im a die hard war gamer. i love a map that lets me feel like im standing over a table in some bunker, but i absolutely adore the map and graphics of this game. they seemed corny at first, but after seeing them in action they've become so... welcoming. i just want to play the damn thing already.
not a fanboy by the way. i only starting playing HOI3 3 years ago, and while its one of my favorite games, its actually not that great in a lot of ways... it has glitches and broken features that have been broken since its release date. its an entirely unrealistic simulation of world war two. i mean, shit, it doesn't even track equipment or casualties. manpower is some abstract number that grows linearly from 1936, you don't slowly run out of it and lose efficiency and national unity as the war chugs along, at some point you hit a brick wall and run out of people all together. somehow changing your draft policies creates more people, researching agriculture creates more adult males in a game that wont even span 16 years...
creating reserve units costs 1 fourth the industry that a standing army does, and they fight just as well. France can make its army bigger than AI Germany, compose it entirely of tanks and obliterate Russia if you know what you are doing, and its only concern is oil. most multiplayer games don't allow reserve troops. speaking of oil, if you aren't cheesing the system like i just described, you will never have oil problems as any nation. ever. ever. not even japan. air defense doesn't work. multi role is worse than regular fighters in every possible way because of some statistics not working as described, or vice versa. i cant remember. either multi role beats fighters, or multi role is totally useless in every way, and UMBA.
for something like 2 years toughness and defense did not work as advertised and the dev team didnt even notice until the community showed them. one of the most major land combat gameplay elements, more important than armor, since most units didnt have armor, in third, behind only hard/soft attack and division softness for importance, DIDNT WORK AT ALL.
nobody knows how naval combat works. its either way too vague and complicated, or way too simple. ive played HOI3 for hundreds of hours and i cant decide which one it is. thats all i have to say about that.
practical and theoretical knowledge are both theoretically good ideas, but the way they are implemented for production creates a micromanagement nightmare. completing parallel lines of certain builds results in a massive loss of IC that you can somehow regain by.... staggering your builds. but only sometimes. because HOI is a buggy mess. sometimes staggering your builds results in them all completing at once as your practical knowledge goes up. sometimes staggering your builds doesn't do a damn thing and you have to close your game and restart to see if MAYBE your practical knowledge will work the way its F***ING SUPPOSED TO.
same with researching ahead of time. you're supposed to be able to complete research ahead of time, without wasting efficiency by having it complete January second or later of next year. the formula rechecks itself at the end of the year and if you were researching ahead of time but no longer are, you didn't waste any time. like, if you were 1 year ahead of time and 122/367 days into your research, and next year you weren't ahead of time, youd be 122/183 days complete with your research. now you are 2/3rds done when you thought youd only be 1/3rd done. well just like production efficiency, sometimes this "feature" just full on doesn't work, and you lose time researching. i have no clue why, or if im just losing my mind, but it feels like sometimes it doesn't work
i cant play the game for more than 1 and a half hours without restarting it because the graphical errors mount up so fast. flags disappear, arrows stop appearing on the map(where are my troops even going?) counters stop appearing on the map(i hate the models but id rather have the models than COUNTLESS UNPATCHED GRAPHICAL ERRORS)
SO HERES THE FREAKING DEAL. despite all of that, i still find HOI3 to be one of the funnest war games I've ever, EVER played, and like i said, i discovered PDX 3 years ago. I've been looking for a LONG LONG TIME for this kind of game...
and now its sequel is coming out soon. and its improved on its predecessor in every way I've described. and somehow its not WARGAME ENOUGH because you don't like the COLORS?
