Here we go, boyz!!! Hearts of Iron III impressions!
 

I'm so excited!

Gamersgate sent me an email informing me that I get some sprite art for the game if I pre-order. Fighting off my misgivings about picking up a paradox game at release, I click through to pre-order the game. I'm confronted with ridiculousness.

The payment provider who I am apparently locked into will not except visa or mastercard credit or debit cards from the US, so I'm screwed out of the pre-order. Gotta love it when companies flat out refuse to take your money.

If you want some info about the game (and various video clips of development versions), check it out here: hoi3.com - Hearts of Iron 3

Some observations:

• They've made the game "3d"... I have mixed feelings about it. It's mainly the map that's in 3d, I don't think unit graphics are.
  
• It looks like they've really tightened up the interface significantly.
  
• There's a much more reasonable military command and control structure in the game now.
  
• It looks like they doubled the number of territories.
  
• I think I read that the game is going to be less event-based and more emergent. That would be great, but I'm afraid the AI will blow it.

The AI will make or break this game. No different than earlier versions.

Highly anticipating this game.

I'll miss the tech teams though, I like making my tech teams various futurama characters.

And I believe they've done away with a lot of the clicking in the intelligence and diplomacy sections (thank God).

By 3d, I think they mean in the same sense that EU3 went 3d when they released it.

I don't doubt that the interface will be better, they seem to have done a decent job with that and gameplay of late in their games.. The issues I -STILL- have with their games are:

- Sometimes the games are unplayable not till the first patch, but until like the second expansion pack. I hate saying this since I have gotten so much enjoyment out of Paradox games, but they almost are a non-buy for me now until at least the first expansion pack if not the second one.

- Multiplayer in paradox games is at least 10 years behind any decent game these days. It is overly buggy and painful to run.


If they improved these two areas in this game, I imagine it will be another great game for them.

Rather would see CK2

Spent an obscene amount of time on the first two games. The majority of that was figuring out what the hell was going on, but I had a great time with it.

Still don't know how excited I am about it though. I find myself having a lot less patience with games, and the last couple Paradox games have disappointed me.

I will most likely pick it up though. I'm a sucker for these grand strategic games where I can wreak havoc with altering history. Some of the best games I played in the previous ones were as South American countries.

+1

+2, or even Vicky 2.

It sounds like you can delegate some stuff to the AI in this, I liked HOI2 but it was hard for me to manage air/land/sea all at once.

Sounds like to me that you have much tighter control on patrol areas for aircraft and I think for naval units. Instead of a certain region to patrol you can choose specific areas I believe.

I'll pick it up once the first patch comes out to fix the glaring issues with the release version (at least, that's what I've done with the first two iterations).

+3

I wait about 2 years before I buy games from Paradox and the Total War series. By then the "Gold" or "Complete" version of the game is out. Most of the issues have been fixed and there are great mods available. I have not even picked up EU3 yet.

But I can not wait to play this game in 2 years. :D

I'm a smart guy. I will never figure out why the hell Paradox games leave me cold. But I've learned the lesson well enough to not pick this up.

Actually what I enjoy more than the HoI games themselves are the AARs (think dynasty report) that the guys over at the Paradox board put out there. There are some guys over there with serious writing skills and imaginations.

I enjoy reading the AARs but I enjoy the ones that focus more on their gameplay and strategies then the one who write brilliantly. I realize I am in the minority on that, but I find the AARs that i truly enjoy to be rare because I feel too many have more fluff then content for me.

Completely agree and it seems that dynasties have evolved over time to rely more and more on these narrative hooks. I've always been of the mind if I want to read something like that I will read a book instead. I want to read about game mechanics and how people approach the game.

Obviously people enjoy writing that way more and it must help them be immersed, so more power to them. I do have a hard time reading them though.

See I'm exactly the opposite. I much prefer the ones with some narrative behind them, especially once the game has been around for a while and the mechanics have become familiar. To each their own I guess.

my existing laptop lags bad in the TW: Empire demo. I can't wait till I get a new laptop that blazes and can run the hell out of it and by then it should be patched and modded and playable.

Looks like the demo is out

Demo mirror links - Paradox Interactive Forums

+4

That said, I can understand it. HoI and EU are the cash cows for Paradox. CK and Vicky don't make nearly as much money, unfortunately.

