I am just now getting into this game series. I went through the tutorial, which considering the options, is pretty limited. I would have liked more cause and effect type stuff.
I still couldnt figure out why the tutorial told me to launch an attack over a river with the support coming from a province that had less of a penalty against the attacker. I would think its the other way around, it would be cool if the tutorial had given more examples of why I was losing I mean.
Anyway, with the tutorial over I tried playing the first campaign with France, and I was stuck in the middle east with a navy, like 5 divisions of infantry and a small bomber force. Im pretty green but it seemed like most of the action wasnt happening there. It wasnt long before I was trying to invade italy with my one fleet.
That didnt end well, but aside from moving troops into africa to help support the british movements I couldnt really get a grasp of what was going on.
So is there a nation that is sorta the n00b nation? Good starting point? Im guessing it might be germany but I was hoping for an allied nation to start with.
The US and USSR are the easiest countries. With the US, you’re essentially never under threat(Japanese don’t launch invasions of the mainland), so you can basically screw around and do whatever. Especially if you turn it communist in 1936 by jacking up dissent.
You can pick a specific year? I saw the campaigns but they covered ranges. Russia DOES seem like a pretty sound choice, I really just need to get the research and production stuff down to pure reflex so I can react.
I know you can adjust game speed and thats fine, but I assume the game gets hard in parts and right now I am fresh outta boot camp :)
What is messed up about the Doomsday scenario? I heard the old HoI 2 stuff was in Doomsday so thats why I got it, but I don’t actually know much about the Doomsday portion.
Doomsday includes all of HoI2, but lets you play past 1950 with expanded tech trees. It also includes one new scenario, the Doomsday scenario, that kicks off in 1945 with a US nuking of Moscow.
When it comes to best nation to start with, I’d say Germany instead of Russia or the US. With Germany you see action fairly quickly, so you don’t have to wait around for someone to declare war on you, and German troops are the best in the game for a long time so you can expect to win against even numbers of troops. With Russia you’ll have a hard time in every battle against Germany as their troops are just so much better than yours. Instead of rapid action you’ll be forced into long grinding battles to wear down the enemy.
Germany also has the advantage for the beginner in that you don’t have to mess about with fleets. You can focus on the land war.
Also, once you have your feet wet and want a bit more of a challenge (and an AI that actually garrisons it’s provinces properly against invasion) try the Determined AI Mod.
Makes the major powers play more like a human would, and makes Japan mount a credible offense.
If you’re fascist/communist, sure! You can declare war on anyone you like. If you play a democracy though, you have to take public opinion into consideration. In the game that’s abstracted with the policy sliders and the belligerence rating.
You have policy sliders that determine your nations political outlook. One of them is Interventionism-Isolationism. That slider has to be on the interventionism side to be able to declare war at all. But declaring war as a democracy can only be done against agressive nations. To keep track of which nations have been agressive, every country has a belligerism score. It’s on the diplomacy screen. How far towards the interventionist side you are determines how much belligerence a country has to have before you can declare war on it.
Keep in mind you can only move one of the sliders a single step every year. There are also scripted events that can move them, but you have little control over them.
The AI is more aggressive, doesn’t collapse in the face of a two-front war, builds better mixes of troops, has it’s tech tree path optimised to go after techs humans tend to value, is less prone to supply issues and some other stuff. It doesn’t change when and why nations declare war, but when they are at war their troops tend to act better.
But it’s not something you should attempt on your first playthrough.
If you feel overwhelmed you can try starting with Finland or Poland. Take P. in 39 and try to better their historical performance. Finland has the Winter War with the Soviets.
Does it do it through cheating, or just because it is a better AI? I guess I don’t get why I would want to start with a slightly incompetent AI when there is a better more realistic one available. Can you scale down the difficulty of that more realistic AI?
Sort of. The difficulty level in HOI2 acts as a cheat mode. At lower levels you gain free industry. At higher levels you get industry penalties.
I generally play with the DAIM mod but it does has some impact. For example, AI Japan will almost always absorb AI China by 1938, which makes Japan a tougher opponent (the UK has to keep a lot of troops in India to compensate, for example). Playing as Russia I’ve seen the AI UK actually pull off a successful amphibious invasion of France, which never happens with the supplied AI.
At any rate the differences are less with later patches. The AI’s been much improved over the past year or so and Doomsday improved it further. Still, it finds it difficult to do amphibious invasions which basically screws Japan over.
The AI in HoI2 is just a bunch of scripted states, linked together.
The reason why you shouldn’t start with it is that if you’re new to HoI2 you’ll have your hands full just figuring out how the game works. There is a lot of things to learn, and before you work it all out the new AI scripting is probably wasted.
Also, I think I’ve hit a bug or two in it, where some AI nations don’t reinforce their troops, but that can be hard to spot.
My very first game of HOI, I started early and played Italy, thinking I could get some “practice” in Ethiopia for the later larger war. Which worked well. You’ll have some fleets to start and get some practice using them to move troops, and support invasions and the like without a lot of pressure too. I went ahistorical later. I went with the Mussolini’s rebuild-the-Roman-Empire meme and also didn’t side with Germany (allowing me to grab the Balkans from them to boot) and came pretty close. Couldn’t get France before time was up because of public opinion though. It was probably the most fun I had with HOI.
How effective are assassinations? What are the conditions needed to raise the chance rating? Political/Social unrest? Lots of spies? Manipulating the govt for military action and funding aside, can a lot be accomplished with diplomacy?
