The AI in HOI IV is an absolute mess once you get to know the game and I’m afraid it is going to take Paradox forever to fix stuff since their crew is going on vacation in less than 2 weeks. This means delays when they get back, and who knows what will be held back fix-ways cause they want to DLC it up. It is of great concern to me that Paradox has spread itself way too thin.
So, currently what is the best medium complexity WWII game out there?
Order of Battle Pacific
That is the only answer you need.
Apple and Oranges, but Korsun Pocket is great if you are alone and have a supply fetish.
If it isn’t only the theme, but also the scale you are looking for, I don’t know of any answer but would be really intrigued to hear one too.
Actually, it’s now called Order of Battle; WW2.
My preference is the Combat Mission series by Battlefront. But that’s only if you’re interested in tactical simulation at the platoon up to battalion level. Played PBEM against humans it’s a good time and very challenging (far more so than any AI as you’d expect).
Some people say that Unity of Command is the absolute dog’s bollocks. I have it, but have never played it.
Does that do the whole world? I was under the impression it only did the Pacific war. I’d prefer a game that is everything all at once, not split up the war into subsections.
If it helps alleviate that concern at all, ever since CK2 each project has its own dedicated team. Previously they’d work on one game or expansion then largely need to move over to the next project, but HOI4 has its own lead designer, AI coder, etc.
That’s good. I keep hearing about team member X gets moved to Y project, CK2 trimmed to just one person etc. Seen a lot of that this year which always sounds concerning.
Yeah OOB is a great game but it’s nothing like HOI4 in terms of scope.
Then you want Hearts of Iron 4.
Gary Grigsby did “World at War - A World Divided” 10 years ago and that was really great. But I have not been able to get it to run.
Making History 2 is a decent WW2 era game. It doesn’t recreate a historical WW2, it just uses a historical start.
Yeah, I played that.
Dunno if you’ve heard of it, but Paradox just released Hearts of Iron 4. Maybe give that a try?
Or in seriousness, HOI2. That’s about it for what you’re looking for.
HoI2 was fun, but was it really a wargame? I mean it takes place during the war and you move units around some of the time, but the actual behavior of the units and the consequences of them moving and fighting seem very different from conventional wargames. As Russia, I played it half a dozen times and the Axis hardly ever invaded me. Once the Republicans won in Spain and the Axis just sat around being sad, and a few times they just did very little at all. They did declare war once, but didn’t do much in the at-war state. I guess the remains of Poland scared them or something. I spent most of my time doing stuff like invading Afghanistan and China and futilely doing nothing much in the Winter war… Typically I “won” by building up my spy activity and trying to coup Germany every turn until at around the time they were supposed to be in the middle of the drang nach osten they magically turned into the GDR and became my pals :)
For me a wargame has hexes and 99% of the combat results aren’t “retreat with minor damage”. Okay, I can live without the hexes. And it may be true that corps-level units are indeed hard to defeat, but in HoI2 I had the feeling that they were wet bars of soap slipping all over the battlefield.
Also I bought the game after all the patches and expansions came out, and the navies still didn’t actually do anything.
So really I guess I prefer smaller scale games where the meaning of the conflict is more straightforward and the tactics are easier to control, and also where the software is capable of properly playing the game…
Also for me half the fun of HoI2 was directing research with my special lab and engineering units, and I saw they killed that fun entirely in HoI3 for some bizarre reason, so I never played the sequel.
If you long for the days of flight sims as games instead of rivets and switchology, then you should probably play this.
So the last WWII-era game I played that involved hexes and some semblance of wargame play was… um… Operation Crusader from Atomic Games. When was that? The 90s? The AI was pretty crappy there too, but at least from time to time it would assemble some armored units and do something with them, anyway.
Didn’t we used to call this tactical vs operational? Tactical being your hexes, looking at one battle, like Order of Battle. Operational was the big picture stuff like Axis and Allies or HOI4. I think we call operational “grand strategy” now. In any case, sounds like jpinard wants something big picture, I don’t think there are many of those.
jpinard, I was actually going to recommend this game. I thought it was too old though so I didn’t bother. I actually just installed it last week and it works fine on my Windows 10 computer. What’s wrong with yours? Do you have the original or the updated version? They should work. Because if not that there isn’t really much out there other than HOI. Unfortunately they want $40 for World at War otherwise I would buy it. But I’m not going to pay $40 for an updated version of a game that I probably paid $50 for originally.
On the other hand, you may want to try out Strategic Command 2. It’s basically a worldwide game but unfortunately it’s a Battlefront game.