I always had an opinion that Australia is wasted potential. It would be so cool to create a pacific empire like Japan

As an Australian who enjoys playing Australia I am offended by the title but am very happy to see you play Australia

True story Bitt3rSteel is only the guy I know who could enjoy playing Communist Australia for 24 hours straight.

Other countries: Fight against foreign powers with their focus tree Together for victory countries: Fight against foreign powers and also their focus tree.

Australia: Was one of the most important Minor allied nations. Who literally played a large role in almost every theatre before going behind Churchill's back to change the course of the war in the Pacific. Paradox: Ehh lets spend 5 minutes making their focus tree.

Australia desperately needs an update.

As an Australian, We need a better focus tree.

In Poland you can make a bear your king. It would be funny, if in Australia you could play as an Emu Empire.

We desperately need an Emutopia and Kiwiland update.

Australia storming French-controlled Normandy in 1943 after annexing UK is possibly the most cursed D-Day scenario possible.

I have an ungodly amount of hours on ironman Australia because it feels like the perfect underdog story plus as awful as the focus tree is there is some gold in there (2.0 years a head for small frame, destroyers, subs & cruisers), really nice industry bonuses. Colabs and annexing Indonesia is vital for industry, resources & non- core manpower. Always did civil war in the Netherlands but that trick with getting the invasion off from Russia is gold, will use the hell out of that. Great video that I will take a bunch of ideas from!

You sound so giddy when you mention the ships you'll build, it's adorable

As someone who really enjoys playing New Zealand, this video inspired me to give Straya another shot.

I like these "sub-optimal" videos! You laugh more and I laugh more. It's just as interesting watching a virtuoso be technically impressive (grinding out wins, fixing bad saves) as it is when they tell us a story and roleplay out a concept. Keep up the great work!

Australia was so fun to play in hoi3, being so tough to stop the japanese before america came in made it feel like a genuine struggle to help hold onto places like singapore

As an Aussie, this brought me tremendous joy, and as an Aussie girl, I don't even mind that you pledged to kill your own, Aussie men (2:44). [sips.Vegemite.smoothie]

Democratic Australia on historical AI focuses is actually really really fun. It's similar to Canada in that you're really far away from all the fighting so if you just abandon infantry and planes, and go all in on medium tanks you can put down like 12 really good tank divisions and just zip around North Africa, Italy and later Germany because you don't have enough units on the front line for the AI to think of you as a priority. Single handedly won the war for the allies multiple times as Australia, even saved Poland from being yoinked by Stalin once

“I don’t do armor” Immediately puts armor on the cruiser. 😳

Naval Australia… my god. The criminals are fighting back. GIVE THE AUSSIES A BETTER FOCUS TREE GOD DAMNIT

I cracked up so hard the moment he said "The Australian Army's already outside Berlin" and it's just 1941

他用實力證明了這遊戲，只要有足夠的陰謀就可以贏 不管你是多麼偏僻又貧弱的小國家 只要你會搞掉那些沒有軍隊的國家，就可以壯大然後繼續贏下每一場戰爭 該死的，他讓整個社群的人難堪

The title should be every Australian's life motto

My great grandfather is from Australia. I remember during worker day of how he told me how he marched through tokyo, ending g the Asian war truly a war hero.

Bittersteel: this is a terrible country also bittersteel: kills the entire world in 5 minutes flat

best video from the series so far. no mods and no boring standard approach

I think you need like 1 set of fighter wings for every certain amount of bombers in order for the bombers to actually want to go on their missions. I tend to go for 1 fighter and the rest bomber wings.

The image at 0:03 got me to subscribe. I never get tired of that joke

Paradox this is a petition Australia needs a better focus tree

You totally got me turning the image upside down at the start. I just rotated the phone for full screen so I rotated again to get it oriented just for you to trick me again! I've been had 😂

Australia

Australian fan here. You did well mate. Cheers for that. 🍺

Historically accurate title is historically accurate. Australia went from swol doge in WW1 to wimp doge in WW2; we did bugger all despite the war being on our doorstep. WW1 it was 4 divisions at the tip of the spear, WW2 was couldn't even defend new guinea properly, and that's a place still 80 years later still isn't tamed/is extremely rugged and difficult.

Carrier Fighters actually slap because they still do naval attack damage (very little damage, but still) and they will wipe out an enemy's naval bombers. It is still a good idea to put at least one squadron of naval bombers in each carrier, but I always prioritize the fighters.

