So I just downloaded this on a whim having never played a Hearts of Iron game before.
Holy hell is it mega complex.
Welcome to Paradox games. They're intimidating as all hell, but if you can get over that hump they're incredibly rewarding. The easiest one to start with is probably Europa Universalis III Complete, though, since it's got the best interface of the bunch and has a scope that's a little easier to get a grasp on. Hearts of Iron and Victoria are Paradox games that are best left until you've gotten a feel for the more streamlined ones like EU3 or Crusader Kings.
Edit: it's also worth knowing that a good part of learning a Paradox game is in knowing what information to ignore. For example, in HoI3 all the weather information is more or less superfluous for anything but the most anal min/maxing. Knowing if an area is frozen over can be very helpful, but the rest won't affect much honestly.
So because I posted this in the wargames thread and its relevant
Okay first impressions on the demo now that I've gotten a hang of the major game mechanics.
A lot of combat has been automated, you build divisions which consists of up to 4 brigades of any combination of unit you designate, infantry, artillery, tanks etc. Divisions are assigned a leader and for extra logistical and organization bonuses you can assign them an HQ as well. A regular HQ can manage two divisions and you can then add another HQ on top of it which can can manage 3 division HQ's and so on until you have the theater HQ. The more units you have attacking at the same time the higher the organization penalty is, this is directly offset by the theater HQ so its in your interest to assign all fronts to a theater. Bonuses are applied from each HQ to attacking divisions by range (range is determined by your radio tech).
Now this all sounds rather complicated and it did take me a while to get the hang of it. But once you have your HQ chain set up you can tick on the AI. You can choose to give the smaller HQ's objectives and a "stance" that determines if they attack aggresively or aim to hold the line, if you assign an objective inside your territory that HQ will try to defend those provinces or if you assign in the enemy territory they will try to conqour it. You can tell your HQ which direction you prefer them to take (circumventing mountains instead of going straight over them) or let them figure it out themselves. These individual HQ's will try to do their objectives and still gain full benefit from the theater HQ.
You can also just tick on the AI for the theater HQ and it will automaticly assign all HQ's under it to attack or defend basicly leaving the entire front to the AI and let you deal with important stuff like diplomacy, research and making sure they have the right units to get the job done. A theater HQ will automaticly request units it believes are needed to achieve its objective and you can assign him all these units from the production screen with the click of a button and they will automaticly get there when they're built.
Basicly when you start as germany you have two theater HQ's, there's the Werchmart in Berlin that oversee's the blitz on Poland and it will get this done in less then two months if you assign it the blitzkrieg stance. The other HQ is in the Rheinland, the border to France and I found assigning this theater the defensive measure wasn't actually that good. So I opted for attacking stance and gave it defensive objectives and the AI puts up a much more aggressive defence and actively counter attacks and supports the various battles but will never actually attack the french because it doesn't have the manpower to overcome the massive defensive line they have there.
Overall this game is fucking great, I got a lot out of the demo, you can't play around with production since you only have four months and the german unit composition is a bit weird (no artillery brigades for example) but Paradox have really outdone themselves here and the AI actually helps you and is supremely useful, I feel like this is how Master of Orion 3 should have been done.
Demiurge on
0
Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
edited August 2009
I am really quite annoyed at this thread as it is Thursday and the game comes out tomorrow. Shame on you people for getting my hopes up.
Pretty much, it takes 120 days to produce an anti-tank or artillery brigade and the demo only lasts 4 months. So far I've only managed to hold out for 3 months as Poland, they get beat up pretty badly and there's not a lot you can do about it. Germany has more tanks, better weapons and much better doctrine techs so they get high chances on combat events and their much higher organization means they last longer in combat and can fight again sooner.
The only problem with the demo (apart from major geographical mistakes - check out the location of New York City or Stalingrad) is that the OOB is a little hard to grasp. I think people complaining about the clunky interface will have a lot better of a time when they actually start in '36 and build their own OOB.
Other than that, I really prefer the new tech system over the other, and the new national laws and decisions is a huge improvement over sliders in HOI2.
I was thinking the exact same thing. "Oh, I guess it's time to invade Poland...again." I'm going to have to do something crazy to keep myself interested, like start the manhattan project in Luxembourg and nuke Chicago.
Ok forget what I said earlier. I just played the demo, and it plays nothing like HOI2. I have to have this game.
For my first game I decided to turn everything over to the ai and fast forward to december. I love that your army group HQ's actually act like a high command, parking in Berlin and pulling the strings, screaming for more tanks and planes. You actually feel like the supreme leader instead of supreme micro-manager. The ai actually did well in Poland, conquering every province by mid-October 1939.
