Given how many big HoI fans there are on this board, I guess there will be a lot of people happy to hear that Paradox’s new game will be another version of their WW2 game.
I was really hoping for something else - either Crusader Kings or something completely different. HoI 2 with the expansions is already a very, very good game; hard to imagine how you would improve it beyond the usual interface stuff.
Troy
You dirty punk. I was in the middle of writing this post. I’ll see YOU afterschool…
You know where to find me.
Troy
If only they hadn’t moved to this terrible, terrible excuse for a 3D engine.
I fear it will look worse than Panzer General II (aka PG 3D in parts of europe).
Hopefully it’s at least not as nondescript as EU3. (disclaimer: Haven’t played either of the addons)
rezaf
10,000 provinces? Oh wow.
Now if only they’d take some of my suggestions into factor. If we’re going to have ten thousand provinces it seems like their going to boost the complexity by some large factor so they better damn well go for a well reasoned C&C approach. I’m rather sick of having hundreds of generals as say, Germany, that I never use so I’d like it if they have each division commanded by an individual general attached to a higher up commander, attached higher, etc. Largely automated probably.
Yeah, I’m not sure that terrain maps with mountains sticking up is really going to work in a period where most planning was done with paper maps and aerial photography.
I’m hoping they go flat, but their massive hard-on for their new map engine makes me doubt it.
I had kinda hoped they’d remove provinces as movement system alltogether, and include a army is where army are concept.
I mean for admin reasons sure, but for moving armies, I’d love to station my army as precisely the position I want it at.
Beyond that, great game.
It’ll definitely be in the EUIII engine, which just begs for something like Janster’s suggestion. Or at least animations of the battles playing out*. But I could go for MOTS, as long as it truly is TS and not some “extreme-to-the-max” business.
*This will never happen, but as long as we’re dreaming, I really think that battles should bring you into a CotA game when they start.
I guess I’ll wait to see screenshots to confirm that it is in their ugly-ass awful 3d engine before I cry myself to sleep every night.
At least Rome looked only kind of bad, as opposed to the eye-bleeding awful that was EU3.
I don’t get it… why make this kind of jump to an engine which looks worse, has more expensive asset creation costs, higher support costs, and runs on fewer computers? For a lot of other games, I see how the advantages of camera rotation, animation, and pure poly throughput on modern cards can be worth it, but for these games? I just don’t get how it makes sense at any level.
When we investigated making the jump from 2D to 3D (Age of Empires 2 to Age of Mythology) we didn’t give it the go ahead until we had extensively proven to ourselves we could make a 3D game which we felt looked as good as our 2D games. YMMV, but I think we succeeded. But does anyone think EU3 looks better than EU2?
All that venting aside, HOI2 is still a game I play regularly, so if they don’t screw it up (c.f. EU2 > EU3) this could be great news. The HOI > HOI2 jump was pretty amazing.
Oh dear Paradox folks, please don’t make it purely continuous movement. That’s just adding a whole new level of fiddly detail which IMO would add very little (though I’d have to see it in the context of the full design to tell, admittedly). But provinces provide a very nice and clean abstraction…
One thing that really kills me is the fucking load times with EUIII. It’s easy to pop in for a few quick days in HoI II, but EUIII takes ten minutes to load and makes short sessions nearly impossible. So, they should fix that.
I really hate to be one of those people that says “works for me,” but how much of that is exaggeration? I started playing EU games with EU3, and I can get to the main screen in about 30 seconds and load my save in about 10 seconds, tops. Are the load times really a problem?
EU3 can take several minutes to load when it’s building the map cache, but that should only happen the first time you run the game.
I think EU3 can look okay with the right mod (i.e., this one).
Seeing how EU3 was a serious disappointment for me, I’m less than jazzed about HOI3. However, the main reason I hated EU3 wasn’t the graphics engine, it was the complete lack of character and historic realism (Teutonic Knights colonize Cuba in 1480! HRE gone by 1520! 4 giant blobs battle for world supremacy! Wheee!). Since WW2 is far more focused, that probably won’t apply to HOI3. I’ll keep an eye on the title, but it’s not an auto-buy.
Who gives a shit what the engine is?
As long as they don’t fix the HORRIBLE AI from the first two games, there isn’t any point to this.
Between the insanely rampant AI cheating, and the incompetence of it, they have to fix this. Otherwise don’t waste our time.
So as someone new to HoI, is there any point in starting with the first game; or should I just skip to the second? Is the HoI2 expansion considered a must-have?
EDIT: or maybe I should just pick up the HoI Anthology and grab it all…
I was going to post a link to this before your edit. That said, I think Doomsday was standalone and you’d be actually playing that with the Armageddon expansion-expansion (essentially an update they charged $5 or something for).
HoI was actually quite different, they steamlined a lot of things in II (research - much more micromanagement in HoI1 - and resources come to mind).
That said, I think HoI2 is the better game, and it’s still on their stylish-boardgamy-2D engine. There are also some very nice mods out there for it.
rezaf
I really hate to be one of those people that says “works for me,” but how much of that is exaggeration? I started playing EU games with EU3, and I can get to the main screen in about 30 seconds and load my save in about 10 seconds, tops. Are the load times really a problem?
EU3 can take several minutes to load when it’s building the map cache, but that should only happen the first time you run the game.
It’s definitely the map, but when I only have maybe 30 minutes to play I usually just jump into HoI instead of my EUIII game at this point. Maybe it’s something running on my machine, but I usually close Firefox and it’s not like anything else is using my GPU.
I like the graphics btw, but I may be the only one.
Skip HOI1 completely. IMO, HOI2 is better in pretty much all ways. I’d recommend the two expansions, but even core HOI2 is pretty compelling.
I wish they would try something new. CK was going in the right direction but they didn’t follow up that timid forray into new mechanics. How about supersmall scale (families in a single village), no-zone maps, battle mini-games? Nope, increment the number and chuck it out there.