How many of you played HoI III at release? It was pretty bad. After patches and expansions it was a good game, but out of the box IV is better.
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So far - imo HOI3 is a superior game to HOI4
- Thread starter rjohansen
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People who are happy with the game dont think its sub par. You acting like an authority on a game loads of people find great is just foolish and condescending of you.
Id be playing it right now if i wasnt at work.
You should just move back to hoi3 or hoi2 if you dont like it, youre just a very vocal minority trying to speak over a lot of happy people by insulting them with no respect for other people daring to have different tastes to you.
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So you like magical leadership points better? There's really no good way to show technological advancements in a game
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wasn't there, but I tried it on a friends PC when I was abroad that summer. Remember it perfectly us lanning at his place in Spain. It was a cluster fuck. We decided to have a gangsta rap movie marathon and go out and get trashed instead. I have to say, IV even with well a bunch of faults, is better then that.
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SOME fans may not have wanted HOI IV to be scripted - but clearly many do.
HOI, HOI II and HOI III had both random variety and scripted historical events, usually in a nice balance. We got the feel of WWII, we got scripted events to reflect history - and we got the alternative history variations to stop it being too predictable. There is no reason why that could not have remained. HOI IV has done away with historical feel and atmosphere almost altogether, has taken the game too far into randomness - and done away with most of the actual history altogether. Can it even really even be called a WWII game anymore, such is the deviation in every single game from every single nation? We are not asking to be utterly railroaded, but we ARE asking for a "WWII" game to actually feel like WWII, albeit with "what if" variations. For many, it seems, HOI IV no longer does.
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I will first say I never played 3 but fully agree... When things work you don't need to play previous games to get that feeling. Some features are missing that I fully expected to be in the game. Yet the game is still insanely well done, part of the problem I think is its success, Paradox style seems to be lay a platform and build upon it. Players are seeing such a fantastic platform with an extreme amount of possibilities that it seems bare. As a foundation however its extremely rich I feel. By no means am I saying that everything is justified... What I am saying however is given time and Paradox's previous track record of listening to fans overall we are set to get the best ww2 sim their is imo... Some failures are simply inexcusable, despite Paradox's experience they still manage to release games with the exact same UI problems that every other title has had at launch, that had the same exact complaints and requests for improvement.
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Without its expansions, HOI3 is trash. There's no Order of battle, just endless micromanagement. The espionage system sucked and even worse they released bugfixes in the expansions. At least with HoI4 there will be more bugfixes with patches and updates.
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Is he a minority though? Have you seen the agree/respectfully disagree ratios on these comments? Seems to me opinions are really quite heavily split. However, I completely agree that whatever one's views, respect should be maintained at all times, especially for those who disagree with you.
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I disagree with Research, completely, I found HOI3 to be more interesting and dynamic. I like the idea that you research a plane and then have the option of a carrier variant, same with tanks and TDs/SPGs/SPAAGs... but that is about it. research feels souless, the moddifiers that affect reseach speed are artificial (companies bonus that you buy with political power) or standard (computer research) and let's talk about the lack of rhyme or reason to the number of research slots. Here HOI3 was clearly superior, leadership was an interesting resource you had to juggle and proficiency were reasonable (practical and theoretical)
Additionally, the Tech tree lacks roots, most techs start in 1936 or thereabouts, little in the way of legacy techs and, while that is not a problem for the mayors, the issue is that minors will have far more tech than what they should have.
The removal of the option of buying foreign production lines is also a sad thing, though, again, this only affects minors
Production is freaking great and I am happy to have it (although I wish I could do something with obsolete gear, the pop up in my latest game wants me to do use obsolete planes to build new wings... and I really rather sell them off or scrap them)
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Hmm I think soulless might be the wrong word to describe HoI4 in comparison to 3, since arguably 3 is the one that was the most sort of mechanical and spread-sheety. Countries would just research everything if they could and there were no instances of mutually exclusive things. They simply had way more techs so you had to research tons of them at a time. Instead of one armored tech which you then create variants on, there were 4 armored techs, one for each component and most people would just get all of them unless they were specialising in speed for larm or something. Getting research credits based on NF and such is an interesting way to provide some variety in how your research path goes, I'd say. You say the companies and research buffs are artificial, but I don't really know how you'd make that less artificial. It seems to me to be an extra way to add variety to countries with historical flavour and further customise your output. I like it.
