A list of things wrong with HOI3

[Erzherzog]

Got a problem with supply lines going through allies/puppet states ? Just play a minor, lol!

Actually he admitted it was an issue Pdox hadn't solved yet. Redding is teh hard.

Got issues with micro-managing your units ? Play on auto, lol!
Welcome to watching your Blitzkrieg go down the drainer, as invading France will take your troops months/years (if they pull it off), where in RL it took Germans a couple of weeks. Welcome to Germany sending ALL of its troops up to Norway just before Barbarossa, because some stupid LUA would tell it so.

That's not what he said and that's not how auto works. German AI can and will conquer France in about a month and a half. Auto is not an all of nothing thing. It literally allows you to decide just how much control you want. Even then you can set ai to aggression levels, or give the AI goals. (You can even give your allies goals.) Germany sending all of its troops to Norway could only happen if you explicitly told your military to focus on and only on Norway. Sounds like you need the auto-control.

Have a hard time making a sense out of the initial OOB ? Assign your troops to the AI, lol! Before you had an unorganized mess, after you'll get the most inefficient mix-match of Panzer leaders commanding air defence infantry you could ever dream of.

How is this any different from the last two HoI games, seriously.

Not going to bother to further reply to your diarrhea of a disillusionned Paradox fanboy till you take a breath in, and calm down. I know this is the Kodex where it's cool to spam insults every two lines and all, copy paste wikis that everyone in this thread probably has read about and pretend to sound the wiser, but if you can't be bothered to tolerate that people express about games a different opinion, especially if it's as flawed as yours, allow me not to give a flying fuck about it.

God the fucking irony. It's one thing to snipe at people but damn, you managed to not just be wrong, but to state the complete opposite of the truth. Honestly didn't care one way or the other in this topic until your post.

 

[Karmapowered]

Actually he admitted it was an issue Pdox hadn't solved yet. Redding is teh hard.

Look, I don't have a problem with how supply works in HoI3. It's as obscure and unintuitive as possible, in my opinion, yes, but globally it works for me. My Panzers get bogged down in Russia, like they should.

When someone chimes in someone else's discussion, attempting to ridicule their opinion, whatever it is, with arguments that sounded pretty subjective to me at best, and stupid wrong for others, that is where I take an issue. Basically, because someone stated their experience of the game had been underwhelming on some points, they should get flamed down for being immature ? Reading the advice given by some others (play on auto, lol!) gives me the opposite impression.

HoI3's UI is bad, that is a fact. As someone said, if you have to use third party tools to play the game as intended, it should be a strong enough hint.

Hoi3's supply system is poorly documented (and I'm talking a bit more high-level documentation than the Wiki or manual), and probably could be improved to make a whole lot more sense to the beginning (and even grizzled) player. Even those with the technical know-how will agree to it. I bet it is one of the first thing Paradox will change, if HoI4 ever sees the light.

Hoi3 is a game with a steep learning curve. Don't expect it to work out for you without pouring some decent time into it. Good things need efforts sometimes. At the end of the day, it is a GOOD (great even) game however.

What is there to argue, or flame people about, I wonder ?

That's not what he said and that's not how auto works. German AI can and will conquer France in about a month and a half.

Good for you. My experience has been different in some occasions. Reading the Paradox forums rather frequently, I get the impression I am not the only one.

Not that I mind it, I play Germany myself often enough, it's just when I play Japan that I have to carefully watch my German bretheren so that they don't mess up in Europe, while I clean up the Pacific. If they do, I edit the save game, to check where they messed up.

Auto is not an all of nothing thing. It literally allows you to decide just how much control you want. Even then you can set ai to aggression levels, or give the AI goals. (You can even give your allies goals.) Germany sending all of its troops to Norway could only happen if you explicitly told your military to focus on and only on Norway. Sounds like you need the auto-control.

I know that, and I'm sorry if I sometimes have to exaggerate to get my point through. Thing is, most everyone does it on these forums, so I don't feel as restrained as in other places. Still, my advice to a new player would NOT to start on auto, no matter what. The AI does help you, provided you know what exactly it does. Sometimes, it's OK, sometimes, it would be a horrible decision leaving the control to the AI.

How is this any different from the last two HoI games, seriously.

Sure, but what is your point ? People here were discussing issues they have with HOI3, not the prequels.

God the fucking irony. It's one thing to snipe at people but damn, you managed to not just be wrong, but to state the complete opposite of the truth. Honestly didn't care one way or the other in this topic until your post.

So are you the one I should refer to in the future before posting ?

Honestly though, I don't get why people, even if they were put on a pedestal by most other people on the Kodex, like Garfunkel (EDIT: I think he can take the jab, without feeling offended or something), can't accept that others relate to different experiences about games. That is what motivated my reaction.

There will always be fundamentals, but if you posted about how great HoI3's UI was, for example, I would probably continue objecting to it, not flaming you down as a LTP newb'.

