Well, since this topic was changed from "negative feedback" too this i'm gonna write my critical review of the demo here:
I didn't like the demo.
HOI2 was a fun, independent game with little associations to other paradox titles like EUIII and Victoria. However, it seems the developers have taken away all things nice and independent from HOI2, replaced it with EUIII and Victoria features and called it HOI3. Why on earth i ask you?
Lets just talk about 1 small thing i noticed that shows in my eyes how wrong this game has turned out, concerning it being a EUIII and Victoria duplicate rather then a sequel to HOI2(hte actual gameplay works as a whole i guess).
In the top left corner of the screen you see(all countries playable in the demo have this) a flag with the text "country is at war". Clearly a feature also present in EUIII. Why was it there? Well, i found it quite handy in EUIII as you concern yourself less with actual warfare then more important things like diplomatic relations, laws, tech and wealth. Why? Because victory in EUIII means being the country with the highest status by means of colonization and economical power(and religious). In Victoria the victory conditions are: prestige, biggest industrial sector, and army size.
In HOI3 however to achieve victory is to have the most victory points. These victory point are actual areas on the map. So the only way to win is to wage war and conquer.... So i don't need a reminder in the top left corner that my nation is at war, i know that already, its the whole point of the game.
In my eyes this seems unneccassery, something the game could do without. But it was in EUIII wasn't it, so why not HOI3? Well, because HOI3 is not EUIII. Seems like all atention towards war and combat has been taken away by all these trivial things.
Certain other things that bothered me, like not being able to merge units, no support attack option, the clearly unneccesary complex tech system with all your troops having multiple different specs that can be upgraded seperately(takes a long as time memorizing and getting an actual overview), combat not being really realistic when 3 tank divisions face 1 polish cavalry division they fight for 3 days and get a couple hundred killed while killing a little bit over a thousand troops instead of the tanks totally outclassing them like it should be, HQ's being nothing more then a few men standing around doing nothing being totally inefficient at combat or speed(just an obstacle in my eyes) and of course the production queue, where you can see there are submarines being build but you got no idea what class they are....
oh, and here is another big thing. Point in HOI3 is that you can change history right? You don't have to land in Normandy, you don't have to invade the lowlands, you don't have to start Barbarossa. How come then that cities holding historical meaning in WWII like Caen and Arnhem are shown as cities on the map while much larger, clearly important cities like Glasgow and Dublin are not? If i would start a D-day in the game, i would want to land in Calais, but Caen seems rather important doesn't it? It being displayed as a city like Paris and London. I mean, why not keep it simple and just make all Capitals and famous cities show as cities on the map(like in HOI2 which was nothing wrong with)?
Thing i do like is how you get to see on the map what events are currently unfolding(like interdiction, encirclement) just like in EUIII. I like the sprites too, they look cool in 3D. The rest of the map looks pretty neat, i would love to paint the entire map black or green, if it wasn't all so complex and tiny. I don't mind it would take a long time, its just that most of that time you will be doing other things then fighting and conquering.
