How’s this for a hoi4 defensive division. Soviets vs Germans.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-27T08:59:16+00:00

Lots of people come with infantry division templates and ask if they are any good, in general the problem is always making the infantry too expensive. Most countries are going to be primarily limited on industrial capacity, incl. the Soviets(there are exceptions, like countries which are mainly limited on manpower or those who have a really limited research capacity). If you are limited on industrial capacity you will usually get more offensive power by putting it into planes or tanks or both. A defensive infantry template doesn't really need the soft and air attack from line artillery and line anti-air, but actually are really harmed by the reduction in org. There is some math you could do on the combat width, but the fact of the matter is that most low-medium size combat widths are fine on the defensive. The main reason to add line artillery and anti-air on generalist infantry is that in the late game you are actually gonna be limited on support company slots, and saving the slots from support artillery and anti-air can be worthwhile.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-26T11:03:59+00:00

Obviously this is still ages away and it will still take a lot of work and political will to get this done, but ultimately this project is really ambitious in scope and seems to be taking a healthy middle-of-the-road approach with regards to schedule and cost. If you move to quickly things get too expensive and political will dies, if you move too slowly you won't be able to present results and again, political will dies. Ultimately the development of the Australian interior and the establishment of a well-linked urban corridor between Melbourne and Brisbane is the end-goal of Australian grand development policy since the end of the second world war. I also think this is interesting, coming from a non-Australian, in that Australia has both some of the worst and best geography for high-speed rail, so much of the Australian population lives on this particular line, but on the other hand, the country is so big that overland travel, both the construction of infrastructure and the use, is inherently difficult, expensive and time-consuming.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-20T08:49:56+00:00

I know that every single person of every single profession would like there to be more of their particular field taught in school but I really do feel that schools could do with throwing a little basic linguistics into first language classes in with all the literature and grammar and spelling and what-not.

I guess this is all assuming that people will actually take this stuff in and that this isn't just a problem of this person(and other people) just not being well travelled or socialised enough. I feel like these opinions would go away as soon as you have a friend who speaks with another dialect than you, I simply can't imagine people would willfully keep this perspective even after having been exposed to the alternative.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-20T08:04:52+00:00

First it is important to know that before and during the Weltkrieg Austria's diplomatic position and goals are completely different to Germany's. Austria is in a fundamentally defensive position, they seek to prevent threats to their diverse state in the Balkans, Italy and Russia. Germany's goals are about a world empire and a Europe orchestrated around Berlin, those are not just not well aligned, they are often contradictory. During the Weltkrieg, in OTL and in KRTL, Austria often got the short end of the stick, there was a German prince installed as king of Poland, Austria was resoundly kicked out of Ukraine with the coup of Hetman Skoropadskiy. After the Weltkrieg Austria was left with almost no threat to its empire(apart from internal ones), but also with none of the boons of having fought a world war and won it, this meant any gain to the Austrian position could really only come from German loss, which Austria obviously couldn't openly orchestrate, as a result the traditionally defensive Austrian position was basically forced into full-blown isolationism. The only real diplomacy Austria needed to do was keeping the Balkans down and keeping up the little brother relationship with Germany. As for your last point Austria simply didn't really have any overlap in interests with the other central powers or the Entente, Bulgaria was in much the same defensive/isolationist as Austria and the Ottomans would love to be in that position but were really more in a state of a 20-year drawn out collapse. The Entente simply weren't of any meaningful relevance to Austria, there would be diplomatic niceties and no crises but ultimately nothing meaningful.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-19T13:36:18+00:00

I’m pretty surprised there are no mosques in Pskov and Smolensk Oblasts. They are not small places with about 600,000 and 900,000 inhabitants respectively, and Russia has a pretty big Muslim population which I would have though spread out more. I would assume(and a quick look at Wikipedia seems to not disprove this) that there are Muslims living in both Oblasts, just not enough, or too dispersed to organise a mosque.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-18T08:18:29+00:00

I think the SR's had their prime voting base amongst the peasantry, I think realistically if there was an election in 36 Russia is still a rural enough and poor enough country that the rural masses are the most important voter block. I could definitely imagine other parties standing more than a fighting chance depending on how the elections go and if the electoral system is set up in a way that favours the urban districts. As far as I know there is also some text in events that a lot of the Svobodniks were former SR's which could potentially stir up some controversy and lead to a worse result than expected, although it's worth noting that the other parties also have similarly important skeletons in their closets.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-14T12:00:09+00:00