I think the resarch slots are mostly fine, but minors are very OP because of how limited scaling is. 3 vs 5 slots is a much smaller tech difference than 30 leadership vs 8 leadership in HoI3.
It is unfortunate they didn't include this I agree.
My idea that I posted like a year ago was that variants such as SPART / TD on chassis would be optionally constructed using preexisting equipment as a resource input. So you essentially get a ~50% discount on the cost of building them compared to building whole new vehicles with that variant. You would set up production lines to make TDs out of your obsolete tank models after you switched to new production, similar to how it happened historically. But when the old chassis runs out, you can still make them, but at full cost since you don't have any chassis to convert anymore.
This seems very plausible to make, although there would be bugs if you tried to mod it in - it would say 'missing resource' if you didn't have the existing tank as inputs and it's not 100% certain that you can actually allow equipment to be treated as a finite production resource that gets USED UP after production.
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I agree with most of the OP. I do feel however that some things are much better in HoI4.
I love the new division builder, but the template system is far too restrictive. If I can't split and merge divisions in the field, the new system is inferior to the system in HoI3 which allowed me to do so. I am using a mod to remove the xp cost of making templates, but being required to use templates is still a pain in the butt.
The new research system is great. I do miss some of the granularity of the HoI3 system, but I am willing to accept the simplification in exchange for the mutually exclusive techs/doctrines. Tech slots are a bit strange, I slightly preferred the leadership system. It is good that countries are not so badly mismatched in tech, but bad that they are almost identical. I also don't like that there is no way to spend more or less on research depending on priorities.
The lack of an Order of Battle is sad for me. I can see that removing it makes things easier for the AI, but the AI is horribly incompetant anyway, so I am not sure that tradeoff has paid-off.
The AI is abominable. The AI should never attack a well fortified city across a river with only a small armored division. Much less should it do this repeatedly. The game knows this is a hopeless battle, but does it over and over. Why!? I know the devs have said this is a priority, so I am willing to overlook this for now, but it does mean I can't really enjoy the game until it is fixed.
The map is very good, but it looks terrible. It is beautiful, I suppose, and the 3D artwork is wonderful. The problem is that none of that makes playing any easier. The HoI3 map conveyed information to me much more quickly and easily. Most of this can be fixed with more map modes (how is there no simllified terrain map mode!?). The rest might be fixable with mods.
The messages and auto-pauses! This is the worst thing for me so far. I need my 25 pages of message settings back! The game is barren and uncontrollable for me now. I will play HoI4 a bit more to give it a chance to grow on me, but I think I will have to go back to other games until this changes. No provisions have been made for the micromanagers who control every division province-by-province.
I like the national foci much better than the arbitrary dates attached to decisions in HoI3. Too bad we have to wait for more countries to have their own. Looking forward to a game as Finland with it's own focus tree.
The volunteers system is a great addition. I haven't figured out how to send planes and ships as volunteers. Maybe you can't? It should probably be limited by manpower rather than number of divisions though. If you happen to have a very large template, your 2 or 3 divisions can be much stronger than if you just have small-medium templates, which doesn't really make sense.
No ledger? Still hoping I just haven't found it yet. I was looking forward to tracking casualties by country. Are we not getting this info now? I want my statistics and spreadsheets! How many battleships does Britain have? Maybe this is listed somewhere, but it should also be in a ledger where I can sort countries by number of battleships.
I feel that most of this is about simplifying the game, and especially the UI, so that people are less daunted by it. This is fine, but it should not take complexity away from those that desire it. Reducing the number of pop-up messages might improove game flow, but removing message settings means I HAVE to have less pop-up messages even if I don't want to.
I love the new division builder, but the template system is far too restrictive. If I can't split and merge divisions in the field, the new system is inferior to the system in HoI3 which allowed me to do so. I am using a mod to remove the xp cost of making templates, but being required to use templates is still a pain in the butt.
The new research system is great. I do miss some of the granularity of the HoI3 system, but I am willing to accept the simplification in exchange for the mutually exclusive techs/doctrines. Tech slots are a bit strange, I slightly preferred the leadership system. It is good that countries are not so badly mismatched in tech, but bad that they are almost identical. I also don't like that there is no way to spend more or less on research depending on priorities.