 

[Random Dumbass]

Garf,

Hilarious how you appeal to some perceived higher intellect that makes you understand the game better than a DUM NEWB LIKE ME HURR. Obviously the UI is amazing and the way that supplies work is crystal-clear and I'm just stupid for not understanding it and having to hit the Paradox forums just to understand why certain (retarded) things are happening in my game. God forbid they tell us how supplies work in the tutorial! But of course, it's so "obvious" - supplies are centered in my capital city and I need to set up convoys to go to every port that is supplying my troops on various fronts and that the chance of these supplies reaching my troops is dependent on 6 or 7 varying factors that must all be attended to! You'd have to be an idiot NOT to know that as soon as you fire up the game for the first time.

You also brush away the ally/puppet supply thing as if it is a tiny bug when it's so profoundly game-changing that it's startling they didn't release a patch right away to fix it. Telling me that I can't make any puppet states and that I have to defend half of Asia and Africa as if it were land that I give a shit about is retarded. Maybe one of the biggest bugs I have ever seen in any game that hasn't been fixed despite the release of several patches.

Leader/HQ micro-management:

They bring in a semi-realistic chain of command. What they do on different levels:
-Theatre commander reduces stacking penalty by 1% per skill point
-Army group commander decreases supply consumption by 5% per skill point
-Army commander increases organization by 1% per skill point
-Corps commander improves chance of reserve divisions to enter battle - this especially can be a HUGE difference
-Division commander improves combat efficiency by 5% per skill point

In addition, traits get added to every unit under the commander, though each level of separation from division dilutes the effect. Division is 100%, corps 50%, army 25%, army group 12.5% and theatre 6.25%. Traits also stack. If a Division commander, Corps commander, Army commander, Army group commander and Theater commander all have the Offensive Doctrine trait, it gives the division a combat modifier of 10% + 5% + 2.5% + 1.25% + 0.625% = 19.375%, when attacking.

I rest my case lol. Going from division to division, and army to army picking and choosing which leader I want where is not my definition of fun, in fact I have never heard anything more gay and LARPy in my life. In fact it reminds of grinding in WoW: spend a lot of time doing stupid boring shit so that you can enjoy miniscule bonuses here and there. Fuck that.

Bullshit. Add a wargoal. Human player placed wargoals override AI wargoals.

Unless we're talking about Britain, France, Italy, USA, Japan, USSR or any other nation that you are de-facto at war with due to allegiance to a certain faction. In that case, the nation that decides the loser's fate appears to be entirely random ie: Italy and Germany pwnfuck Britain, and then Japan gets to randomly conquer them for some reason.

So if you don't give a shit about that stuff, why click on it in the first place? You can leave all that to the AI to manage if you want. Just leave the OOB as it is on game start, keep leader auto-assign on and toggle "assign units automatically" in the production screen. AI will take care of all that stuff. You can just lean back and pretend you're a hardcore grognard. Why the fuck are you playing HoI3 in the first place is a mystery to me if you cannot understand chain of command, supply lines, OOB/TOE organization and whine about micro. All of these features that were heavily advertised from the start and had been asked by fans since HoI1.

I give a shit that the UI looks like garbage due to all of the useless/gimmicky crap they have stuck into the game. It's like what skyway was talking about earlier "sitting back to watch the game" are you serious? If I want to kick back and watch something it's not going to be a fucking screen with squares moving around on it. And it isn't about "cannot understand", more like the willingness to do so is not there because the reward involved is not a reward at all - it's micro-management boredom.

Patch the game to 3.05, it's stable. Have enough memory. Don't alt-tab out of the game. Don't use mods. USE THE FUCKING AUTO-SAVE, put on monthly if you're nervous. But really, non-modded HoI3 3.05 only very rarely crashes on me. With mods, CTDs come far more often as they often bend the engine and stuff.

I'm patched to 3.05, running on 8GB RAM and a i7 quad. It has nothing to do with my system and more to do with the obviously shitty coding.

There's a fucking separate map view for supply and you can hover your mouse over provinces to see a tool-tip which explains what's going on. Reading the manual or the wiki would help. Basically, your capital produces all supplies. Each division calls back to capital and demands X amount of supplies, which is 30 days worth (carried by the unit) plus 1 day extra. Each unit then traces a supply route to the capital or a port that is connected by sea to another port that is connected by land to the capital. If each province has 10 infra and there is no partisans and your supply techs are up-to-date, supplies flow easily. The worse the infrastructure, the higher the partisan level and the more ancient your supply-techs, the worse the situation becomes. The more units you have, far from your capital or from good infra provinces, the worse the problem gets. Additionally, the supply AI/logic sends out more supplies to the system then needed, as a buffer. This is why the supply demand on the production screen often jumps up and down. After building a nice stockpile during peace, you can safely keep it under the demand during war for several months and follow your stockpile. Ways to solve supply issues:

