f13.net

I did the 'very stupid thing to do with paradox games' approach of pre-ordering it on steam, and not waiting to read any post launch reviews.  But oh well, I loved HOI2.

Waiting to finish work so I can head home and install it.  Comedy to follow, I'm sure.

Discuss.

Like bad reviews would have stopped you getting it. Its an EU engine game, how bad can it be?  :grin:

Do not play it like it's HOI or HOI2. It's good. It is not those games.

Care to elaborate?

I'm not sure how to, precisely. It's huge. There's now an actual OOB and chain of command you have to pay attention to. There's a real supply chain.

It's the most different game from EU they've done in its own way. You just have to jump in and learn everything from scratch.

Good, I might try having a shot at it, then. Time to beat the crap out of the Allied scum. Glory to the Reich.

Just realize it's like jumping into a well head first. This is a BIG game. There are also some performance issues and one major bug introduced in the launch day patch with consumer goods. I expect the bug to get fixed really quickly but I would steer clear of the 1936 scenario for awhile because it will fuck you hard.

Does it actually have a real tutorial?

Ha ha who am I kidding.  :awesome_for_real:

Or you could do what I did and move the US over to fascist dicatorship, create the Empire of America (IE, I annexed everything from the panama canal to Alaska), join the Axis powers, and drop the 101st Airborne on London (also, ironically, end up Occupying Iraq..)  :why_so_serious:

But yeah, thats actually good news on it being so different.  I like it when they shake up game play (as long as its for the better, of course).

Demo's been out for a week. I strongly recommend trying it before buying, both because it requires a fairly beefy machine (probably not an issue for most here) and because so much has changed. Mostly for the better, though grognards are wailing their eyes out over how horribly inaccurate the map is.

So far the biggest problem is that the game can essentially play itself. You can have as little input as "Yo, Generals, go conquer Warsaw, k?" and then the AI will go off and do it. Given the scale the game's at now (thousands of subdivided provinces, units defined down to the brigade/regiment level) some macro-managing is unavoidable, but the game very much encourages you to trust the AI to figure out where exactly to move your units. However, so far the AI doesn't seem to totally suck, which is a plus.

Also, the game looks a lot more like an old-school wargame now! Horrible map colors and all (I seriously expect map mods to come out in, like, a week - it's pretty bad), with attack/defense numbers on units.

Hah! Map colors! Nothing can impress you if you played this "back in the day":

(http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/1987/828114-cc_large.gif)

(http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/1987/828119-cc__5__super.gif)

(hmm, well, those were actually funky colors, now that I give them a second look)

I actually really like the new map, especially at max zoom.

So I decided to play a little Italy and crashed as soon as I annexed Albania. GOOD THING I DIDN'T SAVE MY GAME SINCE IT WAS THE FIRST MONTH BUT I SPENT AN HOUR SETTING UP MY FLEETS!

Christ, they really have changed things around.  Going to take me forever to figure this all out again, bleh.  But seems like some pretty cool changes.  The way they've changed research is pretty neat, though I do miss having the national specific tech teams to choose from :(

It's actually way closer to HOI1 with the tech now. I prefer this.

There are some warts on this bad boy, though. They're going to HAVE to tweak the diplomatic AI. Fuck a bunch of the US jumping on the Axis in 1938 or Mexico going apeshit. Bad diplo AI + really good invasion UI = way ahistorical stuff. I get what they're doing because I got what they were doing when they transitioned to EU3: a way more open ended game that's still historically plausible. Unfortunately, the smaller the time frame the more you need to keep things on rails. They didn't do that with HOI3 and they're going to have to reign that in a little.

My fear, based on what they did with EU3, is that they don't consider it a problem if WW2 consists of Sweden and Brazil vs Turkey and Indonesia.

Oh. And there's a crippling bug with 1.1 where armies cause 4x the consumer good maintenance that they should. This causes a cascading economic collapse as the entire globe trades all their resource stockpiles for supplies, because they can't afford to build them due to the IC load of consumer goods, and then running out. Literally. As in, everyone by the second year builds nothing but consumer goods.

Well, at least by pre-ordering, I received a steam copy of HOI2 with the two expansions for free :awesome_for_real:

I never played Armageddon, but I just opened it up and its pretty cool.  The campaign world they made is very similar to one I kind of wanted to make if I wasn't so damn lazy.

IIRC the scenarios in the Armageddon mod aren't very playable. You run out of resources, by design, after about 3 months. This is to "encourage you to take someone else's" (except everyone else ran out, too).

Rad  :awesome_for_real:

Hmm, never played heard of the originals, or this until now, but it looks interesting. Might give the demo a whirl.

I posted a walkthrough on Q23 last year for taking over most of the world as the USSR in HOI2, might be worth a chuckle:

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=44726

Does it still have the "game ends in 1953 no matter what" rule in place? That, and the bugs that were supposed to creep up when it was modded away, kept me away from HOI2. Being America and beating up Germany, or whatever, isn't that interesting to me. I want to conquer the world with Bolivia or some shit, even if it takes 200 years.

