Hearts of Iron 3 (PC DVD)

I liked HoI I, I loved HoI II and with great pain I must admit I bloody hate HoI III.
I really don't understand why the game has changed so much since the the last version...I mean, HoI II had some points that had to be adressed but these were really little tweeks compared to the changes they have done to the game now.
To start off, the loading time is horrific (and no, my system is not outdated), I sit there while I get messages like 'generating trees'(!?!), generating the world (yawn) and after maybe a minute or two I'm finally where I have to be, the game interface.
It LOOKS the same as HoI II but is definately different. They have increased the amount of provinces to an impossible number (like there weren't enough in HoI II). The units are just counters with the military symbols of each branch of the army, so any wargamer will find this comfortable but many, many people liked the graphical representation on the screen (HoI II) where you could really see your armor units move across the map; now you see a counter with a green arrow moving from one province to another.
The technology tree has been dismembered and you have to research each part of your unit separately (eg. not only do you have research 'medium tanks', but also it's main gun, the armour, the engine and the reliability). I miss the point why this could be an improvement because I don't think anybody is going to develop a 1944 medium tank with a gun of 1960 and an engine of 1926...
This is true for all assets (land, sea, air). For crying out loud, you have to develop (bigger) fuel tanks for your bombers. What did they fly on? 2 gallons of fuel???
Other aspects of the game like diplomacy and economy are in some ways the same as in HoI II so I'm not going to comment on that.
The game has also changed, they introduced the HQ concept that all units are bound to a HQ on a higher command level. While this is true in real life, again I don't see the benefit. In HoI II when you had a HQ nearby, you were able to attack with more units without penalty. That worked fine, why change it and make it more complicated? Also combat has become sterile, no animations, nothing. Just a few 'boom' and 'pang' sound in the background to make you 'feel' it.
The game speed is sloooow. If I set this on max speed and begin in 1936, maybe, just mayby I'll be in 1937 after a few hours of gaming.
I can go on for a while but there is no point as by now you will realise that this game is a missed opportunity.
I will go back to HoI II and from time to time back to HoI III just to TRY to like it. Maybe they will release an add-on which will fix many points I'm making here; maybe its wishful thinking...

Hearts of Iron 3 at release was something of a disappointment. See the many negative reviews right here on Amazon for the details - slow, crash-prone and with a tendency to go hog-wild with the "alternative" part of alt-history. Things have gotten much better and I can now say without any reservations that this is a good, approaching great game.

What is HOI3?
A grand strategy game covering the World War 2 era from 1936, the year Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland and set Europe on the road to war, to 1947, the year after the real-life defeat of Japan. The player can choose to control any nation from across the globe, from titans like Germany or the USSR down to relative minnows like Liberia or Ecuador. The object of the game is rather fluid - certain nations are locked into one side from the beginning, but with many, including the USA, Italy and Japan, the player can choose to side with democracy, fascism or communism, or simply pursue their own military aims - although any amount of warmongering will mean you probably ending up in one of the alliances sooner or later, and the game, as a war simulator, will be very dull for anyone attempting to play a neutral, pacifist game.

What's the gameplay like?
Complicated, although there's plenty of optional automation. At your disposal are warfare (of course), diplomacy (generally focused on trading and on either gathering nations to your cause, or agitating to get yourself admitted to one of the big alliances, with a few other bits and bobs), industry, technological research, national politics, and espionage. All of this can be automated - if you want to play the low-level tactical game, you can assume direct control over every trade deal and troop movement. If you want to play the strategic game, you can turn on the automation for everything and just define general goals for your highest-level commanders. Or you can play a mixture, allowing the AI to handle all the diplomatic and espionage stuff while you march your armies around, or indeed vice versa. The AI is generally quite adept at doing what you want it to, although be warned that if you have your diplomacy automated while playing as Germany, the AI *will* press the "Demand Danzig from Poland" button that starts the War in 1939, regardless of how well prepared you are.

Troops are commanded in the traditional manner - you march them into a province, and if there are enemies there, then violence commences. Divisions are rarely destroyed through direct combat; they will fall back to regroup when their morale or organisation level reaches breaking point, only being completely annihilated if they have nowhere to retreat to - which makes encirclement a key objective. Air wings and navy groups are handled differently, being assigned missions which can scheduled and set to auto-repeat or not as you wish. There's also an "Order of Battle" system which allows you to set up command groups above your divisions, at the corps, army, army group and theatre level.