Best. Australia. Run. Ever. (or at least that I have seen)

Australia during the WW1 mod is kindof interesting because in my playthrough Germany actually tried to defend its colonies in the pacific. It actually was quite the challenge for me to oust German forces out of the pacific.

I know what you mean when you say super optimally, the Malaysia play through was honestly the most entertaining video you made👍

kind of late to the vid as always nice video Bittersteel! Keep the work up!

Its a shame really that the focus tree is kinda mid, considering how Australia played a big roll defending from the Japanese. Also id love to see a Populate or Perish focus for Australia.

The absolute slander as an Aussie (I still agree our tree is garbage, but still)

Getting powerful navy ships is perfectly lore-friendly, provided you try to home-brew them from an outdated Swedish design even though you don't have a domestic ship building industry and spend decades trying to get them up to speed while the project costs balloon far beyond expectations and delays use up most of their service life. Then years later you learn your lesson and buy from the French instead, but cock up the process so bad it causes an international incident, and you have to pay a nearly billion-dollar fine to break the contract so you can go running to the Americans instead (who definitely didn't exert pressure behind the scenes to ensure exactly that outcome).

Hey! I've seen that the member names always start with the same names (maybe it's supposed to be like this, idk), but it would be cool if the names list could be randomized before every video so more members could have their names as divisions. Anyways, great video as always, keep it up man :)

It's funny you promoted Thomas Blamey to being a Field Marshal: to this day, he's the only Australian (or at least the only person actually born in Australia) to ever hold that position.

Nice to see that you’re still in charge of Belgium as well

0:50 bitter sounded like he was really happy lol

"cheap destroyers, cheap fodder" you just described the scrap iron flotilla.... it was extremely successful.

hey that was a nice & refreshing video :D The flag isn't that bad steel! It's a lovely Kangaroo jumping toward the sun, looks pretty nice ^_^

i had an relativly fun game as australia, focused on tanks and got 2 of their achivments. The thing was that i dont have the dlc, so i had just the base tree and i think that made it more fun

That aircraft carrier isn’t that left field. The HMAS Melbourne was a majestic class aircraft carrier and it operated in the 50s

The first 3 DLC's they did are really showing how restricted they are these days, been itching to do a Japan game but each time I look at there focus tree just makes me sad. At least they are "slowly" updating these older trees, Yugoslavia got a ton of new focuses a while back, India can now finally gain access to its full manpower, and Canada can now have a large army and a good industry. No sign of Australia, New Zealand or South Africa getting any TLC yet however... Also from my own Experience from Carrier Fleets, secondaries are useless unless using Dual Purpose, extra Anti Air is handy especially if patrolling waters where the AI throws up Aircraft, same goes with Radar down the line, as it will help find enemy fleets much easier. Aircraft wise "I think" better engines and survivability massively reduce combat losses, when engaging ships with any sort of AA, especially Armour Plates. Also Fighters are great when dealing with enemy carrier fleets as Carrier Planes tend to go for Carriers more often than not, as well as Carrier Fighters also have some Naval Attack themselves, I tend to split my Airwings with a 50/50 split between Torpedo Bombers and Fighters. Also bit of an interesting note, if you got down the Ballistic Rocket technology you can gain access to Anti Ship Missiles for Naval Bombers, and they hit much harder than torpedoes, bit of a hidden tech that most players never see thanks to that line being useless otherwise.

0:50 he just got so happy talking about the navy

I would like it if someday paradox goes through the older focus trees and gives them an update. Some of the older ones suck.

what makes Australia such pain to play, is no doubt the lack of research slots. as despite having great point to become a naval power, you have no research slots to research pretty much anything.

I bet Bittersteel is going to rant before every Commonwealth nation!!! Excited to see you play the Raj tho XD

Oooooo knew bitt3rsteel video, haven’t watched it but I know it’s going to be good love your content bitt3r keep it up don’t burn out. :)

you can actually plan an invasion with just military access without joining their faction, you just need to plan an invasion from your country to theirs first, then plan the actual invasion (which is now possible), and then just delete the previous invasion and assign your units to the actual one

I swear I was just checking if you had played any Australia games when you uploaded

I tapped this not knowing it was hearts of iron and was ready to lobby the government into sending a few drop bears to you

As an Australian and someone who usually only plays Australia, you have offended me good sir! haha great video as always!!

