[HoI3] Hearts of Iron III Demo

[Lysander13]

So how many of you TWC'ers have given it a try?
I've been messing around as Britain the last few hours and this title seems like it's going to be pretty bad ass as far as grand strategy games go. It's early going obviously but i don't really have any major gripes yet. If i had to come up with something... I would say the UI seems a bit clunkier so to speak but i'm not really labeling this as a bad thing yet. Just gonna take a bit getting use to i think. The whole ordering of units and the command structure feature confuses me at times. But again i think it's just something new and it'll just take some getting use to. The only thing i will chalk up in the negative column are the tutorials. Not really a big deal as far as i'm concerned and I would imagine for HOI Vets this is a who cares feature but if your a noob to the HOI series....Good luck trying to figure out how to play this game with those tutorials.

For those who've tried the demo.... What do you guys think?

[Kanaric]

i preordered the game so i will wait for that to play, extremely exited at this point. I am going to go with russia pre war to rig elections.

[hellheaven1987]

Where?? Where is the demo??

[Cougar109]

Gave Germany two tries and France one. Overall looks like it's going to be a great game, only things I can pick at right now is the UI just seems a little messier and inefficient then it should be though in reality with another 5 hours of game play under my belt that wont be an issue anymore. The other thing is the Theater AI seems like it could use a little more work but I haven't had anything game breaking come out of it yet. Tutorials as you said are terrible, luckily I didn't really need them. Also not seeing any other nations ministers doesn't really seem to make a whole lot of sense.

As for the games I've played, the AI has actually been fairly brutal. Both tries with Germany the British launched successful naval invasions on my coastal provinces taking a few pieces of land before I drove them back into the sea. Poland actually put up quite a bit of resistance and it took about 5 times as long to break them as it did in HoI 2. When I played France I was in the process of getting completely rolled between Germany and amazingly Italy who just stormed through my Southern provinces which really weakened me for a full on German assault. In the 4 months of game time I lost nearly half my provinces as France. Can't wait for the full game to come out on Friday.

@HellHeaven: Take your pick.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...d.php?t=415797

[Town Watch]

I didn't like the look of the interface, feels extremely clunky. Some pointers.

-tutorials sucked, I never checked developer previews on how the air war works in HoI3 so I eventually gave up on using my airforce at all in the demo.

-you can't use the enter key to close those goddamn pop ups, yes you gotta always click e.g. mission type and settings for aircraft, and mouseclick the affirmative button.

-you dont see where your divisions are when you click-and-drag a whole bunch of divs, it just shows a list of divisions ( you cant even scroll all the way down I presume, lets say if you had to select the whole red army for example, for strategic deployment and disbanding purposes). NOOoo you cant do that, you have to search through your whole command structure to find where everything is.

-Thank god you still can re organize things in a better and proper way when you start a normal grand campaign though.

-map has lots of faults in it, go to the lower right corner, there's the province search button, search for stalingrad for example.

[Kanaric]

paradox tutorials always sucked

[vizi]

Tutorials? Manuals? What are these things?

I will just buy the game when it comes out. At some point.

[hellheaven1987]

Try the demo for half hour, my first impression:

1. Overly complicated structure, especially research and political part; I have no idea what those means even after looking them for half of hours.

2. Bad military organization. It seems now you cannot group a division more than 4 brigades, and for unknown reason I find HQ more than actual combat units (LOL). Divisions also cannot merge together into bigger unit and there is no time showing when your units would reach its destination.

3. Bad map view.

Summary: I can see Paradox tries to paint HoI series not just a war game by including deep economical and research system, but the overly complicated system and too much restrictions make the game lost its origianl feature.

Score: 6.5/10

Edit: For unknown reason I feel it is like Rome without patch.

[Cougar109]

You might want to give the manual a go Hellheaven because the way you run the military in HoI 3 is through those HQ divisions. You can't group brigades anymore as you could in HoI 2 or EU 3, in stead you group them into divisions and give them an objective. Difficult for me to explain but you really have to read through the manual for this game if you haven't been following it.

[hellheaven1987]

You might want to give the manual a go Hellheaven because the way you run the military in HoI 3 is through those HQ divisions. You can't group brigades anymore as you could in HoI 2 or EU 3, in stead you group them into divisions and give them an objective. Difficult for me to explain but you really have to read through the manual for this game if you haven't been following it.

