Everyone’s favorite WWII strategy game is having a redo and will be coming out soon from Paradox.
Just reading the developer diaries it seems like it is going to be extremely intricate. I still haven’t mastered Victoria yet, I’m a little intimidated by this new game.
Hearts of Iron III is coming? I guess I should buy HoI 2, then, if I don’t want to be too late
It sounds really cool, but a little complex.
Are there any WWII global-level games that are less complex than Hearts of Iron, but more complex than Axis & Allies?
SQUEEEE!! Europa Universalis 3 got me addicted to their games, but HOI 2 was a bit too graphically outdated for my tastes. I guess I’d better schedule in about 400 hours of play time coming up.
Excellent, I loved HoI II.
Excellent. I spent hundreds of hours carving out empires in HOI2 – I think my favorite was moving west across the breadth of Eurasia as the Japanese, squeezing the Russians between myself and the Germans, then winning a harder and more satisfying victory over the Nazis. Also fun was carving out a Mediterranean empire as Italy, then joining the Allies and taking control over most of Germany.
Dammit. There goes my life for the next few years.
I had a copy of HoI2, and worked the hell out of that game. I wish I were more comfortable making modifications to the game files. My greater Brazilian Hegemony would have been the most fun ever with modern gear.
I actually couldn’t really get into HOI2. It was probably because I sucked, I couldn’t win even with Germany over France. My issues was even if I outnumbered my opponent 10-1 I’d still lose.
I hope they improve the AI, especially the Allied AI.
In HoI2 the allies often dumped 200 divisions in places like Casablanca or on some Pacific island.
I bought the first HOI and it was atrocious. The mechanism of the game just did not function at all. I tried playing Canada and spent half the game trying to develop decemietric radar, or whatever tiny little technological advancement it was; it was impossible to figure out how to mesh my war effort with the UK’s.
Was the second one better?
The second one was a huge improvement on the first one in terms of gameplay, if not graphics. It still required a textbook style game manual, though.
I played every small country in HoI (not Canada. I was working my way up, Canada is too powerful, and I’m yet to play it). Also, I played with a mod that added technologies to the tree, making many discoveries even more difficult. Simply put : the game is intended to play the main powers. If you’re playing a small country, you must specialize in narrow fields. For instance having decent armoured units and not much else.
However, I’m surprised that you had that much troubles with Canada. It has decent resources at the beginning of the game, and begin, if I’m not mistaken, with acceptable technologies. Actually, it’s a super-power by comparison with the countries I’ve played. Maybe it doesn’t have much industry, and you didn’t build factories? Or didn’t manage your resources correctly and lacked, say, rubber, and your war effort was stalled as a result? Or spent your resources in general improvements in strategy/tactics that you couldn’t reasonably afford? Spend too much on building units and didn’t have enough ressources left for research? There might be many reasons but in all likelihood, if it isn’t a management issue, you had ambitions too big for your country.
In any case, I didn’t play HoI2, but from what I read, it makes even more difficult to play a minor power, because you can’t be given technologies by your allies directly anymore. Instead, you’re given “blueprints” and you still have to do research to implement them.
Essentially, it’s possible to play minor countries in HoI only because Paradox found out that in its other games, people enjoyed playing them. But contrarily to Europa Universalis, a minor country won’t ever be able to pull much weight in the game. Essentially, when you play one, you conquer some neighbouring regions, or you help defending a beachhead here and support an attack there so that your stupid AI ally won’t be trashed and you call that a major victory for your country. Sometimes you call it a major victory simply if your country survived. For instance, you play Greece, aren’t eliminated, and even occupy some territories in the Balkans. That after trashing your fleet, keeping WWI-style armour and planes, forgetting about decimetric radar, and being very happy when you’ve improved your mortars.
Also, if you ever intend to play HoI 1 again, be sure to go to seek the players-made mod (I don’t remember its name). It adds a lot of events and as a result much more variety and surprises to the game. In the normal version, you can see that almost all games end up almost exactly in the same way if you’re not playing yourself one of the major powers.
For the record mastering Victoria is akin to getting a PHD, so don’t let that deter you from trying out other Paradox games. 
That’s sort of the problem. In terms of simulating WWII, it makes no sense for Canada to have an independent tech tree; Commonwealth countries should be sharing techs, strategies and advancements, at least to some extent.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I will probably preorder this game. I’m a firm Paradox fanboy.