Hello DH community!
As a self-introduction, I’m the lucky guy who happened to be entrusted by DH devs to give you some feedback.
Hopefully, this post could address your concerns about DH and shed some light into the in-depth information about the features in game.
First, let’s me list some constraints:
1. I have only played the game for about 25 hours, and only with Germany, China in 1914 scenario and Germany, Italy in 1936 grand campaign
2. The game is still in developed state, so, all my opinions could be subjected to changes by the devs
3. This is my first time writing the preview like this, so forgive me if I make any mistakes
4. Due to being engrossed by the game, I actually forget to take screenshots, which I can not show all of you, sorry about that!
5. All the version of HOI mentioned and this game, were played at normal-normal.
Ok, now all the trivial stuffs has finished, let’s me go into the main points
1.What is the most important features that you want to change, if you could, to improve the playing experiences in HOI 2, ARMA+DOOMSDAY, and even AOD? The AI, of course!
Then you should be please to know that, the AI in DH, in my opinions, is great! Compare to WIF( one of mods of HOI 2 which has impressive AI), the AI in DH has an upper-hand.
The AI isn’t passive anymore. It knows how to deal with you, and how to deal with others, and as the result, sometimes, you must feel exciting about the way they respond to your attacks or decisions. Let’s have an example, the second game when I played hands-off as Germany in 1914, the Aus-Hun created, quite a great deal for Russia, Serbia and even France or Italy, even without my help or intervention. It knows how to encircle, how to choose terrain to attack, and how to delay the enemy’s armies to achieve victory. Another example could be France as its armies will now try attack your provinces, those which are protected by light force. And there is UK, it knows how to move its army to France’s soil to conduct its own invasion, and protects the coast of the nation by using appropriate naval force.
In 1936 campaign, while I played as Germany, and try to take control of NatSpain forces in the war, the RepSpain army create quite a headache for me. Good combination between Air and Ground Units, with the use of amphibious assault in some provinces to try encircle and cut off my force.
But the AI isn’t only good at military jobs. It also does its jobs in intelligent and production sector properly. The AI knows how to steal your bluesprints, delay your production queue, or sabotage your research, or even create smear campaign to increase your partisan level. These things happened regularly (read: if you have never thought about intelligent before, now, it is a good time to practice them before the game come out). On the other hand, if you let AI handle the task for you, you can rest assure without worrying about those things (as in you only need to set up the threshold percentage or frequency that the AI will automatically attempt intelligent operations).
Move to the production sector. I must say, I’m impress with it. Personally, I prefer to control everything myself, but for those of you who want to concentrate in military, the AI is your safe bet and trusted partner. The efficiency of trading that AI controls is quite high, as it can help you identify which resources is in the direst situation, which resources that you can trade out significantly to gain the one that you need the most. Moreover, if you let the AI controls the sliders of distributing IC into tasks, you can also find the effectiveness adequate. In one of my game, I let the AI did everything for me, from production to trading, to convoy and intelligence, and the competence was more than enough to help I win the war focusing only on military stuff. Further more, you can let the AI handles the “support operation” for your allies ( for instance: giving and receiving bluesprints, resources,…).
While there is no advance slider as in AOD, as some of you always asked for in the forum, the adequacy in other sectors the AI can control could make up for it. And with the new system for intelligence and production, etc….it’s no fun anymore letting the AI control everything for you.
Nonetheless, I would like to have the ability to automatically increase relationship points with a specifically nations. As I always find it is too much tedious to do them manually.
If you are always following the DD, you find that the manpower and mobilization system in DH is quite new. In peace time, the amount only increase slightly, in war time, you have event to decide how much manpower you want to have in your pool, of course, for the appropriate price. And before you ask, the price is high. This demands you somehow understand the situation, draw the best conclusion while consider the advantage and disadvantage of your decision, regards the problem.
To address the problem that probably is the most confusing, the maximum cap of resources. To be fair, the resources have no caps. More like, they are scale. You can increase the resources over the threshold level, but that requires a lot, more than normal. But, apparently, there is also no reason to increase them more than necessity, because as I stated above, with the help of AI-controlling trading, gaining a suitable resources level for the war, or even during the war is not too difficult.