• Improve your infrastructure - build "railroads" of 100 Infra provinces from your capital to the enemy border where you will be attacking in 6-12 months. Once on the attack, extend these "railroads" over to enemy territory.
• Keep your high-supply units (armoured, mechanized, motorized) on good terrain and near good infra. Don't attack USSR with 52+ tank divisions and then wonder why you're OOS behind Ural mountains.
• After strenuous, extended operations, let your units rest for a while and gather stocks of supplies.
• If there's a safe sealane, manually add supply convoys from your ports to enemy ports. Increase the level of ports - lvl 10 port can handle far larger quantities than a lvl 1 port. But even lvl 10's have their limits, so if you are playing as USA and invading Europe, you need several convoys - basically one from each eastern seaboard harbour to various European ports. As Germany, it's a good idea to make convoys from Rostock/Stettin/Königsberg to Riga/Tallinn/Leningrad and from Split to Sevastopol.
• Place 1xGAR+1xMP mini-divisions along the supply "railroads". You don't need to cover the whole area you have conquered, just make sure that there's at least one line of good infra provinces that's secured by your rear-echelon forces, so that partisans won't be able to create havoc in your supply network.
• Don't use high-supply/oil units in shitty terrain/infra combos. There's no point in putting armour divisions into the jungles of SE-Asia, for example.
• Make sure your chain of command is in order and you have high skill level generals in command of Army Groups - a lvl 5 general will give a 25% supply consumption reduction to EVERY division under his command.
• Use Logistic Wizards generals commanding corps at really rough spots.
• Use transport planes to deliver surgical supply drops at critical spots.

So basically, you needed a paragraph in addition to 9 bullet points to explain this feature which is supposedly very simple and straight-forward and pretty important if you want to be able to play the game properly. Bro, if I need to look at a wiki or forum to understand something so intrinsic to the game then the developers have failed in certain respects of game design, and in this game in particular the supply system is a mess, and it's silly that you're disputing this fact.

And back to the UI: there is a bar that shows you the KMPH of the wind in a province. For God's sake. Who gives a flying fuck.

And BTW you should perhaps hold back on all the nerd rage. I didn't call your game a piece of shit, in fact I said it was fun and pretty good. But you have to be knee-deep in Paradox cum to think that the UI and various parts of the game aren't total bullshit.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Bro, if I need to look at a wiki or forum to understand something so intrinsic to the game then the developers have failed in certain respects of game design, and in this game in particular the supply system is a mess, and it's silly that you're disputing this fact.

Gold Box games are a mess, Cloaked Figure has just announced.

So basically, you needed a paragraph in addition to 9 bullet points to explain this feature which is supposedly very simple and straight-forward

Naw bro, it IS very simple and straightforward, the paragraph explains it. It is also explained in the manual, it was explained by Johan during development and it's something that is inherently logical in most wargames - that units trace their supply through hexes/provinces to X point.

I give a shit that the UI looks like garbage due to all of the useless/gimmicky crap they have stuck into the game.

No, you complained that clicking on a unit gives you a window with all sorts of useless shit. Well guess what? You never need to open that window. The little screen gives all the basic information (composition, speed, supply status, leader, current activity). I don't get why you complain that when you ASK for more detail, you GET more detail.

And back to the UI: there is a bar that shows you the KMPH of the wind in a province. For God's sake. Who gives a flying fuck.

So what? You need the weather overlay to check that when you attack, the ground isn't frozen or muddy for your tanks and there's no storm to hinder your planes. That takes 5 seconds. You don't NEED to get mixed with all the little details and I can't see why you bitch and moan about them ruining your game. It's as if you complained that there are too long and detailed item descriptions in Icewind Dale - which is technically true but no-one forces you to read them and you can play the game just fine if you only check the stats.

Going from division to division, and army to army picking and choosing which leader I want where is not my definition of fun, in fact I have never heard anything more gay and LARPy in my life.

CF, DUUUUUDE. We know that you're a thug-life bad-ass gangster! If that's not your thing, why even play HoI3? And again, you don't need to do it, the AI can do it for you.

****

bla bla bla

Butthurt detected.

Just cherry-picking a few gems :

• Got a problem with supply lines going through allies/puppet states ? Just play a minor, lol!
  Want to replay the US liberating Europe through the UK ? Well, sorry, but you can't.
• Got issues with micro-managing your units ? Play on auto, lol!
  Welcome to watching your Blitzkrieg go down the drainer, as invading France will take your troops months/years (if they pull it off), where in RL it took Germans a couple of weeks. Welcome to Germany sending ALL of its troops up to Norway just before Barbarossa, because some stupid LUA would tell it so.
• Have a hard time making a sense out of the initial OOB ? Assign your troops to the AI, lol!
  Before you had an unorganized mess, after you'll get the most inefficient mix-match of Panzer leaders commanding air defence infantry you could ever dream of.

