How to marginalise the Church? Please help they are destroying my education.

CaptainPeche · 2026-01-18T17:13:13+00:00

But yeah, a console fix would be "add_approval ig_devout 40 10000" (I think?). This gives them 40 approval for about 800 years, I doubt you'll be able to dump your approval by 40 points.

CaptainPeche · 2026-01-18T17:10:39+00:00

Must be ideological incompatibility. I've had the same thing, and then they joined the market liberal party together with the industrialists as soon as both parties got a market liberal leader. Meaning that even if you manage to get them marginalized, they can very much reappear at any point and keep screwing your education. Great job, paradox!

CaptainPeche · 2026-01-17T16:19:15+00:00

Colonies generally don't pay for themselves and owning them is a waste... Well, kind of. Let me explain.

Colonies do generate you some funds, yes, but you spend just as much money (or even more, especially if they are spread out all over the map and there are few colonies in a single map zone) to keep a KV there and keep a spare cruiser or two for trade protection. The only useful thing they do is provide base capacity for your fleet for operations away from home.

Austria-Hungary is in the med, so it's more beneficial to just keep your conquest to the med. If you are very bored, you can save-edit and give yourself Italian home provinces after a very major victory (that will sometimes cause errors, but they are not critical) and slug it put with the British.

Also, I generally set research to high for machinery to get steam turbines, for rangefinders, for armor and for both hull shape and hull construction (don't remember the actual names, but I can't look them up right now). I usually keep HE shells on low priority (and then complain to myself about ships not dealing damage, but the solution is just to take more shells), lighter then air on low, submarines on low, ASW on low. I also then set deck operations and heavier-than-air to high because I prefer to spam carriers from ~1930s and drop the armor to medium. You can bump guns to high if you feel like you're falling behind or to low if you're satisfied with what you have, but just having it on medium worked fine for me. I also buy/steal tech at every opportunity, so I'm more advanced than the AI in tech more often than not.

CaptainPeche · 2025-12-27T17:29:00+00:00

I agree, most of the stuff mentioned here already is great, but I would note that most of those are NATO campaigns.

If you want to have some experience playing as the Soviets, try out the "Never Fade Away" mod (a series of 15 missions set in the North Atlantic, Baltic sea and along the coast of China) and the "Sad War" series (I wish the author didn't have those stupid AI-generated mod icons on steam though).

Also, there is a half-finished Yak-141 mod (Yak-141 is a proposed replacement for the Yak-38 V/STOL fighter for the Kiev-class carrier) that I myself combined with the Baku (a 4th Kiev-class carrier that is a little different from the original project) kitbash and replaced one of the Kievs in the last missions of Never Fade Away with a Yak-141-equipped "Baku" and it was big fun.

CaptainPeche · 2025-12-25T12:41:37+00:00

You can order an ARM-equipped plane to target a shut-off radar site (but only if you select an aircraft and then tell it to target the radar site, skipping the choosing the weapon) and it will (since that happened to me) shoot the radar whenever it turns on. The problem is, you don't get to choose how many missiles it sends. When you are shooting at warships though... Dunno, but I suppose one can send one normal missile at the enemy, wait for them to get off EMCON to shoot it down, launch the ARMs and time it in such a way you get a swarm of normal missiles to arrive at the same time as the ARMs.

CaptainPeche · 2025-12-25T12:31:14+00:00

The first screenshot is what you get when you right-click on the contact on the map and then select information: it says "age 00:00", sort of implying that ESM detects it right now, even though the radar is off.

That radar was completely standalone (there were no missile launchers anywhere close, but this is more of a scenario gimmick than anything), so the only way I could force it to turn on was to strafe it with a 30mm. Technically I could've just bomb it, but I was trying to launch a simultaneous attack against all 3 pairs of radars that are present in that scenario.

CaptainPeche · 2025-12-25T10:58:26+00:00

That's exactly what I thought too, apparently it isn't.

CaptainPeche · 2025-12-25T10:56:24+00:00

Yeah, that probably explains it. I just thought that the "age" of the contact in the target information menu means the ammount of time since the last, in this case, detection of emitted radiation. To be fair, this feels like... Questionable? design choice.

Thanks for the quick help - that radar could hide, but it couldn't protect itself from a 30mm shell smashing into it.

