Hoi4 exists in a really funny place where people who have never encountered paradox games before think its really complicated when in reality it *is* the simplification of many of the esoteric systems of the previous games. See; the unholy abomination that is the hoi3 tech screen below:
I had to run a third party program to organize all my divisions into corps, corps into armies, and armies into army groups, all while assigning a general to every level.
Hoi3 OOB is either "sickos yes" or "wtf is this" depending entirely on what your specific fixation that brought you to buy the game was. The logical extreme for the former is Gary grigsby's war in the east or hoi4 for the latter.
BICE is life
one day
Get ready to rage quit every campaign before 1940
you make it sound so enticing
I almost get more joy setting everything up *just right* prior to 39. The war can become anticlimactic lol
okay but i kind of love that aesthetic
You kind of had to just know how some of these systems worked beforehand because theres no way some new person is going to realize how the theory/practical modifiers worked off the cuff without any help.