Sure brand new focus trees are cool and all but jesus they need to do a sweep of quite a few of the old dlc trees and bring them up to par with their more recent work so selecting them doesnt feel like a mistake. Unless you're Bittersteel of course. Then its only a geographical inconvenience.

Together for Victory countries: Literally untouched for 7 years. Reminds me a lot of EU4 where 50% of the countries haven't been updated after missions were added.

If the enemy used naval bombers you should absolutely use antiair on carriers, as they're the first to be targeted and aa reduces the damage taken (so you spend less time in port repairing) It will also shoot down a couple of planes, but that's basically meaningless

I remember an aussie playthrough where I kicked Italy out of east Africa. Stole a German rail gun that was in british Somalia and named it THE BIG ONE. Occupied all of italian Libya and Sardinia. Then turned my army around to go kick Japan in the rice balls. That was a fun game.

As an Australian, for what we were in regards to our accomplishments in ww2, I feel Australia has been neglected in hoi4. Just to name a few noteworthy accomplishments, the Royal Aussie Airforce at its peak had operated 6000 aircraft by 1944, placing it as 4th largest airforce by 1945. Australian bomber squadrons were among the first of the British overseas forces to recieve deployment to the European theater in 1939, and of course we'd been there for the British as it fought desperate battles over the skies of Great Britain. We also have the 'Scrap Iron Flotilla' of 5 Australian crewed destroyers, HMAS Waterhen, Vampire, Voyager, Stuart and Vendetta. In 1939, while being outdated 1918 models as Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Progaganda Herr Goebbels would put it; 'scrap iron', the scrap iron flotilla had got first blood on the Italian submarine fleet in their first deployment to the Mediterranean and sinking a handful of vessels. They'd participated in the Battle of Cape Matapan; the allied ships sustaining no significant losses while sinking Italian heavy crusiers, destroyers; also scoring significant damage to Italy's Battleship, the Vittorio Veneto. Other noteworthy engagements include their anti submarine and escort duties along the North African coast, the resupply of allied forces in Tobruk as well as the Vampire's service in the Pacific theatre. Of all the dangerous operations carried out by the scrap iron flotilla, only the HMAS Stuart and Vendetta survived. Don't forget that the Australian troops had fought well against Italian and German forces in the African campaign. The Aussies under the command of the British probably held the African force together since London and North African field command was getting into fights at the time when the axis forces outnumbered British forces by kilometers. Need I say, before Montgomery took command, nobody had any love for the apparently incompetent British officers. Apparently, the anzacs ran a bayonet charge into the position where Generalfeldmarschall Rommel was and the general took a picture of it that was recovered in his belongings. Honestly, Australia needs a rework that actually shows what we were capable of at that time. Australia may not be the main protagonist in the story but that doesn't mean we should be written off as being only useful for steel and tungsten. I'm not sure what interesting paths you could take for alternatives, but I suppose you could make it so that the Emu's overthrew the government as payback, or we could just declare war on Emu's and send them to Madagascar until it becomes too convenient to genocide the overgrown turkeys by sending them to the frontlines as meatshields that give big breakthrough, recon and hp to your divisons which should be powerful in the support companies/doctrine rework, or just the German kind of genocide. Another alternate could be a monarchist path where we put Michael Hastings aka australian man who claimed to be rightful heor to the British throne. With an infant Michael Hastings, we could partition King George to relinquish the throne or declare our own Head of State. Perhaps include a path for Australia to become successor to the British Empire under His Majesty, the sovereign monarch of Australia, Earl of Loudoun and rightful heir to the crown of England, Michael Edward Abney-Hastings the first. I reckon if we include an emu supremacy path, the player gets exclusive access to Australian fauna mounted divisions such as kangaroo mounts. However, if you go with Michael Hastings, he gives you access to exclusive units such as experimental battlecrusiers that were meant to be a hybrid of battleship and aircraft carrier. The British had planned the concept in 1917 with the HMS Furious. The first real attempts at building a battleship that could support fighter wings and big artillery guns to match that of the modern battleships was put into development in Japan but the most well known of these of the Yatamo class did not succeed due to torpedo bombing. However, whose to say that King Michael doesn't want to make one of those behemoths his personal flagship so perhaps he or rather his regent (he would be an infant) would be able to negotiate a deal with Gibbs and Cox, an American shipbuilding company that drafted plans for the concept that was never commissioned, and have them sent to Australia for development. More experimental units/equipment for Australia could be the Sentenel tank, Melvaine's Mobile Pill Box, Grasshopper Light Tank (Aussie Transformers), the Cossor Land Cruiser (a big tank shaped liked a dick), the Wirraway, the CAC-15 'Kangeroo', the CA-12 'Boomerang' and the CAC P-51 'Mustang' just to name a few Australian designs.

yeah the focus tree sucks balls but im glad they updated the amount of territory you can actually build on. It was crazy small for one of the largest land masses around.

