Learn from Darkest Hour

[Count Drew]

These are immortal words I cannot overstate. I went from HOI2 to HOI3 and was completely put asleep. The control, simplicity and beauty(yet vast detail in HOI2) brought me back. Darkest Hour was an amazing add on and I am watching eagerly the development in HOI4 and I see some of the qualities there from the previous versions. I know that a lot of work was done on HOI3 to repair it after it's release but once I was lost on it, I never came back.

Perhaps it's a personal thing but I would say the feel, the immersion and everything to do with it. When I play Darkest Hour I feel like I'm in WW2, the little bit I've put into HOI3(I feel like I'm in some sort of WW3 scenario) doesn't suite me. Just doesn't stick... and I know a great deal of people feel the same as the former is much more popular.

I am happy so far with some of the progress and things I've seen done on HOI4 and keep up the good work and we are all very patient and hope it comes out of the starting line at least partially finished and polished(beautiful)

 

[Adonnus]

Darkest Hour is the greatest Hearts of Iron game by a huge margin. Hoi3 was fun at times but felt unfinished in comparison.

 

[Sharp163]

Darkest Hour is the greatest Hearts of Iron game by a huge margin. Hoi3 was fun at times but felt unfinished in comparison.

I completely agree. DH had a superior map, better event chains, representation for WW1, more alt history capabilities, better graphics, more friendly interface.... It's just a great game, in every way.

 

[panzerzombie]

Pssst, you never talk about the DH-Club !

 

[theJ]

so... uhm... perhaps it'd help if you guys gave some concrete examples of things that made DH awesomesauce for us younglings to pour over....?

Cuz right now there's really not much substance in this thread...

 

[Zaku]

Darkest hour was okay I guess, but It felt more like a mod or an expansion of hoi2 instead of a seperate game.

 

[fredgiblet]

I was told HoI2 was superior when I was getting into Paradox games recently. I tried it, ran into a TON of annoyances which made the game marginally unpleasant to play, then tried HoI3 and found a lot of those annoyances were alleviated. I'll admit I didn't get too deep into 2, but I personally don't see the advantage of it.

 

[Nats]

I dont see much in the Darkest Hour Steam info to make it sound too much better than vanilla HOI2. When I used to play HOI2 I used to have it modded and it looked much better than those DH images on Steam. But I couldnt play it now. HOI3 is barely acceptable to play until HOI4 comes out, but HOI2 is just too old and dated now for me.

You can always find people who will avidly point out any classic old game's good points, which are nearly always gameplay related rather than related to graphics, but that doesnt mean I would play any of them today. I loved HOI2 in its time same as I loved Civ 1, B17 and Gunship 2000 but I couldnt bear to play them today.

 

[shri]

What exactly does DH offer that HOI3 doesn''t?
Just the map of HOI3 is a million miles progress from the "stale HOI 2 map".

P.S.: i do own HOI2, DH, HOI3 and its variants

 

[fredgiblet]

I dont see much in the Darkest Hour Steam info to make it sound too much better than vanilla HOI2. When I used to play HOI2 I used to have it modded and it looked much better than those DH images on Steam. But I couldnt play it now. HOI3 is barely acceptable to play until HOI4 comes out, but HOI2 is just too old and dated now for me.

For me HoI2's graphics are acceptable, it's just the interface design is poor.

 

[Caesar15]

God, what is with this forum and the "Darkest Hour is the best and Hoi3 sucks" circle jerk?

 

[Zaku]

You can always find people who will avidly point out any classic old game's good points, which are nearly always gameplay related rather than related to graphics, but that doesnt mean I would play any of them today. I loved HOI2 in its time same as I loved Civ 1, B17 and Gunship 2000 but I couldnt bear to play them today.

The XCOM series is a great example for this. The old ones were classics and I love them all to death, but you can't compare them to the modern Xcoms, or even to an indirect remake such as Xenonauts. They are way more advanced in terms of graphics, sounds, interface, gameplay. I simply can't make myself play the old ones any more. HOI2 is the same for me. I played maybe a thousand hours with all the versions of HOI2 back in the day, but I can't play it any more because of these reasons.

I feel like hoi3 is a much superior game overall, but this is normal and to be expected. I hope I will have the same experience with hoi4.

 

[Killerrabbit]

What exactly does DH offer that HOI3 doesn''t?
Just the map of HOI3 is a million miles progress from the "stale HOI 2 map".

P.S.: i do own HOI2, DH, HOI3 and its variants

That should not be the question... It should be; "What does DH offer that HoI4 doesn't". I can't think of much to be honest.

BTW, I will never understand people who liked the HOI3 map. 1) It didn't look good. 2) It was very inaccurate 3) Too much provinces in my opinion. (Although some people apparently would not be happy until there is 100.000 provinces) The DH map wasn't awesome either, but at least it wasn't a complete eyesore and it featured some cool stuff like accurate distances and terrain overlay.

The best looking map for classic PDX games for me is EU2. Smooth and simple. EU4 and HOI4 is lightyears ahead though.

Sorry, maybe too much ranting here by me... Having a boring day at work

 

[GeneralPetrov]

I don't think Darkest Hour had any specific features that made it better than HOI3, it was more that HOI3 added a lot of stuff that made it worse then DH (stupid amounts of micromanagement, frustrating railroading, the OOB hq's, etcetera).

 

[panzerzombie]

For one thing, it easily fixed the stockpile problem by introducing caps on stockpiling - caps directely related to IC and lost stock when over it ( ok, I dunno if any of the other HOI dlcs did manage that, don´t remember ). After seeing it I couldn´t believe why Pdx didn´t do ANYTHING about fixing stockpiling in HOI3, was it a stubborn "we don´t copy from modders"- attitude ?

 

[fredgiblet]

Most likely it was a "There's more important/easier things for us to fix."

 

[qer]

I would like to add that DH has kaiserreich and other very good mods. Mods for Hoi3 are worse than the one of DH

 

[TheRomanRuler]

I would like to add that DH has kaiserreich and other very good mods. Mods for Hoi3 are worse than the one of DH

BlackIce is pretty good for what it aims to be.

 

[panzerzombie]

Most likely it was a "There's more important/easier things for us to fix."

Aha, making fuel a joke and germany and japan laughing about RL fuel shortages is not important in a WW2 Game
And there were even easier things than putting a cap on stockpiles, Oh come on...

edit: It came out in 2009 and after over 6 years and 3 DLCs still no fix....

 

[Beagá]

DH simply had better events and a better tech tree.

Also had the better map (subjective, I prefer making individual battles more relevant over having a more detailed one full of 1 infantry versus one infantry that I will never care about). It did suffer from having the silly "one province per hour" rule. Air war was done better in HOI3 in most aspects.

I wouldn´t say any HOI game (including Arsenal of Democracy) is better than the other, because each one has qualities the other don´t. Ideally HOI4 is the one that learned from all of them.