Exploring the "Hidden" Italian Focus tree in By Blood Alone 

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Imagine being an italian soldier you joined under Mussolini because it pays well enough and there was no other job, you get deployed in Ethiopia, come back to take all the Balkans and see the king take power, then the catholics are so based that the pope takes over. You might think well this is it we've unified Italy and our ambitions under catholicism but no the pope tells you to rush Moscow. That's a very loyal soldier.

Petition for Bittersteel to play the new Swiss focus tree

*WW2 kicks off* The pope: “we’ve come to save you!” Half of Europe: “ hooray it’s the Catholic Church!” The pope after getting a dozen free war goals: “FROM YOURSELVES!” Half of Europe: “oh no it’s the Catholic Church”

Finally, an answer to question: “The Pope, how many divisions does he have?”

Papal State to Roman Empire is pretty based tbh, I’m glad that’s an option in the game now!

Funny bald man go bye bye

You just know that some scribe in the Vatican has started to record all of these Pope installation strategies for future use

seems to be a slight audio glitch, a high pitched noise chirping int he background, seems to only happen at the spoken parts and stop when the mic audio is not used, so most likely something with either the mic or the recording software. but outside of that great video.

for the 4th research slot at game start, you probably should grab synthetics cause it's needed for the economic tree

The Char B1 is the most majestic tank ever made! Also, early planes didn't have radios. Sometimes they had to land to relay information, sometimes they had carrier pigeons on board. In WW2 the Italian military was rather suspicious of this whole new radio thing and didn't put it on their ships or airplanes, at least not for a while. Which of course didn't help all the poor communications problems between the navy and army branches. I would call it broken telephone, but that would be an upgrade over semaphore flags :P For whatever reason I got the event that Balbo called off the AA, without doing any Aviation foci at all. Maybe because I had radar/communcation research up to date?

Man, too bad the pope path was spoiled in the achievements and PDX con, I cant imagine going down the pope path and realizing there was a new path for the first time!

I dont know if its just me but the Audio sounds like theres a whirring cricket in the background

For the ships, refitting isn’t too bad if you do the med fleet designer! Also get the officer corp refit one. I managed to do about half the destroyers to be decent ASW, and the battleships into battery 3. Managed to beat some of the UK navy (about 3 carriers and battleships plus a boatload of light ships) with the help of bombers!

Great guide - thanks. I found a bonus - Italy now has a focus which gives free bicycle units, so you can also get the Tour de France achievement when you take out France as Italy. MMM

Love your country guides dude, I learn SOOOOOO much from these vids!!!

Finally Stalin got the answer to his question we've been seeing for several years. Stalin - "The Pope, how many divisions does he have?" Italy - "Alot."

I like how you said "we are gonna puppet serbia" and you puppet croatia at that moment . I hope that is not going to cause another balkan war .

Nice video. I've found it's easy enough to beat Ethiopia with just the extra tank and cavalry divisions in the south and the mountaineers in the north without quite as many losses to attrition.

Dedicated naval bombers are so incredibly strong this patch....have a trophy navy and just send them out once you've pacified the seas with bombers 🐟🐟🐟

Recently downloaded the free Hoi4 from Steam(the 3 day offer one) and this was one of the things i really wanted to try but couldnt due to not having any dlcs, so thanks for doing a playthrough of it!!

Its extremely important to make sure conscription law and economic laws are up before switching to Monarchy/Pope path. Otherwise you get locked until you go to war. Funny enough, you can go from Kingdom of Italy > Papal States > Italian Empire > Roman Empire also. When you proclaim the Italian Empire as the Pope it will name change to Italian Empire and go back to being green instead of the grey/white of the Papal States.

Literally battleplanning with 100 divisions + on field marshal line Bitt3rSteel: I have a deficit in Guns you don't say?

I always use 1 r&d Slot to "rush" a tech (I also help this rush with advisor & choices +15%) Like an infantry weapon 2/3 years before help a lot (or a plane on multiplayer)

Btw I found a cheesy little exploit a little while ago to do with civil wars, where as a fascist or communist nation (who can immediatel send lend-leases) you can delete your army and then just send all of your supplies to a nation at war (usually spain or Italy) and then, when you start the civil war, your side (eg monarchist Germany) can get the lend lease back thus allowing you to have every supply your nation owns before the civil war during the war. Not the most useful exploit but it can be nice for crushing civil wars and I dont think Ive seen anyone else do it (I havent checked if it still works recently but it almost definitely will)

One of the smoothest transitions into a sponsor I have ever seen.

