Hmmm....HOI3, yes, I own, but don't play, but should I?

[I WUB PUGS]

I probably put in around 1000+hours into HOI1 and another 1000+ hours into HOI2. I was a huge fan of the Stony Road to War mod for HOI2 and the Complete SR for HOI1.

I've played all of the EU titles and a bit of Vicky 1 and 2.

I bought HOI3 a while ago but haven't really put much time into it, in fact I bought it for like $30 and played like 20 mins and just put it aside and never went back to it. I'm fairly busy, and I just bought CK2 and Wargame: European Escalation, and I'm locked in an EU3 MP game on Sundays.

What I'm wondering is from your viewpoint (if you have as long a Paradox history as I do), is HOI3 really worth it to put time into? Is there a best faction to start with? USA was always great for beginners as I recall from HOI 1 and 2.

[TheBromgrev]

Well, it depends. The HOI3 modding scene is fairly vacant when compared to HOI2 and its derivatives. That has a lot to do with the fact the game engine changed and the vast majority of HOI2 modders are too lazy to figure it out. The CORE team comes to mind here, as they whine, , and moan about certain commands not being available anymore yet there are ways to do what they want; they just don't want to take the time to learn it.

With that in mind there are only a handful of mature major mods for HOI3 and its SF expansion, and that list dwindles for the FtM expansion. ICE is probably the most popular mod for HOI3 and SF since it adds tons of new units, events, and techs and has no AI changes and is a very strictly historical mod, but its creator ditched the mod and is now making DLC for the base game and the new team has gone nowhere with it. The Historical Plausibility Project is focused on AI improvements and making the game be less sandbox but not strictly historical. It has stable HOI3 and SF versions out, is almost done porting over to the FtM expansion, and several features of it are in the SF and FtM expansions. August Storm is in between ICE and the HPP and is more for multiplayer games. It also has more of a post WW2 focus and has a stable version out for SF and FtM. Realistic Unit Progression Mod is a new one that aims for strict historical unit production and research and is only for the FtM expansion. There are various other mini-mods, like Cromos's collection of random stuff you can read about in this forum.

The base game isn't too bad now, and will get better after the Community Map Project is included in the upcoming patch. The naval AI still does some stupid things, if it does anything at all, and there are absolutely no post-war border adjustment events in the base game. The supply system before the expansions was complete garbage, but it's been fixed in the latest expansion. I wouldn't recommend playing the base game without the expansions. SF added the extremely useful ability to create new supply convoys and FtM added a lot of good stuff, like wargoals, coups (this came from the HPP mod), battlescenarios like what HOI2 had, fixed the naval supply bug (supplies always get shipped out even if they aren't needed, creating supply black holes in certain areas), and the ability to select only a subset of units out of a big list by holding the shift key.

Overall HOI3 is not HOI2, and that's important to keep in mind. The only similarities they have is the setting, resource types, and unit types. The tech tree is different, units have component techs they use to determine what model they are, events happen at random unless the event writer knows how to make them fire on a specific date, IC doesn't work the same way, the supply system is new, and the military AI is not moddable. The HQ hierarchy is quite nice once you get used to it and the smaller province sizes and overall better map (though it's still crap until the CMP is added) make it so I can't go back to HOI2. I'd recommend giving it a try as Germany using the 1939 start and putting everything but the theater HQs on AI control, so you won't be overwhelmed by all the new features and can see what the AI does, which will give you a good idea of what to do and what to not do. Once you get the hang of things slowly turn off AI control of one tab at a time. The tutorial is broken so don't bother with it. If you end up liking it, then I would seriously recommend getting both expansions if you don't have them, as they add tons of improvements.

There's also a very good Germany tutorial in the official HOI3 AAR forum that goes in-depth as to how the game works. Here's a link to it: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...torial-Take-2. There are a lot of other good AARs in there that show how the game and the mods work, so I'd recommend browsing through them to get a feel for what was changed. Most of the AARs are for the various base game iterations, but for the ones showing off mods the HPP is by-far the most popular mod for AARs. It has more active and finished AARs than all other mods combined.

[I WUB PUGS]

Thanks for the info, I've got up to Semper Fi I believe since it came packaged. I'll see if I can get some time for it here this week.

+ rep!

[Poach]

A few of us in the EU3 group have HoI3, we could do some casual MP games on it if you found you enjoyed it. We have some hosting issues atm (between Hil and I) but efforts to fix it are lacklustre because its just the two of us and we have EU3 anyway, but if we got more we could see what we could do.