A glance at HoI3

[MadBurgerMaker]

Another issue that people have pointed out is that Italy utterly crushes France once the war starts. 

I believe what happens is France seems to think (rightly, to a point) that Germany is the bigger threat, so the AI only leaves a few divisions to defend against Italy.  Italy, of course, considers France to be the biggest threat on their borders, so they stack their armies on the border and kick the shit out of whatever crappy forces the frogs leave there.

I just tried to slow down the Italian onslaught with my meager South African Expeditionary Forces and ended up losing two infantry divisions and a corps HQ for my efforts as I was zerged mercilessly by greasy haired dudes with Tommy guns.  I couldn't even slow them down (well...locally I did, I guess) with heroic counterattacks from my lone armored division. 

The British, meanwhile, have said "Fuck France," and went and invaded Sardinia instead of helping their allies.  I'm thinking the same thing.  I'll go for a North African land grab.  The Italian Navy is getting smoked by the RN, so I'm pretty sure I could sneak in there, grab a port, and spread like a virus over their territory.  If not....welp...I guess I can withdraw to Sardinia.

[Ideologue]

At least it's just a same result from different causes, though--France falling.

The reports of China nearly always destroying Japan on the Asian continent are far more disturbing.

[MadBurgerMaker]

At least it's just a same result from different causes, though--France falling.

Yeah.  Germany gets France and Vichy is formed, etc, even if it's the Italians doing the asskicking.

The reports of China nearly always destroying Japan on the Asian continent are far more disturbing.

TBH, this has never happened to me, although I play from the '36 scenario exclusively.  Japan seems to crush everything even remotely resembling China.   In this current game, they've annexed Nat and Commie China, made a puppet of Shanxi (?), and are working on Guangxi and Xibei San Ma.  They've made a successful amphibious landing on Hainan and are moving north up that way.  Edit:  It's 30 Dec, 1939, btw.  The war in Europe started on May 1.

Edit2:  And it just CTDed for the first time while autosaving.    At least I had it set to save monthly. 

[Ideologue]

Japan often steamrolling China is probably just as bad, though.

[MadBurgerMaker]

Japan often steamrolling China is probably just as bad, though.

Seems like it just needs a little tweaking, at least for my games.  Slow down the Japs a little (more than a little, I guess), but don't make the Chinese an unstoppable juggernaut that lands a million dudes in Tokyo by '41.

I have no idea how one would go about doing that though.

[Tamas]

Well in my British game I could not stop the entire Italian army which was invading France, so I just landed in Naples and reached Milan, never facing more than 2 Italian divisions at once at any given day.

[Ideologue]

Japan often steamrolling China is probably just as bad, though.

Seems like it just needs a little tweaking, at least for my games.  Slow down the Japs a little (more than a little, I guess), but don't make the Chinese an unstoppable juggernaut that lands a million dudes in Tokyo by '41.

I have no idea how one would go about doing that though.

Neither do I.  I spent weeks trying to mod a solution into HoI2, but no matter what, I either overpowered China or Japan and one or the other would acheive total victory on the continent no later than early 1942.  There are two problems that I identified that could not be readily solved:

1)The land combat model: the failure to include a sophisticated logistics model permitted unrealistic advantages for whatever side happened to be winning.  For what it's worth, this also made the Russo-German conflict less accurate than it could have been.  This might be different in 3, which seems to have a more advanced logistics model.
2)The political model: there is no politico-military incentive for Japan to not swallow all China whole, and the political model strongly favors outright conquest over negotiated settlement or partition, but this was never Japan's goal in China.

A suitably nuanced event string could probably have done it, but this was more research than I felt like doing, particularly since I had bigger fish to fry, like the aforementioned problem with the Eastern Front closing too soon, and eventually I just gave up.  (I also did something, and I've never found out what, that broke my mod copy of the game, so that dented my enthusiasm quite a bit. )

[Fate]

At least it's just a same result from different causes, though--France falling.

The reports of China nearly always destroying Japan on the Asian continent are far more disturbing.

It's not even all of China. It's Shanxi that's overrunning Manchuria/Korea. And yeah, it's happened in all three of the games that I've played from 1936 to 1942 so far.