I’m excited for your Switzerland video

I decided to go with concentrated industry as Switzerland in an Axis run(learning the mechanic for the government), because they are limited by build space and I figured it would help to have the +5% factory output. And that'd I'd be mostly safe in the air if I join the Axis and didn't need the reduction to vulnerability, and I had limited research slots so didn't need the retention as bad. But it was more like -100% factory output in the end, when the enemies put 2000 uncontested bombers above the Alps and obliterated all of my industry and defenses despite stacking max anti-air. Italy lost Africa and Germany failed the invasion of USSR just barely because they spared too many troops preempting D-day; which they failed to oppose in the end. Japan ended up being successful but by 1946 the Alpine Supremacy had been all but annihilated. I recommend going dispersed industry as Switzerland to anyone who read this far lol.

I love the pope path it’s got to be one of the best paths in the game. The papal state national spirit is very strong

Nice LTT Desk Mat, I have the same one

I like your style. Liked and subscribed.

It’s so much easier to do the papal Italy if you get struggle so if y’all do the full papal tree on the right side get struggle so you can go into the papal tree with more non aligned support

more achievement guides would be appreciated

I personally like going for Concentrated Industry when I play a lot of smaller countries such as almost any South or Central American country, but I take Dispersed on any large major such as France, Germany, or the Soviets

Now I want Bittersteel to play "the most blessed Soviet" again with new patch so badly and see how glorious the peace deal will become.

I think the new peace deal system is pretty cool, but it also seems to lead to way more border gore. I actively tried to avoid it, even giving up territory and it still happened. I thought that was supposed to be fixed?

Damn your thumbnail looking cleannnnnn

It's okay bittersteel, you can admit you like dispersed better because the icon is better

Just what I needed, a bit of fun... Just got done with a germany campaign, wanted to restore the EU, got everything I needed but since I called italy into the war, they took a bunch of stuff from the UK, which I had to garrison, it was so much in fact that even on local police force, I had no manpower. So, after I started the civil war, I released a bunch of nations and returned some terretory includuing the Yugoslav stuff Italy starts with. Well, thats requiered too. I hate my life.

26:31 - "that would be an ecumenical matter"

Bitt3rsteel has hands!! This was shocking news to me!!

How do you get high enough balance of power to fire the event? When you complete “seek papal support” it resets balance of power to 0 and from there I can only get 60% bop toward “his holiness” which isn’t enough. What the hell am I missing?

I might be insane, but does anyone else hear that high pitched sound that is like encoded into the video? Great video as always Bittersteel.

Seeing you take Ethiopia to War Escalation X and then go for Crusader Kings IV as The One True Heir of Solomon would be cool.

They need to rework the trees to bring them up to balance with the intent of other trees. The fact that you can puppet bulgaria and they can still as your puppet is annoying, or being Greece and not in a faction with Germany, Bulgaria can just take Thrace without you having a chance to say no.

yessir bittersteel with that custom mechanical keyboard

Game looks awesome and quite challenging. I like it. What I don't like is the price. €180,- for the DLC , and €5,- for a monthly subscription. I know it's optional, but when I play it I would like to have the full version.

Did something change to this in the current patch? Seek Papal Support resets the balance of power to 0, making it impossible to hit the 61% needed with all of the available options and requiring you to wait a year to do Liturgical Reforms for a second time.

19:00 "im gonna puppet serbia" puppets croatia xd

I don't think this works anymore, They slightly changed the Papal Support Focus so now the scale resets to 0 making it that you can not get enough papal support to actually change. I could be wrong but Idk.

It'd be amazing if there was some sort of event with Catholic Mexico

the peace deal mchanic was just not ready to be released yet to many problems in my opinion. it's impossible to role play and set up realistic borders

Screw the optimum path "I don't lose!" Thumbs up for that.

Utilise the blackshirts can be much more useful when trying to get the pope than disband the blackshirts if you use the focuses to get the grand council members as advisers.

Should do the Holy, Rome, and an Empire next!

whenever I try to play, yugoslavia submits and becomes my puppet EVERY SINGLE TIME. My game is historical just like yours though, I just don‘t know what to do

Italy ❌ Catholicism ✅

now with the new resource rights mechanic, there's no real reson to NOT puppet everything that's not your core territory

I always pick dispersed, I don't even care which is better (and they're close enough regardless where it doesn't matter much), I hate not producing anything for the first couple of weeks, when I get new equipment I want it now Also I switch up my production enough to justify it being basically always better for me... At least when I'm a major

i cant tell if im doing something wrong or if this focus tree is bugged. Every time i complete seek Papal support my power struggle gets set back to 0 and i have to wait a full year to do liturgical reforms to get the Pope's ascendancy.