Keep on lying, fuckface. Even in 1.0 HoI3, AI-led Germany blitzkrieged Poland in historical time frame, often simultaneously fighting off a French invasion. German AI never sends all its troops to Norway either. Calling the LUAs stupid is as logical as calling hammer and nails stupid - they are tools of the trade. LUA's are very good for finetuning the AI of certain countries for certain situation. If you play Germany but let AI take command of most your troops, stuff like what you described would never happen. Additionally, if you let the AI handle production, it follows its production LUA, which doesn't include "air defence infantry" or any shit like that. While it won't be as min-maxed as a player would get it, it's good enough to fight other AIs.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Let me give you an example, to hopefully clarify my predicament : we are playing Germany, it's autumn 1939, during the invasion of Poland. German troops manage to breach the front-line. We wish to rush the VP, because there is no point in further wasting time on this front, Norway and France are waiting. Let's say we send one of our strongest divisions through the breach, in order to cause mayhem behind it.

Suddenly, a "naked" (without support brigade) HQ auto-magically appears in the exact same area that we just had breached/cleared, *right* before our own division arrives. Our division on the move hits the virtual HQ, instantly destroys it, but just wasted its precious attack ability. It's stalled for I can't remember how many hours (about 2 in-game days, I think) before it can attack AGAIN.

I had to quote this whole thing because I don't know what you've been smoking.

1. If your entire plan is wasted because ONE DIVISION got attack delay when it wasn't supposed to, I got bad news for you son - you're not going to conquer USSR or USA. Your plan is inherently flawed from the beginning. Even the AI sometimes launches spoiling attacks.
2. HQ-unit only does not cause attack delay in 3.05 as the unit immediately retreats if it's the only defender - unlike in 1.0 where they fought until it lost ORG. Even then, if you had a softness <50% CA unit (ie a proper panzer division) fighting a HQ-unit, it always destroyed them very quickly thanks to the "hard on soft" bonus and kept moving on.
3. AI does NOT use HQ-divisions as "combat" units as it ignores them completely when making calculations of strengths, as I've already stated. The reason you bump into them is because the AI is pulling them back, trying to avoid being encircled.

And of course I'm butthurt. Sheek started this whole thing about HoI3 being "too complicated, the UI is a mess, the game mechanics are all broken" because he was too dumb to understand how the game worked. Almost like a clockwork, there's someone else every 3-4 months to whine about the same stuff.
Oh and CF?

Hilarious how you appeal to some perceived higher intellect that makes you understand the game better than a DUM NEWB LIKE ME HURR

Maybe understanding HoI3 was easy for me since I've played HOI2 and HOI1 to the death before it. In any case, I managed to decipher the mechanics behind Gary Grigsby's "Pacific War" when I was 16 since the "Best Strategy Games" collection CD came without manuals. HoI3 is in no way more complex or more incomprehensible than the original PAC was. Smoke less weed, massage those grey brain cells a bit more.

 

[Destroid]

GarfunkeL you addressed what the HQs do, but you didn't address what they actually add to the game, which is little outside a giant pile of micro.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Karmapowered has blatantly lied before too btw. And at the same time proven himself to be a retard, when he tried to criticize Valkyria Chronicles 2 as VC1 when *everyone* was talking *only* about VC1.

EDIT:

GarfunkeL you addressed what the HQs do, but you didn't address what they actually add to the game, which is little outside a giant pile of micro.

Anyone should be able to assess from that what they add to the game.

1) They give you an additional layer of gameplay, this being organizing the army effectively.
2) They can be used to move about armies expediently.
3) They allow for things like efficient occupation automation.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Why be so angrily apologetic about a game when you have its superior version ready to enjoy?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Why be so angrily apologetic about a game when you have its superior version ready to enjoy?

Nah, HoI2 simply has less of everything and a worse engine underneath. Objectively it cannot match its sequel.

 

[Random Dumbass]

GarfunkeL, you keep asking me "why I'm playing this game" after you you fail to defend some stupid feature as if the point of a game like HOI3 is to get bogged down with aspie type crap like assigning HQ's and leaders to the dozens of brigades/armies I have littered across the map. The point of the game is to simulate/take part in an ahistorical version of WW2. Everything else, in terms of features, can and will be discussed. You can't defend an obviously shitty and cluttered UI because "that's the game". They COULD HAVE made a better UI which still tells us all of the information we need to know, but they didn't. They gave you a little box full to the brim with random numbers and words in a game where the tool-tip doesn't pop up most of the time to explain what does what.

And, AGAIN, you completely ignore/dodge the question about the puppet territories. Very much a game changing bug which has not been addressed despite the release of several patches and despite the fact that the game was released years ago.

But go ahead condescendingly telling me that the UI and supply system is amazing and that I'm just stupid for not finding enjoyment in dicking around with buttons for hours just to be able to play the game without my troops "running out of supplies".

You've said a lot of bullshit up to this point but I can't really remember them all here are some gems:

1. If you hover over your province/unit you can figure out why the supplies aren't reaching them.
A: No you can't. It just tells you that they're out of supplies which you already knew.

2. The supply mapmode, you RETARD!!!!!!
A: It's helpful if I wanna know what my current supply routes look like, not helpful at all if I wanna figure out why supplies aren't reaching a certain province.

