I've recently encountered some issues while playing as MacArthur America. I recently started playing again and was happily surprised that you could focus out of the GD as MacArthur using Al Smith's focus tree.

My current problem is that these Focuses change description and effect sometime around late 35, early 36. When FDR is nominated and you get the notification for the 36 election. At that time, some of the focuses will change description and indicate they will help you remove GD, by changing the modifier to slow economic growth and so on. But I have had problems with this because if you start Al Smith's tree and finish it prior to these focuses changing their description, the benefits are not retroactively enacted. I've also encountered getting stuck in the first phase of recovery, Slow economic growth, by starting the tree too early and it seemed to "bump" that modifier down the chain to the last focus, meaning there were no focuses left to remove slow economic growth. The kicker here is, the final focus's description indicates it will remove "slow economic growth" if I researched it again.

I'm going to reload my save back to the start of the civil war and see if I have a save where I haven't started Al Smith's focus tree, because I swear I have used it before to completely remove the GD modifier's.

Thanks for any input or explanation as to what is going on.