marc_v3 said:
Now I have pretty much figured out the basics of combat and producing units. But the most confusing thing is all those anoying popups. (Your aircraft is being attacked. your aircraft won. You lost a battle in the atlantic.) If I start a cenario other than 1936, I have to play whack-a-mole and pause the game every 2 hours.
First of all, you can always lower the game speed. Lowering the game speed makes it easier for you to command your forces, and makes the whack-a-mole effect less annoying.
I play with almost all the popup options enabled, with only a very few exceptions, because otherwise I lose track of my troops. If you have to turn off popups, turn off the ones that are annoying you by coming up all the time (like the ones about your aircraft winning battles). Do
not turn off the ones that tell you your ships or soldiers are being attacked. Sometimes, the only way to avoid losing divisions or ships to a larger enemy force is to order a hasty retreat.
Have you read the .pdf manual that comes with the game? The paper manual is not very good, as usual with Paradox games, but the .pdf manual is pretty good.
And the whole aircraft thing is confusing, how much damage will a English bombing raid do? Can I ignore the luftwafa for a game, or is it essential?
How much damage an English bombing raid can do depends on how many bombers they throw at you.
If your troops are in the open (not dug in and on plains or desert), they can get
slaughtered by enemy tactical bombers and dive bombers. I'm not kidding. Similarly, your own tactical bombers (like the American B-25 and the German Ju-88) and dive bombers (like the Stuka) can do a lot of damage to enemy ground troops, if you have them. You need to research air doctrines to make them effective, especially the dive bombers- bombers with high org do a lot more damage. Most divisions have lousy air attack, so bombers generally don't take very much damage when attacking ground troops.
Strategic bombers, on the other hand (like the Lancaster and the B-17) damage industry. Industry damaged by strategic bombing will eventually be repaired automatically, but if your enemy builds up a large force of strategic bombers and starts using them on you (which the British and Americans eventually will), then they can really screw your war machine up because they'll be blowing up your factories as fast as you can rebuild them.
For the Germans, strategic bombers don't make that much sense. You can only research so many different things, and strategic bomber wings are expensive to build, too. Stick to tactical and dive bombers and use them to destroy the enemy's ground troops, or to help defeat their ground troops faster during a battle so that your own troops will advance faster and take fewer casualties.
Strategic bombers aren't very good at bombing troops, and dive and tactical bombers aren't very good at strategic bombing.
Now, if you try to throw your bombers at the enemy all the time they'll get shot to pieces by enemy fighters. This is where
fighters come in. In HoI 1 you more or less have to micromanage your fighter forces. Use fighters to attack enemy bombers (fighters can slaughter unescorted bombers very quickly), or send them on patrol above enemy airspace to shoot down the enemy's planes. You can even attach fighter units to your bomber wings to protect them during their bombing missions.
So yes, air units help you a lot.
Thank you for helping this noobish, noobity noob that has his mind bent on world domination! (This is no Axis and allies board game.....)
You're not a noob; you're a newbie. There's a difference.
marc_v3 said:
So since there are lots of HoI vs. HOI 2 threads, should I buy HoI 2 as a newb? is it easier to play? I dont like the idea of DD or ARM yet, so is HoI 2 a big enough improvement over HoI?
Doomsday really just makes some minor changes to HoI 2; it arguably makes the game better and doesn't make it any harder. Armageddon is still in the debugging stages and a lot of people don't like it, so it's probably just as well if you leave that until it's had a chance to ripen a bit.
It's your call if you want to buy HoI 2; you'll enjoy it a lot more if you first get the hang of HoI 1 and
then learn HoI 2. You can learn either game without knowing the other, but mastering one makes it much easier to learn the other.
If you want to enhance your HoI 1 experience (or, for that matter, your HoI 2 experience), there are a bunch of mods for the games that you can find on this forum. Paradox puts a lot of the important stuff in their strategy games into text files in the game folder, and if you know how to edit those files you can produce all kinds of neat variations on the game concept. I recommend the CORE mod, for instance.
