Compare/Contrast hoi3 and 4

[Archie]

I only have a few hundred hours in HOI3, and most of those were restarting the same game because I had colossally messed up something; but, I loved the concept, especially the research and tech support and battle planning aspects. Those were/are superior with regard to choices, as well as having the look and feel of reality. Also, the slider bar domains gave me the power to do more research though at the expense of spying and officer training. HOI4 tech research is very streamlined (and good), but I'm always outpaced by time and end up lagging in gaining research in a number of critical areas. OTOH, HOI4's interface is much more manageable! In HOI3, I tired quickly of the incessant popups. Also, production in HOI4 is much simpler (and less confusing). I actually prefer the Battle planner of 4 better than 3; but I do miss the role of assigning officers and creating the mix of my stacks. OTOH, the point, click, and green check of HOI4 is extremely convenient. In summary, I think that they are both great games with HOI4 being easier to learn and play. Perhaps the final version of 3 is less frustrating in terms of AI; but 4 is pretty awesome and the devs keep improving and adding new content. Personally, I don't mind paying for quality, but I recognize that it's a perspective difference in each player's situation (so I'm not trying to start an argument over our perception differences).

 

[adam_grif]

I only have a few hundred hours in HOI3, and most of those were restarting the same game because I had colossally messed up something; but, I loved the concept, especially the research and tech support and battle planning aspects. Those were/are superior with regard to choices, as well as having the look and feel of reality. Also, the slider bar domains gave me the power to do more research though at the expense of spying and officer training. HOI4 tech research is very streamlined (and good), but I'm always outpaced by time and end up lagging in gaining research in a number of critical areas. OTOH, HOI4's interface is much more manageable! In HOI3, I tired quickly of the incessant popups. Also, production in HOI4 is much simpler (and less confusing). I actually prefer the Battle planner of 4 better than 3; but I do miss the role of assigning officers and creating the mix of my stacks. OTOH, the point, click, and green check of HOI4 is extremely convenient. In summary, I think that they are both great games with HOI4 being easier to learn and play. Perhaps the final version of 3 is less frustrating in terms of AI; but 4 is pretty awesome and the devs keep improving and adding new content. Personally, I don't mind paying for quality, but I recognize that it's a perspective difference in each player's situation (so I'm not trying to start an argument over our perception differences).

HoI4's greatest success, in my opinion, was dramatically reducing the number of management bottlenecks. By this, I mean the amount of time you have to spend paused, and the frequency with which you do it. HoI3, for large countries especially, required the players to do an extremely large amount of front-loaded decision making, configuring the research, officers, espionage. Then, if you wanted to set up your Order of Battle properly, it required a ludicrous amount of time. You could do this while the game was unpaused, at least, but reorganizing the Soviet OOB took forever and may god have mercy on your soul if you wanted to change the structure of the divisions in the field for the soviets. Throughout the game, you were needing to constantly adjust sliders for supply, upgrades, reinforcement etc. Then you needed to enable/disable research on the research list, deploy units and so on.

In HoI4, they did a really good job of distributing your management workload quite evenly. National Focuses are every 70 days in most cases, the smaller number of researches means much less time needed to manage that, unit deployment is much more manageable in bulk, you can change your forces en masse via templates and template tweaks, there's minimal OOB tweaing because it's so cut down. You are making decisions regularly, but you are rarely if ever swamped with a huge number of decisions at one time that slows the game down to a complete halt.

For all it's problems, HoI4 does a lot of things really well. The fact that they nailed so many things that used to frustrate the hell out of me in HoI3 is why I have hope that it will eventually morph into a truly amazing product.

 

[Paglia]

I only have a few hundred hours in HOI3, and most of those were restarting the same game because I had colossally messed up something; but, I loved the concept, especially the research and tech support and battle planning aspects. Those were/are superior with regard to choices, as well as having the look and feel of reality. Also, the slider bar domains gave me the power to do more research though at the expense of spying and officer training. HOI4 tech research is very streamlined (and good), but I'm always outpaced by time and end up lagging in gaining research in a number of critical areas. OTOH, HOI4's interface is much more manageable! In HOI3, I tired quickly of the incessant popups. Also, production in HOI4 is much simpler (and less confusing). I actually prefer the Battle planner of 4 better than 3; but I do miss the role of assigning officers and creating the mix of my stacks. OTOH, the point, click, and green check of HOI4 is extremely convenient. In summary, I think that they are both great games with HOI4 being easier to learn and play. Perhaps the final version of 3 is less frustrating in terms of AI; but 4 is pretty awesome and the devs keep improving and adding new content. Personally, I don't mind paying for quality, but I recognize that it's a perspective difference in each player's situation (so I'm not trying to start an argument over our perception differences).