Army group west, on the other hand, got it's shit pushed in by some smelly Frenchmen. As soon as I hit unpause, HQ was calling for more anti-tank assets. Maybe I should have listened because as my panzers were rolling into Warsaw, French tanks were storming into Alsace. So much for the Sitzkrieg.
Here's the situation mid-October:
Notice the blob of blue spreading unopposed into the Rhineland.
A number of things surprised me about the demo:
-The interface is pretty damn slick. I had easy access to any relevant info. And I love that you can optimize your production sliders with a few clicks. That was so fiddly in previous games.
-The AI. I was not expecting an aggressive France. I actually counted 3 encirclements. A huge one caught half the Polish army and destroyed it. And France caught my poor infantry in a blitzkrieg of its own. By the time I occupied Poland the frogs had an open road all the way to Berlin. Even though I controlled every territory, Poland refused to surrender when the peace event fired. Its possible the ai saw that France was making gains and that I had a real fight on my hands. Pretty impressive actually.
-Completely new gameplay mechanics. Namely everything is more complicated. I thought I had pretty much everything figured about HOI2. I could do a world conquest as Chile by 1948. Now I have to scramble to complete fall 1939 operations as Germany, one of the easiest tasks of HOI2.
The demo only lets you play for 4 months, but what little I saw seemed pretty good. At first there was the usual Paradox pop-up avalanche, but tweaking the message options sorted that out. I'm sure there are some idiosyncrasies in the ai that I haven't seen yet. I haven't even touched the naval aspect of the game. We'll see how the ai handles naval powers like Britain and Japan. In the previous game it did pretty poorly. I don't see the increased complexity as a bad thing. I love picking apart game mechanics, and there are plenty of new ones this time around.
On defensive the OB West doesn't actually do a very good job. I recommend attacking stance since it will actively counterattack and seek to take back lost territory. The hilarious thing for me was that OB West actually managed to take two of the french provinces and break the line, I don't know HOW it did it since the french have level 10 forts and you have to pass a river but it damn well did.
I did as Demiurge suggested and set the ai to attack, and specified the three or four German provinces directly bordering France. It did not do so well. France was able to make a breakthrough in one province, and poured divisions through the breach. It then sent a small force toward the army HQ while the rest of its divisions encircled my infantry on the Belgian border. I'm going to do a repeat test tonight and see if I get similar results.
No actually. I wanted the AI to focus on defending the French border, pulling forces from Belgium if need be. The Belgians were completely quiet, and no allied attacks came from that sector. Unfortunately the French pretty much crushed my defense entirely by attacking from the Maginot Line. I got several pop-ups saying that a division was destroyed, and was reformed from invalids on leave and put in the reserve pool.
I'll try it again setting all provinces as objectives, as well as messing with AI stances. The AI France was not as passive as it was historically, which makes this an interesting what if scenario.
Between HOI and HOI2 I've probably put in over 2000 hours into this series. And I read all of the developer diaries. and I'm still feeling a bit overhwelmed.
How does one go about turning a shitty nation into a powerhouse? Always wondered that. Do you just disband all units at the beginning and focus all resources into tech, or what?
How does one go about turning a shitty nation into a powerhouse? Always wondered that. Do you just disband all units at the beginning and focus all resources into tech, or what?
Err, I guess you could invest into IC by building factories, but it takes like 10 months to build one level of factory so if you're already a tiny nation you're not going to be a "powerhouse" by any means at the end of the campaign.
-Influencing is realllllly overpowerd as of now. Apparently the Allies are able to get Finland (!), Yugoslavia, Romania (!!), multiple latin american countries and the USA on their side by 1938 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). This is all good and well if you put all of your leadership into research and diplomacy but makes it nearly impossible to become strong as a Latin American country (with the Allies encroaching into your territory).
-Haven't tried the HQ command yet, will comment on it later
-the UI is really hard to deal with. half of the time the prov names don't come up.
-It is too easy, as of now, to do landings. Alright, on the demo
1.select great britain
2.put some troops into a transport
3.send them to the closest prov to berlin
4.surround berlin
5.congratulations, all of Germany is out of supply now.
Nearly anyone can do this. I saw an image a guy posted of Germany where he managed to invade the USA and take the East Coast.
Within 4 months.
Overall I love it though. I'm going to buy it and play a Comintern Mexico the moment I get the money.
They still trace all supplies from the capital? That was one of the biggest flaws from HOI2. Sucks they didn't update it, what with the revamped supply system. They should allow you to place strategic supply dumps closer to the front. Maybe mods can fix it.
