People are complaining about the map? Just wait until they actually play the game.
I chose to play a '36 italy game hoping to be a mid-level power that could do just enough to help the axis win.
It’s now November 41 and:
Germany annexed Austria, invaded Poland, and then… nothing. No invasion of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, France. Nada.
Japan had done nothing to date until…
they invaded France through Marseilles. They’re now half way to Paris.
I’ve edited my tone in retrospect, I was perhaps a little too overbearing.
It’s not suddenly crap, but there are reasons why certain cities were strategically important in WW2 and it had to do with geography. To look specifically at Stalingrad and Smolensk, both of which are Soviet cities that are not correctly located, they are both located in places where major rivers came close together, effectively creating a type of “choke point.” In HOI3 they aren’t located on these “choke points,” thus changing the gameplay.
And despite the suggestion in your linked sticky, there are already very basic mods that have fixed these location problems as well as added more urban areas where appropriate. Despite your suggestion that even a minor map change will have long-term ripple effects, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
None of which explains why the most blatant map errors weren’t found before you built the game around it.
I share your concern.
This is the occupational ego hazard of being a developer. At least a conventional developer only really gets it on launch. On a MMO live team, it’s continuous.
It’s continuous at Paradox, too. I’ve been following their forums for years and there have been flame wars about minutiae since EU2.
Johan also gives as good as he gets (most memorably flaming the crap out of CA for Empire: Total War’s lousy AI) so I wouldn’t feel too concerned.
Plus, the map really is kind of dopey, and blaming it on “good gameplay” is a dodge. If you set a game on Earth, it kind of has to be accurate, or you get people who live somewhere complaining about how you got their home wrong. If gameplay trumps accuracy, just set the game on Midas-4 or something.
Although there’s a long history there too… so much so that Serbians complaining about how the Balkans are borked up in Paradox maps are such a long running meme that some of us suspect that Paradox messed up the REST of the world as an ironic troll.
More on topic, I just finished a good couple of days playing as Germany. This has been my first “real” game of HOI3 in a while and I went to 1/1941. Used some of the posted AI mods to sharpen up the trading and intelligence AI, along with a couple of cosmetic ones.
About 1938 resources started getting really tight, but some trade brokering fixed that. Started WW2 in July of 1939, and had Poland subdued by the beginning of September.
After that are when things got a little odd. Specifically, I did my usual ahistoric HOI stunt as Germany of snagging the Netherlands early (attacking in November 1939, in this case) while keeping Belgium neutral to prevent the French from rolling in and reinforcing. Turns out they didn’t need to. The Dutch had somehow built almost 100 divisions. I eventually slugged my way to a victory, but it took all the way to June of 1940 (even though I had taken Amsterdam via an airborne drop the first week of the war, which I was quite proud of thank-you-very-much). Meanwhile the German Navy (which I had built about 6 battleships to add to at the AI’s recommendation - hey, go nuts) was having fun picking off the odd French or English cruiser. I may have achieved naval parity with the Allies without even knowing it. Although amusingly, I was down 1 BB - the Bismarck. Of course, it took the Hood with it. Who said HOI3 was ahistorical?
Once the Netherlands finally fell, I turned everything over to the West Front AI, declared war on Belgium and Luxembourg, and told them to go nuts. Which they did, mainly because France had maybe half the units of Holland. Paris fell about 3 months later, and I was able to invite Italy into the Axis (who in sterling Italian fashion promptly did nothing whatsoever). Vichy France never fired though, to such a length that I wondered if the event even existed in this version. Finally, when my armies were along a line from Bordeaux to the Swiss/Italian border (in other words, taking 2/3 of France) France finally surrendered, in around October 1940. OK.
I then told the AI to target a slew of cities in England, thinking it would array itself along the coast and wait for a decent navy, while checking out what my eastern garrisons were up to. The AI promptly landed 4 infantry divisions in the south of England. Well then! It didn’t look like it was prepared to reinforce them, but it was certainly keeping the English busy.
Unfortunately the speed, never the best, has slowed to a pretty horrid crawl by 1941, with a pause every 4 in-game hours or so. I’m thinking waiting on the patch before trying again.
More than a month to conquer Poland? What kind of maniacal dictator are you?
I’m pretty shocked at 100 divisions in the Netherlands, though. I’m playing with a few fixes and have never seen anything like that. Usually it only takes maybe 12 divisions to subdue them.