3. The details are just extra! You don't have to read them if you don't want to, it's like an RPG.
A: And I'm the one on drugs. No, the details have a lot of important information on them, it's just that the lead designer for the game is apparently a sadistic fuck who wanted to make people suffer with a disgusting UI whenever they want to play the game.

And since I can see that this is going nowhere I will just concisely try to explain the fallacious reasoning you present as to why HQ's/micro-management/opaque supply system are "fun" - you entertain this notion that just because you have spent enough time on this game to understand all aspects of the UI, even the more retarded one's which are not governed by logic (supplies) that this somehow means that other people who are newer to the game are simply stupid for not understanding how everything works. You also seem to think that because YOU enjoy what is essentially the "paper work" of the virtual world (micro-management) that other people who don't enjoy sitting and looking at numbers and names for hours on end must, again, be stupid. You have to understand why you're wrong, right?

 

[Karmapowered]

The Kodex never fails to provide with entertainment.

Well, where to begin...

Even in 1.0 HoI3, AI-led Germany blitzkrieged Poland in historical time frame, often simultaneously fighting off a French invasion. German AI never sends all its troops to Norway either.

Ooo RLY ?

I'll give you a hint, and it's called Google. I'll even give you another hint : "Paradox forums Germany AI Norway". Pick ANY of those threads, just so you can't accuse me of having initiated them, or fighting my lone crusade on some forums for shits & giggles.
In exchange, I'll take the freedom to pick just one (I have to concede it's my favorite) :

Just had the worst single player experience of all time
To be honest, I'm about ready to give up on this terrible game. I'd like to share with you one of the worst single player experiences I've ever had.

I decided to have a go at Ethiopia with the hopes of gaining access to the sea and assisting Italy in Africa. I acquired peace immediately with Italy so as not to be a puppet. The experience that followed was horrific to say the least. Japan joined the axis and began the war in Shanxi with an AI that had no rhyme or reason. They moved back and forth between the Shanxi border and the Russian border as if they couldn't make up their mind. This resulted in Shanxi annexing Manchuria as early as April 10, 1938. They continued on to conquer Korea and pretty much end Japan in the span of a year. I thought ok, maybe I should keep playing as there is always a chance Germany and Italy have success. Things couldn't get any worse right? Wrong.

Germany invaded the lowlands around April as they usually do only to send hundreds of thousands of men into Norway. This resulted in Belgium holding and the French pushing Germany back towards Berlin. To make matters worse, the hundreds of thousands of men in Norway literally got stuck because of supply issues never making it to Narvik. Italy of course was pushed out of Africa a few months after triggering the "It's Our Time" event.

The game was essentially a waste of my time. I had managed to upgrade the entire starting 16 militia brigades of Ethiopia into Infantry with up to date weapons in all areas ready to carve a slice of Africa but by then it was already over. What disturbs me more than Paradox's lack of interest in fixing well known AI issues such as the German Norway Invasion is the fact that no one else complains about it. I see not one single person on the forums besides myself trying to hold Paradox to the standard they set for themselves. If Hearts of Iron 3 fails, the blame will be on not only the developers, but also the community who stayed silent and content with a flawed product. Hearts of Iron 2 fans, many of whom I know well, will be vindicated in their hatred and predictions of failure for HOI3 if this nonsense continues.
source

But it was you that called me out for "lying"...

Calling the LUAs stupid is as logical as calling hammer and nails stupid

I happen to call LUAs stupid whenever their integration leads to stupid situations in-game. LUAs aren't stupid by themselves. But keep invoking semantics whenever it suits you, and drawing fancy parallels to DA2, Red Alert, Icewind Dale, HoI2, Alice in Wonderland, whatever, to detract from the reality of the subject.

they are tools of the trade. LUA's are very good for finetuning the AI of certain countries for certain situation.

The scope and capabilities of LUAs are much broader than "finetuning". You, if any here, should know that. Ask any decent HoI3 modder, preferably one belonging to the BIG four or five projects on the Paradox site, and they should confirm that good LUAs can make, or break the game. The popularity of Lothos' scripts, that come to supplement and improve on a failing stock AI patch after patch, probably isn't warranted either, right ?

If you play Germany but let AI take command of most your troops, stuff like what you described would never happen.

Because the same AI that operates when you aren't in control would suddenly know better ? Right on, dude. Does the outstanding fallacy of your logic not hit you straight in the head sometimes, you feeling so exceptionally superior intelligent and all ?

Additionally, if you let the AI handle production, it follows its production LUA, which doesn't include "air defence infantry" or any shit like that.

No shit, Sherlock. Air defence infantry doesn't exist, but if the shitty unreliable AI that is behind the reorganization process of the OOB could invent it, it would. There is strictly no benefit whatsoever to hand the AI global control over your OOB in-game. None. Well, except if you had some twisted fantasies about messing with illegible blurbs of armies, divisions, officers and theaters.

While it won't be as min-maxed as a player would get it, it's good enough to fight other AIs.