Man, wow, thats... Thats I haven't had anything near that amount of allies but I play Germany and bide my time, Poland usually joins the allies mid 38 but I've been toying with ways of keeping them near me so I can attack them without the pesky allies declaring on me. The game doesn't respect historical accuracy as much as HoI2 but apparently thats because of the improved AI and it being hard to tie it down to specific acts.
It's been ages since I played HOI II, and I can't remember how to combine units. Is it the same command in this? I have several fleets in the Mediterranean that I want to move and join up with my main fleet in the North Atlantic, but I can't figure out how to get the bastards to combine and move as one fleet.
Edit - Never mind, found it. My fleet won't rebase or move beyond certain points though, which I don't remember happening in the last game, nor was it, to the best of my memory, this confusing.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
Fleets have an operating range, determined by the lowest ranged unit in a stack. So if you have a modern fleet with 1 flotilla of old destroyers it will apply the destroyers' to the whole fleet.
Fleets have an operating range, determined by the lowest ranged unit in a stack. So if you have a modern fleet with 1 flotilla of old destroyers it will apply the destroyers' to the whole fleet.
Yes, but it was the same in the previous game, which would not let you move the units very far, but would let you rebase them.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
Ewwwww, I was all ready to jump on this from the comments in this thread, then I get to Steam and see it has launch-day DLC. Fuck that. I won't support a dev who is willing to cut out bits and charge extra.
If someone could tell me how to rebase a fleet, I'd be very grateful. Damn, this game is difficult to learn.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
Yeah that DLC is just the pre-order or special edition bonus (packed up for selling to normals? I can't get steam to launch). I don't see it as a reason not to buy the game, that's just silly.
Sprites are in there as it is, these are just an alternate sprite pack.
the sprites werent even a bonus on Steam anyway. Actually I preordered on steam, got HOI2 on steam for free and am now already pawning off HOI2 boxed on goozex. win.
If someone could tell me how to rebase a fleet, I'd be very grateful. Damn, this game is difficult to learn.
There is a rebase mission you can select from the mission menu. Have you tried that? If I remember right, just right clicking on a province with a naval base is enough to rebase a fleet. I could be wrong. But the mission from the drop down menu should definitely work. Its a very small button on the left hand panel when you have a fleet selected. Click on the text that displays the fleet's current mission, and one of the options should be "rebase." Hope that helps.
Posts
Welcome to Paradox games. They're intimidating as all hell, but if you can get over that hump they're incredibly rewarding. The easiest one to start with is probably Europa Universalis III Complete, though, since it's got the best interface of the bunch and has a scope that's a little easier to get a grasp on. Hearts of Iron and Victoria are Paradox games that are best left until you've gotten a feel for the more streamlined ones like EU3 or Crusader Kings.
Edit: it's also worth knowing that a good part of learning a Paradox game is in knowing what information to ignore. For example, in HoI3 all the weather information is more or less superfluous for anything but the most anal min/maxing. Knowing if an area is frozen over can be very helpful, but the rest won't affect much honestly.
Okay first impressions on the demo now that I've gotten a hang of the major game mechanics.
A lot of combat has been automated, you build divisions which consists of up to 4 brigades of any combination of unit you designate, infantry, artillery, tanks etc. Divisions are assigned a leader and for extra logistical and organization bonuses you can assign them an HQ as well. A regular HQ can manage two divisions and you can then add another HQ on top of it which can can manage 3 division HQ's and so on until you have the theater HQ. The more units you have attacking at the same time the higher the organization penalty is, this is directly offset by the theater HQ so its in your interest to assign all fronts to a theater. Bonuses are applied from each HQ to attacking divisions by range (range is determined by your radio tech).
Now this all sounds rather complicated and it did take me a while to get the hang of it. But once you have your HQ chain set up you can tick on the AI. You can choose to give the smaller HQ's objectives and a "stance" that determines if they attack aggresively or aim to hold the line, if you assign an objective inside your territory that HQ will try to defend those provinces or if you assign in the enemy territory they will try to conqour it. You can tell your HQ which direction you prefer them to take (circumventing mountains instead of going straight over them) or let them figure it out themselves. These individual HQ's will try to do their objectives and still gain full benefit from the theater HQ.
You can also just tick on the AI for the theater HQ and it will automaticly assign all HQ's under it to attack or defend basicly leaving the entire front to the AI and let you deal with important stuff like diplomacy, research and making sure they have the right units to get the job done. A theater HQ will automaticly request units it believes are needed to achieve its objective and you can assign him all these units from the production screen with the click of a button and they will automaticly get there when they're built.