Good point made

 

[AlanC9]

/facepalm

you mean that's all I had to do to make a game I had to pay serious cash for to actually run and be playable! oh man I should have thought of that!

why didn't one of you guys say something about this in 2009?

I don't know where you were going with that. Your friend "couldn't declare a war to see how wars worked," but there are plenty of scenarios where you can see how wars worked. That isn't an issue with the game running or being playable.

 

[Alex_brunius]

I remember having a coworker come over to playtest HoI3. after spending 15 minutes with it, and me telling him he couldn't declare war to see how the wars worked, he quit and never bought it. remember the whole espionage mechanic where you couldn't just declare war, you had to "spy" your way into conflict? Yeah, this. It cost this company money, literally.

Start HoI2 or HoI4 as USA and try to declare war and tell me how well that works out...

The same kind of restriction existed in HoI3, which is a good thing because it's a game series based on History and not a game for impatient players that want to take over the world in 15 minutes.

There are plenty of other arcade games available if you want to take over the world in 15 minutes. Not catering to arcade players might cost Paradox money, but it's also a way for them to make money since everyone else is competing for the impatient instant reward arcade players and very few other companies compete over the players who want to sit down and play epic 20 hour games that go into great lengths to try to model depth and historical accuracy.

 

[The Balbinater]

There are plenty of other arcade games available if you want to take over the world in 15 minutes.

I don't play aracade games. haven't since I was a little kid. don't be so sanctimonious, it is most unbecoming.

NOBODY said we were trying to take over the world in 15 minutes. NO. BODY.

I specifically said I bought the game and a friend came over to playtest it to ascertain whether or not to buy it. he opted not to. truth be told, I wouldn't have either had I a friend to who would have showed it to me in its released state.

 

[Alex_brunius]

I specifically said I bought the game and a friend came over to playtest it to ascertain whether or not to buy it. he opted not to. truth be told, I wouldn't have either had I a friend to who would have showed it to me in its released state.

If your friend was interested in looking at how the game was running while at war though I think AlanC9 has a good point.

Why not start one of the many scenarios available at release where you start at war, or even start as Italy which starts at war in 1936?

The HoI3 demo (which is free) would be a great example since you got to play as Germany for 4 months from the 1939 start point where they start the first day in war (September 1939).

NOBODY said we were trying to take over the world in 15 minutes.

If the reason your friend opted not to buy the game was because the game don't allow you to declare war in 1936 as any nation in the world, then I would say your friend is much closer to the type of player that is looking for game where you take over the world in 15 minutes then the type of players that want a deep and historical 20 hour per session game.

Nothing bad said about games where each session just lasts 15 minutes though, some of these arcade games are really fun, but they offer a very different experience then HoI3 or 4 does.

 

[elektrizikekswerk]

If your friend was interested in looking at how the game was running while at war though I think AlanC9 has a good point.

Why not start one of the many scenarios available at release where you start at war, or even start as Italy which starts at war in 1936?

The HoI3 demo (which is free) would be a great example since you got to play as Germany for 4 months from the 1939 start point where they start the first day in war (September 1939).

I think it now has been said often enough that there are scenarios. And I guess the message has arrived. Heck, he already said that he didn't think about that option several posts ago... So no need to repeat it again and again. And again. -.-


And again.

/edit: Nothing against you, you just happen to be the third (or already fourth?) in line to point at that...

 

[The Balbinater]

Alex, you try real hard, but you will NEVER convince me HoI3 was a quality product.

I've tried to find links to my old complaint threads from back in the day, but alas, Big Brother has devoured them.

truly, I am impressed for your romanticism regarding a game that constantly crashed and NEEDED expansions to even be playable. were that all fond memories were so based in reality!

 

[Alex_brunius]

Alex, you try real hard, but you will NEVER convince me HoI3 was a quality product.

That's because I agree with you that HoI3 was a product with really bad quality, especially at release. Not sure how you got the impression of something else...