The lack of an Order of Battle is sad for me. I can see that removing it makes things easier for the AI, but the AI is horribly incompetant anyway, so I am not sure that tradeoff has paid-off.
The AI is abominable. The AI should never attack a well fortified city across a river with only a small armored division. Much less should it do this repeatedly. The game knows this is a hopeless battle, but does it over and over. Why!? I know the devs have said this is a priority, so I am willing to overlook this for now, but it does mean I can't really enjoy the game until it is fixed.
The map is very good, but it looks terrible. It is beautiful, I suppose, and the 3D artwork is wonderful. The problem is that none of that makes playing any easier. The HoI3 map conveyed information to me much more quickly and easily. Most of this can be fixed with more map modes (how is there no simllified terrain map mode!?). The rest might be fixable with mods.
The messages and auto-pauses! This is the worst thing for me so far. I need my 25 pages of message settings back! The game is barren and uncontrollable for me now. I will play HoI4 a bit more to give it a chance to grow on me, but I think I will have to go back to other games until this changes. No provisions have been made for the micromanagers who control every division province-by-province.
I like the national foci much better than the arbitrary dates attached to decisions in HoI3. Too bad we have to wait for more countries to have their own. Looking forward to a game as Finland with it's own focus tree.
The volunteers system is a great addition. I haven't figured out how to send planes and ships as volunteers. Maybe you can't? It should probably be limited by manpower rather than number of divisions though. If you happen to have a very large template, your 2 or 3 divisions can be much stronger than if you just have small-medium templates, which doesn't really make sense.
No ledger? Still hoping I just haven't found it yet. I was looking forward to tracking casualties by country. Are we not getting this info now? I want my statistics and spreadsheets! How many battleships does Britain have? Maybe this is listed somewhere, but it should also be in a ledger where I can sort countries by number of battleships.
I feel that most of this is about simplifying the game, and especially the UI, so that people are less daunted by it. This is fine, but it should not take complexity away from those that desire it. Reducing the number of pop-up messages might improove game flow, but removing message settings means I HAVE to have less pop-up messages even if I don't want to.
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The issue being that the display was bugged 95% of the time...
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Stellaris has had 4 patches in the first month. The sky is not falling my friend, relax, take a breath, and go outside for a few days/hours you will be surprised how many patches we get coming up very soon.
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I think you have a messed up definition of the word "playable." By all that I've seen said about HoI3 and done with friends with HoI4 (we split the container we're poor grad students), HoI3 was in an abysmal state compared to HoI4 at launch. Literally unplayable is something I've seen mentioned by Veterans of the series. While the AI often acts in ridiculous ways, at least the game can be played even if the AI makes it often laughably easy.
I'm still utterly confused why people are making this comparison. It's about as accurate as calling CK2 and EU4 similar.
Great point, however, I have not seen the UI deliberately lie as is occasionally the case in EU4 and CK2. Has anybody else? Not including the whole encryption and decryption mechanics.
While not in the same vein as you would want, you can always lend-lease old gear and vehicles to nations you want to support.
No ledger. Unfortunately for many, some of that info is obscured depending on your decryption tech and the other nation's encryption. You either get no numbers or a range for things such as land, air, and naval units. Meanwhile, you can see casualties when looking at the little progress screen when you're at war.
I agree that there could be a ledger that can consolidate or show some of this information. It would be really nice.
I think you are right, soulless is not the right word, but it is disjointed. But in Hoi3 you could specialize your armor or your planes. System wasn't perfect, but it forced it to choose your own style of play or to try new things. Additionally, the Leadership system was a good way of managing scarcity, you could invest leaders in the Research field, in diplomacy or as officers for your troops. much prefer to have four techs covering the four aspects of armor than "armor 1"(specially when the names are arbitrary, for instance in the UK tech tree, the Matilda is a fastish light tank, not a slow as molasses infantry tank like irl, or the model for the first med tank is a Cruiser tank, who were fastish and had little on the way of armor)
As for the companies? I'd get rid of that completely, either go back to HOI2 system or Hoi3 system of practicals and theoretical, the former is in the game, sorta, in the form of EXP for modding units, it would be a far more organic way of doing research. you research something often, you are better at it, you have a lot of practical experience building planes? you might come up with some sort of upgrade faster too....
