We really want to make hoi4 feel streamlined and easier to get into…
Judging from the paradox forums, you have a significant portion of fanbase who are about ready to faint when they hear the word ‘streamlined’.
I don’t mind, but it depends on what’s being streamlined.
Hum if streamline = dumbed down than I am not thrilled. If Streamline means make a competent AI so I don’t have to micromanage airwing missions than I’m all for it.
I’m pretty confident that Paradox knows their fan base and understands that dumbing down the game isn’t going to make many happy. Usually I cringe when I hear a dev talk about streamlining, as it usually is a euphemism for removing features or limiting choices. In this case, though, I think the HOI3 series could be improved by streamlining without losing it’s complexity. I thought they did a pretty good job doing that with EU4. PDS has had a mantra lately of “Complexity without being complicated” and I think that’s a good goal to work towards. You can have complex but accessible games, as long as it’s designed and presented well.
Hoi 3 session for me typically starts with about an hour of redoing the German order of battle, or any other nation that has lots of units to begin with. After that, i make goals and set tech according to what I need in the field, it a -LOT- to keep track over, but the game for me never was as complex as Victoria which I thought was a beast when it came to knowing what the heck was going on.
There are several things they can do here that I don’t think will hurt the experience. I don’t have patience for grogs who think complex in itself is a goal, that just destroys any enjoyment given. I’ve played all 3 HOI’s now, and the first one was almost axis and allies like simple compared to what Hoi 3 is, and Hoi 2 didn’t have enough provinces to simulate the great war effectively and was bordering stuck at advanced axis and allies.
The 3rd one struck a note when they finally broke out of the box and just gave us the bloody war served without any pandering, it was glorious but also a -lot- of work needed to get it working.
We shall see what they pull out of the hat, but I guarantee you guys, this time it will be working out of the box, and it probably will be glorious, and I probably will feel sad that when I had my 8 man MP group, we only had HOI 1…
This. If I had one wish for HOI 4 it would be for some way to make it easier to label, organize and streamline the process redoing the German OOB. It’s a tedious, time consuming exercise even before starting to play the game. I would think it would be possible to have a spreadsheet format or something of that nature where you can do all that stuff and then deploy the division and air wings to where you want them to start, at least in the 1936 campaign.
I agree Kevin. I like the direction Paradox took with EU4 and it it ends up like EU4 I’ll be happy. IIRC, HOI2 had an even more complicated R&D system than HOI3. At first I was a bit put off by the simpler R&D, but the current R&D system in HOI3 is still very deep and provides plenty of options. They potentially good simplify it even more. Antitank guns, ammo, tank armor, tank engines, tank reliability. But I would not be ok with a generic tank R&D or even a light, medium, heavy R&D.
I recently started playing Stardock’s Fallen Enchantress. To me one of the coolest feature was designing your own troops, because it let you take advantage of racial characteristic. The expansion/ver 2 of Fallen Enchantress,Legendary Heros. Eliminated weight as design element. This made designing troops far less interesting. The rest of the game was better, but it still felt like 2 steps forward one step back.
I’d like it if the game gave you a bunch of ‘points’ on game start to buy military units and structure/deploy them how you would like. Would save the trouble of renaming and modifying everything already there. Of course, amount of ‘points’ would vary by the size of the country.
HOI3 lets you do exactly this. :) It was added in one of the expansions.
Which expansion was that, don’t think I’ve played that one, and I thought I had em all
The last one, Their Finest Hour.
A new custom game mode for single and multiplayer where you start with a clean slate and can instantly produce units, research technologies and affect political alignment, speeding up the early years for those who would like to jump straight into the action.
Each nation is given a number of points to work with in diplomacy, production, and technology. The number of points is different for each nation, i.e. the USSR gets far more points to work with than Romania. I won’t play the game without this feature anymore, as I can completely customize my start and have no need to rearrange OOB.
Oh goodie. Might revisit then. Thanks for the tip.
Hey Johan, very excited for this. Please don’t strip the game down too far. Something along the lines of what we have the Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis IV would be great. Don’t forget about a useable interface at high resolutions like 2560x1600 or 4k.
I’m also wondering if there might be a way to incorporate a second screen - much like a lot of the games on the consoles are doing now with utilizing the Ipad. I think this would be a great way to convey pertinent information (ie battles, alerts, spreadsheet info, etc)without clogging up the computer screen. How cool would it be to have an Ipad set up next to the computer screen? Kind of like a command post. Just dreaming…
Very nice preview article at Strategy Informer.
I am very excited about this part:
…you don’t have ‘Light’ ‘Medium’ etc… tanks anymore, you have specific chassis and you tell your factories to build pools of different military hardware. As an example, you can set a region to build Sherman Tanks, and it takes into account all the relevant factors and then tells you how many you can produce in a week. If, for example, a region was able to produce six tanks those will go into the tank pool, and then you create your tank regiments and divisions from that pool, and those regiments will use Shermans…
That almost exactly how I would make my ‘dream’ version of HoI, if you know, I ran a development studio. Lots of encouraging news in that article.
I like it—not only does it feel more correct, it also makes lend-lease a lot more sensible than it was in previous HoI incarnations.
The preview was full of all sorts of awesome. The only bad news for me is the 2015 release date, I don’t want to wait a whole year!
Another preview article contains some nice tidbits.
You see, it’s important to draw up war plans because units get bonuses if they have time to reach their jump-off points and prepare for the attack. You are weaker if you order units around at a whim, so you plan and prepare for operations.
But plans can be stolen.
That’s very elegant!
I was really hoping for Victoria 3 to be announced, but that preview definitely makes HoI4 sound promising.