Johan of Paradox once again inserts foot into mouth...

[MKSheppard]

I'm sure you guys remember when Johan said "RTW/Empire had no AI", back during the dev cycle of HOI3.

Well, he's at it again!

Link

Summary of nice quotes:

Johan [Paradox]: Tactical combat does not work in a strategygame. It makes the strategygame into a joke.

You mean like:

X-Com Series?
Jagged Alliance Series
Forge of Freedom (by Matrix and Western Civ Games)
Crown of Glory (by Matrix and Western Civ Games)

All mix the two different playstyles very well.

Also some nice gems:

There will be no more patches for HOI3 after 1.4 -- If you want more bugfixes, etc; you will have to buy Semper-Fi (the expansion).

Johan had this to say about Semper Fi:

Johan [Paradox]: its in test by the great betas we had on hoi3, who do a splendid job of tracking down problems and suggesting tweaks.

Link to Semper Fi Page

The key thing that leaps out at me (and what should have been in HOI3 from the start:

---Players can now define their own Theatres with a simple dragbox system.

That's not to get to the absolutely horrid issues with time compression with HOI3 -- yes, I do own HOI3; but I bought it for $7 bucks when it was on a Direct2Drive sale last christmas....and even at that price, the game is shit.

Summary:

HOI3 Patch 1.04
Road To War 1936 Scenario
1920x1080 60 Hz
Core 2 Quad Q6600; 8 GB RAM, Geforce 8800 GTS

It takes about 4-5 seconds for each day in January 1936. By that average, it takes 150 seconds (2.5 minutes) for a 30-day month to pass. That comes out to 1800 seconds (30 minutes) for a year to pass.

1936-1939 is three years. That's 1.5 hours of doing nothing but staring at the screen as the US waiting for war to break out.

Additionally, it takes about a year for me as the USA to research single engine fighter technology. That's 30 minutes before I can substantiatively change my direction of research.

While waiting 30 minutes for a year to pass may be acceptable to some younger masochoists who have a lot of time, I'm no longer the person I was in 2002; I'm older now, and I don't want to spend time twiddling my thumbs.

For this reason, I just can't play Silent Hunter 3 and 4 anymore -- even a simple war patrol in SH4 with a S-Boat out of the Phillipines takes several hours, due to the absolutely horrible way that the Silent Hunter series handles time compression.

[Stark]

Does this guy have a history of saying dumb things?

That said, there is an example of poor tactical combat making a game a joke: Master of Orion 2. It's hard to do well, and Paradox is obviously not the group to break new ground in that area.

Master of Magic had meaningful tactical combat in the context of a Civ clone, and it was the business. But hey, maybe his great team of beta testers told him it was impossible?

[CaptHawkeye]

If Paradox ever wanted to put Tactical gameplay into their games they should probably contact the guys who did Theatre of War or Combat Mission.

But they won't, because it's like sacrilegious or something for devs from different teams to work together. Besides, it's not like the 2 games I just mentioned are shining examples of good UI design either.

[MKSheppard]

Oh Man, thanks for reminding me of MOO 1 and 2.

I completely forgot about them.

And also Master of Magic!

If MOM counts, what about the early Heroes of Might and Magic games (before the series turned to poo?)

Space Empires might count a bit (SEV suffers from the same issue that HOI3 does; it dramatically increased the amount of time it takes to process a turn; and like HOI3, it is a very methodical game stretching over a long period)

[Edward Yee]

One of the supposed upsides to SH5 was how it handled time compression, not that that forgives what else was wrong with it. But yeah, "tactical combat does not work in a strategy game" is bullshit, especially since as long as you separate the two portions, it can and DOES work, and MKSheppard's listings of X-COM and Jagged Alliance (I didn't play Forge of Freedom or Crown of Glory) are two perfect examples of how that can be done. Heck, even the Total War series (for all its issues) recognized that separating them into distinct phases is good. It's a shame, as I like the idea behind the Europa Universalis and Victoriana, but Hearts of Iron feels too recent to me for such a play style.

While waiting 30 minutes for a year to pass may be acceptable to some younger masochoists who have a lot of time, I'm no longer the person I was in 2002; I'm older now, and I don't want to spend time twiddling my thumbs.

When some "hard strategy" players complain about younger people supposedly having shorter attention spans, I think this is actually what they're (unknowingly) referring to...

[Stark]

Making players play through hours of literally nothing because the management AI is so crap, the game so slow and the UI so bad is hardly 'hardcore'. It's just crap.

[Samuel]

Especially since they can just set the game up to have a scenario with a different start date. It doesn't require changing anything- just run the game and save the file as a scenario.