Looks like I'm one of the few on FOFC that prefers EU to CK and Vicky.

EU is really the only one I play regularly and I have bought most of them.

I still play EU3 weekly with Barkeep (when he isn't out touring the world).

Count me in the even odder camp who prefers HoI to any of the other series, although EU would be 2nd and I sunk a ton of time into the first two of those.

I've been following Troy Goodfellow's twitter as he has been playing the game for review and sharing some general thoughts. It sounds like a Paradox release. Lots of AI issues and some bugs that are really hampering the game.

Might be one I wait for a sale on in a few months.

It goes HoI then EU for me. I played the mess out of EU I, then I got HoI and haven't really gotten back into EU (I have both EU II and III now). I'm very interested in HoI III, but I'll probably do like I normally do with their games and wait til it hits the Half Price Books for like 8 bucks. I tend to get too emotionally involved if I buy it on release then have to wait for the patches to make it really playable.

Just visited Paradox forums to read the reactions to the demo and it seems that HOI3 will need a few patches before it is playable enough. Not a surprise sadly.

yeah, I haven't had time to get the demo yet, but I had no intentions on buying this until at least the first expansion pack if not later. Until I see a Paradox game that is playable before the first expansion pack, I will continue to do that. Just to clarify however, I almost always end up buying their games, just wait and let them finish getting the bugs out before I do.

I am guessing perhaps this time next year I will be considering it.

The demo setup is kinda whack, it's 1939 but Germany has WWI tech in a number of areas, especially the industrial technologies.

On my first run through the demo I decided to act ahistorical and see what would happen if Germany invaded Belgium and Poland at the same time as opposed to waiting for the Poles to fall and then focusing on Western Europe. In the east I just let the AI handle that theater, Danzig was taken quickly, Warsaw took about a month and after almost two months Germany had eaten half of Poland.

In the east my guys rolled through Luxembourg and went a few provinces into Belgium but after the Dutch mobilized their army the AI (again I let the AI handle this theater but I did detach a several divisions to take a little control in some areas) decided that the Dutch-German border needed to be protected. This took needed troops away from the French-German border and I hate to even post this but the French broke through my lines and got halfway to Munich before some of the troops I brought over from Poland arrived :D

But what I did was more for fun, I just wanted to see some things happen before four months were over even if my strategy was a bit stupid. I wound up stopping just before November, I'll try using Germany more historically next time.

Italy was kicking France's butt, which seems to be the rule going by other people's experiences on the Paradox forums, in several pictures posted Italy was taking all of what would become Vichy France. I didn't bother with naval combat at all (I want to slowly get the hang of this, there's a lot more to keep track of than EU) so there wasn't any interaction with the British except for my fighters vs. their bombers.

The game also runs at an inconsistent speed for me, sometimes the hours will go away by the second, other times each hour is taking 5-8 seconds. EU3 doesn't run so hot on my laptop either despite being comfortably above the required specs. I'm having trouble deciding air on whether to get the game asap, after the first patch, or after the first expansion pack. I'll be lurking over on the Paradox forums for the next week to see how much others are enjoying the game.

Most useless tutorial ever? I think so. It has the Paradox special of being completely non-interactive and they one upped themselves by having Hitler be your instructor. It is all over the top at trying to be funny and fails miserably. He shoots himself at the end of the tutorial. Not sure what else to say about that.

The map has some really odd geographical things going on. I suppose it has something to do with balance but the placement of New York and Philadelphia is completely out of whack. Lots of weird things going on there.

I do really like the new command structure though. Being able to macro the game a bit more and set objectives basically and have the AI take more control of getting it done. Makes it feel more like you're shaping the war and not an all powerful being.

I like how that extends to fronts and you can be in charge of the Eastern front and let the AI handle things on the West for instance. These are neat features.

The new research model is really neat in theory but overwhelming at first glance. It is almost incomprehensible to look at the screen. I really like what I've heard on the interdependency of the techs and how production helps research.

Didn't spend much time with it though, and think I will still wait a while. It has potential though, but a pretty steep learning curve even for those familiar with the series.