I'm most shocked that Paradox did such a piss poor job in developing the Eastern Front. HOI2 is light years ahead in terms of difficultly and realism. I guess this might have something to do with the Consumer Goods bug. Most of the Soviet's IC is tied up in either that or supplies, so any annihilated brigades cannot be replaced unless you have a massive supply stockpile.

[Fate]

Japan often steamrolling China is probably just as bad, though.

Seems like it just needs a little tweaking, at least for my games.  Slow down the Japs a little (more than a little, I guess), but don't make the Chinese an unstoppable juggernaut that lands a million dudes in Tokyo by '41.

I have no idea how one would go about doing that though.

Neither do I.  I spent weeks trying to mod a solution into HoI2, but no matter what, I either overpowered China or Japan and one or the other would acheive total victory on the continent no later than early 1942.  There are two problems that I identified that could not be readily solved:

1)The land combat model: the failure to include a sophisticated logistics model permitted unrealistic advantages for whatever side happened to be winning.  For what it's worth, this also made the Russo-German conflict less accurate than it could have been.  This might be different in 3, which seems to have a more advanced logistics model.
2)The political model: there is no politico-military incentive for Japan to not swallow all China whole, and the political model strongly favors outright conquest over negotiated settlement or partition, but this was never Japan's goal in China.

A suitably nuanced event string could probably have done it, but this was more research than I felt like doing, particularly since I had bigger fish to fry, like the aforementioned problem with the Eastern Front closing too soon, and eventually I just gave up.  (I also did something, and I've never found out what, that broke my mod copy of the game, so that dented my enthusiasm quite a bit. )

I'd figure the easiest way to slow the war down is to lower the infrastructure to 0 in all provinces and add high level land forts in the "core" regions of Japanese (so, Korea and Manchuria) and Chinese area control (inner mountainous regions).

[MadBurgerMaker]

Well in my British game I could not stop the entire Italian army which was invading France, so I just landed in Naples and reached Milan, never facing more than 2 Italian divisions at once at any given day.

Ah goddammit...I think I waited too long to try this.  The CAGs  that make up the South African Air Force ( ) have been spotting significant Italian forces in the middle of the boot there headed down south to fuck me up again.  I made it across the straits without significant resistance, but it appears that's about to end in a big way. 

Edit:  Blammo 30,000 badguys in Cosenza.  And the fuckers are attacking my convoys now.

[Tamas]

Oh and if you do manage to defeat Italy: the whole fascist-nazi italian puppet state event is completely fubared (triggers when italy surrenders but to make italy surrender you need to capture all VP cities including the ones the puppet state will form on) so when you insta-conquer mussolini's little-italy, make sure to annex it, or suffer horrendous supply consequences.

[MadBurgerMaker]

Oh and if you do manage to defeat Italy: the whole fascist-nazi italian puppet state event is completely fubared (triggers when italy surrenders but to make italy surrender you need to capture all VP cities including the ones the puppet state will form on) so when you insta-conquer mussolini's little-italy, make sure to annex it, or suffer horrendous supply consequences.

Hm...sounds like that event needs to be tinkered with to only include the Southern Italy VPs (Rome, Naples, Taranto, and Palermo) or something. 

Edit:  Or does the new country form simply when Italy surrenders without a specific event?  If so, IIRC, you can make a country surrender by really kicking the shit out of them with strategic bombers, winning battles, etc, without conquering all the VP spots.  Invading half of Italy and essentially burning the other half down might be enough to do it.  I'll cheat in this SA game and let you know what happens.

[Winkelried]

At risk of stating the obvious, Switzerland should not be joining any wars, period, no matter what the great powers do with their intel.  The main purpose of German spies and diplomats in Switzerland should be to keep the price of smuggled, looted gold, not to prevent a surprise attack from the jack-knived armed Alphorn Militia.

[Neil]

Japan often steamrolling China is probably just as bad, though.

Seems like it just needs a little tweaking, at least for my games.  Slow down the Japs a little (more than a little, I guess), but don't make the Chinese an unstoppable juggernaut that lands a million dudes in Tokyo by '41.

I have no idea how one would go about doing that though.

I've never seen any game where China actually landed on anything outside of mainland China.  China's starting navy sucks, the AI tends to build millions of infantry divisions, and the IJN is kickass.

[Ideologue]

^No, that's true.  But Japan losing Manchuria and Korea and SE Asia to the RoC is still really bad, just less hilariously, "Goddamn-this-shit-is-broken" bad.