Of course that would require the computer to be able to run in a way that isn't entirely crazy.

[Stark]

You'd really think starting early for the US would be fun, to watch the emergent situation in Europe collapse diplomatically and the war start in different and interesting ways each time, so you can adjust your intervention strategy.

Except, it's a Paradox game.

[Gandalf]

You'd really think starting early for the US would be fun, to watch the emergent situation in Europe collapse diplomatically and the war start in different and interesting ways each time, so you can adjust your intervention strategy.

Except, it's a Paradox game.

It's also an idea that (should be) retardedly easy to implement. As it was set up in HoI2, different events had different probabilities of going another way. Germany had a 95% chance of pushing for Anchluss when the option came and 5% of sitting on its can, etc. You'd think that all they would have to do is alter the percentages a little so that periodically Germany (around whom the game is really centred) might do different things.

For those who want it to happen the same way each time, just establish a "realism mod" where the weightings are different.

[MKSheppard]

You'd really think starting early for the US would be fun, to watch the emergent situation in Europe collapse diplomatically and the war start in different and interesting ways each time, so you can adjust your intervention strategy.

Also, so you can try different approaches.

WE WILL BOMB BOMB GERMANY WITH B-36S FROM MAINE!

or

WE WILL BOMB GERMANY WITH B-29S FROM ICELAND/GREENLAND!

But that requires you start in 1936 so taht you can change the R&D paths and production priorities of the US, so that you can get them and a reasonabul force built up by 1941-42.

Except, it's a Paradox game.

You mean how you have to control every goddamn thing, and accept/reject fucking trade requests? Or micromanage diplomacy yourself?

[Bluewolf]

You mean how you have to control every goddamn thing, and accept/reject fucking trade requests? Or micromanage diplomacy yourself?

Man you really need AoD. At least try fix the trading and make the Espionage system not so horrific to deal with. Diplomacy is still there but come on. Half the time your either getting troops/giving troops or going "Influence Nation".

[PeZook]

I HATED the "influence nation" thing. For fuck's sake, if it's something you need to do regularly, then automate it! If it's not, then give the decision a bigger one-off impact. It's terrible that you need to remember, every single month, which countries you want to build up relations with, and click through the list again and again and again.

And I'm one of those insane people who really enjoyed HoI2. I can't play it anymore, though, due to the same reasons Shep can't. I was way more willing to tolerate stupid bullshit back when I could reasonably expect to have 5-6 hours of free time every evening.

[MKSheppard]

Influencing Nations should be automated -- you should be able to draw up a list of nations you want to spend diplomatic points on to try and draw into your axis (heh); and the game takes over from there.

MAJOR influence operations like funding/staging a coup, etc should still require actual player selection and approval in the diploscreen -- because those things should have a catastrophic effect if they fail, and even if they succeed, will cause other nations to shit a brick.

[PeZook]

Or, better yet, tie your "influence" and "diplomatic points" to your actual actions (HoI2 kinda did it: you could increase your standing with someone if you gave away free trade goodies, though only to a certain level. Arguably, it should be the other way around.)

Though since that's actually difficult, and thus Paradox is bound to terribly mess up the execution. Currently, if you spend enough diplomatic points on somebody, you can be a complete dick to everybody else and they won't mind. For example, in one game as Poland, I took over Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Latvia, and the USSR was all cool with me because of my incessant clicking on "Influence Nation".

[Samuel]

More annoying is the fact that they don't really model ahistorical things well and it makes alot of the nations look blatantly idiotic. Like the fact communist China refuses to ally with the USSR... even when being invaded by Japan. Or that puppets and liberated territory isn't taken into account for war score so you can push the Japanese of the mainland and have their fleet and industries dying from lack of supply and they will refuse to surrender or even make peace!

Anyone know how to use force diplomacy? I try F12, but for my computer that just raises the volume.

[Artemas]

are you on a laptop?

[Samuel]

are you on a laptop?

Yes. I'm screwed, aren't I?

[Vendetta]

are you on a laptop?

Yes. I'm screwed, aren't I?

You should have an Fn key on the keyboard. Hold that and press F12 to switch from the hotkey behaviour to the standard behaviour. There may be an item in the control panel or manufacturer software which controls whether the hotkey behaviour is default or not.

[Artemas]

are you on a laptop?

Yes. I'm screwed, aren't I?

On my laptop, for EUIII, I needed to just punch in some esoteric combination of keys. Like, function + k +j, or some shit. Check out the paradox forums for cheats on laptops, it helped me out.

[Thanas]

The arrogance of Paradox never ceases to amaze me. "Hey guys, we make a BS game and then rag on other producers."