Why do you love Hearts of Iron & how would you explain it to a friend?

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I think I will recomend HOI4 to my freinds because im a fan of CKII and EUIV and I did enjoy HOI3 but it was very complex, but now whit HOI4 I hope we will have a nice blend of over the top strategic gameplay and manegment.

Allso WWII is prety cool if you ask me.
I mean immagine if japan does a mass landing in allaska and british colombia and then drains north american Manpower in the rockies until fianly blitzing across the great plains and making the Saint Laurence into great atlantic shipyards.
The mongolians industrialised there lands and go invade eastern asia whit russian support turning them into a regional superpower who sent there divisons and pushed the germans out of russia, until it was steep nomad who took the flag on top of the Reichstag.

Thats whats great whit paradox games, the sandbox sytle of games offer endless possibilitys.
 
I have very much enjoyed HOI3 and look for the following features:
- a simulation of the Second World War that spans the entire globe;
- a game that allows the the user to become fully immersed in the game, from the strategic to the tactical;
- allows for the exploration of a wide range of "what if" scenarios;
- includes the actual leaders and events of the war;
- includes the actual units, armaments and technologies present during the war, allowing players to pursue their own development paths;
- includes powerful tools to analyze and assess the current status of a country, its military and those of its opponents in order to inform decisions;
- has a capable AI that plays a competent game, presenting a competent opponent without artificially increasing or decreasing assets; speeding up or slowing down production and research, etc.;
- includes an AI that can take on the management of all or some of the functions that need to be performed in executing a successful war;
- simulates the real world results of tactical through strategic encounters, simulating events such as Pearl Harbor, the British sinking of the Italian Navy (things that HOI3 cannot duplicate);
 
Well...

I can't tell you exactly why, but this just about sums-up how much I love this game & what it takes to get me to stop playing.




(This is the actual cake topper from my wedding. Thanks & credit to Lothos who made the original opening screen, as well as about 99.99% of everything else, for this brilliant mod)

Photo taken before the chaos began ;)
 
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Strange, mine had a trolly with a body in a bag with an opening cut for the nose and my wife pushing it....(joking!)

On HOI3 at the point of TFH I find a wonderfuly fun game that can give me hours of enjoyment and I do reccomend it to friends in my
other hobbies and even one of my doctors. I find the period facinating and the units/leaders alot of fun to try and outdo what was done
in they war by my own strategies. It has some serious limitations that I would hope someday they might come bach and tweak for us
oldtimers (subs that work would be great).

I (with a few reservastions) look forward to HOI4 to cointinue the improving of the franchise over all these years. I am hopeful we will
see many improvements to that game with minimal reductions in detail and in fact hope for even more historical detail. For the old
grognards, you can never get enough and I am in by 52nd year of wargaming, boardgame, computer game, minatures. looking with
great anticipation to HOI4! (and the mods to be done off it! lol!)
 
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So… you had to be smuggled out of the morgue :eek:

And people thought my cake topper was cool :blink:

I’m in my 52nd year of breathing and didn’t start “proper” war gaming until I was 11. So, a novice by comparison, but I still consider myself an old-timer/grognard and, like you, want ever more detail. As you say, working sub’s would be a good start and, in particular torpedoes. For me, taking stuff out for “playability” would not be the way to go with this game. Yes, I understand that PDS want to open it up to a wider audience, and that’s fine from a sales/profit point of view, PDS is, after all, a business that needs to make a profit, but this game is (AFAIK) unique in its complexity and that is, for me anyway, its charm.

Sometimes I’m reminded of my attitude towards the first Lord of The Rings film (also from way way back) in that I wonder how much it would cost for them to “do it properly”.

The entire sub’ question though, at least the way I see it, will be dependent upon how supply, especially overseas supply, reinforcement and lend-lease, works. Way back in the early 80s, a college friend & I wrote a set of WW II rules, heavily naval biased it is true, but the strategy for the entire game devolved to getting resources “home”, troops and their supply out to theatre and the protection of the convoys that carried everything.

