My point wasn't the history or justification "in-lore", it was gameplay.
This is a wargame series, specifically grand strategy. Just as you are not customizing which helmets your soldiers use in the tactical-level Combat Mission series, you should not be getting bogged down in the minutiae of production models in a strategic-level wargame.
I think we weren't doing a good job explaining our points but I do see where you're coming from.
It makes sense to be dictating how much of your industrial capacity is being allocated to specific branches, even specific genres in that branch, but this should remain general in nature. We are building U-Boats and Tanks, not spending 0.35% of the government budget on type IIAs, 0.75% on type VIIBs, 3.5% of the budget on type VIIICs, 10% on the budget on Panzer IV Ausf. G, etc. It is pointless and taxing on resources the player could be better allocating elsewhere.
I agree and disagree and I think it needs to approached through ground, air, and navy.
Starting with Navy. I think Man the Guns despite creating some hokey, Kaiserreich-tier focus trees did a lot of good with how it approached the naval aspect in HOI4. Before MTG, the navy was very abstract, not well explained, and the most tedious part of the game. Now, its actually fun to play with. Out of the three equipment designers, the naval designer is the only one that works and works well in my opinion. There is micro-ing with navy and I think its very tolerable given how open fleet composition is. For example, regardless of what is put on a ship hull or type of hull you can place that ship in any fleet and click a button to perform a mission. You can easily design task forces to do a certain mission well, such as make a submarine fleets that are very stealthy, intended for naval mine laying, and can switch to convoy raiding when needed and go back to mine laying when required. You can also make top tier picket screening destroyers to protect carrier task forces or make inexpensive escort ships with interwar guns and torpedo but updated hydrophones and depth charges and give them the best anti-submarine capabilities possible. For capital ships, you can choose to make speedy surface raider at the expense of high powered guns or make a very capable line heavy cruiser. The designer makes sense.
Now, it sounds like you don't enjoy this sort of thing but in it's defense, how you build your navy and compose it part of national strategy on how to win a full on war. I mentioned Japan and how it make very capable destroyers, those destroyers came out the cost of more numerous escort type destroyers, the production opportunity cost mean their destroyer fleet was spread too thin to deal with convoy raiding by US warships such as the US submarine campaign in the early war and then later on by US surface strike forces. Same with Germany in the early game, you have limited dock yards, how are you going to wage a Naval war? Go all in on U-boats like Donitz originally wanted or use precious industrial resources to get surface warships? From a grand strategy game perspective it makes a lot of sense due to how it will impact your naval strategy and is one of the few things HOI4 actually models well. There is micro-ing the production but with how long it takes to build ships, its not that tedious to check in.
For ground and air this is where I feel you and I are going to agree. The tank designer, air designer, and how the military industrial designer work for those branches eats up a lot of player interaction time. Starting with the tank designer, I don't hate it but its one of those things where it feels like it doesn't have a place given how HOI4 simplifies battalion and company composition. You can't create an armor battalion and have three companies of Panzer IIIs for general tank combat and company of Panzer IVs as infantry support tanks. It's either all of them as how you get it and no composition selection. It's annoying wasting army experience building a tank chassis from scratch for production when the old way was you had a tank ready to go after researching 1938 medium tanks. The modules themselves make very little sense despite trying to tie them into historical reasoning such as the choice between diesel and unleaded fuel engines. Germany went with unleaded not because of speed or confidence in their tank reliability, they did it because get diesel from synthetic fuels they were dependent on was an expensive process and they chose to make synthetic unleaded. That's not modeled in game and the game could never support such a thing without significant rewrite of code. Having modules like radio because tanks with radios were decisive factor in the Battle of France and the early campaign of Operation Barbarossa, is nice but its not modeled well because radios are dirt cheap to have and the number of slots a tank has is independent of the turret size or something should impact the size of tank. What makes this worse is when the military industrial designer gets the inevitable upgrade (more clicking to even select the upgrade), when click the box to update existing equipment in production, the game won't automatically update your production, you have to go into the production menu and click each out dated production line and select the upgraded variant. That is a lot of clicking that no one in their right mind should like doing. I'm with you on this, what a waste of player time especially since it doesn't make much of a different beyond min-maxing stats.
