Why should I buy Darkest Hour?

[KaiserBismarckll]

I've had ~1000 hrs experience with hoi4 and broadly like it. How is DH different? should I shell out $2.50 for this game or is it already obsolete for those without nostalgia? In the unlikely event any of you know about the unreleased Darkest Hour mod for hoi4, how will that compare?

 

[Dinglehoff]

I've had ~1000 hrs experience with hoi4 and broadly like it. How is DH different? should I shell out $2.50 for this game or is it already obsolete for those without nostalgia? In the unlikely event any of you know about the unreleased Darkest Hour mod for hoi4, how will that compare?

It is obsolete.
Intelligence, diplomacy, and endgame resolution are all poorly implemented and frustrating.

 

[KaiserBismarckll]

Didn't expect that response from a forum dedicated to DH, but thanks for the insight.

 

[Lord Rommel]

Biggest difference:
HoI IV is sandbox and HoI II DH is planing.
HoI IV is more "casual" and DH is more "deep ingame mechanics".
HoI IV has modern GFX, UI and graphical details. DH is working on a old bit-engine that can cause problems on modern systems.
At the end you can sum it up to the following result:
HoI II and DH are "old" games (10 years) and HoI IV is the modern game. So it is no surprise that DH lacks some elements of a modern game.
But compared to HoI IV DH is a real strategy game with planing, focus and adjustments - and no grand Sandbox like the current PDox game gen.
Oh. And by the way: The AI is the same for both games ^^

So at the end it is your decision.
Both games are different.

And dont listen to the trolls

 

[Dinglehoff]

Didn't expect that response from a forum dedicated to DH, but thanks for the insight.

I play it now, and have a Germany game going that I'm wrapping up. Those are my honest comments.

 

[Nick3210]

I've had ~1000 hrs experience with hoi4 and broadly like it. How is DH different? should I shell out $2.50 for this game or is it already obsolete for those without nostalgia? In the unlikely event any of you know about the unreleased Darkest Hour mod for hoi4, how will that compare?

Hoi-4:
- no old-good atmospheric monochrome WW2 photoes! Only ugly childish anime. Brrrrrrrr
- 4 years after release, game still have No Money, No normal/adequate resourse-trade-mechanics *facepalm*
- No key economical resourse - Energy *facepalm*
- No supply-produsing, no supply-consumption of Units! *facepalm*
- Absolutley primitive tech-system , without large assortiment of historical tech-teams and "tech-components". (Hoi2/DH have amazing, deep tech-system, the best system in all Hoi!)
- not sure as it is today, but 4 years ago I remember as in MP Game - there was needed special player who conntrolled only Air-battles... just because there was diferent map visualisation for Air and Land Maps, so Air-Map do not show land-Units and Land-battles! *facepalm*
- and I don't even want to talk about the terrible, broken "battle plan system"

So, as you can guess - in DH there are no such ridiculous shortcomings.

Summary - Hoi-4 is so hopeless that this stillborn game can't be reanimated even with deep modding.
And DH - still is the best game and modding platform in all Hoi Universe ! And this is true, I'm not joking.

 

[Altruist]

I haven't played HoI4, so it is difficult for me to compare. I have seen several HoI4 MP-games on youtube, though.

I liked HoI2, I like even more DH which is kind of an enhanced HoI2.
There isn't a game I know which has the in and outs of WW2 better implemented than DH IMHO. I started to play it alongside the plan to learn more about the military side of WW2, to read up about it and to really understand what Blitzkrieg, deep operations are. That worked, I think, surprisingly well. Which probably is quite high praise for Darkest Hour.

The impression I had from watching HoI4 games on youtube: I wouldn't had that experience with it. It rather looks like they are completly different type of games or rather aiming for a quite different type of player. While HoI4 tries to free the player from all those "tedious" tactical decisions to concentrate fully on the strategic scale, DH goes the opposite way and allows you to dive fully into the tactical level. Both has its pro and cons but the most important point is probably what you like and seek in a game.