Basicly when you start as germany you have two theater HQ's, there's the Werchmart in Berlin that oversee's the blitz on Poland and it will get this done in less then two months if you assign it the blitzkrieg stance. The other HQ is in the Rheinland, the border to France and I found assigning this theater the defensive measure wasn't actually that good. So I opted for attacking stance and gave it defensive objectives and the AI puts up a much more aggressive defence and actively counter attacks and supports the various battles but will never actually attack the french because it doesn't have the manpower to overcome the massive defensive line they have there.
Overall this game is fucking great, I got a lot out of the demo, you can't play around with production since you only have four months and the german unit composition is a bit weird (no artillery brigades for example) but Paradox have really outdone themselves here and the AI actually helps you and is supremely useful, I feel like this is how Master of Orion 3 should have been done.
So I can't beat the german tanks with my calvary in the demo?
Other than that, I really prefer the new tech system over the other, and the new national laws and decisions is a huge improvement over sliders in HOI2.
What are you French?
For my first game I decided to turn everything over to the ai and fast forward to december. I love that your army group HQ's actually act like a high command, parking in Berlin and pulling the strings, screaming for more tanks and planes. You actually feel like the supreme leader instead of supreme micro-manager. The ai actually did well in Poland, conquering every province by mid-October 1939.
Army group west, on the other hand, got it's shit pushed in by some smelly Frenchmen. As soon as I hit unpause, HQ was calling for more anti-tank assets. Maybe I should have listened because as my panzers were rolling into Warsaw, French tanks were storming into Alsace. So much for the Sitzkrieg.
Here's the situation mid-October:
A number of things surprised me about the demo:
-The interface is pretty damn slick. I had easy access to any relevant info. And I love that you can optimize your production sliders with a few clicks. That was so fiddly in previous games.
-The AI. I was not expecting an aggressive France. I actually counted 3 encirclements. A huge one caught half the Polish army and destroyed it. And France caught my poor infantry in a blitzkrieg of its own. By the time I occupied Poland the frogs had an open road all the way to Berlin. Even though I controlled every territory, Poland refused to surrender when the peace event fired. Its possible the ai saw that France was making gains and that I had a real fight on my hands. Pretty impressive actually.
-Completely new gameplay mechanics. Namely everything is more complicated. I thought I had pretty much everything figured about HOI2. I could do a world conquest as Chile by 1948. Now I have to scramble to complete fall 1939 operations as Germany, one of the easiest tasks of HOI2.
The demo only lets you play for 4 months, but what little I saw seemed pretty good. At first there was the usual Paradox pop-up avalanche, but tweaking the message options sorted that out. I'm sure there are some idiosyncrasies in the ai that I haven't seen yet. I haven't even touched the naval aspect of the game. We'll see how the ai handles naval powers like Britain and Japan. In the previous game it did pretty poorly. I don't see the increased complexity as a bad thing. I love picking apart game mechanics, and there are plenty of new ones this time around.
I'll try it again setting all provinces as objectives, as well as messing with AI stances. The AI France was not as passive as it was historically, which makes this an interesting what if scenario.
Err, I guess you could invest into IC by building factories, but it takes like 10 months to build one level of factory so if you're already a tiny nation you're not going to be a "powerhouse" by any means at the end of the campaign.
-Influencing is realllllly overpowerd as of now. Apparently the Allies are able to get Finland (!), Yugoslavia, Romania (!!), multiple latin american countries and the USA on their side by 1938 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). This is all good and well if you put all of your leadership into research and diplomacy but makes it nearly impossible to become strong as a Latin American country (with the Allies encroaching into your territory).
-Haven't tried the HQ command yet, will comment on it later
-the UI is really hard to deal with. half of the time the prov names don't come up.
-It is too easy, as of now, to do landings. Alright, on the demo
1.select great britain
2.put some troops into a transport
3.send them to the closest prov to berlin
4.surround berlin
5.congratulations, all of Germany is out of supply now.
Nearly anyone can do this. I saw an image a guy posted of Germany where he managed to invade the USA and take the East Coast.
Within 4 months.
Overall I love it though. I'm going to buy it and play a Comintern Mexico the moment I get the money.
This is in 1938...
Edit - Never mind, found it. My fleet won't rebase or move beyond certain points though, which I don't remember happening in the last game, nor was it, to the best of my memory, this confusing.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
Yes, but it was the same in the previous game, which would not let you move the units very far, but would let you rebase them.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
Sprites are in there as it is, these are just an alternate sprite pack.