Hearts of Iron 3

Well, EU2 vanilla kinda did just that. Little events, but the AI objectives were set in a way that would gently force them along the path of history.
I.e., Spain would always send their explorers towards america and then colonize / conquer there, the ottomans would try to conquer the balkans etc.
That’s the least I’d expect in HoI3, agendas for nations defining their likelyhood of joining the allies, of invading foreign countries etc.
Hitler invading India or the Japanese landing in France just kinda sounds terribly wrong. Well, unless either snagged up a huge chunk of the world prior to that.


rezaf

One wants, broadly, histry, otherwise why bother with all the historic details? At the same time you want your actions to cause a believable butterfly effect on the course of that history: that’s what we are looking for in historic games, the “what if?” factor.

6,000 is very light. Battalions are ~800 men and most divisions were between 10 and 15 battalions. See here.

The Magna Mundi mods for EU3 do a good job straddling the line between historical flavour/determinism and dynamism. They aim for historically plausible outcomes–so instead of strictly historical events that’ll fire blindly at a set date with no real flexibility, you’ll get events that take a host of relevant factors into account and end up feeling a lot more realistic. For anyone disappointed with EU3’s relative lack of historicity, give Magna Mundi a shot. Personally, I barely play the unmodded core game anymore.

+1

Tyrion has it right.

The supplement to the HOI3 strategy guide is up in the FAQ subforum. It covers country-specific strategies, analysis of unity types including their cost effectiveness, and a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff including modding.

I will definately give Magna Mundi a shot. I am in the middle of an unmodded game and am very disappointed that Japan seems to be losing to China. Germany couldn’t get past the Maginot line. Italy captured Paris and France was given to Germany. I’m still having fun but these things are annoying.

Johan posted an update today about the status of 1.2, saying he hopes to have it out by next week sometime.

There’s quite a few really horrible events designed to just randomly screw you over in MMP. There was a mod of the mod around called funMMP but I can’t seem to find it. Anyways I think you can get rid of a lot of those events (particularly FRAMED!) and avoid some hair-pulling by removing the following two files from MMP’s events directory…

barbary_coast.txt
bb_additions.txt

Here it is:

Japan joins the Allies? England surrenders?
That makes me want to play the game. That sounds awesome.

Never been framed and the Barbary Coast events aren’t all that bad so long as you aren’t playing a large trading nation. Nevertheless so long as you aren’t an utter warmonger you’ll never be framed really, it’s designed to help prevent people from going apeshit and having Pfalz or some other minor from taking over all of Europe if played right and really with the latest version you’ve got enough abilities to expand without accumulating a drastic amount of BB.

Well now, that sounds promising. I was just firing up EU3 to install Magna Mundi. Maybe I’ll play that until the patch comes out.

I just finished a short (not surprsingly) game as Belgium. Well, I could continue but I’m now an gov’t in exile with one division in Africa and a few transports in Britain that can’t reach Africa. So . . .

Anyway, my plan was to build up my border with Germany and Luxembourg and see if that would help. When the Germans invaded Poland in May 1939 I was a member of the Allies and things didn’t go so badly at first given that all my troops started as reserves and had to build up in strength while fighting Germans. But with Luxembourg and the Dutch neutral I only had on direct province to cover and my expensive luxury interceptors came in handy. While Poland fell in about 3 weeks, the war in the west continued on.

The big issue, as it turned out, was that Nationalist Spain and Italy were both part of the Axis. That was just too much for the French to cover, though the AI’s behavior was plenty odd. They shifted about 1/3 of the troops from the Italian front to the north when the war broke out, making them much more vulnerable there. For some reason they kept several divisions on their border with me for quite some time and never took advantage of the transit rights they had. In fact, only the UK in the form of air missions ever assisted me.

While France facing three attackers is a recipe for disaster, a few things helped out, at least at first. Finland joined the Allies and the Germans had to send troops for an amphibious invasion and eventual takeover. Meanwhile the Brits never sent troops to France, but did have a big army at Gibralter that steadily marched north, lead by an armored division under Montgomery.

Then the German AI did something rather tricky and invaded the UK. I’m not sure what it really gained, other then pulling British air units out of northern France, but it ultimately failed. Nonetheless it did create a moment about 3 months into the war where Italian troops were at the gates of Paris, German troops were at the gates of London, and British troops (Montgomery) were at the gates of Madrid!

Then Paris fell and the French surrendered and it all went south after that, except for the Brits in Spain. Finland surrendered and my Belgians were quickly surrounded and wiped out by German and Italian troops.

Awesome.
Are people asking that stuff like this get patched out? Because wtf?

There are several issues with how things played out that are generally viewed as problematic by many players.

First, Finland joins the Allies almost all of the time, as they did in this game.

Second, France gets rolled over by Italy pretty much all the time and yet a “Vichy France” result where Germany gets the spoils is almost always the result. For example, Italy captured Paris and when France surrendered it was mostly Italian and Spanish occupied provinces. Italy got nothing in the result of the peace, Spain got only a few provinces in North Africa that they were occupying at the time the war ended, but Germany ended up with their historical occupation and control of big chunks of France.

Third, though I didn’t mention it Japan once again got kicked out of Manchuria and Korea. That’s happened in every game I’ve played that started in 1936 and has been widely reported as common in the game by others.

Fourth, the Germans seem to be able to amphibiously invade the UK without much effort. It should be pretty hard for them to do that given the strength of the British navy. A human player has no problem defending against a German attempt, but the AI apparently does.

Fifth, several other things seem to happen almost all the time. Denmark rarely, if ever, gets attacked the Germans. Same with Belgium, the Netherlands, or Luxembourg unless they join the Allies first. It’s all rather predictable, actually.

That all said, there is a lot of fun to be had and the basis for a great game is here. The issue isn’t that the above things happen, its’ that they happen way too often. They just need to tweak some of this stuff and that is what the forthcoming patch will hopefully do.

Well, among other things, Italy conquering France stretches the bounds of historical credulity to the limit, considering that even after Paris fell the Italians were barely able to advance 5 miles versus French resistance (in one case, versus 8 men).

If your response to that is “sure, but this way is AWESOME!”, then may I suggest you mod the American forces to include Wolverine and possibly Spiderman.

Woah, woah.

Wolverine and Spiderman? That way lies madness. Naturally you’d only mod in Captain America.

The idea of Britain using Spain as a launching ground for an invasion of France seems like a great idea, and I really would like to see how it’d work. It’d be tough to cross the Pyrenees, but once you did, you’d have a nice port right there, if I remember correctly from my Republican Spain game in HoI2.
I also like the wackiness of Japan joining the Allies, or even a failed Operation Sealion, but like you all say, if a human could easily defend against it, the AI should do it as well.
Italy beating pretty much anybody is insane.

The 1st Duke of Wellington beat you to the idea of Britain invading France via Spain by about 150 years :-)