I modded the officer rate to double the amount of officers per research point.
In my game, Communist China beat and puppeted Manchuokuo, but left Japan in Korea (despite being at war), and Japan shortly thereafter annexed Nationalist China. How? Why? I got nothin’.
I think part of the problem with the map is the extreme cost of making a change. It takes something like 4 hours on a good machine to recompile/recalculate edges/nodes, borders and such.
There is so much I love about HOI3 – the expanded scope of the map (if not the errors), the AI level of control, the more sane diplo / intel systems and research. But man, it just goes too far off the rails of history for me. I’m hoping this will improve with some patches. Of course now the good things about it have probably spoiled HOI2 for me but I wonder whether I need to go back and just let HOI3 bake a bit more before jumping back into it.
The only thing I’m really not digging is the way absolutely everyone has joined the Allies. Seriously, how is the DR going to help? All of my other complaints are fairly niggling, other than the odd map, of course. But yeah, good times all around.
I see. Thank you for good explanation Lum.
Damnit, why Paradox games seem to become more and more generalized and less historical with each iteration? Since EU2 and HOI2 it all went downhill. What a pity. It used to be my favorite game company. :(
I’m expecting there will be some shift back in the direction of higher likliehoods of historical outcomes (in the absence of player impact, anyway) as patches and even expansions come along. There has been a pretty loud outburst about this on the boards, extremist arguing aside.
But the bigger issue, I think, is how these historical options should be presented in the game. I’m not a big fan of event driven exercises and would rather see the AI constrained “behind the scenes” then forced to follow certain paths because of events. Ideally the game should leave it up to the player and AI to even reach the point where the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact is even possible. Then again, the forced division of the world into 3 camps is a rather arbitrary way of handling things. It’s not out of the question, IMHO, that the Soviets could have allied with the UK and France in 1939 (there were discussions) or that Hitler could have manipulated Europe into supporting a war against communism. While the current system allows this stuff to some extent, it doesn’t do so in a way that really gives the player the full range of options.
I started a game as Belgium today thinking it would be a quick little match, but it’s pretty dull going back to a minor after playing with the majors. When it takes upwards of an hour to just to run a year on the fastest speed, those early periods are deadly dull when there is little to do but wait for your three research projects to complete.
I dunno, there has been a pretty lout outburst about this back when EU2 was released as well, but Paradox just proclaimed that was the direction they wanted to go, and there seem to be a lot of players that like the more generic gameplay.
And to a certain degree, it’s just the AI doing some of the stuff players would do. The problem here is, for me at least, it’s more fun to try and do ahistorical things when the AI nations mostly stick to their historical course and thus the world (where not infuenced by the player) continues to look reasonably like it would have looked in history.
EU3 (at least back when I tried it) started from a historical point, but quickly degenerated into Denmark fighting Zwaziland over colonies in South America, Myanmar colonizing deep into Siberia, Kleves conquering Japan and more stuff like that. That’s just not the game I want to play.
Events themselves were the most fun aspect for me in EU2, but vanilla had VERY few events, those were mostly the work of modders, thus as long as Paradox provides a good, flexible event engine, I don’t really care how many they implement themselves.
rezaf
Divisions during WW2 varied greatly in size, but 6,000 is a roughly safe number to go with, so you’re looking at a 600,000 man army. Soviet divisions could be up to 12,000 men.
The EU comparisons bother me because those games cover centuries and a period of time in which things were very chaotic to begin with. So that they are more “wide open” makes sense.
HOI, on the other hand, is the most focused period a Paradox game covers. As such I don’t think it can be built around “wide open” gameplay to the same extent. Nor do I think that is Paradox’s intent. It’s rather difficult at the moment to determine whether what is happening in HOI3 is because Paradox decided to let it be that way or if some other things aren’t working as intended. For example, amphibious invasions from halfway around the world clearly aren’t intended, yet they are happening.
In the end HOI2 reached a reasonable compromise on the issue and so far I don’t see any reason to think HOI3 isn’t going to also head in that direction. There will always be some people who loudly proclaim their dissatisfaction with things, but the reasonable middle ground is where I suspect most players of HOI3 are at.