That there is still an active player and modder community around DH although it is 10 years old and there is a HoI3 and 4 should tell you something.
But that usually HoI4 and DH players don't like each other very much... says also something *grin

 

[TomorrowsHerald]

DH is an old game, so it can't exactly beat the dazzle of newer ones, but so far its the only HOI game that managed to strike a balance on the game's combat mechanics between too much and too little with HOI 3 characterizing the former and HOI4 the latter. The AI isn't brilliant, but it gets the job done and given enough forces will generally be able to keep them together and there are plenty of mods that build upon it. If you are more interested in the political and diplomatic angle, DH is a poor fit outside of event heavy mods such as KR, but combat wise I'd still say it beats the alternatives and that's all I want from a WW2 strategy game.

What I love about DH is that it constantly presents you with strategic choices; should I industrialize or militarize? What kind of military do I need to win? What can I actually afford? What is the most efficient way to make use of limited resources and how do I best direct them against the enemy? KR DH, in particular, is a lot more brutal with manpower meaning that every large campaign is a gamble; fight too long and your army can wither away, build too many divisions and it will become impossible to support them through extended warfare. If I can't break through Belgium, perhaps I can cut off the Austrian army in half by taking North Italy.

It never stops making me think.

 

[VTs]

Some quotes from HOIIV forum

Dead game. That's all

They don't even fix it, the game is broken since ages in many mechanics, it's sad but it's the way they works now.

LAR having a broken and buggy spy system doesnt help, especially with how tech stealing is handled (please stop steaing useless crap like heavy tank destroyers when i dont even have heavy tanks researched). Its been out for like, a year now?

BFB was such a low quality release that i was constantly stunned when playing through and looking through the code. EU4's Emperor DLC was an amazingly buggy release...it broke the AI in many areas and included game breaking bugs like the AI refusing to hire troops in peace and disbanding units in a way that didnt give them manpower back, as well as tons of performance issues and other bugs.

But BFB come close to how low quality is. The sheer amount of typo errors in the code leading to broken focuses and coring wrong states is amazing. I was trying to figure out why I could not core Albania via the Ottoman Empire decision, and then realised that the dev had put "All Albanian States required : [insert French Syria states here]" in the code. So you needed French Syria to core Albania. Bulgaria also ends up coring and renaming the wrong states, and Ottomans have a decision that ends up coring some random Spanish states in Iberia....

PI needs to go back to the drawing board for HoI. HoI IV is a failed experiment in simplification aimed at drawing in more players. It shares very little with its predecessors. It's supposed to be a world war simulator with a focus on military tactics and organisation, not Total War: World War II. Darkest Hour is the closest HoI has come to perfection, in my opinion.

 

[TomorrowsHerald]

Some quotes from HOIIV forum

I don't think it is specifically HOI4's fault in so much as each HOI game experiments with something different and at most they share superficial similarities. Crusader Kings pretty much knows what it is about, so does Victoria, EU, and other games. Sure, they change between versions, but the core of what those games are seems to be more or less consistent or at least much more consistent than what HOI is. I think that currently, the problem is that Paradox wants both war and political game when HOI is inherently a wargame in its core concept and doesn't do politics very well. What they need is two games each focusing on one of these elements; HOI for the world wars as strategy games with minimal politics and diplomacy, and a Cold War game with minimal combat that focuses on politics & diplomacy.

That's why I think Darkest Hour & Hearts of Iron 2 beat the others; it was the only one that said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! While keeping it a detailed grand strategy game on the divisional and army corps level and thus manageable without it becoming a micromanaging nightmare or too superficial. Both HOI3 and HOI4 tried to broaden the scope of the game to the point they ended up doing neither particularly well IMO with one having too much stuff and the other too little. My biggest problem with HOI4 is that in trying to give me infinite options I almost feel like I have no options at all; I can't really manage my armies without it becoming a custody battle between me and the AI. I personally find the battle plan and the inability to concentrate airpower properly just downright insulting.

In DH, I can not only organize my armies is a fairly straightforward way, I can also time assaults; when the land forces will move, when the carriers will launch a surprise attack on the enemy fleet in the first moment of war, when will fighters sweep over the battlefield, when the bombers will follow and the CAS finally devour retreating enemy formations. I can organise these on the provincial level and down to the hour of when they start, how long will they continue, and under what conditions will they retreat for repairs. There is no such thing as a free lunch in DH, you can upgrade units, you can build new ones, you can reinforce them, and make supplies but you can't do everything at full capacity; you have to choose. Supply and trade isn't all I'd like, but it certainly simulates them better than HOI4.

Its too bad East VS West got scrapped, I think that it would have solved this problem and let each game specialize on its own thing.

