Mods & settings for best single-player experience?

[dulcamara]

Hi all... I've owned HOI3 for years, picked it up a couple times but never got into it. Since at the moment I'm craving some good WWII action and heard it's best to wait for HOI4 to mature, thought I'd revisit 3. No idea what kind of community is still around, but assuming there are still quite a few holding off on the new one.

I'm playing a 1936 campaign as France and feel like I've gotten the gist of how to play, a lot of the mechanics are pretty solid, but overall the game feels kind of.... lifeless. Not to mention the AI seems to have trouble showing any sort of initiative, I halted the Germans into a stalemate with almost no effort at all.

I realized that it's probably more fun to play nations that had to be aggressors, like German/Italy, but otherwise what are the best mods at this point to get a satisfying well-rounded experience? I'm looking for things that:

-Give you a more dynamic AI to contend with.
-Add a little personality to the experience. I heard Dies Irae does this for Germany, but AFAIK it's not updated for the latest expansion(s)? Any alternatives?

One of my biggest complaints is that it's so hard to get any feedback about what's happening in the world around you. One of the things I love about Clausewitz games is the sense of a living world and storytelling you can conjure up separate from your own actions, but that's lacking in HOI3. You can see who has occupied what territory, you can tell which fronts/units have active fighting, but that's about it. I can't find any lists for casualties/losses aside from ships sunk to track each nation's war experience, it's hard to get a sense of what kind of units/tech your opponents are fielding, or changes to government, etc.

I feel like Paradox missed an opportunity there - maybe a biannual 'newspaper' type update, or something that chronicles major battles or particular nations' known tech advantages, etc. Something that helps tell the story of the war beyond looking at the map. Is there anything like this?

Thanks in advance. Any other solid mods - even if they don't do the above - are welcome too.

 

[Count Blue]

From what I hear from others good mods are HPP, Black Ice and TRP.
All those mentioned in the upper part of the forumpage.

Also you might find that its best to write you own mods in the sense that you make one for every nation you play.
Its actualy very easy to do so.
There you can boost the AI nations that you expect to be your biggest enemies.
Example:
You want to play germany so you boost the soviets and/or the UK or US.

You might also want to try some minor nations like china or some southamerican countries.

Sadly HOI3 misses out on the big picture. Its just a wargame and not much more I think.
Theres no real political or diplomatic game in it to my knowledge, but others might have more info on this subject.

 

[Kovax]

There was still a fair amount of diplomacy and politics in the Semper Fi expansion, but that was heavily nerfed in For the Motherland. Before that, Cores still mattered, and there was some semblance of historical "cause and effect", but the "on rails" approach to fixing the flaws had already impacted it pretty heavily. Wargoals were added as a substitute, but the game didn't have the same feel after that point.

The HPP mod for SF fixed a lot of the issues, and made it possible to go off the rails without breaking the game, while requiring more effort to do so. It handled it nicely if/when things did go off the beaten path. Sadly, HPP for the later expansions seems to have been all about balancing multiplayer, so the single-player game isn't what it used to be. I find it pointless. TRP does some nice things for the AI, but I'm not at all fond of the overall approach. You probably want to look into Black ICE if you've got the later expansions.

 

[Count Blue]

There was still a fair amount of diplomacy and politics in the Semper Fi expansion, but that was heavily nerfed in For the Motherland.

Interesting info. Thanx. I still do prefer to play Semper Fi.
Cant really get the same fun out of TFH.
What would you say are the real benefits of TFH compared with SF apart from the already mentioned stuff.

Did they fix anything really gamebreaking in it?
Because I wonder when I play SF if I miss something.

 

[Didz]

One of my biggest complaints is that it's so hard to get any feedback about what's happening in the world around you. One of the things I love about Clausewitz games is the sense of a living world and storytelling you can conjure up separate from your own actions, but that's lacking in HOI3. You can see who has occupied what territory, you can tell which fronts/units have active fighting, but that's about it. I can't find any lists for casualties/losses aside from ships sunk to track each nation's war experience, it's hard to get a sense of what kind of units/tech your opponents are fielding, or changes to government, etc.

I know what you mean. I've found this to be a major problem in writing my Soviet AAR, as it seems nonsensical that the Soviet leadership would not have been carefully monitoring events in Europe and the Pacific both before and after their involvement in the war. But actually obtaining that information from the game and presenting it in an AAR is not easy, I've had to make extensive use of the Campaign planner to create my own process for monitoring the progress of the war, and even use the Tag-switching exploit under strict self-regulation to obtain data on force strengths and losses.

Even when data is provided I find its often badly formatted and involves a lot of manipulation off-line before you can actually gain any value from it. The classic example being the ships sunk report you mention, which provides no summary, or filtering, and therefore needs to be painstakingly extracted onto paper before it provide any useful information. Likewise the Army Commanders Report is an absolute pain to try and use when planning things like promotions and allocations of commanders for the same reasons.

It is possible to extract most of the information needed but only with a lot of manual effort and I find myself cursing the game designers for not giving the player any thought when designing these reports.

 

[Kovax]

What would you say are the real benefits of TFH compared with SF apart from the already mentioned stuff.

The main changes from SF would be the addition of Armor/Piercing stats, Lend-Lease, wargoals, coups, and tech stealing.

Armor versus Piercing provides a more involved "armor race", which penalizes you for not having a gun that can penetrate the heaviest thing the opponent can throw at you. While I consider the idea good, the implementation is so-so. Lend-Lease is a positive addition, but doesn't affect every country. Wargoals were another good idea, but never completed, so a lot of countries don't have any goals other than to conquer or puppet the whole thing; a positive step only half-taken. Coups and tech stealing were added ("gamey" options), while the diplomatic effects of Cores, diplomatic drift effects of raising threat, the mission for lowering neutrality, and other spy missions were sharply reduced or removed (probably to balance multi-player); a move in the wrong direction, in my estimation.

The later expansions also fixed a variety of small bugs, while adding a few new ones. Some significant issues from before, like Defensiveness and Toughness not working for air units, were never fixed.

Overall, I enjoyed Semper Fi the most at the time in terms of basic gameplay, but after playing TFH for a couple of years, it's hard to give up the newer features. I still occasionally consider reinstalling the game only up to SF, so I can play that again, but it just seems like too much effort. SF was clearly an improvement over the base game; FtM and TFH are more like lateral moves, but since I've already got them on the machine, I'm not going to jump through hoops to remove them.

 

[Count Blue]

The main changes from SF would be .........

Thank you for clarifying that so precisley.