A hundred divisions… how many men would that tally? 200.000? half a million? That’s like every male of millitary age in modern day holland, let alone 1939’s lol.
I finally got the corrupt save issue. Not only my last save from yesterday but also the autosave before it both don’t work - the game crashes when I try and load them. Luckily the previous autosave still works, so I only lost about a month and that’s ok in my Soviet game since I’m not at war. But I’d be pretty pissed if I was. I figured it might be the known “sunk carrier” problem but deleting the one sunk carrier I found in the save file didn’t solve anything.
One thing it did reinforce is how badly the game needs an “exit to main menu” option from inside a loaded game instead of just a “exit to desktop” option.
Edit: So I posted on the bug forum and someone found another sunk carrier in my save. Deleting the attached air wing (that’s the issue, apparently, that the ship sinks but the game decides to keep the attached air wing information in the sunk ship entry) fixed the problem and now the save loads.
tried the “resign” button ?
That seems too logical. :-)
I wonder if the Allies sent a ton of expeditionary forces to Holland. It would explain why I was able to roll through France immediately after!
I am playing the anti-game of you, also choosing Italy in '36.
I swiftly conquered Ethiopia, which in retrospect might have been a mistake, since it seriously hurt my economy.
When Germany attacked Poland in June 39, I launched an attack on southern France. Italy single handedly conquered France by December '39, without a single German ever setting foot in there. The Italian army went on to conquer Allied Nationalist Spain and Gibraltar, while leaving the AI to mop up Africa. All of the British navy was in the Mediterranean, so the Italian fleet is pretty much gone after inflicting heavy casualties to the Brits.
Germany, looking for a replacement to it’s France campaign in '40, launched a very successful Sealion (Home Fleet being in the Med and all) instead, fully conquering the British Isles, including Ireland. The Brits keep on fighting elsewhere though.
Being idle, Italy turned to the Balkans. After taking Yugoslavia, Athens was about to fall, when some 50 US divisions landed in Brest. A remarkable feat, with a German occupied Great Britain.
In other news, China surrendered to non-axis Japan early '40. And USSR is sitting on it’s butt.
Interesting times indeed.
The map definitely isn’t the biggest issue with HoI3 but to me it’s symptomatic of Paradox’s quality control. Instead of working on a feature until it’s done and done right they settle for working until it’s good enough to release, even if it’s unfinished, knowing that they can work on it post-release and get paid to include it in an expansion pack, or rely on the community to fix it for them.
I’m definately more annoyed by this than minor map errors.
Will there ever be a Paradox AI whose navies aren’t simply equipped with unlimited range?
rezaf
Well said. I agree.
Hmm. I keep reading these amusing AARs, while waiting for the patch and contemplating if I should try this game or resurrect HOI2 instead.
Question to the veteran players of HOI2 who are currently playing HOI3 - is it just me or this game tend to be quite a bit more ahistorical than HOI2? (I am talking about gameplay and AI, not the screwed map)
Wow. In every game I’ve played (or even heard about), Japan gets its ass kicked off the mainland. I wonder what the difference is?
HOI3 is far more likely to go off the historical rails than HOI2. In HOI2 the Axis, Allies and Comintern are mostly pre-ordained - Italy may join the Axis at a different time, Germany might successfully recruit Spain, etc., but the US isn’t going to join the Axis unless a human player goes to great lengths to make it happen. In HOI3 the player has to go to some lengths (using the intelligence system) to NOT have the world zerg against them.
In my game I had my spies dutifully propagandizing against the horrible threat posed by Denmark (a very gamey exploit due to how threat can be implanted into small countries); eventually though in early 1940 I had to cut back on intelligence budgets due to an officer shortage (they, and research, come from the same budget pool). Once I did, Canada, South Africa and Australia promptly joined the Allies. So diplomacy is very much keyed to intelligence, and if you don’t micro that part of the game, the world will ally against you in short order as the Axis (dunno about others, right now Germany is the most playable nation it seems).
There’s other details, some resulting from the scenario setup. For example Germany doesn’t start with the Westwall built (unlike both France and Czechoslovakia). Historically accurate (Germany didn’t build it until they reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936) but very easy, especially for HOI2 players, to miss it. So if you don’t build fortifications on the French border yourself, the French will ahistorically attack into Germany in 1939. I suspect a lot of new players miss that.