I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Yeah, hearts of Iron is a game that I played a lot for a short time, but have no interest in playing again.
If the DLC was truly separate it would be one thing. But, with each DLC they modify the base game a bit… but not completely. To get the complete modification you need the DLC. That leaves all kinds of stubs in the base game that don’t make any sense without the DLC. Like, you can create a special weapons research centre where (sans DLC) you can research 1 item, and that 1 item isn’t even useful or interesting. Or, you can choose to research a vehicle chassis that… can never be used because all the vehicles that use that chassis are in the DLC.
It even seems to me like the basic “war” part of the game is broken simply because certain DLC exists. Like, at certain parts in the game, it is essentially 100% impossible to break through an enemy’s entrenched position, so you simply reach a stalemate where neither side can advance.
What I think happened is that they added mechanics to some DLC package that make it possible to entrench more than in the base game and also to break through that entrenchment. But, then they basically added the entrenchment to the base game and the way to break it was only in the DLC. I don’t think this was necessarily done in a malicious way. It’s just that with dozens of DLC packages, it probably becomes impossible to properly test things (and they care more about the users who buy their DLC).