Hearts of Iron 3 Out Today

[Ingmar]

But he was such an effective teacher!   

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...

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.

[Modern Angel]

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.

[Ceryse]

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..

[sidereal]

I'd rather play Dwarf Fortress.

Totally reminds me of this board game I had in high school.  Was unplayably complicated.

[Trippy]

I'd rather play Dwarf Fortress.

Totally reminds me of this board game I had in high school.  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.

[Modern Angel]

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.

[satael]

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.

[Tannhauser]

Yeah, I've put it on the shelf until it gets patched.  As an alternative I play 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.

[pants]

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  - they sure werent lying when they said more than 3!  Back to the drawing board with more aggressive spamming...

[Dtrain]

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?

[Lum]

I'd rather play Dwarf Fortress.

Totally reminds me of this board game I had in high school.  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.

My father had this on a wall in the garage.

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

It probably explains a lot.

[Ingmar]

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?

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. 

[Modern Angel]

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?

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.

[Trippy]

My father had this on a wall in the garage.

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

It probably explains a lot.

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

[Tannhauser]

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

[Lucas]

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

[ghost]

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?

[Montague]

I'd rather play Dwarf Fortress.

Totally reminds me of this board game I had in high school.  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.

My father had this on a wall in the garage.

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

It probably explains a lot.

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

[Endie]

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.

[Stormwaltz]

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 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.

4) Gary Grigsby just released an "Admiral's Edition" expansion pack for War in the Pacific. Now with twice as much fiddly grognard goodness.

[Tannhauser]

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.

[Endie]

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