GXC - Post-Unification tree is underpowered

[TheFireKahuna]

Quick questions HOI4 version: 1.8.1 Kaiserreich version: 0.10 beta

Foreword, I love the Federalist tree and the tag, the design and idea. Great Experience and vision.

Describe the change you would like:

• Provide bonuses for some of the Federal Authority focuses, to prevent them having 0 effect when Federal Authority hits Very High before they are all completed
• Convert National Healthcare to provide some sort of bonus post-timed idea, or provide a secondary focus or decision that provides a bonus upon expansion. Most importantly, provide the Inadequate Public Services penalty to other unified tags if its a starting penalty.
• Add some way to get a fifth research slot.
• Provide more ways to obtain Building Slots, ideally through some form of decision or event based method, or more focuses. Maybe some Plan decisions if you pick Industrialisation Committee, or either some decisions for Decentralised Development partnerships or random events that provide slots. Some sort of way to increase it. Or boost the Land Reform to provide some sort of slot based bonus or boost (+1 slots for all?)
• Expose all resource decisions to post-unified China tags that are available to regional tags, just make it more difficult/expensive or less effective. Like the Yunnan decisions, the Fengtian development with Japan, various ones from other trees. Use flags set by any focus that gives them, to avoid repeating them on unification. Or add new ones. At the moment, China has dramatic under-provision of Steel and Oil more post-unification, with no way to increase it (nothing from Infra either)
• Provide more help or reduce the penalty for developing a navy, the 10% permanent penalty is very high with the number of building slots, and naval is both hard to build and not too important for China.
• Buff the infra development decisions, or boost the construction bonus, the amount of Infra gained is too low, especially compared to much of the world.
• Provide some way to core or develop then core or just develop Tibet/Xinjiang/Mongolia.
• In general, the best thing is to promote the idea of self-developing provinces, or provinces being supported by the government. The medium for post-unified development should be the provinces, uplifting, developing or coring them. Maybe move penalties to be baked into China's states as modifiers or state-type, and give post-unified China of all tags some way to gradually 'develop' and remove them. Could have them disabled if controlled in a 'regionalist' way, aka a tag is based there, and have post-unified trees allow removing them away from the capital. Overall, if Federalists start with low-authority, support and particularly absence of public services as penalties, all tags that fully control China should suffer them too.
• Long term, some way to make/join a faction, make some trade deals, seize Chinese claims, etc would be ideal.

Explain the reasoning behind this change: I've completed a campaign as both Fengtian and Federalists from Guangdong, and the main thing especially with the Federalists is an underpowered developmental capacity post-unification.

The Focuses in the Political Tree that increase Federal Support dont sum up to Very High, meaning you can get Very High with focuses to spare. Those focuses then give you no reward. In addition, most of these are for Federal Support, which at its best level is a 0.10 Political Support Penalty, with no 'bonus' version of it. Some more unique ideas or effects might improve those focuses.

The Healthcare Reform has a strong implementation, but its actual effect is removing a penalty, one that unified Qing, KMT or Fengtian doesn't have. In effect, the Federalists spend 1 year clearing a penalty no other China tag suffers, with no imminent reward for doing so after.

The Education reform works well, but as Federalists, there is no way to get a 5th research slot, if you picked Rural Literacy 2x in a row (Guangdong and Unified).

One of the most difficult things to do as China is establish a navy, especially Federalists which start with No Navy. Yet, the focus that reduces Destroyers and Submarines production time by 10% has a permanent, massive 10% consumer goods penalty, which when constructing a late-game fleet takes away many factories needed for huge quantities of Steel and other resources, as well as factories needed for Dockyards, while providing only a small help and no bonus to Carriers (from the Focus on Carriers focus either). In addition, industrial designers are fairly weak for Federal China, no new ones post-unification. Also, considering that Federalist China starts from 0 naval tech and has 4 slots at end-game, the naval bonuses only help 1 tier.

Federalist China has no way to develop Resources, no focuses give resources, unlock decisions for resources (that regionalist tags have, that Federalism should give the tag access to), leaving China with serious deficits. Post civil-war USA, max tech has 1853 oil, 531 aluminum, 0 rubber, 362 tungsten, 1527 steel, 3 chromium. A fully unified, max tech China with Mongolia+Xinjiang+Tibet has 5 oil, 78 aluminum, 301 rubber 100% from refineries, 539 steel, 124 chromium.

Building slots arent too high either. Post-tree completion, the best province is from Fengtian at 23 slots. Guangdong at the end has 14. Most states only reach 4-8, with ~10 reaching between 10-20, most being Legation cities. Hong Kong has 10. In comparison, late-game USA has most states hitting 10, with up to 25 slots in ~13 or so states. In addition, Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia are uncoreable, reducing slots further. The tree gave 24 slots total, +10% max slots. This seems like a decent sum, but this is the baseline. Without these, the slot count would be much more problematic than it is. The number makes sense, on unification, the problem is the lack of ongoing development for China, namely, max slots. Also, the only reduction to Consumer Goods is the -5% from the original Guangdong idea, of which the idea ~50% of the bonuses Federalist China gets post-tree.

The railroad focus and decisions are very underpowered. Post completion of all of them, much of my infra was still 2-4, and with only a 10% bonus to construction, the time to get them to something respectable was still very long.

Additional context or comments: The post-unified tree has a bug, Set Up Provincial Assemblies replaces Popular Support with Very High Federal Authority, instead of boosting Support. Also, the New Model Army modifiers from the tree seem to split into two by the end, with one giving penalties cleared by the other version present. The Election event also has bugged text, the description is partially shown over a button. The focus tree election doesnt give Federalist China any ministers.

[Alpinia]

The Set Up Provincial Assemblies focus reward is a bug that's since been fixed.

[ghost]

@Vidyaorszag Is this even being considered, it should be closed otherwise.

[Vidyaorszag]

Will keep this feedback in mind, thank you.