Thomahawk2k
commented
4 years ago Thank you for your report. Revolution: We will take the revolution changes into consideration, though a British rebel tag seems hard to justify as they can't rely on the natives to be apathetic to their cause. I will in any case lower the amount of time before the Canadians will have to give up and lower the chance they will actually go for it. This mainly only exists for Canada to have a chance to recover South Africa quickly if they want. Popularity: Popularity is not just how popular a group is, but also how much influence they have. Once the capitalist state has been taken down the influence of the old regime is gone. However, I'll consider adding political power debuff to the white flight idea if it turns out there's really too much PP to go around. Brain drain: I think the current implementation is satisfactory here. It turning into famine levels is not very probable as I see it. Manpower/Industry: At the core, the way it's supposed to work is that the syndicalist version has people but no guns, while the minority regime version has guns but no people. I think that is quite well implemented in this way. Maltese will look at the 5% conscription bonus however, that might be a little much. As long as there remains at least enough factories not to end up not building anything at all, it is not a problem that it's significantly lower than it was. Research slots: If you'd've taken those university research slots, the white flight event would have removed them again. Minor other things: Will be or are already taken care of. Loc of that last one is just wrong.
ghost
Quick questions HOI4 version: 1.9.3 Kaiserreich version: Dev 8/11
Time for another campaign as South Africa. This time as the socialists, and I'll go a bit further into things now that I've experienced things from both sides as well as talk about the ups and downs of it along with some of the specifics in the socialist path.
BLACK MONDAY MECHANIC
It's basically Sweden's with some tweaks. By extension, it's fully functional! While they're very similar indeed, something that may disappoint some, there are in my opinion at least enough changes to vary it up a bit. You gain access to different option in the focus tree, having the money printer go brrr is more accessible, some focus tree advancements being tied to your handling of unemployment and tariffs don't lead to the RP yelling at you to mention a few. More importantly, it gives the player something to do in the early years instead of just 5-speeding while waiting for an event to tell them that they can do things again. It could hypothetically be more fun and inventive than the original concept it leans upon, but what's there currently is fully functional and does its job in my opinion and I'll take something fully functional and fun over most other alternatives.
SOCIALIST WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE
I won't mince my words: this one's a mess and I advocate for drastic restructuring. I'll get the epicenter of the issue out of the way first: it was utterly pointless and a complete non-event in my run. After a year of fighting, this was the result:
It hinges on tags that can't seem to conduct naval invasions of this scope and distance in 1936 to conduct naval invasions of this scope and distance in 1936. If it did work, however, that'd be a disaster. If the Entente could use ports in Angola or some other nearby area, SAF's five divisions would stand against the full force of the Entente. SAF is outnumbered several times over at this point and if the Entente gains a single beachhead it's likely over for them. Assuming that the current scenario isn't a complete unicorn where the AI ceased to function, it's in my assessment that the present situation offers no challenge at all, but would present a potentially overwhelming one if the Entente could actually naval invade with dozens of divisions against SAF's meager garrisons. I have an idea for a possible scenario that could replace this, and enacting this would tackle a few more pedantic nitpicks I have with this.
EXILE THE GENERALS INSTANTLY
Currently, the generals for SAF get all thrown away of the player does one of the early military focuses.
However, before doing that, the generals remain, happily and joyfully commanding their still-loyal men to fight and die under the banner of syndicalism and slay the soldiers of the king they swore loyalty to weeks prior. Common soldiers, sure! But all these generals high up in the commanding positions of His Majesty's armed forces, so loyal to the Crown that they're deemed to be put through a purge? No, axe the lot right away on day one of the war, and instantly give the player his/her.
Currently, the SAF tree direly lacks army XP as well. Perhaps the focus that eradicates your army command could be used to give the player some early AXP, or perhaps just mitigate some extra debuffs granted in the wake of the revolution? Maybe it could be used to expand the roster from 1 gen/1FM to another noted radical joining your officer ranks? 1) The current focus deprives the player of skilled generals and replaces them with nothing. If the bandaid is pulled right away and the player instead has a chance to add something, it'd be seen as a positive and desireble focus instead of something to be possibly pushed off into the future. 2) We'll save ourselves from the inevitable Reddit post of someone smugly doing what I just said was possible.
Anyway, new idea for a war. Let's try this at least.
REPLACE THE ARMY
Delete the SAF OOB when the revolution happens, give them a new OOB consisting mainly of militias and maybe one still-loyal infantry division. Make sure that whatever's spawned is slightly stronger than what's mentioned in the next step, but basically, have the player get a bunch of militias - maybe a mix of European socialists in the cities and native militias spread around a bit more. This way we can both deal with the whole "why's everyone suddenly OK with Totalism" thing, and more importantly mechanically control for the player's strength and placements. Notably, not being able to garrison ports and important cities for the next step. Also, while I understand that obviously some soldiers while flip, the fact that the entire army leadership is considered a threat to the revolution, and the fact that South Africa has precarious race relations and other things that put the army at odds with the revolutionary government, means that I'll advocate for this for the sake of gameplay, flavor, and narrative consistency.