I just did another demo game, again with ze Germans. Poland collapsed after a month and a half and the game automatically had some Molotov-Ribbenthorpe Pact like event to split Poland between Germany and USSR.

After that I tried shifting a bunch of those troops over to the West but after a week or two realized that I was only sending the HQ units themselves and not the divisions under their command, so that slowed down my response time some. Once I got more guys in the western theater I DOW'd Belgium and Luxembourg, took most of those two countries and was just about to turn SW for Paris before time ran out.

After reading about the effectiveness of diplomacy I tried influencing several nations towards the Axis and it worked far too well. Hungary joined the Axis historically but I was also able to recruit Portugal and Spain a month into the demo. Spain immediately began ripping through France's sparsely defended Southern border and made it halfway to the English Channel before the demo ran out of time. Italy also took a few provinces in SE France but not nearly as many as my last game.

This game is addictive.

You're making this up, right?

Nope. They don't refer to Hitler by name but it's pretty clear: bad mustache, bad paintings, angry rants, hates the communists, hates the democracies.

But the worst part of the tutorial is not being taught how to play by Hitler, or the spelling mistakes, it's that it does nothing to introduce the player to the new options for having the AI manage parts of the military or how to take back control from the AI.

I wish I was.

I will clarify a bit though. It is all in text, and is incredibly tongue in cheek. They are mocking him pretty thoroughly.

I believe they also never actually say it is Hitler, but it is pretty blatant. The usual cracks about the moustache, painting, and all that jazz.

They definitely put more thought into the Hitler jokes portion of the tutorial than they did on actual usefulness.

Bah, i'm so weak. I have purchased it and I'm downloading it right now from gamersgate.

Blazers are looking pretty weak too. :D

I'm downloading it from gamersgate. Stayed up late last night to start the download immediately upon release. I wake up this morning to see the download halfway done and a big ol' error message on my screen. It did let me resume the download, though. Why the hell couldn't it have dealt with the error and resumed itself? Gah. The download is going slow enough (sub 50 kb/s on a FIOS connection) as it is.

Let me know what you all think as well. I was feeling weak myself and was tempted to go ahead and buy it when I remembered how little I have actually played EU:Rome and the waste of money that was, so had enough strength to hold off for now.. :)

How well do mods work with Steam games? Any trouble at all?

On the Paradox forums people are saying the downloads are much faster on Steam than Gamersgate.

The reason i ended choosing gamersgate even being an steam usual customer is to avoid troubles with mods and specially because patches are released immediately for GG and it could be a few days for steam. Also i'm not sure if beta patches work with steam, you must wait for them to release the official ones, and paradox games are known for requiring a ton of patches.

I wound up buying it via Gamersgate for a lot of these reasons, plus on Steam some people were having problems getting their "CD key" to download the strategy guide and play MP.

My speed is slow and fluctuating, it will be 3-9 hours from now before I'm playing.

W00t! Just got home from work and I see the game downloaded!

i downloaded the demo, but apparently it's corrupt.

So, uh, I won't be buying the game at work tomorrow as I had planned on doing.

Same thing happened to me. We probably downloaded it from the same site and same mirror and that mirror had bunk files.

I've got the game installed but haven't booted it yet. I may play some tomorrow.

Three different mirrors, three corrupt demos.

Screw it.

Unfortunately this game is a typical paradox release. I have to recommend waiting on a few patches before you buy.

The game speed just CRAWLS for me and apparently a lot of people on Paradox's forums.

I also have a lot of nit-picky things to say about the interface as well.

As it stands this game is a step forward in the series and a step back with the other foot.

I'm re-installing HoI2 + expansions for the time being.

Do you have the patch installed? It's said it helps a lot with the game speed.

I couldn't play it yesterday as had alot of work to do, but i'm just installing it and will report back.

Yes I do.

And here's a post by one of the devs

So at least they recognize the problems many players are having. This game has a lot of potential but at the moment it's almost unplayable for me.

I downloaded new video card drivers and adjusted its settings for performance instead of quality, that helped a little bit but it's still taking 15-30 seconds for a day to go by most of the time, every now and then it gets even worse. I played a for a few hours and only made it to August 1936.

Soooo...what's the latest on HOI3? Still unplayable?