Hearts of Iron?

[Michael Emrys]

Well, I took the plunge and ordered HoI3 and Semper Fi, which are at this moment downloading. I'll see whether I like it or not and by how much. Anyway, it's something to do on a Sunday morning...

Michael

[agusto]

I personally never liked HoI3 much. I loved HoI2 and all its expansions, mods etc, so i picked up HoI3 immedeatly after its release, and it was terrible. Unstable to the point of crashing almost every time i wanted to play, extremely bad performance on my PC frame rate wise (although my hardware was much better than the recommended minimum specs), and i simple really disliked the idea of playing a grand strategy game on a 3D map. Additionally something that i absolutely could not bear was the unit naming system. German army regiments getting names like "3rd armored regiment"? Really? I hated having to rename all my units manually to more historical name every time i started a new game.

Anyways, as far as i can tell, the developers have solved all problems regarding stability and performance over the course of the past few years, so today it only comes down to a matter of personal taste weather or not you like the game. I think the engine is quite sophisticated in terms of political, diplomatic and economical simulation. Much better than in all HoI2-iterations IMO.

[Chops]

Anyway, it's something to do on a Sunday morning...

Michael

Well Michael, you could take a stroll on the trails at Ft. Worden, go for a sail in the harbor, or maybe go down to the Co-Op and grind your own peanut butter. I have some more ideas if you need them.

[Haggard Sketchy]

The root problem with the HoI series (and other Paradox games to lesser extent) is the sheer scale and complexity. When you have a game that models units to every brigade, time to every hour, along with diplomacy and espionage and all that...good luck making a balanced, realistic, historically plausible game. Never mind an AI that can handle it.

SC series compares favorably if you don't want all that detail. That said, there's nothing like HoI. Complexity is its unique point and its flaw.

I played several MP games of HoI3 a year or two ago. It solves the AI problems (for major nations), but nowhere do a game's shortcomings get more apparent than in the sheer gaminess of experienced human players competing with each other. Hence the necessity of like a bazillion house rules. Oh and the connection gets dropped by one of a dozen players every so often. A pain, but worth trying.

@Sequoia yes they did add a tooling system.

[Rosseau]

So how is Matrix' World in Flames for $108 with no AI? Did anyone buy it?

[Jock Tamson]

I played the Europe Universalis or whatever the name was, which is the underlying engine but a medieval to early modern setting. It sucked. The situations were interesting and it looked great, but actually piloting nations I rapidly found that the core mechanics of the game were just broken. They tried to make it challenging with so many balancing mechanics (dissent model, "inflation", crazy diplomacy restrictions on attacking anyone a d crazier reactions to not attacking whoever it wanted you to attack) that I wasn't commanding anything. The game was commanding everything to some bad movie script and trying to keep things on the rails by punishing deviations from its own hidden preferred path. The worst possible micromanagement nightmare coupled with minimal actual control, arbitrary consequences to everything, no where spelled out, etc.

Manufacturing casus belli, getting a toe hold into foreign dynasties etc is the game, it's not Civilization 5.

[76mm]

So how is Matrix' World in Flames for $108 with no AI? Did anyone buy it?

meh. I bought it, having never played the boardgame. I bought it mainly for multiplayer, but so far no multiplayer either. Overall, very disappointing...

[Collingwood]

So how is Matrix' World in Flames for $108 with no AI? Did anyone buy it?

There are a gazillion bugs still, apparently multiplayer doesn't work - so people resort to sharing their desktop as a workaround. I was interested but reading the support threads, it's probably 2 or 3 years from being a finished game and is best left to the hard-core who know WiF well.

[altipueri]

Given that most of the world thinks Angry Birds and Candy Crush are what computer games are about I find it strange that the minor wargame sect factionalise and bitch so much amongst themselves.

Hearts of Iron is a great game. Most of what Paradox have done are terrific historical games; so too for AGEOD and Matrix. CM too, of course.

Pretty much all of these games are good and potentially instructive to children and could be too to our wretched politicians who have such a shallow understanding of history.

[Ultradave]

I have HOI3 - I haven't done much with it. At the time I got it I was too busy to put enough time into it.

I enjoy AGEOD - Civil War (don't have CW2 yet), and Napoleon's Campaigns. (need a -2 for that too!)

Command Ops - both Bulge and Market Garden are fun

Command: Modern Air / Naval I spend a lot of time with.

Flashpoint: Red Storm is good for modern - kind of a modern version of Command Ops. A bit hands off, but it is designed as a operational level - so once you give orders, units take over on their own. Like Command Ops it has a good and believable AI (I think).

[agusto]

Command: Modern Air / Naval I spend a lot of time with.

Flashpoint: Red Storm is good for modern.

I really love these two. My favorite titles currently besides CM.