Given the fact that nuclear ICBMs were part of the game, there wasn't really any reason it couldn't go right on into the present and beyond without the combat model seriously breaking down, except for that arbitrary limitation.

I conquered most of S. America with Chile (damn you Brazil!) in HOI2.  I am going to pick 3 up, I like the series.  Interested in seeing how they do supply this time.  Also like the idea of AI running my armies under my command but I'm sure I'll zoom down and move things around as well.

Is there a mod for this?

It's supposed to be hotfixed tomorrow.

Ok, installed and patched the game no problem.  Game ran fine until I finally agreed to join Germany in their war against Nationalist and Communist China (!).  Now all my units in the production queue went to 0% and stay there, and all of my sliders in the Production window go to zero when I close the panel.    :heartbreak:

This is giving me "What the fuck do you mean North Korea invaded Venezuela?" Superpower 2 flashbacks.

Someone could make a decent chunk of change developing a nice 3rd party newbie-oriented tut. for this game. 
I saw ramblings on the forum that if you register your copy with Paradox you can get a free strat. guide though.  God knows it needs one.

Yeah, taking me a bit to get the hang of the new stuff.  I'll probably wait a bit until its patched and then throw myself at it some more.  Should have known I'd need to try playing this when I had more free time to figure out wtf everything does.

The map looks pretty good once you bump the resolution to max.  I don't like the music in this one as much though :(

So, can anyone that has actually played this give it a thumbs up or down?  I'm guessing it is a turn based game.

Well, if there is the possibility of messing around with the music files (still have to purchase the game), and if you play one of the fascit/nazi dictatorships, you could download the various regime tunes/anthems they produced (this is especially true for Germany, Spain and Italy, of course) and put them in the appropriate directory. Add a whole new dimension  :drill:

EU engine games work in a hybridized real time/turn based format. The game progresses in real time, but you can pause the action at any time to enact commands, then unpause and the action continues.

Nothing like that. It's just Japan being in the Axis and deciding to request help in the war.

The tutorial being narrated by Hitler is a bit tacky.

But he was such an effective teacher!   :awesome_for_real:

My eyes totally glossed over the Tutorial button, this being a paradox game and all, heh.  Guess I should give it a whirl and see if Hitler can teach me how to play this version...

Yeah, do that and report back! Tell us if he is a...
(http://themissamandamae.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/grammar_nazi.jpg)


Schnell, schnell!

Don't bother, it is nigh useless. It is less a tutorial and more a Power Point presentation with comedy text "narration" in badly-translated English.

I just don't know. It's ambitious and there are a ton of good changes but this seems even more broken than usual for a Paradox release. And that's saying something.

I keep trying to get into Paradox games because at their core they are a genre I tend to enjoy (and is otherwise damn near devoid of action), and this is the first time I've tried to get into the Hearts of Iron series. Fuck me. Its not that the game is too complicated.. more that its too obtuse. I keep running into things that don't juve with the rest of gameplay or have little to no explanation (why do planes built/assigned to my HQ units dwindle in strength and not have the ability to be detached? the entire HQ concept is.. clunky as hell). Shit, as Canada the US wouldn't even sign a non-aggression pact. No one would. As Canada! How non-threatening do I have to be?

I want to like the game, much as I wanted to like Vicky, or EU. But, ugh.

Tried loading up a Soviet game in '36 after playing Canada to learn the basics of the mechanics and the sheer amount of shit to keep track of..and I imagine most major powers are the same way.

And Poland seemed to vanish, but still possibly holds some German territory, with none of its own.. mind-boggling. The whole controller/owner of provinces seems odd, in that the colours/borders don't always seem to align with who actually controls or owns it. See a lot of that in China with Japan; just adds to the confusion.

I've yet to see a Paradox game with a decent UI or presentation. Being niche is fine and all, but Christ..

I'd rather play Dwarf Fortress.

Totally reminds me of this board game I had in high school (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1563).  Was unplayably complicated.

What? 3rd Reich was hardly complicated.

Complicated was something like this

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2802

That map was so big it wouldn't even fit on a ping pong table.

Yeah, it's not the complexity for me. I taught myself Victoria before it was fashionable. Wait, my wife is telling me it was never fashionable. REGARDLESS, it's not the complexity but the brokeness. Or maybe the way it's broken. I can't tell. There's something off-putting about the nature of the bugs for me that other Paradox games didn't have. I've been with them since EU1 and this is the only one I've felt that way about. I may have mentioned that before but I'm straight fanboy.

Oddly, I'm playing DF as we speak.

Somehow HOi3 is turning out to be a "Master of Orion 3" kind of game for me, hopefully further patches will do something to fix this.

