The German Empire isn't broken by any means. It isn't even the strongest nation lategame, that honor goes to the United States or the Russian Empire.
The German Empire is the strongest nation in the midgame because Prussia has an amazingly well-educated populace in a fairly compact area. This allows for effective national foci use. You'll get craftsmen, clerks, capitalists, liquor, glass, artillery, etc while Russia and Austria are still struggling to get their literacy rates going. You'll get ahead in research and be able to exploit the bonuses you get from that. You can leverage your strong midgame and beat down your rivals, putting yourself in a position to sit at #1 until 1936.
But Germany falls off as lategame comes. Austria, provided that it hasn't succumbed to foreign or domestic policy disasters, is more populous and resourceful than you. Austria can also use National Foci better than you can, because it has places like Galicia with over 1 mil pops. By 1900 it can have the game's strongest industry fairly easily if it's managed to hold on to its lands (which it rarely ever does in AI hands - playing Austria is a foreign policy nightmare). As the 1900s go on, you have to watch for Russia and America, the most populous nations, rising up to usurp you.
Consider using Free People and Liberate Country to take chunks out of Russia and America. This will cripple them both, allowing you to sit at #1 for the rest of the game. Germany will outpace Britain and France fairly easily, so don't worry about them.
If you're talking about Greater Germany (formed by Austria), then yeah, that's broken as hell. It literally bathes in coal and manpower. God help your enemies if you form it.
I actually didn't make particularly good use of national focus points at all, as I neglected industry for the first 50-60 years of the game. Even after destroying the capitalist-built industry and starting from scratch, then destroying everything I built and starting from from scratch again, I easily outpaced all competition. It wasn't even a challenge, except when I messed up my industry out of laziness towards the end.
I mainly spent national focus points on building Socialist or Communist party loyalty in my states, or replenishing damaged brigades. (With unintended consequences like being able to get 10 brigades from single provinces like Bayern and Prague. Counting reserves, my army was about 8% of my population towards the end. Talk about army with a country.)
The problem, at least when Germany is played by a human, is that it's incredibly easy to subdue and include Austria in a Greater Germany as Prussia. I opted to dismember Austria first, as I wanted pretty borders (and no dumb satellites), but if I had decided to powergame 100% I could have annexed literally the entire thing by Decision 10 years or so into the game. The Prussian military is so strong, even at the start, that it can easily defeat the usual Franco-Russian alliance with minimal losses, and still have more than enough manpower left to crush Austria afterwards.
Granted, you could say the same thing about countries like the US, Russia etc. in the hands of the player. There is one big difference, however: Germany tends to perform incredibly well even when controlled by the AI. The US tends to laze around in third or fourth place, and Russia struggles to even keep their great power status at times. (They lost the position to
Switzerland of all countries in my game)
The only serious rival in my game was France, and that only lasted until I had enough of them and wiped out their military completely.
That said, I am planning to give Prussia -> Germany another go soon, this time with an intact Austria and a bunch of house rules to facilitate relatively historical (or plausibly ahistorical) results. It might be less overpowered then, and have some real competition to deal with.
Vickymod now has a war goal that forcibly removes your opponent’s cores on your land.
A nice feature from a gameplay-perspective, but not particularly realistic in the timeframe. France never giving up on Alsace-Lorraine actually makes sense IMHO. Germany dictating that they no longer have any right to it isn't going to change anything. If I wanted to, I could just have increased relations with France to a point where they couldn't declare war on me anymore though.
My game is on the 35th War of Chinese Reunification.
That's hilarious. Is it because of your interference, or is the AI just messing around?
, but I like my monarchist one.