Now THAT is quite the understatement. No serious HoI3 player would rely on the AI for offensive purposes beyond the tutorial stage, not even on Army level. For defensive purposes, beyond the basic behind the lines garrison duties, the AI quickly shows some pretty bad shortcomings too, if you happen to play the UK, Japan or Italy, and to a lesser degree the US and France :

Oh hi, what's my garrison suddenly doing on the frontline ? (EDIT: yes, you can prevent this from happening, but not without reassigning troops to custom-created theaters, otherwise said, not when playing on auto)

But I forget the advice we were given in this thread, play a minor instead, lol!

If your entire plan is wasted because ONE DIVISION got attack delay when it wasn't supposed to, I got bad news for you son - you're not going to conquer USSR or USA. Your plan is inherently flawed from the beginning. Even the AI sometimes launches spoiling attacks.
(snip)

I don't want to sound rude, but are you dense, or are you faking it ? Who's talking about ONE division ? At this point, I am starting to not only wonder whether we've been playing the same game, but also to question the superior knowledge thereof that many here seem to credit you with. The issue with HQs (brigaded or unbrigaded ones) and attack delay has been a long standing one, discussed over and over and over at the Paradox forums.

Once again, I invite you to use Google and educate yourself on the matter. Open your browser, type in "Paradox forums attack delay HQ" and read. Just do it.

If you can't be bothered, I'll pick some random quotes from some random threads :

Sometimes its seems I am fighting more HQ units than actual combat units. Oh yeah, just love that one Theatre unit that commands one Army Group that commands one Army that command one Corps that commands one Division of Miltia.... Four HQ's and one actual combat unit. Gotta love getting an attack delay each time each of those enemy HQ's moves in the way. I just roll around in hysterical bouts of delerious delight when I have to fight the same battle several times because the AI moves a new HQ into that VP I am trying to take...
source

My main problem is that HQs refuse to fight but still manage to trigger the attack delay. It's like my 50.000 man are delayed for days because they were briefly aware that 1000 enemies were behind those hills, but they retreated rather than go and fight....
source

Its worked this way in early HoI3 (pre 1.02 patch IIRC) - currently your units will always have attack delay after battle (unless battle takes several days to resolve).
Source

Everyone but you is unknowing, and stupid, I got it. I will spare you dissecting your previous posts, because quite honestly you bore me at this point.


[ TLDR; ]

Your overall bullcrap level regarding the matters at hand in this thread is closer to 100% than a cheap Smirnoff.

Keep massaging your ever-growing neurons e-peen, if such is your inclination, since it seems that you suffer some kind of complex in the matter. In the meanwhile, you fail to display the knowledge proper to any authority over HoI3, and the maturity required to deal with documented (and dare I say reasonable) user feedback, be it partly negative such as provided in this thread.

I admit that I had a rather high esteem of your contributions on these boards till now too. You sound no more than a vulgar and rabid fanboy at this point. Make of it what you will.

 

[Karmapowered]

Karmapowered has blatantly lied before too btw.

Dear Vaarna,

Despite my best efforts in patience, it seems that you keep failing at grasping the basic matters that one tries to convey to you. I have attempted to use various angles, words, phrases, even metaphors, but I am not willing to stoop down to onomatopoeias to get my point through with you.

In front of such observations, consistent over time, I hope that you understand my concern about the quality of your replies. Indeed, it is our common responsibility, for the sake of future generations of readers on the mighty Kodex, that this place continues to prosper and strive without useless gibberish such as yours. Therefore, I would kindly ask of you to refrain from posting any further crap, to keep this place as crap-free as possible in the future.

You're offered to return to the jRPG subforum, or any equivalent, to resume promoting crapatastical tactical games, like Valkyria Chronicles 2, the series of which you enthusiastically compared to the "best RPG EVA!", in the company of other like-minded people who enjoyed VC2 as much as you seem to do, and post legendary reviews about Jagged Alliance 2 on gamefaqs.

In the case of a refusal on your part, you'll be invited to just shut the fuck up next time you feel that you don't have the beginning of a clue of what people are talking about.

Thank you for your attention.

PS : Feel free to leave your usual brofist trail on all the posts of more eloquent and smarter people than you that will argue with this poster in the future, to show em' that you've got sum'!

 

[Father Walker]

Jesus, this thread is becoming totally tl;dr.

 

[Renegen]

the supply system is optional.

 

[GarfunkeL]

GarfunkeL you addressed what the HQs do, but you didn't address what they actually add to the game, which is little outside a giant pile of micro.

They add a pseudo-realistic chain of command, something that had been asked for, repeatedly, after HoI1 came out.

GarfunkeL, you keep asking me "why I'm playing this game" after you you fail to defend some stupid feature as if the point of a game like HOI3 is to get bogged down with aspie type crap like assigning HQ's and leaders to the dozens of brigades/armies I have littered across the map.

But it IS the point of the game. Or one of the points of the game. HoI2 does not have that stuff and is entirely playable. HoI2 also has an extremely simple supply mode and far less provinces and technologies to worry about. You could be having far more fun with HoI2, instead. I don't understand why you insist that HoI3 should have been modified to suit your tastes, instead of you finding a grand strategy game that fits your tastes better. In that respect, your complaining isn't any different from the people at Wasteland2 forums who try to get Fargo to make a Bioware-style RPG.

