It’s launching imminently (August 7th). Hell, I’ve got a review copy which is looking at me threatening. I inch away. I’m not Tim Stone, for God’s sake. He can handle a strategic lady like you. I’ll just try bopping my cock gently on your forehead, and that’s no use to anyone. Er… metaphorically speaking. Anyway, for those still on the fence, there’s a demo of Hearts of Iron III available now. In it you an play as Germany, France, Poland or the UK for the first four months of WW2. Poor Poland. Anyway, there’s a latest trailer below, which shows off the Blitzkrieg gameplay. “Blitzkrieg” is one of my favourite words. Go Blitzkrieg!
That sure is some Blitzkrieging.
You can pre-order it from here, if you fancy.
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There is an incredible amount of number crunching going on under the hood. The simplistic graphics don’t do justice to the scale of this game.
Gonna give this a go, but I’m hooked on the rather excellent Airborne Assault: Conquest of Athena at the moment, thanks to Tim Stone’s recommendation, so I don’t think I’ll be buying HOI3 just yet.
Whoops. I meant Airborne Assault: Conquest of the Aegean. Don’t know what the hell I was on about there.
Yeah there’s something funny in there somewhere, which seems to cause some people (including me, weep weep) to have crippling performance problems.
I guess maybe it’s something to do with multi-core CPUs? A shame, anyway, I was looking forward to this. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.
I’m not experiencing the multi-core CPU performance problem you mention, Janek, but I know others on the forum have. You can go to your task manager, fine hoi3.exe, and set the core affinity to None or something along those lines to fix the issue.
I hope I like it. I will buy it anyway as I played Hearts of Iron 2 quite a bit without paying (err borrowed from a friend). I enjoyed Europa Universalis more than Hearts of Iron in the past.
Juggling with affinities was one of the first things I tried, didn’t seem to make any difference. So I might be wrong with my guess, or it might not like certain lines of CPUs, or something.
I’m very good at Dwarf Fortress to the point where it is hardly a challenge any more to keep my dwarfs alive. I played HoI 2 and almost had a heart attack and all the options it gave me. I can’t imagine that this is going to improve upon that. I think my limit is a Total War type game because I need some kind of action that makes sense to me. (For example I sent like 10 german troops to attack 3 Polish troops, they march down a little line and suddenly the fight is over, my troops are dead and Poland has 4 troops now I have NO Idea WTF just happened and there is no after action report that I can read as far as I know)
It gives you way to much info without giving you enough info which is insane O.o I’m not saying the games are bad, just not for me.
@Kieron “I’ll just try bopping my cock gently on your forehead…”
If the review of HOI3 started with that in PC Gamer I’d re-subscribe in a moment. =-P
TBH this site has killed pc gamer utterly for me. They would never get away with what they do here. Or feel the personal focus to flap on about their own personal preferences.
Until they sell out in 2012 to be able to afford to eat i mean.
I did an article for PC Gamer a few years back and was completely caught out by the editor when I referred to a section of the magazine they’d stopped something like two years before.
I had to admit I hadn’t read it in years :(
Developers who refuse to play modern games are twats. So too are journalists who refuse to read their own rag.
Also, dogs who don’t kick their own nuts.
If this is hard and true, it’s mine already, stop touching my thing.
I thought this was about the latest JRPG from Square Enix. You know, the one with the emo robots.
No it’s not a game for console pussies, scram.
Kieron, it’s becoming increasingly hard to share your humour with my mum.
Kieron is sharing something else with your mum entirely.
You know, the guy who has written the tutorial must’ve had a rather fun day at the office. That thing’s bloody hilarious!
@Quests
Wow, you managed to be more of a cunt than people who use “consoletard.”
@Kieron
The hell is with you the last few days? I think the Darkfall crap got to you.
I strongly recommend anyone thinking of tackling HOI 3 takes a look at the quickstart guide here:
http://www.hoi3.com/HOI3_Quickstartguide.pdf
The manual’s somewhere on the site too. The in game tutorial is apocalyptically bad, I wouldn’t bother. But once you’ve cracked the quickstart, things start to come together. I managed to beat history by 5 days in taking over Poland by the time I’d got the hang of it :D
Why do great games always have to be so flawed? This is a badly written RAM-guzzler. From a game of that simple interface you’d expect playable experience on a 2.26GHz/2GB/integrated graphics. No dice.
fijam, that’s hardly fair. This is doing FAR more work under the hood pretty much any other game out there. It’s simulating a world of ten thousand provinces and dozens of AI actors who have to competantly handle the Second World War across all that space at the division level… which is before we consider the resource/diplomacy/production/research/intelligence/politics subsystems. It’s a miracle it loads at all.
And if it is underoptimised (and it does seem to be, to be fair), that probably has something to do with a dev team in single figures. And, going on past experience with Paradox games, it’ll be patched soon enough. First patch is scheduled for release, no less.
Brigade level, not divisional :D Look again.
HoI3 is, along with ArmA2 one of the few games you can play and still feel quite unequivocally clear about your manhood.
@Schurem
“HoI3 is, along with ArmA2 one of the few games you can play and still feel quite unequivocally clear about your manhood.”
So say we all! =-D
@Jae And it does all that even when paused? The interface is not responsive, I have to hover the cursor over a button for about a second for it to light up. The CPU is not really stressed either, it’s the graphic subsystem that sucks. And I do not think it’s about the optimizations. I still remember the HoI1 installer copying hundreds of .bmp files, each one for every unit. I think the series is just badly coded. Or perhaps they just target only high-end systems with that game.
And don’t get me wrong, I am happy that Paradox invests in ambitious projects like this one or M&B — it’s just a bloody shame they have so little resources.
I wouldn’t expect an integrated graphics card to manage anything =p
Besides Johan (PI’s front man shall we say), has stated that most of the performance issues have been optimized in the release patch. The main one being a huge log file that had to read/write data to the hard disk constantly during play. This was for debug purposes and has been removed from the full game.
@StalinsGhost
I thought that the quick start guide was a good read, especially when combined with the tutorials
…. until the very moment I started a game…
It took me a long time(like, ten minutes of looking over stuff) just to feel confident enough just to press the “resume” button. I mean, I picked POLAND, and I still had two dozen divisions strung out across the length of the border, about four different critical research projects, and an entire system of government to change(I think, I mean I went from an economically and socially moderate country to… well, to wartime Germany basically). And then I spent a while allocating research projects and tuning my nation’s production.
And when I pressed play, I still got warnings about danger and poor allocations in spending. Not to mention that whole blitz thing going on.
God, this game is cool.
@fijam
Disable sprites; if it worked for my piddly four year old laptop, it should work for you. Besides, those counters show some useful info once you can figure them out.
This is one of those games that has always called to me to master it but when I attempt I fail and feel like a horrible idiot :( Maybe I will try again with HoI 3.
Who needs tutorials or quickstart guides!
The fighting in HOI2 was the hard part, until you realize that you need to slow the game way down for your fights and make sure you attack first thing in the morning, and also how the game decides how many men you can use to attack. It’s one of the only games I’ve played in the last 5 years where I spend a lot of time looking at the manual. Overall though, it’s not soooo bad. Then again…
…When most kids were learning how to read, I was learning that the NATO symbol for a division of Mechanized Infantry was a big X with an O around it, and XX on top of the box. My dad loved wargames.
Demo crashes every time I run it :-(