[Michael Emrys]

The root problem with the HoI series (and other Paradox games to lesser extent) is the sheer scale and complexity. When you have a game that models units to every brigade, time to every hour, along with diplomacy and espionage and all that...good luck making a balanced, realistic, historically plausible game.

That's another point I wanted to bring up. HoI would be greatly improved with a little—not too much—streamlining. For instance, daily instead of hourly turns would help in all sorts of ways, moving the game along a lot quicker and reducing the number of mouse clicks per game enormously.. I know they would have to rework (read: simplify) their combat resolution system and air movement, but that doesn't strike me as an insurmountable difficulty.

Michael

[Skwabie]

Given that most of the world thinks Angry Birds and Candy Crush are what computer games are about I find it strange that the minor wargame sect factionalise and bitch so much amongst themselves.

Hearts of Iron is a great game. Most of what Paradox have done are terrific historical games; so too for AGEOD and Matrix. CM too, of course.

Pretty much all of these games are good and potentially instructive to children and could be too to our wretched politicians who have such a shallow understanding of history.

actually wargaming ain't doing too bad all things considered I reckon. There're those 'average' game forums that don't get new posts for weeks or pretty much dead, but look at boards of CM!..

Did recently take a look at HOI and it was just too complex. Sort of focuses on everything and actually nothing... then another look at war in the pacific by matrix games. Still had to let it go coz all these hex stuff without at least some WYSIWYG element just ain't for me...

[Talespin Jim]

I've been a fan of HOI since the original and I enjoyed 3 and will probably buy 4. But I won't buy it until the game is working well. I'm sick of Paradox releasing a game that is a year away from being functional, and several years and upgrades to get to be fun to play, plus relying on player mods to make it good. Even then, not being able to have any semblance of a challenging AI or being able to find a multi-player game I can fit into. And then there's the endless updates to try to fine tune balance such that with version 3.333 having useless subs or planes and 3.334 subs or planes are the only thing worth investing in. It's all kind of like a bad dream that you can't resist going back to.

So, yeah, I can't wait for HOI4.

Though I will go to my psychiatrist to get a tune up on my meds before I start to play it. And after the last time I saw her, she had to retire. So now I have to find a new one. I'm sure you can imagine what that's like. Having to see doctor after doctor driving to cities 75 miles away from home because all the local ones have heard of me. I try to explain to them how HOI messes with my mind and it's like they throw open the door and push me out. I don't get it.

[Michael Emrys]

Though I will go to my psychiatrist to get a tune up on my meds before I start to play it. And after the last time I saw her, she had to retire. So now I have to find a new one. I'm sure you can imagine what that's like. Having to see doctor after doctor driving to cities 75 miles away from home because all the local ones have heard of me. I try to explain to them how HOI messes with my mind and it's like they throw open the door and push me out. I don't get it.

Doctors can be so unfeeling. Some of them give me the impression that they are in the business just to make payments on their yachts.

Michael

[Baneman]

Doctors can be so unfeeling. Some of them give me the impression that they are in the business just to make payments on their yachts.

Michael

There are the other kind too though ( thankfully ). The kind who enabled me to be playing CM today rather than pushing up daisies.

To be fair, I'm not sure how "feeling" he was - I had the impression he viewed me more as an interesting experiment. But at least he wanted the experiment to work.

I was ok with that

[Broadsword56]

And the gold standard was abandoned many decades ago...

Nobody's quite yet managed to achieve the same at the strategic/operational level as BFC have at the tactical (or are you going to argue that ASL is a "better game" than CMx2?). It'll happen one day though. I doubt it'll be Paradox that achieves it; they don't seem to have the historical or programming chops for it.

Abandoned by whom? You won't find board wargames at the corner shop, and they're not the mass phenomenon they were in the 1950s-1980s. But many people still play them, there are more and better ones being published than ever, and the Internet and computer play aids have it possible to play them on computers and find opponents 24/7.

If you don't like them, fine -- don't play them. I'm not trying to convince you to like anything. Just don't make sweeping dismissive statements that are also inaccurate.

[womble]

Abandoned by whom?

The governments of the world?

If you don't like them, fine -- don't play them. I'm not trying to convince you to like anything. Just don't make sweeping dismissive statements that are also inaccurate.

Didn't say anything about like or not like. I dispute only that board games are some acme of the gaming experience (and I've played one or two) across the board. JasonC was the one making the broad statement that board games are "better" than computer games, not I the converse.

For the record, I do like board games. My current lifestyle makes it more difficult (nigh impossible) to play them as I'd like, though, so computer games are approaching infinitely better for my purposes. And CMx2 is better than ASL in so many ways that the very few aspects where ASL is arguably better don't stack up.