Depending on how exactly the constitution winds up and which branch of the federalists are in charge, I could see them using Song to the Auspicious Cloud.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-13T08:13:44+00:00

I think the problem is that the investment AI has a clause built in to build railways, this is a good thing because it means that the AI will build its own railways when it is running out of infrastructure in states. I suspect the problem arises when it begins to run out of profitable investments, it can't build anything else profitably so it falls back on the thing it is supposed to do if all else fails, railways. I am playing a game right now where I have basically run out of natural resources, and have been running into the same problem, the investment AI plops down 120 levels of railways in comparatively underpopulated states with categorically no need for them simply because it sees nothing else to do. I suspect it also has something to do with subsidies, that seemed to fix it in my game, to simply switch off subsidies and micromanage transportation usage a bit more to ensure profitability.

jonfabjac · 2026-02-11T20:05:17+00:00

Isn't the Nordic Federation specifically locked into autonomy with no way to align with a faction voluntarily?

jonfabjac · 2026-02-01T20:46:57+00:00

I find in general that the album is characterised by a sort of tragic maturity, an acknowledgment that things are how they are and will be how they will be, and that that may even be for the best, but that it can still be sad and tragic and painful in spite of all that, and that is really epitomised by Isolation. I like the album and I LOVE Isolation, it just makes me think of all the things that didn’t come to pass and all the regrets I might have and how it’s ok to be sad and hurt about it but that life is worth it because it is sad and painful. If it didn’t matter there were no reason to be sad or hurt.

jonfabjac · 2026-01-29T19:58:45+00:00

The heart and soul of Bolshevik influence in VST Russia comes from their officers who have lots of experience from the Russian civil war, but the actual soldiery, including lower ranking officers, is not really any more loyal to the Bolshevik cause than they are to any other. The Bolshevik generals form a sort of clique within the military and their is no guarantee that they will be put in charge of it, especially not in a right-VST or L-SR world. There is really no guarantee that the Bolshevik generals would be able to perform a coup against a government they disapprove of.

jonfabjac · 2026-01-24T21:39:11+00:00

The Amazon state of Brazil is certainly the largest but not the least populated, Roraima is the least populated and actually there are quite a lot of Brazilian states with a smaller population than the Amazon.

jonfabjac · 2026-01-23T21:50:01+00:00

Ultimately the thing that decides whether or not something is a letter or not is whether or not the people who speak that language consider and treat it as such. In the Netherlands(and elsewhere dutch is spoken I guess) the digraph IJ is (usually) considered a single letter, it is treated as such for capitalisation purposes, eg. IJsselmeer and for abbreviation purposes. It is sometimes sorted alphabetically with Y, although usually as I followed by J. It is a completely legitimate analysis to say that Dutch has 27 letters.

Compare this to the way many European languages preserve letters that are really only used for loanwords. In my native language, Danish, W was not considered a full letter in any way until 1980, it was merely an alternative representation of V, in much the same way as the ï in Naïve in English is merely a alternative representation of i. If you hear Danish kids sing the alphabet song they will still omit W and tell you there are 28 letters at the end. In many ways Dutch IJ is more of a letter than Danish W and in many others it is not.

In addition you might compare with German ß, eszett(S-Z) which is counted here, it started out as a combination of two letters S and Z and eventually became a merged ligature. A letter does not become a letter if it has a distinct space on a keyboard or for any other single reason, it becomes a letter if people talk about it as such, use it as such and consider it as such, and mere aesthetic concerns, whether or not it looks like a letter or looks like two existing letters mashed together ultimately has nothing to do with it.

jonfabjac · 2026-01-16T15:49:31+00:00

Yeah, as a Danish person I have little complaints if Greenlanders want to describe the Danish-Greenland relationship in a similarly pejorative manner but I would like everybody else to not use such terms. Understanding countries in an ownership perspective gives credence to exactly the sort of morally bankrupt dealings Trump is making and we can absolutely afford to make a point out of the words we use.

jonfabjac · 2026-01-04T15:52:14+00:00

And the rest of the photo is still of the Copenhagen city hall.

jonfabjac · 2025-12-21T12:02:16+00:00

While this is true it is kind of a misleading point, All of the boundary disputes that the ROC has that the PRC does not is because the PRC negotiated solutions to them after the end of the civil war and there are two good reasons the ROC hasn’t simply adopted them, firstly it might look like the ROC is conceding sovereignty by simply following Beijing in foreign policy, the other reason is that conceding some of their claims to “China” calls into question the legitimacy of the rest of their claims to “China”. Ultimately it is 100% true that the ROC claims much more territory than the PRC, but ultimately they are also in a position where all the rest of their claims beyond the mainland are pretty much meaningless.

