all for the most part.

Conclusion

Should you buy this DLC? In my opinion, unless you are extremely interested in playing in the region, no. You're basically just paying for a few focus trees and a redundant faction system, and the standard price of $30 is just way too much for something you could also get out of free mods (with most likely much better content!) from the Steam Workshop or the official modding place on Paradox's website.