For the map, in DH, the distance between two provinces is the real one, as far in the game as it is in reality and this is the same when apply to 2 sea sectors. With this new features, naval warfare becomes more and more realistic, as in you must maneuver your ships so that they can achieve the goals of the operation while taking the smallest amount of resources ( as in max cap of oil), in addition, you must position your ship patrol routes, ASW routes etc… to cover the large sea provinces. This, is the same for ground warfare, as now you must plan the routes of the army first, before letting them advance straight to the enemy territory. Moreover, there is new terrains everywhere, which makes the game fresher and give more surprise than all of its counterpart. Last but not least, the resources now scatter around the world, and with scarcer amount than in any other version, so you can hardly see USA or SU spam oil or rare anymore. With the max cap level, now countries are more likely need to be tactical in the way of handling resources, both Allied and Axis, let alone Communist. However, this creates a flaw: it’s quite hard to adjust your old and new strategy at first, at least for those who play HoI for a long time (for me, at least).
What’s next? Now, if you want to build things, such as army, ships, air planes, or even construction stuffs as IC, infrastructure, etc… you must calculate hard and carefully. As the time and the resources needed to build , and support (as in TC) one unit (of all kinds) aren’t just a small amount anymore, it’s quite a lot. Personally, I think it’s quite fun playing HOI games with this features, as the AI can not spam army or IC anymore ( the same apply for human players, as the war will be a disaster if you only spams IC, or you don’t have enough IC to support your army if you only spam military units). You may think that’s this is nothing impressive enough to be mentioned, but let’s me give an example. In AOD, or even WIF, and other versions of HOI, I can take over the world with SU (grand campaign 1936) with only 280 IC (in 1940 to 1944), or America with more than 100 tank divisions, or Germany with 200 inf divs+ 40 tank divs… Now, you can hardly achieve these numbers before the war begins in 1939. This makes you think a lot. In addition, with the new AI and this feature, I hardly spot enemy (none in two of my games) with a stack of more than 40 divs in one province and did not try to help other breakthrough spots, which, we all agree, kind of frustrating in AOD and Doomsday.
Now, the battles. Battles are more difficult to win, longer, and cost more than ever. There’ll be no way that you throw more than 50 divs into one province, and don’t care about a thing in the world, with the hope that your army can triumph. You need a lot more than 4:1 ratio in numbers of divisions to win a battle ( when I play as Germany in 1936, and deliberately wait until 1944 to attack SU, I need 100 stack divs to win over just 16 divs of SU).
Talking about naval and air warfare. With the two new features mentioned above, and with two new missions for air and naval unit, those two become more and more fun to play with. Imagining in AoD or Doomsday, have you ever feel like to cry when you know the Allied have more than 200 planes while your Luftwaffe only consists of just more than 40 interceptors and fighters? Fear no more, now they can’t create that many air planes, so you also can not. Again, this make the battle become more dynamic, and also, did I ever mentioned that it will be more fun? Of course, with the new AI(sorry for repeat, as I think it’s the most important), the computer knows how to support you with appropriate number of weapons ( when you are in the same alliance).
Now, to events and decisions stuffs. You only need to know that you can access to quite a large pool of them, and yes, you can have the ability to intervene directly, or indirectly. ( as in directly take control of NatSpain in the civil war, for example).
As for the tech tree, I have nothing more to add apart from reading the DD. It is simple, but it does the job properly.
But the game isn’t flawless. Well, nothing is. As I mentioned above, it is quite hard to adjust to all the new features ( and it is even worse for newcomers) . Also, I want to have automatic relationship incrementing. In addition, the tech tree could be benefit from more techs ( well, not to the extent of IC) but more of them could make the tech tree feel more historically. It’s not too redundant but not too simple as other HOI versions, and it does its role well, but, more of them could actually be good, I think. The performance is decent, but not too great ( I test the game on two of my laptops, one is 4Gb RAM, Core Duo 2.53 Ghz, Geforce GT 130 GM 1 Gb, one is 2Gb RAM, AMD M120 2.10 Ghz, with a 256 Mb ATI Onboard Video Card, with the former ran about 2-3 secs per day, and the latter about 12-15 secs per day-all fastest speed).
That’s it, folks. The game is great, if you enjoy HOI (whatever versions), you will enjoy DH. With all the new features, DH is HOI 2 with significant improvements, and with all the modding-friendly stuffs, I think you’ll all be please.
PS: It’s clear that my feedback can not address all the things that you want to know about DH ( eventhough I read the forum to find out what is it that you all want to know the most), so feel free to post any questions that you have about the game, I’ll answer if I can.