Yeah, I've put it on the shelf until it gets patched.  As an alternative I play http://www.making-history.com/ (http://www.making-history.com/)  It has it's own problems but you can edit countries a fair amount.  Or you could wait for MH2, coming out this Fall. I know I am.

Inspired by Lum's AAR above, I thought I'd have a crack at HoI2 at the soviet union.  Dum de dum - spam armies, build up in Poland, get ready for teh Germans.  Lets see what my leet intelligence tells me about Germany '>3 divisions in this province'.  >3 eh?  Well, Ive got 20 in my province, so nyah.

Dum de dum, June 1941, Operation Barbarossa time.  Germans attacking my 20-stack!  Lets see how the slaughter of their troops are going. 

61 Germans vs. my 20 Soviets in the province  :ye_gods: - they sure werent lying when they said more than 3!  Back to the drawing board with more aggressive spamming...

I can't remember a single Paradox game that didn't suffer from potentially crippling bugs on the release version.

On a side note: Did anyone else enjoy Crusader Kings and want for a sequel?

My father had this on a wall in the garage.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9650

It probably explains a lot.

Love that game, and yes. EU2 is still my favorite I think though.

I find the max speed on HoI3 distressingly slow. And I *still* can't be Nationalist Spain in a 1936 start without save game hijinks.  :oh_i_see:

Totally agree. There's just something about HOI3 that's not working for me. I like it okay, it's ambitious, I like the changes but it's all implemented in an even more halfassed way after its own fashion. Take the energy to oil to fuel conversion. This is a cool idea. You also cannot shut it off. Go start a game in 1936 as Italy or Japan. Go ahead, I'll wait. You'll run out of energy by early 1937 at the latest because of the huge hit the shitty conversion rate causes. You can't turn it off. So you're faced with the absurd premise that you have fuel to last you the entire war but your factories all shut down.

There are all these little things like that which, for whatever reason, are rubbing me the wrong way in a fashion that every other game they came out with didn't.

And CK is the best game they ever did. Well, tied with Victoria. I want a sequel so badly it makes my teeth hurt.

Yeah we played that one too (well we tried, didn't actually get very far). Our wargaming group was very hardcore :awesome_for_real:

We've had arguments almost come to blows thanks to Advanced Third Reich.  Ah good times, good times.

Slightly off topic: a couple days ago Paradox more or less announced they are working on Victoria 2. They also opened a new section on their official forums:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=443

Yeah, this is one of those games that takes entirely more time to learn how to play than I feel like investing.  Maybe on my week off next week I'll go fully through the tutorial stuff and try to get it down.  So no one wants to give it a thumbs up or down yet?

Probably a dumb question, but did you ever play Gary Grigsby's computer adaptation of that? Hoo boy... :ye_gods:

As someone who poured embarassing amounts of his life into HoI2, I started this on release day (with the 1.1 patch... also released on release day).  After discovering the horrible bugs and terrible single-threaded one-day-per-20 seconds slowness I left it for a few weeks until 1.2 came out.  1.2 does make it playable, although the list of bugs is still lengthy and it's not often, these days, that I need to create a batch file to set things up correctly for the game to run faster than a glacier and without crashing on the loading screen.

Starting as Germany in 1936 (who doesn't at first?) left me reaching early 1939 with no idea if I had massively overbuilt and or horribly under-prepared for Poland.  And managing the huge German Order of Battle, even after sweeping miltary reforms and widespread renaming of army corps, armies and army groups to make sense, was still overwhelming.  So I'm now trying out life as the Brazilians to attempt some South American neo-colonialist hi-jinks.  Trouble is that taking my country's neutrality down while increasing the threat of countries around me in order to hoodwink my unwilling proles into battle is taking forever.  And there is the small matter that the USA guarantees the independence of every single country on the continent to deal with, afterwards.  I may have to mod out that last bit or else face a very peaceful war.

It has the potential, with a world generator, to be a military Civ type game, which HoI2 didn't.  At the very least it is flexible enough to have made up. "balanced" worlds for blue-skying and multiplayer games.

A few things:

1) Lum, your dad was epic level. My father gave me his first-press Star Trek Technical Manual and Franz Joseph Enterprise blueprints, but he didn't do hexgrids.

2) A review of the state of HoI3 (http://wargamer.com/article/2769/hearts-of-iron-iii-state-of-the-game) by the Paradox fans at Wargamer.com. They aren't sparing about the current state of things, but are confident about the patch process.

3) Patch 1.3 in November. (http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=432431)

4) Gary Grigsby just released an "Admiral's Edition" expansion pack for War in the Pacific (http://www.matrixgames.com/products/351/details/WarinthePacific-Admiral%27sEdition). Now with twice as much fiddly grognard goodness.

I'll not buy another Paradox game at release.  Not a one.  I'm tired of my good faith purchases being buggy, unplayable messes.  I can stand a few bugs, but the release version of HOI3 borders on fraud.

Its a nice chabge to hear that futile and ultimately untrue song sung about a game that isn't an mmo.