As I mentioned previously, the Japanese getting creamed by the Chinese in nearly every game is, at heart, a supply problem. Supplying through a puppet seems to be really messed up, so the Japs end up out of supply after passing through Manchuko. I fixed this, like so:
- Manchuko is now annexed territory. This was the actual situation historically anyway, as the entire Manchu government consisted of a half-dozen officials who rubber-stamped Japanese directives, all housed in a single small building. Manchuko didn't qualify as a puppet even by HOI standards. If Korea, which did have its own semi-independent government, isn't a puppet, then Manchuko has no business being one either.
- If the Japs conquer and puppet Shanxi, an event fires which forces them to annex it.
These two things essentially secure Jap supply lines from Korea to Nat China. With supply lines intact the Japs will beat the Nat Chinese in two out of every three games.
I also toned down the Communist Chinese army by making most of it militia, set the Nat Chinese and Commies at war (which is historical) until the Xian incident fires in December of 1936 (assuming both are still around), and gave the commies a few more forts in their mountains so they'd have a better chance of surviving a Nat Chinese attack.
If the supply problems are ever fixed, I think the Japs would do much better, since with my mods they tend to roll right over China. The AI isn't doing a bad job with the invasion, it just can't properly supply any of its units through puppets.
This is true everywhere, of course. It may be wise to change the surrender event so that the AI never puppets, only annexes, to partially fix the supply problem. Of course, this would give the Japs fits if they annex Nat China, since they'd have a hell of a time trying to deal with all the partisans.
I never use the AI for combat, so I only know of the theater command problems second-hand. I can't imagine buying this game only to watch the AI fight the war for me. Where's the fun in that?
AA is still royally screwed (the variable that controls the value apparently didn't get fixed in 1.2), requiring a mod to both strat bomber defence and an increase in AA effectiveness with tech level progression. I set this to 2, which is a 200% increase in effectiveness per research level. Although I didn't test a bombing attack specifically to see if this worked, as Germany the number of attacks launched against me by the allies dropped rather dramatically. Good enough until Paradox gets around to setting the value to what it actually should be.
Without mods, both diplomacy and trading are broken. That's been true since the beginning, and is still true through 1.2. The player-made diplomacy mod works far better than what Paradox has done so far, and Kaspar's production manager is also better than the Paradox default.
As for the guy who asked whether he should go play HOI2 since it's a 'mature' game, I'd unequivocably have to say no. The AI for HOI2 was never fixed, either by Paradox or by modders, although the modders tried awfully hard to get it to work. No modder or modding group could get the AI to consistently and reliably launch a viable D-Day without resorting to event cheats, and the same was also true for Operation Sealion. With the best mods, the AI went from "really, really sucks" to "doesn't suck quite as much, but still sucks", and that just isn't good enough. It was, and is, a broken game.
The same is not true for HOI3, at least in this regard. I've witnessed the Germans initiate a viable Sealion in 1942, and win by taking all of England by early '43. I've also seen the Americans do D-Day, landing about 50 divisions nearly simultaneously at four French ports, capturing most of France before being driven back by Germans rushing home from the eastern front. Alas, this was the Sealion game, and the Americans were utterly alone, so things didn't go well for them.
Believe it or not, Canada and Australia both launched a combined attack against me, as Germany, near Brest, putting about 20 divisions in the field. I never saw that kind of combined operation in HOI2.
This game has serious, jaw-dropping bugs which scream 'beta!' to anyone with half a brain, but one thing it does have over HOI2: a much better AI, at least for the non-player nations. I can't speak to the theater AI because I can't imagine using it, but for everything else its leaps and bounds ahead of HOI2.
