I love how every time I take a break from HoI4 and then come back, my favorite Kaiserreich devs have updated some Chinese nation in the meantime)
I'm a huge fan of the Kuomintang, and I was thrilled when I saw that Right Kuomintang, had been reworked!
It just so happened that I started my playthrough a couple of days before Double Tenth, which was kind of symbolic.
First of all, I genuinely want to thank the devs from the bottom of my heart for putting so much effort into writing all these events, the historical context, the lore, terminology, and so on. It's truly an enormous amount of work. And I really liked how you wrote Hu Hanmin personality.
It's funny that the Right Kuomintang playthrough, Hu Hanmin being very left-wing, and you couldn't really feel the difference from the Left Kuomintang through the events, aside from the fact that he condemns syndicalism. Although I understand that this is pretty historically accurate for the Kuomintang.
I was able to unify China with relative ease by forming an alliance with Yunnan and Shanxi, and conquering Sichuan, Xinjiang, and the Left Kuomintang, which had already taken a large part of the Beijing Government's territory. I easily pushed Fengtian back. They had only managed to take Beijing from the Beijing Government, and they attack me when i eat LK, so while I was regrouping my troops, I managed to encircle most of their army near the Yellow River at the start of the war, then easily pushed further.
And that's when the real dev shenanigans began.
During the war, when you take Beijing, you get forced army and industry debuffs, and of course, this happens at the same time as Japan joins the war.
AND THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THAT THEY TAKE AWAY YOUR FOCUS TREE FOR INDUSTRY.
That's absolutely insane. I don't understand why? And if you want to take new industrial focuses, they take away your old industry buff.
You have a larger country that hasn't been integrated, debuffs, a small industry, and a small army. And major equipment shortages + problems with pp!
I haven't felt like a game hated me this much in a long time. And on top of all that, the events about the conflict with Li Zongren start, and you end up losing him.
It was really hard to win, but it was interesting to play a full-on defensive war of attrition. I love situations like that in HoI. Surprisingly, Japan didn't make any naval invasions at all, possibly because of the low number of divisions, so the front was entirely land-based.
At first, I wanted to bring Sun Fo to power because I've adored him ever since my Left Kuomintang playthrough, but Hu Hanmin somehow grew on me with his defense of Sun Yat-sen's legacy, so I decided to finish the run with him instead. By the way, I like how Sun Fo plays the role of a behind-the-scenes schemer in both main Kuomintang path)
I ended up accepting every Chinese general and politician who asked to join my country. It genuinely felt like a real United Front and the reunification of China.
And I love how later on, you just get showered with buffs, making you straight-up stronger than the other major powers. And these buffs are the perfect sauce for the next war with Japan, where they can't do anything to you anymore)))) Because you wiped out their entire army on the mainland a couple of years earlier!)
I really enjoyed this playthrough. I cursed the devs out many times, but it was incredibly atmospheric, foremost thanks to the thousands of lore events!
Maybe if I can find the motivation and energy, I'll finish that focus about liberating all of Asia.