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Caranorn -> (10/29/2003 8:00:54 PM)
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The reason why I eventually put down HOI (I reinstalled it recently on my new PC, but after loading it once I shut the whole peace down again and decided it was not worth relearning that game) is mostly linked to its ridiculous naval warfare aspect.
The first time you have the combine German submarine fleet together with their surface raiders and surface fleet (a dozen sub squadrons, half a dozen heavy and another half dozen light cruisers as well as 2 or 3 battleships) try and fight face to face against the combined british Home Fleet and Channel Fleet you see that at least the ai is greatly flawed (for one thing it didn't seem to send out it's subs and raiders out well in advance of war, then once war was declared it send every single seaworthy ship along the same route). On the other hand, you can also notice some more serious issues once this situation arrises, which is that the combined Home and Channel fleets get trashed in this action, they win but the first vessels engaged are almost certainly destroyed (oh I forgot to mention that the french usually come to help as well, so it's 3 major fleets) and most others beat up beyond recognition. HOI uses pure attrition warfare for naval combat which simply does not reflect reality. Add to this that with all versions I used (probably not the latest), aircraft carriers were of little if any use, also small carriers like HMS Hermes have as much capacity as a late war Midway when it comes carrying aircraft (yes the Midway will be faster, better armoured etc.). This problem with carrier airpower is bad enoiugh for European operations, I don't want to imagine how it would be for the Pacific conflict (I only played the 36 and 39 scenarios, and never beyond early 41 or so).
When it comes to land warfare, the game seems to do reasonably well, though much could be improved yet (I think I wrote some sugestions for HOI2 on the paradox boards, can't remember it all now). As to airwarfare, it works somewhat and is definitelly not as game wreaking as the naval aspect. The tech and construction parts of the game are nice, but like the rest of the game not entirely thought out I feel. So mostly I feel HOI has potential, but that at this time it's not worth spending much time on. My past experience with Paradox games is also such that I won't try to mod HOi or take part in such a team (you will sooner or later find the limits of the design, I did so within days of trying to create a decent Revolutionary-napoleonic scenario for EU2, or during my attempt to mod the EU2 Grand Campaign to allow for a realistic early game, all the material for serious moddying seem to be present, but eventually you will find the hardcoded material you can't mod past). Additionally, after having bought EU (a more or less faithful copy of Azure Wish's board game), EU2, Legion (they never even credit GMT and Richard Berg for copying large parts of his game rules and tables (I think even commentaries directly taken from rule or scenario books)) and HOI, I don't trust Paradox sufficiently to buy another product before it has undergone some major public testing (all those games have potential but appear to be little tested if at all, they just aren't finished products, and unlike a board game you can't fix serious problems in a computer game). I think the people at Paradox wish to provide serious and quality games, but somewhere along the line marketing wins out (which might explain their use of real time gaming based on old turn based games).
And like Les the Sarge I greatly prefer turn based gaming. The Paradox games were probably the only so called real time games I spent many hours playing. The reason for that is obviously the modulable speed of play and pause option (which is not an option in multi player though, so the most challenging games would be unpauseable except for emergencies). Another reason is that I know that the EU engine is really turn based and only has a semblance of real time mechanics superimposed (I wish they just left it turn based).
I think I'll start studying WiF rules again and start preparing myself for a hopefully soon to arrive WiF board here at Matrix:-) Now I'll only need a serious computerised division scale game about WWII (and WWI) (I won't call it computer Europa, but that's roughly what I'm thinking of).
Marc aka Caran... only playing beer and bretzel games these days as good monster games just take too much time and space
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