I wait with bated breath upon the naval aspect and, possibly even more so, on supply. These two aspects will either make it or kill it for me.
 
Well...

I can't tell you exactly why, but this just about sums-up how much I love this game & what it takes to get me to stop playing.


I don't mean to be picky, Nev, but is a Game Over screen the best thing to use as a cake topper for a wedding cake?

Either it means that the marriage will end soon, or that you won't be gaming any more because you are married. Pretty grim, if you ask me. ;)
 
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The reasons I love this game is because it puts me in charge of an entire nation through WWII, researching new arms and doctrines, building armies, navies and airforces and putting them all to use in grand plans either emulating WWII or branching it out in alternate ways. Everything highly detailed with division design, army composition and hierarchies of leadership from division level up to army group level. It's all I could ever wish for in a grand strategy war game :D
 
Historical immersion does it for me. Whenever I read a good history book, as soon as I set it down I'm starting up whatever Paradox game is out there that represents that time-period.

How would I explain a game like HoI to my friends that are cool enough to appreciate it? Well it's a game that has you spending more time thinking than playing. It's WWII, and that's important. WWII is a different context than most other Paradox titles. You go to war in other games, but usually only briefly and for various self-interested purposes. In HoI you mobilize an entire nation for war to ensure its survival. It's something you can't really do in the other games. Vicky comes close, but if every last resource of your nation is thrown into war you'll soon find rebels overthrowing your government.

And each faction is fighting against one form or tyranny or another. Germany's oppression by the Treaty of Versailles, the fresh memory of nearly every nation supporting the "Whites" against the Soviets during the Russian Civil War, the threat of Hitler to the Allies, Japan challenging the colonial powers for hegemony of Asia, and poor Poland surrounded by greedy enemies and abandoned by the Allies at wars end. It's a time bomb, and as you play from 1936 you get the feeling of all that tension building up before it explodes.
 
Anyone who's the least bit interested in 20th century history (or alternate history such as Harry Turtledove's works) simply MUST give this series a try.
 
I´m going to love HOI4 if it is anything like HOI3 but will run on computers with AMD switchable graphics. I played 200 hours of HOI3, the game crashed more than a 1000 times before I gave up, so I have been waiting a long time for HOI4. Please don´t let me down.
 
I could echo many things others have said... but one of my favorite parts of the game (esp later versions like Darkest Hour) is the almost constant tension that you are running out of time and resources and don't have enough to do everything. As Germany, getting ready for war by Sept 1939 and then having enough mobile divisions to slash through france in the summer of 1940 and then expanding your forces even more for barbarossa. I typically always play historically in that once it's June 1941 I declare war on the USSR whether I feel I'm truly ready or not
 
Poland is Germany, Europe is Germany.

That reminds me, when is Germany Invading Poland again? Also you think Russia will get in on the move?
 
1a. Can you do better than a WW2 leader?
1b. Answer great questions like : Was the A-bomb really necessary? Why would Stalin kill off most of his top brass? Could you have out performed Hitler? Could France have been saved? What if Hitler had never invaded the Soviet Union?

2. Grand strategy, WW2 era, You can set to micromanage the parts that interest you and let the AI handle the parts you are not interested in.
 
Because its HOI :D so many hours that I spent on HOI3 and don't have any regrets.
 
i´d say:
DEAR friend, I love HOI for all the obvious reasons, good strategic simulation of ww2, all the world, lots of hours, replayability with dozens of countries (not Andorra), possibility of 1946 and beyond, etc.
DEAR friend, if you want to learn to play, begin with HOI1 it's very good, HOI2 its a masterpiece and i can´t tell you all the features but is WOW, the perfection is HOI3 (with a superMOD created -sorry im not saying names-) and hoi4?
sorry, for me the saga dies in HOI3.