Is it just me or is there like, a high pitched squeal inthe background throughout the video?

is there any way you could a general non overpowered nation guide? I find it really hard to play nations other than Germany, Italy, US, China, Japan, UK... and even the Soviets and would be interested to see how you can thrive and maybe even stand up to the Germans for instance as smaller nations.

18:39 - Bitt3rSteel decides he no longer needs any Serbian viewers.

bittersteel I beg you to do a world conquest as bukharin purely because I like his hat, other than that spectacular work as usual

This is a second recent video of yours in the last week or so that has quite a bit of high-pitched interference in the audio track. Would you mind looking into your audio capture process and seeing if you can get rid of the interference? It makes it very hard to watch the video

There's a slight high pitched noice from your audio. Other than that, cool vid.

Dispersed and concentrated have 3 shared bonuses and thoes 3 are the only ones concentrated so yeah

The pacify Ethiopia thingy is bugged right now. It says it needs 60% compliance when it actually needs 70%. I believe this has been fixed in the beta patch.

Hey Bitt3r, noticed in your last few vids the audio has a high pitched ringing sound all the way thorough - thought it was just my headphones at first but seems to be from the vid. Just letting you know

Nice hands and arms btw.

Waiting for Papal world conquest! Holy land in the Earth, at the gun point ;)

Claim the Montenegrin throne is done while Yugoslavia has control of it Also you can hide obsolete focus branches so you get less scrolling

if you pull out of Ethiopia you get to skip two focuses and immediately convene the grand council.

To be fair the first time I played the new update and used the peace deal mechanic I made a world just like that

29:48 yeah, so historical.

I keep coming up short at 60% support exactly. Are Grand Council gains retained at all?

For some reason declaring on yugo always drags france into the war, and also deposing Mussolini causes a civil war. I tried following everything you did but it still happens, any idea why?

I don't know if dumping the whole army in The Horn of Africa is a good idea, it seems like a supply nightmare. You can crush them with whats already there before the emperor flees you just gotta micro.

Play the world ablaze mod, countries like Germany but especially Japan and the USSR are challenging and hence fun

Yugoslavia didn't reject my offer...

Deus Vult!!

Bitteesteel says he is gonna puppet Serbia Also bittersteel puppeting Crotia

Next Gameplay: Papal State vs. Ottoman Sultanate vs. Orthodox Russia (Third Rome)

Hey Bitter, for the last few videos there's been an absolutely horrid ringing sound in the background, making it basically unwatchable for me. Is there anything you could do about it? Thank you!

1:35 Our Main Battle Tank is the Abrams, not Abrahams.

Two times now as Italy and both times Yugos yielded.

How the ever living hell does Bitt3rSteel manage starting with just 5 mils on guns?! I’ve been having MASSIVE gun deficits since the DLC dropped, meaning I need to have at LEAST 15 mils on guns to break even, like what the hell

Bittersteel this is kind of random, but next time you attack the Soviets, instead of going for localized training centers, try putting the spy in Vladivostok!

I cant get the balance of power down to 0, all decisions have run out

idk why, but I've done about 5 runs of italy (on historical) and yugoslavia always submits

7:15 (ish), instead of losing, can't you just pick Struggle in Ethiopia as a normal focus? If you don't Micro-push it should take about 40 days to autocomplete the "success" one, so you could have manually completed one of the "loss" focuses through "spindoctoring" rather than actual loss?

im somehow 5% short of papal dominance when i followed everything he did

You have a decision to release East Italian Africa after “Minister of Africa” focus is completed, that will immediately complete “Pacify Ethi” mission for you

Bittersteel really have a thing for the Papal states

19:00 Says he'll puppet Serbia, proceeds to puppet Croatia.

When I try to get the Pope in charge there always sneaks in some support for Mussolini or the King which messes up my Balance of Power. Does anybody have an idea where that support comes from?

Switzerland!. What can make a man's heart turn Neutral!?

Okay yeah you know what.... Yugo submitted. The only time ever from my 1000+ hours of HOI4.

They is a ring noise left in my headphones, it may be to do with your videos, you think you could fix that?

Ah yes! The pope! How many divisions he got? -Iosif Stalin (He really said that)