 

[VTs]

I've been looking into buying IV, and was doing some due diligence. I was SO shocked to not find any praise of the game besides things like "yeah, it's fun, but what really needs to be fixed is....."

Looking at some of the comments about DLCs too:
MtGs - a naval dlc that breaks the naval game
LAR - doesn't work
the latest BftB - breaks some things for some countries and doesn't make sense.

I looked hard to find soembody commenting that it was a good game, with some special qualites, unique impllementations etc. I couldn't find anything other than a lot of players want lots of things fixed. And that is scary 4(?) years after release.

Surprisingly, I have decided not to buy it.

 

[TomorrowsHerald]

I've been looking into buying IV, and was doing some due diligence. I was SO shocked to not find any praise of the game besides things like "yeah, it's fun, but what really needs to be fixed is....."

Looking at some of the comments about DLCs too:
MtGs - a naval dlc that breaks the naval game
LAR - doesn't work
the latest BftB - breaks some things for some countries and doesn't make sense.

I looked hard to find soembody commenting that it was a good game, with some special qualites, unique impllementations etc. I couldn't find anything other than a lot of players want lots of things fixed. And that is scary 4(?) years after release.

Surprisingly, I have decided not to buy it.

Sometimes, playing it as just a world war 2 political sandbox can be a bit of fun so I don't regret buying the base game (though I have no intention of buying the DLCs) It's just not what I want from a Hearts of Iron Game. I can actually lose to the AI from time to time in DH, not often, but sometimes.

To be honest, I think I am just the sort of player to whom Victoria 2 and Darkest Hour were the height of Paradox game development. I guess I also enjoy Stellaris in the present, but that hasn't been free of its own troubles in terms of defining what the game actually is (though it seems to be improving)

 

[Pasha]

Sometimes, playing it as just a world war 2 political sandbox can be a bit of fun so I don't regret buying the base game (though I have no intention of buying the DLCs) It's just not what I want from a Hearts of Iron Game. I can actually lose to the AI from time to time in DH, not often, but sometimes.

To be honest, I think I am just the sort of player to whom Victoria 2 and Darkest Hour were the height of Paradox game development. I guess I also enjoy Stellaris in the present, but that hasn't been free of its own troubles in terms of defining what the game actually is (though it seems to be improving)

I think Victoria 2 is the kind of game I might get into. It looks more like it's about building up your nation and less about fighting wars. Although that option is still there.

 

[TomorrowsHerald]

I think Victoria 2 is the kind of game I might get into. It looks more like it's about building up your nation and less about fighting wars. Although that option is still there.

Be ready for your state to collapse several times without an enemy lifting a finger, and then for it to collapse when they do once you figure it out.

After that phase, its a lot of fun. Hell, even defeat in Victoria 2 can be glorious and the world is never the same by the end of it.

The best thing about Victoria is that defeat is hardly ever permanent. The political-war system in it is fantastic.

 

[Dinglehoff]

I've been looking into buying IV, and was doing some due diligence. I was SO shocked to not find any praise of the game besides things like "yeah, it's fun, but what really needs to be fixed is....."

Looking at some of the comments about DLCs too:
MtGs - a naval dlc that breaks the naval game
LAR - doesn't work
the latest BftB - breaks some things for some countries and doesn't make sense.

I looked hard to find soembody commenting that it was a good game, with some special qualites, unique impllementations etc. I couldn't find anything other than a lot of players want lots of things fixed. And that is scary 4(?) years after release.

Surprisingly, I have decided not to buy it.

I havn't bought it but I might. The focus trees, political stuff, and less required micro make it appealing to me. Not sure about how well it's balanced.

 

[VTs]

It's your choice

 

[Bill1993]

Having tried both I can say that HOI4 has its charms.Especially the focus system is actually very interesting in story driven mods and the
production management system is also really good.

But having played 600+ hours of Darkest Hour I can tell you that the combat system in DH is the superior one.And you don't have to fight a battle against the AI
and the front system babysitting your divisions that get redeployed on the whims of the AI.

The modding community is still active and there are a lot of mods that add flavor.

The tech system also makes much more sense in darkest hour.
In hoi4 kaiserreich I was able to get nukes as Greece.And almost researched the entire tech tree again as Greece.

To sum it up Darkest Hour is probably the best 10 euros I have spent in the past years.