Monday, May 10, 2010

Where is the Hearts of Iron franchise heading?

Among other many sore spots, this blog never covered anything at the strategic level of war. As you know, I blog about what I play, and with the many work and family obligations I don't play as much as I would want. I have toyed around with some strategic-level war games, but although I think they are great playing them would demand an amount of time I can't afford.

Past Friday I received my press pack of screenshots for Hearts of Iron III Semper Fi and while browsing them I remembered the nice level of detail that the Hearts of Iron franchise packs for land warfare. I don't think any other strategy level war game models land warfare as good as the Hearts of Iron franchise does. But take that with a grain of salt because as I said, I am mostly ignorant about this genre.

The Russian front: expansive, limitless ... Like the amount of time needed to play this game? 

Nothing quiet of the Eastern Front ... Am I supposed to remember where each unit is going?

How long would it take to manually set the stance of every unit in your OOB?

In closing, Paradox appears to be taking the Hearts of Iron franchise more deep into micro-management territory. My question: is it more always better?

Cheers,

5 comments:

Singleton Mosby said...

There will be more options for micromanagement in HOI3:Semper Fi. You can, however, leave as much as you want to the AI.
If you only like to direct the overall course of the war, set Army Goup or Theater goals. Want to play the OKH roll, you can set goals and stances for the armies.

And yes, you can also go 'all the way' and decide what to do with every single division. That's a very labor-intensive option but fun. Barbarossa will take you an incredible long time to play in that way.

Let's hope there will be fun after the first few months of this campaign and the AI does not 'fuck up'.

If you want to know where each unit is going btw, you can just draw a cadre around them and you'll see big arrows leading to their destination.

JC said...

Hi SM,

Thanks for your comment. Nice seeing you around here.

I see. That's great. So there is a way to aggregate your orders.

This game is listed for release on Q2 2010, are you beta testing it?

Cheers,

P/S: I added your blog into my blogroll. Great stuff there. Congrats!

Unknown said...

I've played around with HoI 3 a bit, but have given up due to the massive amounts of time such a game requires. With limited playtime, it's so much more fun playing lower level games and seeing things blow up than to run a whole country.

As already pointed out you can leave as much or as little as you want for the AI to handle. Not only the military forces but things like research, politics and diplomacy can be left to the AI. HoI 3 is a massive improvement over the earlier games, much more user friendly.

Erich said...

First, I'd like to say this is my favorite blog on the internet.

Secondly, one of the strengths of HOI3 is supposed to be a lot less micromanagement. As an experiment, I tried just telling OKH to take Warsaw and it obediently set everything up and captured it around the date the city historically fell.

Then I tried to do it via micromanagement and made a bloody mess of it. I suspect it's because I don't really understand how to make HOI3 work for me, but the point would be that may not be necessary.

Imagine - a WW2 strategy game with good enough friendly AI to concentrate on actual strategy? Or good enough to handle all the other fronts while you focus your operational "expertise" on the one you judge most important?

I think that's the incredibly ambitious goal of HOI3. I just don't know if it's really possible given the level of AI in wargames (which has been pretty much stagnant except for the SSG games).

My name's Erich, btw.

JC said...

Hi Johan and Erich,

Thanks for your comments and sorry for the late response.

I would be interested in running Barbarossa, micromanagement and all. :) I have to get at least one strategy war game.

Cheers,