You can't defend an obviously shitty and cluttered UI because "that's the game". They COULD HAVE made a better UI which still tells us all of the information we need to know, but they didn't. They gave you a little box full to the brim with random numbers and words in a game where the tool-tip doesn't pop up most of the time to explain what does what.

Okay, big mouth. Explain how to do that because I think they did a pretty good job.

And, AGAIN, you completely ignore/dodge the question about the puppet territories. Very much a game changing bug which has not been addressed despite the release of several patches and despite the fact that the game was released years ago.

No, I actually had to go to work. But I'll address it here - the supply problem through puppets is a feature, as it allows minors to help out majors and prevents majors from bankrupting the industry of minors, through placing their troops there, which used to be an exploit in HoI1. Can't remember if it worked in HoI2 as well. The actual problem only manifests if you play as a major and have to attack through puppet. Fine, I already said that it is an problem. I also pointed out things you can keep in mind that help you to circumvent the issue - namely that you don't create puppets in such locations that block important supply routes or that you avoid attacking from puppet territory with massive forces. It's entirely possible, as Germany, to place a full infantry army in Romania, have Romania supply them and use them to bolster Romanian advance into USSR. And unlike what Karmapowered whined, it's also entirely possible for USA to place troops in Britain and then perform Overlord.

But go ahead condescendingly telling me that the UI and supply system is amazing and that I'm just stupid for not finding enjoyment in dicking around with buttons for hours just to be able to play the game without my troops "running out of supplies".

No, what I mean is that if I can puzzle out how the system works, it is entirely possible for other people to puzzle it out, too, as I'm certainly no IQ140 Neanderthal superman of giant intellectual prowess. You can use the tooltips, the supply overlay, the infrastructure overlay and the other sources of information to produce a composite image that gives you the clues. They show you whether you produce enough supplies, they show you where the supplies are going, they show you which units don't get enough supplies, they show you which provinces are the bottle-necks and so on. It just annoys me when new(ish) players find majority of their army OOS and then immediately spring to the forums to complain that the game is broken, without at least trying to solve the issue themselves. You were just the last straw in a long series which caused my rageburst last night.

3. The details are just extra! You don't have to read them if you don't want to, it's like an RPG.
A: And I'm the one on drugs. No, the details have a lot of important information on them, it's just that the lead designer for the game is apparently a sadistic fuck who wanted to make people suffer with a disgusting UI whenever they want to play the game.

Seriously, much of the information available IS just extra and there for immersion, or for helping out writing AARs or similars. You don't NEED to know the exact models of all the equipment in any brigade. You don't NEED to know the exact SA/HA/etc values of a some unit, unless you are keen on min-maxing everything, in which case you would not be complaining in the first place.

And since I can see that this is going nowhere I will just concisely try to explain the fallacious reasoning you present as to why HQ's/micro-management/opaque supply system are "fun" - you entertain this notion that just because you have spent enough time on this game to understand all aspects of the UI, even the more retarded one's which are not governed by logic (supplies) that this somehow means that other people who are newer to the game are simply stupid for not understanding how everything works. You also seem to think that because YOU enjoy what is essentially the "paper work" of the virtual world (micro-management) that other people who don't enjoy sitting and looking at numbers and names for hours on end must, again, be stupid. You have to understand why you're wrong, right?

I can understand why you think I'm wrong but I can only fall back on what I wrote above - that HoI3 might not be the game for you but as it definitely IS the game for me, I don't want it changed in the ways that you want it changed. In any case, if you insist on playing HoI3, you can switch the supply to "arcade" mode, which means you don't have to worry about infrastructure or partisans or supply through-put AND you can let the AI handle all of the micro stuff, if you play on Normal or Easy (probably even on Hard).

As for the written diarrhea Karmapowered is spewing out, my goodness. I've said, several times, that there are hordes of clueless morons whining on Pdox forums, so pulling threads from there isn't any sort of conclusive proof. The attack delay is a minor quip in an actual well-planned invasion, that utilizes multiple prongs of attack - as any proper plan should have. Claiming that it ruins the game is fallacious. But let's go over your sources:

1. First one is about adding combat brigades to HQ units, not about Ethiopia. Good job there. But it's a great example, as plasticpanzer is blatantly lying in the thread about current AI behaviour - since HQ's were turned into 0-width unit, AI never uses them in combat.
2. Your second one is actually about the stuff you claim it is. I'm surprised to find Kovax there claiming that HQ'units "respawn" behind enemy lines. I've never seen such things happening and I've been playing HoI3 since release, almost continuously. You might have been well served by reading what Secret Master wrote later, which was the same thing I tried to convey earlier:

   However, I have also found that it is not too big of a problem. The only times HQs delay me significantly is when I've already pocketed or eliminated so many combat brigades that the only thing in front of my is a wall of HQs.

