Hearts of iron iv waking the tiger6/1/2023 There are a lot of new ways to play the game here, and coming up with a working strategy is gloriously overwhelming due to the new options. As mentioned, a new mechanic allows you to spend your hard-earned political points to fire certain new decisions, ranging from starting a border incursion (another new mechanic that automatically selects a couple of your units and a couple of your neighbour's units, and has them duke it out in a not-quite-at-war state that can net you one of their provinces if you're victorious, with options to spend more political power to escalate it to a full-blown war) to seeding Communist saboteurs in Japanese and Manchurian regions, primed to blow up factories and form surprise military units out of the ether should a hot war suddenly begin. Nationalist China and Communist China each get (similar but different) National Focus trees and the various warlord nations share a new tree that allows you to take them in a myriad of new directions. Strategically, it's pretty tough to make any of the Chinese nations work successfully at first due to the overwhelming firepower superiority of Japan, but this is a problem that eventually can be solved (often by fielding lots and lots and lots of men). Of course, it is all in how the designers reflect the theatre that makes it really interesting. In a weird way, you're actually reviewing how historically interesting a particular region or facet of the war is rather than the game itself. That's the thing with reviewing DLC for Hearts of Iron IV. the region truly can play out in a million different ways. This isn't unusual - playing as a minor warlord, and using one of the new National Focus trees and digging through all of the new decisions that can be initiated by meeting a couple of prerequisites and spending a little political power, it's possible to skirmish along your borders with neighbours, agitate political uprising within Nationalist China, secretly ally with the Japanese, invite the leader of the Nationalists to tea, then immediately hand him over to the Communists in order to force the pair of them to form a temporary alliance against the fascists. The day the Sinkiang government finally capitulated, the Soviet Union publicly guaranteed the independence of Communist China and allowed us membership into the Comintern. We were building field guns with Russian tungsten, then firing them at Russian troops. ![]() Of course, the Soviets still believed in our cause - I knew that because they were funneling raw materials to us which we desperately needed to build artillery - but they were also sending volunteer troops to man the Sinkiang front lines. So when I moved my paltry handful of divisions over the border into 100% Communist Sinkiang (now Xinjiang), the Soviet Union was a little put out, seeing as how they felt like Sinkiang were cool dudes. But it's also understandable that we'd grab as much territory from the neighbouring Chinese warlords as we can straight off the bat. A single mountainous province without room for building much of anything, no real industry to speak of, morale at an all-time low and infighting threatening to collapse the whole glorious ideal in on itself, it's only natural that we'd extend a hand to the Soviet Union. See, being the leader of Communist China in 1936 is not easy. And, sure, I shot a few thousand of his soldiers. ![]() ![]() I may have said and done some things I'm not entirely proud of, and I suppose I knew some of them might hurt Uncle Joe a little. Well, if I'm really honest, there have been mixed messages on both sides. ![]() I want us to be friends, really I do, but they send a lot of mixed messages. I have a weird relationship with the Soviet Union.
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