Check out the ‘AI Improvement Pack’ on the mod forum. Addressing this issue seems to be a high priority for them. I’m playing with a slightly older version and getting more historical results.
I’d prefer not so much that countries ‘stick to the script’, but that the game system represent why some of these things were very unlikely or couldn’t reasonably happen. I’m all for alternate history, but not so much for crazy random stuff.
Personally, I loathed the event-driven constraints of older Paradox titles. I want the game to be my sandbox, I don’t want to feel like I’m on rails. It makes the game far, far less interesting to me if I know basically what’s going to happen in <insert_month_year_here>.
I don’t think anyone wants that level of historical exactness. We need to be aware that there can be a reasonable middle ground. Just as I don’t want Germany to invade Poland on 9/1/1939 every time, I also don’t want the AI US joining the allies on their own in every game.
Speaking about everyone joining the Allies; this still took me a bit by surprise:
This has been a very ahistoric game, to say the least. UK finally gave in to the axis, after a German invasion of India(!). So everyone (except UK) is with the allied, late '41:
I’ve noticed lots of people reporting the Fins going berserk. On the bright side, I only had to fight the Fins once in this game - in Albania, of course.
I think I’ll call it quits for this Italian crusade, and wait for the next patch.
So in '39 I get into a scrap with the RN. I actually come out fairly well, though my 2 BBs are pretty beaten up and I lost 7 CLs, 2 CAs, 1 BC I destroyed almost twice that.
Still, I noticed that my 5-star admiral wasn’t contributing any leadership for my big fleet. Knowing the state of HoI3, I saved and reloaded prior to the battle, and demoted Raeder to 1-star. Replay the battle. Ah! There’s my leadership bonus!
Still having fun, but I’m just trying to envision how much testing was actually done here…
It’s another known problem - it was put forward before release that everyone in the command chain would gain xp from actions, but this is either currently bugged or they just never put it in. Frankly its one of the more disappointing oversights currently.
This is slightly different than the command chain thing. You are supposed to require an admiral of high rank to command a large fleet. If the admiral in command is under-ranked, then he won’t apply his leadership bonus to the battle. Instead, it looks as though either the ranks are reversed, or else he only applies his leadership bonus WHEN the fleet is too big for him.
Like I wrote, I actually was quite fond of the event driven system in the prominent EU2 mods (like I also wrote vanilla EU2 didn’t really feature it).
I would prefer it even more if the game was capable of producing a flavourful version of alternate history where everything actually maked sense , but I don’t think one can reasonably expect anyone to come up with a system capable to do this, much less Paradox.
IMO, the “total sandbox” approach robs a game of any historical context.
It quickly gets to the point that always having to play on earth feels like a limiting factor and I’d prefer a random map. If I want to play a generic game about “history”, I can alway play CIV, where most the only thing connecting me to my civilization is the city names and maybe a unique unit.
In EU3, without historical monarchs (I know there’s a half-arsed option for this), historical leaders and events etc., it always felt way too detached from the real world for me.
It’s like in scifi or fantasy books, the protagonists are usually humans or very human-like - theoretically you could have a race of gas-bubble creatures that evolved on a gas giant fight some sort of sentient moss, but who could relate to those, who would want to read about them?
In EU2, I always enjoyed how as the centuries passed the map (outside of player control) always differed from the historical map of the time considerably, but it was always within reason.
The historical events of mods didn’t always make any sense in the context of that map - rampant inflation in a Spain that never managed to conquer the Americas or events depicting the downfall of a Ottoman empire that is actually strong as a bull in the game proper, but these are merely signs of too inflexible events IMO.
But the players on the table were still the same and they played roughly the role they played historically, so I felt right at home and yet it was excitingly different.
Maybe I’m very alone feeling that way, I dunno.
rezaf
Shrug, people want historical results without the historical events happening…I’m always puzzled over this.
I don’t think you can have one without the other, however I must admit there could be some scenario options to please the crowd.