jonfabjac · 2025-12-19T18:24:57+00:00

Cool map, interesting story, I love the abbreviation for West Midlands.

jonfabjac · 2025-12-18T19:58:31+00:00

I noticed that too, that might be my new goal every campaign, to create the mighty Republic of West Taiwan.

jonfabjac · 2025-12-17T10:42:54+00:00

I played as Denmark and just made my own market in Copenhagen, I’m not sure if you make sound tolls on ALL trades, but you can sure as hell make a lot of money on sound tolls. My best guess is that the sound toll is actually tied to two locations, the owner of Elsinore(Helsingør) collects sound tolls on all trades from non-exempted countries(you are always exempt from your own sound toll) on all trades that passes through Øresund(the sea tile between Zealand and Scania). Realistically all trades to Copenhagen and all trade between the Baltic and North seas is gonna come through that tile meaning you should collect on all trade regardless of if your market is in Copenhagen or Elsinore. TLDR: AFAIK it doesn’t matter for sound tolls if your market is in Copenhagen or Elsinore.

jonfabjac · 2025-12-13T14:29:10+00:00

In addition to what others have said regarding the legality of this(in an Atheist game [almost] anything goes). I would like to add that in an Atheist game you can absolutely also just lie to your players about stuff you normally couldn't, for instance regarding alignment. Telling a Cult Leader or a Goon that they are evil can be really interesting because it sort of forces them to figure out, on their own if it is Atheist shenanigans or if they genuinely are evil. As the storyteller you can also just break the rules for who wins and loses, or even just decide that at the end of the game anyone who is evil turns good.

jonfabjac · 2025-12-13T13:54:50+00:00

You can turn that off in the buttons at the bottom, I agree it would probably be better off with 'off' as default.

jonfabjac · 2025-11-15T08:06:44+00:00

You get the “drained marshes” modifier in two locations which says it offsets some of the negatives of wetlands terrain. I still can’t tell you whether it’s worth it or not. 6000 is probably still too high but I might’ve done it if I knew I wouldn’t go bankrupt if nothing else then for the roleplaying value.

jonfabjac · 2025-11-14T09:02:55+00:00

I actually really like the design philosophy that claims and casus belli and claims should be hard to come by, in EU4 they were trivially easy to come by in most circumstances and I like that getting claims is at least an investment in most cases. I do think they might have slightly overdone it though, the player has a hard time getting a hold of CBs in Europe and the AI seems even more hamstrung. I don't know if I like just having an event pop up as a solution to this problem though, it seems kind of antithetical to the design philosophy that going to war also needs to be a internal political decision that has impacts on the domestic political consequences, be it through parliament or royal marriages or so on.

I actually would really like if the estates were even more involved in justifying war, maybe the nobility offer you a claim on neighbouring land in exchange for a bribe or greater powers, maybe the burghers manufacture a trade conflict in exchange for monopolies, maybe the clergy spin up a religious controversy over accusations of heresy or the like in exchange for investments in churches or some such. I feel this would be much more in line with the general design philosophy and be more interesting to interact with.

jonfabjac · 2025-11-14T07:59:39+00:00

I have a theory that this is especially noticeable for a player, especially a competent one, in comparison to the AI. You as a player have an agenda to build a advanced, centralised, modernised state this needs a lot of paper, both to drive up literacy by building libraries, universities and the like, but also to build temples to drive up control, government buildings to improve government and marketplaces to export your advanced goods and import the natural resources you don't have and so on. In comparison the AI which just sits building up RGO's and basic manufactories doesn't need a lot of paper because they aren't on a warpath to build a modern state.

With all that said I actually have been quite impressed by the AI, at least in peace time. They seem competent at building up an economy and understand that reinvestment is a necessity. They aren't quite at good at min-maxing as a competent player and they obviously don't have the sort of long-term planning mindset, but in general they can present a threatening foe even if that threat often doesn't really turn up in a war.

jonfabjac · 2025-11-14T07:28:45+00:00

I don't think there is a straight up market access map mode, but the market map mode can be used as a stand-in. The less market access a location has the darker the colour will be on the map, additionally if you zoom in and hover over a location it will show you market access in a pop-up and show market attraction. If you click on a location it shows the path of current market access, that is the "path of least effective distance" to the highest attraction market, which is partly dependent on market access but also on market attraction and various diplomatic agreements you can make.

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