2022-11-06: By Blood Alone DLC review

I believe that now is the time when the weather’s going to actually start becoming cold, which is exciting as the heat has been quite unbearable for this time of year.

Enough of that, though, as today I’m going to talk a bit about the not-so-new-anymore DLC for HOI4 By Blood Alone.

I’ll admit, at the start I was nothing but enthusiastic for BBA. The plane designer felt much needed, as did the reworks of Italy and the addition of content for Ethiopia and Switzerland. However, at this point, I’ve begun to notice some flaws in many of the core features.

For example, the Balance of Power mechanic only applies to Italy, Switzerland, and Ethiopia. Though I can understand that adding it to all nations would be an incredible amount of excess work that wouldn’t bring much benefit, I will note that they were once touting BoP as this great new feature (if I’m not mistaken in my interpretation of it.) It’s quite a bit of fun, too, so it’s quite sad that it’s not been implemented fully.

The Air Designer is quite flawed in my opinion, too. For example, increased weight does not affect speed — only agility. This is pretty unrealistic. The limited amount of modules also gets on my nerves, too. This is a problem with all the designers, actually. I would rather receive a penalty for having too much shit on my tank/ship/plane than not be able to add my stabilizer, auto-loader, sloped armor, armor skirts, and my heavy machine gun on the same chassis.

I also feel that the reworked African states could have been expanded upon. Sure, there are more states in Kenya and whatever other former colonies they added more states too, but there’s still no Lesotho and Eswatini. Damn it, I want to play Lesotho but they won’t let me. Dirty bastards…

I honestly hope that in the next DLC they’ll refine these things. It’s here that I’ll divert into countries that really need new/reworked focus trees, in my opinion: - Brazil - China - Persia - Japan - Argentina - All the Dominions - Hungary - Albania - Austria - the Nordic States

These are all nations that I feel could really use some additional content, as playing them now is quite stale. A rework of the Generic focus tree would be quite well-appreciated, especially for me, who likes to release random African nations and play them with full seriousness.

That’s my 2 cents.

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