Out of all the things the soviets could have done in the japanese peace conference I'd really expected them to focus on taking at least south sakhalin and the kuril islands. Anyways, great run!

Bloody hell I was watching on my phone and thought that there was a problem with it during the first 10 seconds of the vid lol

Time traveler: Steps on a flower. The Timeline:

As an Aussie in reality our biggest army is the Salvation Army. We have a few row boats and a bi-plane in a museum in questionable order. A few noisy cold war designed subs round out the defence force.

Paradox: start a game from one of the interesting states! Interesting states: Australia, New Zealand

You can already sense that he is becoming more unhinged, just like ISP

HELLO bittersteel I would like to know how I can send one of these disaster safe thingies to you cuz I got a pretty bad game which needs saving.

I was expecting Austria but this is better

Great editing

Together for victory countries needs an update with baltic country style. Standart industry focus tree and unic political tree without any stupid requirement like world tension or being at war. Also recruitable population boosts would be really nice

i know the saying a bit differently..."if its stupid but it works,.. its still stupid...you just got lucky" but great video ;)

John Curtin is basically tf2 sniper

Hey i got a challenge for you for the next video: play as Germany but you can only use horse divisions and you can edit them as you want templates to be.

I miss those days when bomber only Australia would get insane war score.

This could be used to get Australia-Hungary, the long way around though. I never got the paradrop strat fully working

I’m an Australian and seen the video title and got excited thinking it was a video ragging on australia not realising it was in fact a game 😂

I remember trying Australia once thinking I could make a strong local navy and snatch south east Asia but uh...yeah the focus tree

“Not carrier goodbye bomber” “Carrier naval bombers” “that reminds me”

Bruh what was your infantry unit template, those guys were slicing through everything

Bruh when i loaded the video my screen was upside down so Australia was upside down lol

I read this as a dig on australia itself and I was like "yeah he's right" and then it turned out to be a hoi4 video.

I tried a playthrough with Australia a while back on R56 and by the time it was ready to do something it was 1946 already 😆

Bitt3rSteel, you and ISP are the only hoi4 youtubers i watch, i just found you. But I love your stuff, you have a very deep technical knowledge of the game, and I pick up lots of useful stuff watching your videos, that I think have actually made me way better in a very short time! Anyways. Please stop neglecting to use recon teams, you should try to field them in nearly every division that you can. If you have more recon than an enemy, you gain better tactics usage. If you have less recon, they have advantage. If your even, there is no advantage. Going through some forum posts, having more recon than your opponent gives about 15% more likelihood to win battles. So even if your just staying on par with your enemy, you'll find that your divisions will feel way stronger in general. Every vid I've seen you always ignore/hesitate and it bothers me lol, so at least give it a try for a bit. Regardless thanks for the vids.

This was a fun one.

I've been trying to get the "Australia-Hungary" achievement finished and, after a dozen failed runs, I can wholeheartedly agree that Australia has one of the shittiest focus trees IN THE GAME. It's maddening.

i think the best naval bombers are ones with guns too, im not sure tho. i just play battleships

I always like the idea of playing an aggressive Australia or South Africa but it doesn't work

Honestly, this is probably as close to meta for Australia as it currently gets, lmao.

You should get Coloured Puppets for future videos. It's Ironman-compatible and makes the overall map situation a lot clearer.

the nicest hoi4 australian gameplay be like:

By pumping out enough submarines, you can easily naval invade japan and puppet. Build factories then become integrated puppet. Then annex China, make sure 3 levels of collaboration government. Australia would then become an absolute beast.

I'm also running some carrier-based France fleets with full-on stacked carrier bombers and nothing else. It.. works! Let me see how you do it :)

The country of Australia doesn’t really suck... well... fair enough? At least we have free healthcare, and no starvation/water issues More the focus tree does, and yes, don’t let that stop you, think of it as a challenge

it’s terrifying to hear a very experienced hoi4 player say “i don’t know” so many times

I LOVE YOUR VIDEOS

i love how everything wound up bulkanized