Comments on: Atriuming And Ahing? Hearts of Iron III Demo

By: Funky Badger

Funky Badger — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:24:40 +0000

Demo crashes every time I run it :-(

By: Kommissar Nicko

Kommissar Nicko — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:57:00 +0000

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.

By: cowthief skank

cowthief skank — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:56:47 +0000

Who needs tutorials or quickstart guides!

By: Railick

Railick — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:45:17 +0000

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.

By: lePooch

lePooch — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:22:37 +0000

@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.

By: Tweakd

Tweakd — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:25:29 +0000

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.

By: fijam

fijam — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:29:08 +0000

@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.

By: Fenchurch

Fenchurch — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:19:20 +0000

@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

By: schurem

schurem — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:59:56 +0000

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.

By: Jae Armstrong

Jae Armstrong — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:17:41 +0000

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.

By: fijam

fijam — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:45:49 +0000

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.

By: StalinsGhost

StalinsGhost — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:34:15 +0000

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