[Broadsword56]

OK, fair enough. Sorry if I misunderstood.

[Quintus Sertorius]

I've enjoyed the HoI games, but they're clearly WWII pasted on to an engine that wasn't specifically designed for that. For starters, most of Paradox's games have a timeframe of centuries, so when you make a game with a timeframe of about 10 years, it just doesn't work quite the same way.

My favorite Paradox game is probably Victoria. I'm planning on buying Victoria 2 when it finally comes out in a complete package.

[JasonC]

Jock wrote "Manufacturing casus belli, is the game"

Indeed, and the game sucks.

[Squallion]

Jock wrote "Manufacturing casus belli, is the game"

Indeed, and the game sucks.

That's pretty subjective. Plenty of people would say that board games sucks, whereas you're an enthusiast.

Stating your opinion in such a way serves no purpose, but to show everyone else in the forum that you absolutely despise the game.

You already did that in a previous post. Not sure of the point unless you intend to antagonize.

[db_zero]

I recently bought the game and all the mods on Steam for cheap. I haven't gotten into it yet. Sounds disappointing the AI is pretty weak.

As for board games I had a ton of SPI/AH/GDW and other ones back in the day. I wished I never got rid of them as Some of them like Atlantic Wall, War in the Pacific and Campaign for North Africa fetch a nice sum on Ebay. I also can say the same for the magazine Strategy and Tactics. I now buy them on Ebay and collect them.

There is a War in the Pacific remake that cost hundreds of dollars.

One thing about board games-if we run out of oil, and EMP blast blacks out the world or some other catastrophe cuts off the power, you can still play them :0

[Pelican Pal]

I'm a big fan of all the paradox games. They are absolutely unique in what they do, and they are grand strategy games that aren't made for grogs and I appreciate that immensely.

[JasonC]

Yes, I intend to antagonize. Also, I'd like a few days of my life back, spent learning that the designers of EU are jerks. But hey, you can't give me that. Or anything else, really.

Extending remarks - the problem with the way EU handles diplomacy and war effects is that the whole thing is a giant bait and switch, that starts by promising a grand strategy game in which the player actually commands a nation and directs its foreign policy, as well as acting as its supreme military commander - an inherently attractive theme and potential game - and then withdraws all the authority to actually do either of those things. Fearing that the player would be able to accomplish too much with intelligent command in a field of automatons - which ought to be the whole point and attraction of the game - they decided to "make it more challenging" by interposing a set of completely arbitrary legalistic rules of their own devising, having no relations to historical anything, whose sum total effect is to eliminate the player's strategic discretion, and reduce him to a reactive slave of other events.

You can't attack the vulnerable because you have no cause to do so. If you ally with anyone, they will ignore your enemies who will attack you without any regard to causes of anything. If instead other powers attack anyone you allied with, your international standing will be reduced to mud in a second if you don't go to war with the attacker in the name of the alliance - but domestically you will still suffer all the harms of a war without cause if you *do* honor the alliance. You are not punished for not keeping your word, but for giving any in the first place. Other nations are not protected by their alliances if they lack the immediate strength to hold you off, but by the entirely imaginary unpopularity of picking on them. If a war against a great power goes long, even if you win every battle and carry the fight to them and keep all the fighting out of your homeland, and moreover manage all of the above without excessive taxation, you will still bleed popularity to the point of revolt simply because the people supposedly want abstract peace, not victory. Then they have crazy economics engine effects like their imaginary "inflation" that penalize actually growing your income rapidly, designed to close off that avenue of advancement for the player's nation relative to the AI ones around it.

All of them are balancing mechanics designed explicitly to reduce the player's ability to maneuver his nation through the maze of diplomacy, war, and development, in the name of making it "more challenging", but in reality just to cover how badly the AI nations suck in comparison to human directed ones that actually do have freedom of maneuver.

It is a grand strategy game designed by soccer moms who prefer games in which no one wins, drilled to implement social norms of the designers, not realpolitik. Which is all a bait and switch.

I would have enjoyed the same game system without any of the crazy diplomatic and war restrictions, with a minimal alliance system in which allied AI powers mostly but not always honored their word, in which reputation effects were limited to backstabbing allies or similar. It would have been enjoyable enough. Instead I learned the designers would not let me command the nation I was supposedly commanding; they insisted on doing that instead with their stupid restrictions, and I was supposed to like watching the movie that resulted, after all my actual ability to command had be removed.

That is why I say that, objectively, the actual game sucks. It could have been a good game if it actually were about grand strategy. Since instead it is about navigating the designer's arbitrary diplomatic restrictions, it sucks. Those restrictions have no basis in reality, there is no contact with history in navigating them, they are pure handcuffs. It is like selling a bicycle that has the rear wheel chained to a post instead of a drive wheel.