Not a bad idea for tanks, there you can turn them into SPAAGs, TDs, SPGs or even APCs (assuming a tech tree extension) but not applicable for planes. of course without stockpiles, selling them is pointless and so is scraping them. I will go on record that I thought the stockpiles were too much, too large and too stupidly large, bur removing them was a mistake ,they should have set arbitrary limits to them (or limits based on consumption, say, have a stockpile no greater than a month or two of material, and the closer you get to the limit, the less efficient extraction/production becomes)
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I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you and I do like hoi4 but its very clear to me now since playing as Japan for two days now that this game is far more complex than hoi3 ever was. The automation for hoi3 was far better than hoi4 is. And before people try to burn me at the stake understand what I mean. In hoi3 you turned on the HQ and gave it objects and it tried to achieve those objectives. Sure it was not always perfect but atleast you didn't have to MICRO THE HELL out of it just to get it to do a naval invasion. Simply assign it transports and it happily did it. I honestly feel like I'm at the DMV when I'm trying to invade China as Yapan. Worse than this, its become clear to me now that the difficulty for this game is not in the quality of the AI or the game mechanics, its the fact that the players UI is purposely Micro Heavy and the AI does everything smooth and clear. I have no idea how people would play multiplayer with the battleplan system. They needed a QA team that was not like a Pro Micro player and instead someone like Johan. In retrospec I should have known better seeing as how they showed us right out in the open just what this game would be with Daniel defeating Johan in the WWW streams. I firmly believe that most of the people who disagree with me will have not played UK or Japan and have no idea what I'm talking about with the battleplan system. It may be really easy for germany and france and the USSR but for Island nations it is literally DMV 2.0.
I'm actually taking a break from the game today because I just don't have the energy to restart yet again due to failing at Invading China. The battleplans are too tedious to constantly work on and the naval/air interfaces are not automated at all.
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You can't argue with one person's opinion as opinions are subjective. Me? I think HOI2 was a much better game than HOI3 and that HOI4 is the real heir to HOI2. But there are plenty of folks who will be outraged by that statement and I expect to get a few 'respectful disagreements' 
Anyway, my point is that opinions only become important when significant numbers of people voice them and by 'significant' I don't mean the 2-4 dozen folks who are less than thrilled with HOI4. Of course some will think HOI3 at the end of its development cycle is the dogs bollocks compared to HOI4 at the very start of its life cycle and nothing will sway them from that opinion at this point in time. But most folks will just play the game, buy the DLC and get on with their lives instead of disputing which is better.
BTW, I'm at work just now and so can't play
Anyway, my point is that opinions only become important when significant numbers of people voice them and by 'significant' I don't mean the 2-4 dozen folks who are less than thrilled with HOI4. Of course some will think HOI3 at the end of its development cycle is the dogs bollocks compared to HOI4 at the very start of its life cycle and nothing will sway them from that opinion at this point in time. But most folks will just play the game, buy the DLC and get on with their lives instead of disputing which is better.
BTW, I'm at work just now and so can't play
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So far HoI3 has had years of patches and 3 full-blown, full-priced expansions. Honestly, I think HoI3 is still crap compared with HoI4 v1.0.
Just a reminder: HoI2 v1.0 was nearly unplayable. It got better from v1.1 onwards. And lest I forget: HoI3 v1.0 wasn't even playable beyond 1940, literally not playable. Save games from that moment on were broken and the game ran as smoothly as Barbarossa during the Rasputitsa.
Just a reminder: HoI2 v1.0 was nearly unplayable. It got better from v1.1 onwards. And lest I forget: HoI3 v1.0 wasn't even playable beyond 1940, literally not playable. Save games from that moment on were broken and the game ran as smoothly as Barbarossa during the Rasputitsa.
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YEs, but the issue with HOI3 was optimization, bugs and AI, more or less, the core concepts were more interesting that what we have here and THat is the problem,. the Nation screen is empty and pointless, the trade system is an auto yes, gone is the option for trade in spice or cash,outside of land lease, you can't do jack shit with obsolete gear...
Lack of messages and information, not only the pop ups and pauses (configurable) but the info from the front (casualties us vs. them, both in men and material, result of air missions, etc) this last bit is important to any war game, but pdx decided to do away with it, much like in Stellaris.
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