Air is where its most egregious, beyond the vanilla AI can't handle the air designer well, its all the variants you can create and can't immediately deploy. Allow me to elaborate, lets say you have had 1936 medium air frames being built (He 111 as Germany) and configured as a ground attack tactical bomber, just two basic bomb bays because that's all the engine II module can handle and you need them built cheaply and fast to get your air force up to size. You research 1940 air frames and you now have an air frame that is more capable and can handle more modules. You build a Ju 88 design, two bomb bays and bomb locks, similar to a Ju 88 in real life, plus those bomb locks give it the useful logistic strike mission. Those new tactical bombers can't reinforce the existing air wings. Why? Because the missions don't match 1-for-1 and the game is coded to not allow that. That means your existing squadrons with all their air wing experience will have to be disbanded and formed from scratch with new air exercise training as you progress with producing more and more of the new equipment. That is some shitty micro-ing and a waste of time. If you want to create a naval mine laying aircraft also capable of ground attack because that would be a useful multirole plane in the Balkans or Baltic, that's more custom squadron formation from scratch and another line of production you have to start. Oh and the game will give the out-of-date production notification for having multiple variants of the same aircraft, an issue that also plagues the naval production for having variants there.
From a thread on the Paradox forum where a player complained about this issue, the dev had this to say: "
As others have suggested, the current solution is the intended one. We have some ideas on how to make it clearer to players which designs can reinforce certain wings, however, the alternative of reinforcing wings with any plane with a matching role designation introduces vastly more problems than you would imagine. We did initially start out this way, but in practice, it does not work." More horseshit from Paradox as they introduced DLC that isn't compatible with their existing game. To make it worse, that same patch made air wings a fixed size, to "fix problems with the air on shared run ways" even though it screams multiplayer use, so if you make specialty wing you can't even make them small and disperse the wings in certain areas to keep production on the aircraft limited because its all 100 air craft each. Another annoying thing to keep an eye on. I think there is a solution to all this and I will spare the thread what I think it should be because it won't ever happen as it requires Paradox to update code.
What makes it especially egregious is that the game has oversimplified the core, strategic-level actions in favor of the periphery, tactical-level inconsequentialisms. You are actively penalized for not taking advantage of planning bonuses and allowing the AI to ineffectively undertaken your plan in exactly the way the didn't want it to, in favor of focusing on the exact model of radio your self-propelled anti-air platform uses that is only allocated to your crack armored division, which has exactly 7 brigades of mechanised troops, not 6, or 8, or 5, or 3, but 7. It's imperative that FDR be involved in this?
If we were to take the development and maturation of the ideas of Hearts of Iron 4 as a philosophy for the design of Hearts of Iron 5, you would be playing from a first person perspective at a desk tinkering with the gas port system on a beautifully rendered Mauser rifle whilst a blurred television taking up 1/24th the screen plays a real-time map view of the war.
I don't disagree about the planner being a piece of shit, it won't recognize encirclement opportunities and doesn't force resting units to take initiative when the need arises. The thing is poorly programmed. I also agree the division designer has been dog shit from the start, the combat width was the dumbest stat they implemented because it was done on an arbitrary integer value rather than researching what real war gaming does. The funny thing about that is WW2 represented the dawn of the triangle division and how useful it was for military organization during and after the war. You make a historically accurate triangle division in game and it isn't meta because it will lose to a corps size 40 width division. The game has added stat modifiers that only the min-maxers want because going through config files, recording each stat, and plugging into a google spreadsheet to share on Reddits for them to stay entertained.
I disagree about HOI5 being that, instead we're going to get a visual novel Kaiserreich style because that mod has done so much irreparable harm to Paradox's player base that the DLC started to cater to them.
TL;DR, I agree for the most part and HOI4 is a tragedy.