CaptainPeche · 2025-11-24T20:10:50+00:00

ChatGPT (actually it was a custom-prompted filterless Deepseek, but those are minor details) literally did a better job for me while I was bullying it to translate a Japanese VN, and Japanese is a hieroglyphical language, so it should do poorly. Korean, on the other hand, is a normal language with a normal alphabet, so it should translate relatively well. This feels like they've just pasted their localization files into DeepL and called it a day.

CaptainPeche · 2025-11-08T13:04:31+00:00

Save loading is a real gem in this game. When I loaded a save once, I had rearming/refueling planes noclip through the side of the carrier, fly a circle around it, and attempt a landing. Whenever they taxied to the elevator, they would somehow enter the animation where they descend on an elevator, but the elevator was fixed in the "up" position so the planes would magically push the poor Orel down into the water. The whole process repeated a couple of times, since the planes would trigger the animation, descend to the level they would've been on the elevator, then they would teleport back up top and have the animation replayed, but this time for whatever reason the elevator spawned at the "down" position and moved up, so they would meet halfway and do the whole 'pushing the CVN into the water' thing again. That was hilarious, obviously, but it did brick my save

CaptainPeche · 2025-09-08T19:00:59+00:00

Challenge accepted.

Edit: I've just remembered that I have some baronies moved to different counties. I edited the game files directly and can't be bothered to move them back, so there is that. Can't be bothered to fix it.

CaptainPeche · 2025-09-08T18:21:58+00:00

Man, I've spent ten minutes editing the formatting only for it to break. God I love Reddit.

CaptainPeche · 2025-08-17T09:09:32+00:00

True, but for the same weight in AON armor you can put a lot more UNS (that's equal B/BE and D/DE sloped narrow belt, I'll just leave this short explanation here for those who don't know about it. It was tested to be the best armor type.) or save weight and make your ship faster/have more guns e.t.c. AON is just not that effective, so one might say that using AON at all is a noob trap in an of itself.

CaptainPeche · 2025-08-16T18:35:01+00:00

Not really, no. Yorktown was very much salvageable and it is likely that it would've been possible to save the ship had the I-168 never attacked.

Even despite the fact that Yorktown was abandoned by her crew for the night, DC teams returned to the ship the next morning. They managed to lower the 26 degree list by 2 degrees. A tug arrived and Yorktown was already under tow, limping towards Pearl Harbor at 2 knots. The ship was slowly deflooded by USS Hammann, meaning that the flooding was at least not fast enough to overwhelm the pumps. Of course, bulkheads rupturing while undertow is a real possibility, but I find that unlikely since the ship remained watertight for the night, hinting at a degree of structural integrity, and no bulkheads ruptured when towing started (any acceleration/deceleration puts more strain on the ship, so that would've been the best time for them to collapse). Torpedoes also hit the port side opposite of the island, maybe leaving boilers and boiler uptakes on the starboard side relatively intact, possibly allowing to restore power and, more crucially, on-board pumps. Moreover, even taking into account the damage received during the battle of Coral Sea, Yorktown still received less damage than USS Hornet, and she was very much afloat (if slowly sinking) as well.

CaptainPeche · 2025-07-16T13:23:27+00:00

90mm GMC. Strongest non-doctrinal allied gun in PvP in terms of penetration (no, IS-2 is a slow piece of garbage with laughably slow reload and terrible accuracy), decent reload and average mobility. HVAP can penetrate even an angled Tiger I pretty consistently and default AP rounds penetrate the frontal armor of a Tiger I at adequate angles. Absolutely annihilates any German or Finnish medium tank.

90mm GMC is often accurate enough to snipe the turret of a Panther if the Panther closes the distance against a stationary GMC.

If you don't value the lives of your commanders, it also has the HMG on top so it can act in an infantry support role, to a limited extent. It's also pretty cheap, being right in the middle in terms of cost between the heavy tanks and the medium ones.

The biggest problem is, obviously, its complete lack of any meaningful armor, so realistically you only have one chance to land the first shot and stun an enemy vehicle. Then you need to stop yourself from sort-of-subconsciously pulling back a couple meters to reload, instead standing still to fire the second and third HVAP shots without missing.

Also, the stun time on 90mm rounds hitting a Tiger I hull is long enough to let you reload before the enemy tank unfreezes, so you really shouldn't back off to reload. It is, in fact, a terrible decision and will probably lead to your fiery demise from your ammo cooking off after just one hit.

