A glance at HoI3

[Tamas]

Okay so running my first proper 1.1 game, as UK from 1939 sept. 1. Germany finished Poland off by mid-October, had some partisans spawn there since that.

Naval skirmishing, sporadic air battles, and some sub attacks had been the order of the day until March of 1940, when Germany declared war on Norway, shortly after on Sweden as well, which prompted Denmark and Netherlands to mobilize.
This is where things at, I just thought I report.

Oh and SU attacked Finland in 1939, pwned them than went with historical Winter War peace when that event fired.

[Ape]

I'm having a hoot reading through the threads on the Paradox fora 

I didn't pay 40 bucks for a beta test

I love this hardcore realism simulation of WW2

Stalingrad!!

[saskganesh]

Sigh. Apparently the game won't get that much faster, beacuse there's "so much stuff going on." 

chill. it's a real time simulation of turn-based gaming.

[PRC]

Looking at the modding section calls bullshit...apparently if you scale back the trading / intelligence AI a bit (running say every 5 ticks instead of every tick), you can get like a 50% speedup.
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=418002

I just tried this fix and it actually worked pretty well for me.  The top speed is now very tolerable.  I'm not sure about the effect though, I haven't played enough of the game without the fix to know if it is negatively affecting anything.

[Tamas]

Okay, this has been quite fun so far, even if a bit whacky: The whole Scandinavian agression thing and alliances triggered war between Italy and myself plus France. I initially sent the BEF Corps I created from some starting forces (an armored and an infantry division) to Norway. But, the Home Fleet managed to beat off the German invasion attempts (Schanhorst and some other German ships sent to the bottom of the sea).

After that Germany DoWed Denmark, overran it, and used the strait connection to Sweden to land there. I moved the BEF to land toward there, but the Italian situation made me rout them back toward the west-norway port.

The Italian AI was quick to move against Egypt and I had to transport several freshly built divisions there, and altough there were initial difficulties and the Mediterranean Fleet had close battles, now in July I am pushing the Italians back.
However in Europe, altough France initially advanced into Italy (I think they even got near Milan, assuming that obscure little European town is where its supposed to be, haven't checked), once the Italians gathere up against them, they were pushed back and a few weeks ago the northern half of that front collapsed and the Italians are in the process of spreading through the gap into Southern France. Which of course is starting a chain reaction of France weakening the Maginot Line and Germans starting to attack that.

So the BEF is now being rushly assembled in a Norse port to try and save France.

[dps]

I will not be buying this.  Nor will I likely buy anything else from them ever again.

When EUIII came out, I remember there were some complaints that had people saying, "How could this have not been caught in beta?" and both Paradox and the beta tester pretty much stuck to the reply, "We can't discuss what happened in beta because of the NDA."  This time, some of the beta testers have posted that they did in fact complain about the map from day one.  That the map has some problems is one thing.  That Paradox knew about the problems and didn't bother to fix them is plain and simple a fucking insult to their customers.

[Syt]

The map is always decided on early in the production process and then remains unchanged. While that made some sense when the map was basically a big hand drawn graphic I don't see how this would explain it when modders make major changes within a few hours, without knowing the engine in and out.

There's been complaints about some OOBs, too - some of it was brushed away as hard to research/limited research rersources.  However, this is #3 in a series. Surely there's a wealth of  pre-existing data from the previous games and the mods by the resident nitpickers that could be built upon?

[Syt]

[Tamas]

Well that has to a be an 1936 start, judging by the number of divisions.

Still I guess there could be something like a "just invaded" tag for units or something making their movement out of the initial invasion province VERY slow so the defender would have time to gather up units and counterattack.

[Tamas]

  Someone with two hours of free time and a hex editor solved the CG bug. You can do it yourself, just find the topic on the boards. He may have halved the demand for officers but that is easily changeable, just find the defines.lua file in the "common" directory, and change LEADERSHIP_TO_OFFICERS from 1 to 0.5

[Syt]

I always thought that the HoI series, though P'dox' biggest selling franchise, is not really what Johan & Co. are interested in making. They try to do the best they can, but I'm not sure these games are where they go "the extra mile", which, I think, was why Rome was such a lackluster attempt - it was what the fans clamored for, not what Paradox wanted to make.

I think that the original EU3 came close to a vision of Johan's dream game - even though many didn't agree with the freeform/balance for MP approach (possibly a miscalculation by Paradox because EU2 was kept alive way beyond its prime thanks to the MP community).

Unfortunately, though, Paradox needs to generate revenue and that may entail creating something for the market, even if you are not that interested in the whole game.



On the other side we have Stardock, working on Elemental: War of Magic. Frogboy recently asked the community if they'd be ok with extending the development timeline for half a year or so. He said that as self producing, self publishing team that draws its main income from other areas (Stardock's desktop apps) they are under no pressure to release on  a certain date and would like to get as much beta feedback as possible to make the game not only what the devs want, but also something that the fans want.

Actually, I find their approach interesting - they allow you to pre-order which entails participation in the beta (which mean you get charged before release, though). So by pledging support for their development process you get some influence on it.

Granted, Stardock probably generates a lot fewer pre-orders than Pardox/HoI3, but I wonder if that might be an approach for Paradox in the future - give pre-orders the chance to participate in the beta (besides the volunteers taken onboard early on - what would be the alpha test crew at Stardock). It would probably have funnelled a lot of the threads now plaguing the forums at Paradox into the (less visible) beta channels.

[Syt]

Apparently the ahistorically quick growth of the Allies faction can be avoided if Germany sends out spies to France and UK (and one or two other countries, e.g. Denmark) with the mission to create threat, i.e. make those countries look bad internationally and deflect interest from Germany.

[Tamas]

Apparently the ahistorically quick growth of the Allies faction can be avoided if Germany sends out spies to France and UK (and one or two other countries, e.g. Denmark) with the mission to create threat, i.e. make those countries look bad internationally and deflect interest from Germany.

I might be wrong but I think Axis diplomacy is quite passive in general.

And I agree with you regarding EU3: I think the philosophy behind that game is what Johan really likes to make, and I agree with him. And also Rome: Johan had several "no we won't make an Ancients game that age bores me to tears" comments in OT back in the days.

I do think HoI3 was pushed to the EU3 direction, and I can't say for the worse because first of all the diplomacy system is far from being declared hopeless, and secondly, I always got pretty bored with HoI2 quite fast.

[Razgovory]

I for one deeply enjoyed EU3.  It was easy to play but hard to master (this in my opinion is ideal).  I actually liked the way events and such worked since I always felt strait jacketed by the looming future.  Hearts of Iron never interested me as much (though I did get it).

[Tamas]

  I need to find the ledger to see where is my Mediterranean Fleet is because I can't find it. The Italians I guess could not find it either because they decided on invading Malta and defeating its garrison. They had their navy defending the operation I know because I sent my Malta-based subs out but they got massacred.

In the meantime Lybia is mine , Tunis got liberated by me and the French, but the Italian AI sneaked a division up back to eastern Lybia from East Africa so I have to hunt them down.
In return I shall invade Sicily

Especially because the winter (it is January 1941 now) did not slow me or the French down in pursuing the Italians from France back to the Alps, which kind of turned the tide there. So yeah, I might land in Genoa instead and crush them.

Needless to say, mighty Sweden repelled the Germans and now there is trench island warfare around Kopenhagen.

And yes, Italy is much bigger of a problem than Germany now, but mostly because Germany ties down most of the French Army on the Maginot Line.