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unmerged(361238)

Second Lieutenant
4 Badges
Aug 9, 2011
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  • For the Motherland
  • Hearts of Iron III
  • Hearts of Iron III: Their Finest Hour
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Italy in my opinion needs a complete change. About 80% of the games I have played Italy gets owned in NA so hard it isn't even funny. After playing a game as Italy I discovered the issue. Italy starts with multiple divisions split into things like 2 militia brigades or 2 inf brigades. A human player obviously combines these to make a real division, however the AI Italy keeps these 2 inf/militia brigades and gets owned when facing UK tanks etc. Why is Italy such a mess in the beginning? And if this is intentional, why hasn't the AI been programmed to make real divisions instead of fighting with 2 militia brigades. I already started a thread concerning the broken German AI in FTM. Why must Italy be a mess to?
 
The Imperial Might of the Empire has this to say on the matter of Italy.

What amazed me first time playing as italy is what an incrediably powerful force the Italians controlled during WW2. First thing I do, as I micromanage rather than let the AI handle things, is completely overhaul the Italian OOB. I reoganise it along 3 brigade infantry divisions, starting adding art brigades to them, get rid of heaps of HQ's, and completely reassign leaders. The Italian army then becomes a lean mean machine. Then I kick ass, take out France singlehandedly, take out the Balkans and wage unwarranted wars of annilhation upon hapless and innocent peoples around the world, as befits the GLORY of the HOLY CORUGIAN EMPIRE!


!!!6!!!

Given the damage the Italian army (and navy) can then do I find it astonishing that they could have performed so badly, historically, in the Balkans and North Africa.

I would suggest that you carry out a similiar reorganisation of the Italian forces at the beginning of your game, and only then let the AI take over.

Incidentally, I was under the impression that Italian forces suffered from poor morale during the war. Some historical commentators have attributed this (and appalling leadership) as reasons for their defeat. However, I have recently read some articles that say that the fighting moral of the averge Italian soldier was not nearly so bad as some writters have made it out to be. Perhaps there was a wide variation in moral across different Italain units.
 
The Imperial Might of the Empire has this to say on the matter of Italy.

What amazed me first time playing as italy is what an incrediably powerful force the Italians controlled during WW2. First thing I do, as I micromanage rather than let the AI handle things, is completely overhaul the Italian OOB. I reoganise it along 3 brigade infantry divisions, starting adding art brigades to them, get rid of heaps of HQ's, and completely reassign leaders. The Italian army then becomes a lean mean machine. Then I kick ass, take out France singlehandedly, take out the Balkans and wage unwarranted wars of annilhation upon hapless and innocent peoples around the world, as befits the GLORY of the HOLY CORUGIAN EMPIRE!


!!!6!!!

Given the damage the Italian army (and navy) can then do I find it astonishing that they could have performed so badly, historically, in the Balkans and North Africa.

I would suggest that you carry out a similiar reorganisation of the Italian forces at the beginning of your game, and only then let the AI take over.

Incidentally, I was under the impression that Italian forces suffered from poor morale during the war. Some historical commentators have attributed this (and appalling leadership) as reasons for their defeat. However, I have recently read some articles that say that the fighting moral of the averge Italian soldier was not nearly so bad as some writters have made it out to be. Perhaps there was a wide variation in moral across different Italain units.

What in the world are you talking about? I'm not playing Italy. I'm talking about the Italy AI
 
No idea why it is such a mess in game. I had the same impressions. Maybe it is intentional, so Italy is as bad as you describe.
I mean, no offense to any Italians, but they really achieved pretty much nothing in the War and only caused the Germans trouble because they had to take care of yet another front.
 
The reason is completely intentional. If you reorganize the army a bit and make a reasonable
production scheme you get much better results. The Italian AI is the same aggressive as the rest. In
my games (with better production LUA files) Italy permorms much better than in Vanilla. Take into
account that the game has been optimized not for every country to do as best as possible
but for the outcome of the war to be quite similar to the historicañ one in most cases. To do
this it was necessary to handicap some countries artificially.
 
The reason is completely intentional. If you reorganize the army a bit and make a reasonable
production scheme you get much better results. The Italian AI is the same aggressive as the rest. In
my games (with better production LUA files) Italy permorms much better than in Vanilla. Take into
account that the game has been optimized not for every country to do as best as possible
but for the outcome of the war to be quite similar to the historicañ one in most cases. To do
this it was necessary to handicap some countries artificially.

Why would anyone wanna play a game like that?
 
I believe each Major should have optimized AI and the Minors (excluding Nat China) can have the one-size fits all as they aren't going to do anything anyway.
 
Why would anyone wanna play a game like that?

That's my point. That's the reason why the forum is full of posts with comments like
¨Germany is broken¨, ¨Japan is broken¨, ¨Italy needs a complete change¨, and so on...

Fortunately it is possible to improve the game importantly using mods. The game
itself is fantastic, and the AI they have created is simply amazing, but the way they
have presented it is trash. I don't know the reasons.
 
The concept of what a division is not well defined. Varies very much from army to army. What a corps, an army, an army group and so on and so forth are different, composed of different number of soldiers, commanded by different ranks and so on. Not knowing enough about the historical composition of the Italian army at the start of the war to say if it's historical or not, it might very well be. Furthermore it leads Italy to perform as badly in the game as they did in history.