I notice that, but I want a division of 5 brigades!!! Damned!! Why I cannot add one more brigade into a division??

And I also notice that a Marshal cannot command a division - great, now no one bother to promote their generals.

[Celsius]

NO! Damn this demo for being too large to download

[Yoda Twin]

a lot pf people are complaining about non aggressive AI (especially if you give HQ AI command) over at the paradox forums. Looks worrying.

[Cougar109]

I notice that, but I want a division of 5 brigades!!! Damned!! Why I cannot add one more brigade into a division??

And I also notice that a Marshal cannot command a division - great, now no one bother to promote their generals.

Field Marshall's are used when you want to command an entire theater and the ladder goes down for each rank. Theater -> Army Group -> Army -> Corp is the order of the command structure, Field Marshall at the top and it works it's way down.

As far as the max brigade in a division, that'll be easily modded I'm sure. Personally I love the new military system for the game, the reason it appears like crap at the start is because you're basically thrown into a cluster starting a game in 1936 gives you the opportunity to set yourself up to the point where you feel comfortable and strong before all hell breaks loose.

a lot pf people are complaining about non aggressive AI (especially if you give HQ AI command) over at the paradox forums. Looks worrying.

I think that has more with people having no clue how the new system works then with the actual AI along with the extremely unbalanced start for some of the factions. I've been hanging around the PI forums a lot today and most of the complaints have been more user related then actual AI weakness. As I said the British actually launched several naval invasions on me as Germany and France while never breaking far was always trying to push me back from the line, Italy was freakishly aggressive to the point where they may have to actually be toned down a bit, and Poland did a decent job of making the conquest of their nation a slow and tedious process. Obviously in some areas I think the AI can use a bit of touch up but toss this game on Very Hard and it'll give you one hell of a run.

[Yoda Twin]

yea your probably right. Yes its ready in 10 minutes woot.

[Battletoads]

I got the demo but haven't gotten really far due to bad performance.

I liked HOI 2 units better and there is way to many provinces.
Good things is the tech tree is very nice and the leadership stuff.

I got very exicted when I heard ride of the valkyries during loading but they didn't use the full song.

[hellheaven1987]

Field Marshall's are used when you want to command an entire theater and the ladder goes down for each rank. Theater -> Army Group -> Army -> Corp is the order of the command structure, Field Marshall at the top and it works it's way down.

The fact is that Field Marshall can command lower rank unit in reality, as many facts prove. Hence the idea that a Field Marshall cannot command a lower rank unit in game makes me quite surprised.

[Henry X]

how large is the demo?

[Lysander13]

Field Marshall's are used when you want to command an entire theater and the ladder goes down for each rank. Theater -> Army Group -> Army -> Corp is the order of the command structure, Field Marshall at the top and it works it's way down.

As far as the max brigade in a division, that'll be easily modded I'm sure. Personally I love the new military system for the game, the reason it appears like crap at the start is because you're basically thrown into a cluster starting a game in 1936 gives you the opportunity to set yourself up to the point where you feel comfortable and strong before all hell breaks loose.

Exactly right. At first i was kind of confused with the command structure feature but now i'm getting the hang of it and i'm with you there. I'm loving the new military system as well. It just all seems a bit daunting from the demo because you are thrown into one big mess without really knowing how the systems work. It'll be alot different when your the one setting everything up from the beginning.

Loving the tech trees...
Law System
Occupation Settings
Intelligence

This game is going to be completely bad ass can't wait for release day. Funny enough however, i just noticed the whole not being able to see ministers in other countries thing.... That i have to say i find a bit annoying. I'm just not clear on what the logic there is. So let me see if i've got this right.... I'm the Head of State of Germany.....and to find out who POTUS is..... i have to send a spy??

@ Henry X
About 615 MB IIRC

[Henry X]

There's no way I'll be able to download it ath the moment then. I'lll have to wait until I get back home and have a high-speed internet again.

[Kanaric]

People got to realize that this game is going to have a large learning curve. HOI2 and Victoria took me a long while to REALLY learn how to play, expect this game to be the same even if you were an HOI2 expert.