USE A REBELLION TAG TO GIVE THE ENTENTE A FOOTHOLD
When SAF goes syndicalist and the army collapses, use one of the current rebellion tags to cede a port city like Port Elizabeth and nearby land to this tag, be it Natal's or whatever fits. Give the rebellion tag two infantry from SAF's old army template, and a militia or two. They should be deliberately inferior to what the SAF tag gets, but not to the point where a competent player wouldn't be able to weather the storm. The strength should be adjusted in relation to the amount of time it takes for Canada to transfer troops from Canadian soil to South African
THE CONFLICT
The conflict starts on day 1 with the aforementioned rebel tag rising up. A few days later (and without military access to prevent cheesing it too much) Canada will join, but cannot call other allies as the rebels aren't in the Entente and cannot join it, nor can Canada call its allies to prevent the whole "500 nearby divisions landing in Port Elizabeth" thing. The players in the conflict are thus racing against the clock: if the rebels can hold the port long enough for Canadian reinforcements to arrive, they'll likely be able to gradually destroy the SAF forces before a year's passed. If SAF destroys the rebellion before (or after, if they're lucky!) Canadian forces arrive and the rebel tag's erased, Once the rebel tag's dead, Canada will sign a ceasefire with the syndies within a month or something.
CONCLUSION
Maybe it's not perfect, but at least this thing would give the player a challenge, address a few mechanical and narrative issues, and not have the conflict be a frozen cold war that's symbolic.
Of course, if your prior testing of SAF indicated that 1) This wasn't the outcome of the conflict and that 2) Players enjoyed it Feel free to write off my experience as a unicorn and declare everything to be WAD. I'm just basing this on my experiences testing this tag, and if it's contradicted by all prior data, then that's fine. 👍
POST-REVOLUTIONARY WOES
Just like with my NatPop run, I was happy to see that extreme policies don't come without consequences. While the NatPops dealt with a lot of issues pertaining to stability and such from their harsh racial policies, it's good to see that South Africa have to put up with consequences that have been endured in similar post-colonial situations. It's not all sunshine and rainbows and there is an actual struggle to adjust society after years of colonial rule. There are some elements I'd tweak though, although on a whole it's a positive experience. Some assorted comments.
PARTY POPULARITY
This is from April 1936. I already have near-unanimous support for socialism. The numbers should be shifted so that there's at least moderate support remaining for centrist and rightist parties after the revolution. Mechanically, it'd make SAF's PP gains lower (I was able to get all my stuff before 1940) and make focuses that give party support/PP more value than they have now. In a narrative sense, since there's fierce resistance to the revolution, it also makes little sense to show them as having such large support this early.
WHITE FLIGHT AND INDUSTRY
Especially in the Totalist run, chasing away your economic, academic and industrial professionals that made up the old elite has issues, seen as recently as today in places like Zimbabwe end South Africa itself as they wrestle with their past. This is good! But while playing, I realized that if I'd lost all those factories, I'd have been down to almost nothing. I wouldn't have been able to take the IDC focuses, probably. Maybe make sure that there are a few free factories it the mid-section of one of the socialist trees to prevent the SAF player from being stuck with like one civ? If you do the math on it though and the numbers make sense under partial mobilization though then don't worry just leave it as it is. 👍
FARMING PENALTIES
I'd give this a pop growth reduction too. Not as staggering as the flight, but uh. Neither the USSR nor Zimbabwe fared terribly tell on the food front after implementing these kinds of land reforms, ie chasing out the people that knew how to farm and replacing them with more "politically acceptable" substitutes. Maybe have the flight events cause big one-off drops in population and briefer pop growth reduction, and have the adjustment to a new farming class be more of a lingering growth reduction?
MANPOWER STUFF
Currently, SAF gets an early 5% rec pop for free.
Now combined with a lot of the debuffs, it's not that horrible.
I'm just mentioning this in case the 5% wasn't intended and it was meant to impact the rec pop factors instead as that's a more normal approach, especially since the 5% could be exploitable if the debuffs are reduced elsewhere. Not a bug maybe, just something that popped up on the radar.
5 POSSIBLE RESEARCH SLOTS?
As stated earlier, there are two slots a SAF player can get that gives them research slots (three technically, but one's obviously tied to whichever mutually exclusive side of the focus tree you use). Now, SAF can get a fourth one from their regular starter tree right after the broadcasting service focus, so 112 days in if the player doesn't instantly do Black Monday stuff. I wasn't able to test if this was the case, I'm just saying that it's a possible exploit if safeguards haven't been put into place so that gaining more than 5 slots is impossible. 👍
ACTUAL WARS
So yeah, the actual war fightin' happened. I know I rambled a lot about other stuff, but I had an OK time! Really. MAF dying probably diminished a lot of the challenge, sure, but it was fun to fight in an uncommon setting. You don't get to do a lot of fighting in Africa in general so I'm happy to see the region see some play. I'll be brief here though since it's just "hey I had an OK time beating up the RP and Entente."
Namibia? Busted.
And after that, the Entente joined and Portugal's colonies were liberated in the name of the workers, huzzah!
Not long after that, 2WK ended in a victory for 3I. My part was basically limited to holding Africa for 3I. I could've gone on and fought NFA, but I feel like this is a good enough run. I may have whined a bit about the opening, but all in all, I had an alright time!
MINOR THINGS
Minor typo. Should be lowercase S in suggested, and "French-trained" instead of French Trained.
25% mil build speed seems a bit generous maybe?
All the Johannesburg Congress events have "hey you're getting this event next" text. idk if it's WAD or not so I'm mentioning it here.
In saf.169 (I forgot to take a screenshot, it's the football event) there are some typos. It's missing the first letter of the opening paragraph, and it reads like it should be a dot or ! at the end, not a question mark. This may have been fixed by the time you're reading this tough, I see in the loc file it has "..." instead. So maybe it was just my build. Also the tone seems more angled for centrist/rightist events. It'd be fun if the socialist context was different! The sport gaining popularity because of its ties to our dear comrades in the Union of Britain! Something like that. Just thought that'd be a fun take on it if you're a socialist while getting it.
Lastly, not entirely sure I should get this while I'm a Totalist.
CONCLUSION
That's it, thanks for sticking with me, hope this proves helpful to you! Thank you for your efforts! 👍