If you still doubt you can always read my first post in this thread (which is a pretty savage thrashing of the quality of HoI3 at release):

Something that is worth to point out as well with HoI3 is that while it was massively complex, and had alot of systems included in release, the game had so many in fact that alot of them were totally broken, and in a state that was 10 times worse then any mechanics in HoI4 was at release ( except maybe the AI which at release was "just" 2-3 times as bad as HoI4s AI ).

What I disagreed with is which part of the game was bad and why. Not being able to declare war in 1936 with any nation is not something that made the game bad, it's something that HoI3 did right!

I also never really had any issue with game crashing ( but that can depend on setup I guess ).

 

[lihp]

Alex, you try real hard, but you will NEVER convince me HoI3 was a quality product.

I've tried to find links to my old complaint threads from back in the day, but alas, Big Brother has devoured them.

truly, I am impressed for your romanticism regarding a game that constantly crashed and NEEDED expansions to even be playable. were that all fond memories were so based in reality!

Ok, so its your opinion and I actually don't care about convincing or not. HOI3 to me was like this:

• HOI3 actually crashed the first time for me at about 1942 after more than 50 hours playtime on release. I still know it well since I read complaints in this forum and was somehow anxious on how it turns out.
• In fact I had a pelaant start from release on in HOI3. Maybe my computer at that time, maybe magic, I don't know and crashes were rare, less than one is used to with other games.
• From day one on it was playable and I came to even do a Barbarossa.

What annoyed me was my unability to understand how and why theatre AIs work. Actually even nowadays some stuff feels weird. That is actually why I stopped playing after a lot of time.

And I returned to HOI3 due to HOI4 and just bought the package. Holy sh!t HOI3 is great with all the expansions and (in my case) HPP mod.

 

[virre]

Hoi3 right now is miles ahead of current hoi4.

Hoi4 looks great, but has half the features that hoi3 has. Way more control and immerstion in the old game.

I have no doubt this game will be great in 2 years time, but this will be after forcing another payed 7-8 dlc's to get all the features and fixes. Now days its the way it works. You buy 50% of the game at launch , and then the other 50% of the game over the coming years.

 

[The Balbinater]

From day one on it was playable and I came to even do a Barbarossa.

doubtful.

I never, I mean NEVER got past the Vichy France event. It crashed every time. it was one of my posts on this board..

 

[ltccone]

Unfortunately I love HOI3 OOB very much. In additional, if adding staff chief to Corps/Army etc is great. And I like the combat log for individual General in HOI2 a lot.

I loved the OOB, but I hated that HQs were on the map.

 

[ltccone]

doubtful.

I never, I mean NEVER got past the Vichy France event. It crashed every time. it was one of my posts on this board..

It worked if you said no to Vichy.

 

[The Balbinater]

It worked if you said no to Vichy.

you guys just don't get it, do you?

what you are suggesting is that if Venus were Aligned with Mars in the Third Quadrangle of the Ascending Jupiter, the game worked just AWESOME.

/sigh

 

[ltccone]

you guys just don't get it, do you?

what you are suggesting is that if Venus were Aligned with Mars in the Third Quadrangle of the Ascending Jupiter, the game worked just AWESOME.

/sigh

You made an incorrect assertion about NEVER getting by the Vichy event to work when the game first came out; it worked fine if you refused Vichy. You also never even bothered to register your game.

 

[The Balbinater]

another false assumption.

my game IS registered. it is so terrible that I REFUSE to show it... and have never shown it.

man I wish I could show you guys the hate threads of HoI3. it would sear your eyeballs.

you guys thinking the hate for HoI4 is huge, you haven't seen anything. HoI4 IS a good game, and these two games don't even compare...

 

[marcotam]

I loved the OOB, but I hated that HQs were on the map.

Usually, I use the Army/Corps HQs with Heavy Armour Battalion , Heavy Artillery as the support force.

 

[Paglia]

Hoi3 right now is miles ahead of current hoi4.

Hoi4 looks great, but has half the features that hoi3 has. Way more control and immerstion in the old game.

I have no doubt this game will be great in 2 years time, but this will be after forcing another payed 7-8 dlc's to get all the features and fixes. Now days its the way it works. You buy 50% of the game at launch , and then the other 50% of the game over the coming years.

Sadly