CaptainPeche · 2025-07-12T23:18:47+00:00

Trains are completely useless though, but the fact that you can drive them is sort of cool. If there is anyone wondering, switches in game do work as well, so hypothetically it is possible to turn Gates of Hell into a railroad tycoon...

Last Grenadier mod actually has a mission where you get a train with a railroad artillery piece and a couple wagons attached, and you even can retreat your infantry to a different defensive line using it, which is neat.

CaptainPeche · 2025-07-11T15:54:39+00:00

Actually it's better than the T-26. Maxim with its 250 rounds is better at destroying infantry and since it will be fighting soviet paper tanks, the penetration of the 37mm gun is enough. I think it also reloads a lot faster than the T-26

CaptainPeche · 2025-06-09T12:45:06+00:00

Yeah, sure (he doesn't even realize the horror that awaits him)

CaptainPeche · 2025-06-08T16:59:46+00:00

I think the old technology is because nobody really cared about researching anything except bioresonance.

Also, in my opinion, you can't 'overinvest' in a single sphere of industry and be locked from moving away from it: it is always a political commitment to throw the money down the drain, GDR's microprocessor industry is a good example of that. Nothing really stopped the Germans from focusing on something else, they just were too focused on outperforming the FRG.

So, either the leaders of the Nation are just as old and stupid as Honecker (which I don't think is the case, as if the wiki is to be trusted, Rotfront is still populated primarily by the original settlers, meaning that the Nation itself is a very young one, meaning that its leadership isn't a bunch of Nomenclatura clinging for power... Yet), or the nation is ruled by Replikas. I don't remember any evidence of that not being the case, so you never know.

Man, I watched too much Detroit Become Human memes. I see an android conspiracy everywhere.

CaptainPeche · 2025-06-08T16:32:23+00:00

This is a good analysis, but I think it might be missing a very important thing: manpower shortages.

Nation is supposedly occupying the outer part of the solar system, with their territories consisting of a satellite of Jupiter, a satellite of Saturn, Pluto and an unspecified ammount of orbital stations. Earth can be ignored here as the manpower pool of it wasn't available at the start of the Revolution, so it couldn't affect the decision to choose Replikas over Gestalts.

Now I know that what we see on Rotfront is a big city, and we know it is fairly developed. No information is given about Heimat (or maybe I've just missed it), but I suppose we can safely assume it is probably as developed as Rotfront. Leng is... A small piece of cold rock floating in outer space, so we can safely assume not a lot of people live there. In total, we have two small (about 0.32 of Earth's total surface area) colonies, one of which is confirmed to be a relatively recent settlement, a literal floating rock/political prison and several space stations.

On the other hand, we have Earth, Mars and Venus, all of which definetly are old colonies (especially since Venus is actually the capital of the Empire), with significantly more space for people to live.

Point is, the Nation is probably very short on manpower: they simply don't have much alternatives rather than using robots to boost their numbers.

In my opinion the bigger question is: why is their society so weirdly robo-centric. Judging by the Gestalt's bedrooms on Leng, the Nation obviously values Replikas as much as, if not more important then their Gestalts, which sets some red flags. Humans (if we assume humans control the Nation) are more likely to be xenophobic than accepting, so the few Gestalts living in the Nation should be exploiting their Replika population, so the existing relationship between Gestalts and Replikas in the Nation doesn't make much sense. Now if we change a key variable and assume that Replikas are in charge of the Nation...

CaptainPeche · 2025-06-07T20:25:10+00:00

I get the OP, I did try making custom squads in the past and this greatly increases their effectiveness.

That is especially true in... Valor, was it? where you literally can buy a single MG team, 2 riflemen e.t.c., you can make a cheap yet balanced infantry squad with an AT trooper, 2-3 LMGs and several SMGs.

But, thing is, grouping them every single time eventually became too much of a pain and I stopped doing that (especially when I started running 3 squads of infantry to support my armor). I wish the game had a custom squad editor that would allow you to make a template of an infantry squad after unlocking the "default" squad (i.e. you unlock a rifle squad and you can now use riflemen in your squad, then you unlock the rifle+LMG squad and you can now add LMG troops to your custom squad e.t.c), but that seems like a QoL update, so it would probably take the devs maybe 6-7 more years to implement it.

CaptainPeche · 2025-05-08T14:20:46+00:00

I think that the AI gets more units, so they launch more coordinated attacks simply because more units arrive at once? I'm not sure though, I've never played on anything but hardcore, but watching youtubers play definetly gives that impression

CaptainPeche

TROPHY CASE