3. Ah,your third link is the same as the first one.
4. Your fourth link is actually an interesting one, as there's some proper discussion about the attack delay in general. Of course, most of the hot air comes from people who don't know how to queue orders, who don't know how to use spoiling attacks, who don't know how to pin down enemy forces and who somehow, magically, fight dozens and dozens of HQ units. Colour me surprised.

I admit that I had a rather high esteem of your contributions on these boards till now too. You sound no more than a vulgar and rabid fanboy at this point. Make of it what you will.

Oh no, someone on the Internet thinks less of me! WHAT WILL I EVER DO NOW?!?!? And what I make of it, is this: you perhaps played a few games of HoI3 back in 1.0 or so. Many of your complaints come from there. After that, you've only updated your knowledge through reading other dumbasses whine on Pdox forums. Good job, ten points for you.

Because HoI3 has actual flaws, like the naval combat model that, while it has been somewhat improved, is still quite crappy. Or that the only reason to build anything else but 2xINF+2XART divisions is flavour/rp. Or that tank buster trait doesn't work the way it's supposed to be. Or that toughness is nearly useless tech to research. I've never claimed that HoI3 is perfect. But it's a sure sign of a moron when you lose sight of the gem under minor problems of bugs, UI issues or micro-management. Well, minor to me, obviously they are huge issues to some people.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Oh yes and I remembered that part where you whined about what an mess the AI makes. Well, guess what? It doesn't matter when you play SP. The AI is entirely capable of performing what it's supposed to do, when playing against other AI. So it doesn't matter if you leave your OOB and theatres under AI control. As for your silly example of "air defence infantry", the AI will NEVER build something like that, unless you go in and edit the production LUA yourself. Or use a mod that has something like that in it. The default LUA's are pretty good, but they are just that - default. Lothos, as you brought up, has done a lot of work, along with other modders, to create additional LUAs for fine-tuning AI behaviour in certain conditions - which is why I called it fine-tuning because usually when people have problems with the LUAs, it's not the default, generic LUAs but the additional, fine-tuning ones.

 

[Karmapowered]

I guess any further attempts at a rational discussion with you about this topic will prove to be as fruitless, so allow me to take my bow here.

You can rage till you're blue in the face against "the fiendish masses" that don't consider HoI3 as flawless a game as you perceive it in your dream world, it won't make it any different in the end : it's a interesting game, with many qualities, but also quite some flaws.

As far as I'm concerned, you've lost any credibility you might have had on the topic, especially since you started pointing vindictive fingers without double-checking your facts, at people that initially had no issue whatsoever with you, or your obvious passion of the game.

On a more personal level, and once again do with it what you will (perhaps not much), but tone down on the name calling in your posts. It's not an advice, it's just an observation. It hurts the quality of your argumentation, and makes you sound more like a teen that you probably are no longer.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Woe is me. The guy whose claims were 50% lies and 50% exaggeration is graciously bowing out after seeing that there is no chance for "mature" debate. Is passive-aggressive your middle name, perhaps? Considering that you keep on stuffing that strawman and then pretend that it's my argument. I never said that HoI3 is flawless and in my last post I brought up several actual flaws in it - flaws that Í don't need to exaggerate or lie about. So go eat a dick.

 

[Cassidy]

So in HoI3 you have to assign specific commanders to every single division instead of only assigning then to each individually commanded unit. Plus HQ micromanagement, and the stupid neutrality etc etc.

I guess I'll stick to Darkest Hour/HoI2. Abstraction is a necessary element for any strategy game on a higher than tactical level and apparently they went too far into the detailing here.

Of course, micromanagement hell is no problem for aspergers. Explains a lot about this thread.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Why be so angrily apologetic about a game when you have its superior version ready to enjoy?

Nah, HoI2 simply has less of everything and a worse engine underneath. Objectively it cannot match its sequel.

I find it objectively a much more fun game and it's all I need to know, really.

 

[Erzherzog]

How can anyone enjoy HoI 2 with how much the AI gets to cheat? The naval system is beyond fucked up.

 

[Destroid]

I really don't mind cheating AIs in sim style games like this.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

How can anyone enjoy HoI 2 with how much the AI gets to cheat? The naval system is beyond fucked up.

If you hate cheating AI so much then you don't have many games left to enjoy I'm afraid.

 

[Rostere]

It is because of people like the OP games are dumbed down nowadays...

 

[Random Dumbass]

No it isn't. Get your head out of your ass. A poorly structured UI and nonsensical supply system and unintuitive features in general don't mean that the game is "smart". The learning curve is artificial, it could be cut in half while maintaining the exact same game if a better designer were in charge of the game. I'm not asking for "FREE PANZERS IF U R ABOUT 2 DIE". Just for more clarity as to what is going on in some aspects of the game. Obviously the fan boys cannot handle this notion as can be seen in this thread. But go ahead basing your "intelligence" on how well you understand HOI3 mechanics. God knows you can't actually counter what I'm saying using actual arguments.