What in the world are you talking about? I'm not playing Italy. I'm talking about the Italy AI

Yeah, the guy's telling you what the problems with the Italian setup is by giving examples of how to fix them. What you want is Italy to be a power house by default. Personally I wouldn't like that since it would make no sense relating to history. I'd rather have them gimped by terrible setup (much like in reality) than by something a-historical like an artificially low manpower or such.
 
The Imperial Might of the Empire has this to say on the matter of Italy.
.......
Incidentally, I was under the impression that Italian forces suffered from poor morale during the war. Some historical commentators have attributed this (and appalling leadership) as reasons for their defeat. However, I have recently read some articles that say that the fighting moral of the averge Italian soldier was not nearly so bad as some writters have made it out to be. Perhaps there was a wide variation in moral across different Italain units.

The morale of the Italian soldier, and their fighting performance, did in fact vary widely. Some units, such as the Bersaglieri (sp?) and some motorized units operated with notable effectiveness, while others plainly wanted nothing to do with the war. Apparently, as the ineffectiveness of the Italian army (especially relative to the UK forces it had to contend with) became increasingly difficult to conceal to its own people, morale declined even further over the course of the war. Leadership was another issue, and again varied widely, but was in general far below the quality one would expect of a semi-major power (and more closely related to politics and status than to ability).

One problem with the multitude of 2-brigade divisions is not that they exist, but that the AI is attempting to use them as the "equal" of a 3 or 4 brigade division, and (not surprisingly) getting the stuffing knocked out of them. The player will either stack multiple mini-divisions to achieve sufficient force, or reorganize them into a smaller number of larger divisions; the AI uses them individually as-is. A few such undersized divisions can be effective in some the trackless wastes of the region, where their modest supply needs allow them to operate where other units will overburden the limited infrastructure, but they're ill-suited for combat along the coast, where they're stationed.
 
Why 2 brigade divisions? Because that's how Italy organised their army.

If you do all things like the contenders did in the past you get an always loosing Italy and an always loosing
Germany, a forum full of complains and very unhappy customers. Remember you sell games, not history
dvd's. You have created an amazing game with an amazing AI, and then you have manipulated it
horribly to do things historically, destroying most of the potential of the game.
 
If you do all things like the contenders did in the past you get an always loosing Italy and an always loosing
Germany, a forum full of complains and very unhappy customers. Remember you sell games, not history
dvd's. You have created an amazing game with an amazing AI, and then you have manipulated it
horribly to do things historically, destroying most of the potential of the game.

And if they don't, you get lots of posts along the lines of "OMGWTF AXIS WINS IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE OF X Y Z REASONS"

It's a fine balance, and a difficult one to achieve.
 
If you do all things like the contenders did in the past you get an always loosing Italy and an always loosing
Germany, a forum full of complains and very unhappy customers. Remember you sell games, not history
dvd's. You have created an amazing game with an amazing AI, and then you have manipulated it
horribly to do things historically, destroying most of the potential of the game.

Have you not noticed we have historical startpoints untill now? It's kinda our thing. If you don't like historical games you might be in the wrong place.
 
Have you not noticed we have historical startpoints untill now? It's kinda our thing. If you don't like historical games you might be in the wrong place.

You have historical startpoints and historical endpoints, the first is ok, the second is what people complain about.
Looks like you don't want to see it.
 
And if they don't, you get lots of posts along the lines of "OMGWTF AXIS WINS IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE OF X Y Z REASONS"

It's a fine balance, and a difficult one to achieve.

That's very easy to solve, give two options at the beginning:
1. Historical game.
2. Challenging game.

In the first option Germany will have no navy, will not try to invade the UK, Italy will perform horribly, and let the
people who like this repetitive boredom spend their time doing the same over and over.
In the second option Italy will perform decently, Germany will try to invade the UK, etc...
 
You have historical startpoints and historical endpoints, the first is ok, the second is what people complain about.
Looks like you don't want to see it.
I don't see any historical endpoints.

Let's just take the north african issue we have here for example.

I have NEVER once in HoI3 seen it end historically (1943 with DAK surrendering in Tunisia after US attack from the west and UK attack from the east).
 
If you don't like historical games you might be in the wrong place.

Well seeing the effort the guy puts into trying to improve the game I think he's in the right forum. He even brought the allied objective button to my attention a few weeks back :p

Anyhow, I gotta agree with the history fans. The reason I prefer this game series to other like, say, Civilization is that it comes much closer to history. It ties to simulate in stead of just using it for a setting. The beauty of it all brings a tear to my eye as only a burning tanker in Silent Hunter or the wing breaking off a Bf-109 in IL2 Sturmovik can.
 
You have historical startpoints and historical endpoints, the first is ok, the second is what people complain about.
Looks like you don't want to see it.

some of our games are more sandbox and some are less. Hearts of Iron 1-3 are games that are more restricted to history because people expect and want a world war 2 experience (also the time span is so short you need to get a lot of very detailed things right for that experience to happen). If you replaced the AIs with a "gamey" realistic AI that tried to win you would not get a WW2 experience at all because many of the decisions done historically dont make a lot of sense because they were either taken by complete nutcases, or because of limitations not in the game. There is nothing stopping you from modding the game to do this if you want, but its not the game we wanted to make when we started on HoI3.
 
You have historical startpoints and historical endpoints, the first is ok, the second is what people complain about.
Looks like you don't want to see it.

Except this thread is about Italy's startpoint.

And please stop spamming, if people want to use you mod they can get it from your thread.