Re: Re: Re: About the reviewer
Good post as usual, State Machine, but not having played the game, it is just barely possible that you have missed some of the truly outstanding problems (or perhaps not, considering the current level of noise) of HOI.
Originally posted by State Machine
Anyway, the point of my rambling post is that pure-grognard views of the game, or expectations, will not be met because it is not Paradox's intent to meet them, IMO. They try to create a game that is plausible historically, and fun for both the "beer and pretzels" folks as well as the grognard folks (who will despise certain features 
).
Being a person who always puts gameplay over historicism, I would forgive any number of historical inaccuracies if I had fun playing the game. While fun is difficult to quantify, in a game, to me, it has something to do with facing a challenge of some sorts.
When you don't face any challenge at all, you start looking at the negatives, and you start wondering.
You start wondering how a wargame can be released in which, upon loading, control of territory may revert to the original owner, leading your units currently there to be stored in your force pool, only capable of being deployable once the territory is retaken. (Which might actually be a challenge if this included the main part of your army, but it was not
that sort of a challenge I was talking about)
You wonder why the best fleets in the world under AI control seem to prefer either, 1) sitting ineffectually off the coast of their mothercountry, not interfering with the invasion force that is laboriously unloading troops in the province next door, guarded by a few cruisers or 2) seemingly like sending its fleets out of supply range, making them a liability.
You wonder why Japan, having been unable with its ~30 semi-modern divisions on the Chinese front to break through the ~20 militia divisions deployed by the player because it only attacked with 1-3 divisions against fortified positions at a time, having lost these divisions send their remaining handful of divisions from their home island to mainland China one at a time, carefully making sure in 3 out of 4 cases to land in provinces that are currently guarded (impressive given that only 2 out of 15 coastal provinces were guarded), leaving Japan completely defenseless against ground troops and conquerable by anyone with a transport and a division.
You wonder even more, when having played the next nine months needed to research and be capable of finally building a transport, the AI has
built no new ground troops, and you conquer all of Japan with three mechanized divisions you built while waiting for your research to complete, that never face a fight. (Looking in its build queue, it seems that Japan had decided that this was the right time to commission three new air divisions. A
very poor choice). The Japanese navy don't care either, and isn't even awaked by a submarine spoiler attack. (I was willing to do just about anything to try to make Japan act against me at that time)
And when you've wondered about that, you stop wondering why no nations care enough to act against Nationalist China gone bonkers. You may have been the greatest villain on earth, what with the annexation of every neutral nation west of China and until and including Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. And you may have conquered Japan, the Phillipines, Mexico, Central America, and the USA. But nobody cares enough to lift a finger..... Presumably because they are too busy preparing to fight the Germans (who do eventually get attacked by the Allies following the invasion of Germany by USSR - still in the Comintern)
(Afterwards the Comintern and Axis gets taken out by the by now Chinese juggernaut and the game crashes spectacularly.)
And that, my friend, is when it strikes you that despite being currently engaged in large-scale conquest in a game which is (according to the manual) about "Global Conquest" you aren't actually having fun, because none of this is historically plausible, none of it is in any ways challenging, and it has nothing at all to do with being good at the game (played on very hard/furious) - this case being only the second game I played of HOI, and the first one lasting a few hours while I learned the controls.
And then you try a few other setups and realise than none of them are challenging either, since the AI is constitutionally incapable of attacking succesfully against a human on land unless it is massively numerically superior (in which case it is actually fairly good I would like to point out) and since the naval warfare (which one would expect to be quite important in WW2) is fairly irrelevant to your strategies unless you actively choose to hunt down and engage enemy navies: the only challenge you face here is the tedium of redeploying repaired ships.
While Paradox's goal is, as you state,
They try to create a game that is plausible historically, and fun for both the "beer and pretzels" folks as well as the grognard folks
With HOI in its current state, they have failed: It isn't plausible, and for those people for whom
challenge is part of
fun, whether grognard or "beer and pretzels", it isn't fun.
Fortunately, that doesn't mean nobody thinks it is fun, since it is, e.g.,
very easy to play your own nation and do better than they historically did, and you can marvel at the level of loving detail brought to certain aspects of the game, like the brilliant tech tree with doctrines, theories and applications and with a most ingenious way of investment over time, or the consistent and easy to use interface, which is actually very good, lacking mainly a few enhancements to cut down on the often excessive micromanagement - anyone who has tried to upgrade IC in USSR or has had to deploy (or create) many divisions at the same time will know of what I speak - (which may have been a conscious design decision by Paradox to keep the interface clean and uncluttered; there's always a trade-off in that regard)
But it does mean, that for those who expected a somewhat challenging and sort of historically plausible single-player wargame, HOI does in no way cut it - as is.
And while the combat AI is, in fact, vastly superior to the EU series, with an above average ability to maintain a front, for instance, to name but one of many changes, it is currently crippled by the time-frames involved: Building units take many months but conquest takes days or at most weeks since control changes as soon as enemy troops alone remain unbroken in a province (except in the case of one of the reverting-controllership bugs) . Thus reacting to a threat is in the main to be too late: things have to be planned in advance, and if things go fubar, priorities must be changed as the situation demands (this does currently not seem to happen). In EU having forces out of position or even on the wrong landmass (such as having no troops to defend a home island or to defend a huge colonial empire) was not necessarily crippling to the AI since it could possibly raise a substantial number of troops while being gobbled up bit by bit, and thus begin defending itself. In HOI the same sort of behaviour is seen, and it is catastrophic since the AI has no time to react. Likewise, the AIs scattered minor naval insertions, which were also a stable of EU2, becomes much more of a liability when reaction time in-game is measured in days. (3 days to strategically redeploy forces and their marching time to repel the attack - that is, if the AI didn't choose to land in a guarded province rather than its unguarded neighbour which was also a valid target)
The corollary being, that while the HOI AI is in so many aspects better than the EU1&2 AI, it ends up with a much lower overall rating because the changing time-frames and introduction of supplies renders it overall much less effective against the player.
And no sighing over the many features and design decisions that I admire (and there are more than a few) can change that. Even EU2 1.00 and 1.01, buggy and crash-prone as they were, were more of a challenge and fun.
Yes, sorry, that was a long and slightly crabby post, but that was mainly because I had so wished that HOI was a game such as you described Paradox wanting to create and dashed expectations are seldom nice.
By the track record, Paradox-developed products should ship with a
Challenging and truly great by patch 1.03. Current version = 1.xx/1.03 sticker on the box, but somehow I doubt that's going to happen