Partisans and resistance fighters are almost a non-entity; the game doesn't account for units smaller than three thousand men or so, so the most you'll see of them is the occasional provincial uprising, easily put down by any single division of your defence force. Another underplayed aspect is that beyond helping the German-American Bund or the American Communist Party grab power at the 1940 elections, which helps keep the USA out of the Allies, international political intrigue is of minimal importance for anyone - changing the party in power when a nation is already involved in a big alliance does absolutely nothing.

It's superficially intimidating, but you don't have to master everything on your first play-through - which is lucky, since you won't. Overall, it's very much more chin-stroking than heart-pounding.

What are the graphics and sound like?
Functional. The interface is mostly quite intuitive, although some things are in odd places - for instance, you enact national decisions in the Diplomacy rather than the Politics screen, and you create new theatres by building up a new chain of command from the bottom, starting with a division, rather than creating the chain downwards from the theatre level, which would seem more logical.

There's little flash. The map looks like a map, not ugly but not conspicuously beautiful either. The same goes for the units themselves; the default is counters which represent your units - sprites are available as an optional extra - and they do the job well enough but offer little in the all-singing, all-dancing department.

The sound largely consists of music from the slightly more bombastic side of classical, with sound effects limited to the informative - the occasional "Boom! Sploosh!" which announces that a ship has been sunk, or an oddly-chosen clicking noise that tells you partisans have risen up in one of your occupied territories.

How stable is it and what bugs does it have?
It's much better than it was. Paradox seem to have finally squelched a memory leak and speed issue that made the title more or less unplayable at launch, especially for those of us unlucky enough to have computers infected with MS Vista. Crashes still happen, but much less frequently - twice in a solid real-life week of playing for me, as opposed to several times per session when the title first launched.

Also worth noting under the "bugs" heading is the whole alt-history thing. Several progressive tweaks mean that the game has moved into the realm of the plausible - now, the USA won't join the Allies until the War is well and truly underway, Japan will probably beat China or at least fight them to a stalemate, and most importantly, Germany actually will start the war in Europe. Oddities remain, though; for instance, it's usually Italy who does best in the war in France; both the German and French AI will stack 95% of their forces along the Maginot Line, leaving the Franco-Italian border weakly defended and the German thrust through Belgium and the Netherlands under-manned. The net result is usually that Italian cavalry is galloping across Occitania while the German tanks are still bogged down around Brussels, and it's a 50/50 thing which of the two gets to Paris first.

Also, the AI hasn't really got much better at doing naval invasions or allied co-operation. Left to its own devices, the AI's attempts at D-Day are little short of pathetic; British, American and Canadian troops will show up in numbers of a few thousand at a time, usually months apart, attempt to land at a defended and garrisoned port, fail, give up and go home again. Playing from the other side, you obviously have the benefit of hindsight, and can start preparing your plan to liberate France three years before the war even starts, which obviously makes the whole thing rather easier than it actually was.

Overall then?
A deep, involving and (now) mostly bug-free strategy game, recommended to anyone who isn't turned off by lots of numbers and strictly functional, high-level-of-abstraction graphics. Bring a powerful computer because the CPU, not just the graphics card, is going to be working pretty damn hard tracking the manoeuvres of tens of thousands of units across tens of thousands of provinces, even without resource flows and international relations to throw into the mix.

In their quest to update the HoI2 series, which was brilliant, the target was missed by a country mile.

The first and major annoyance is the glacial speed at which the game progresses, making it much more difficult for me to play, as it runs at about a tenth of the speed of HoI2 in its fastest setting - and that is if you're lucky, the wind is blowing in the right direction and the game temporarily does not decide otherwise. I do not mind a slow initial loading (like in Rome) but the debilitatingly slow gameplay is a real issue. And I have a farily fast computer, with plenty of RAM, good graphics, etc., where computing intensive FPS games run without any problems whatsoever.

As others have commented, the game has serious issues with historical accuracy as well and events have mostly been removed. I tried twice to play as Germany and in neither of the games could I fulfill the requirements for a Rhineland re-occupation in March 1936, as it happens historically.

Another major gripe - as also mentioned is the automation of everything within a category, versus micromanaging everything. In HoI2 a fairly effective AI support for convoy creation, trade, and production existed, which could be switched on individually, according to preference, and where no wastage happened. Automating production here leads to massive losses through misapplication of productive capacity to the wrong areas, diplomacy and the other sectors are eqaully not to be trusted. If one needs to micromanage everything oneself, though, the game loses much of its charm, and scalability, depending on time and mood.

The expanded number of provinces is nice and one of the nice new features. Equally I liked the option of now manually asking for licence production rights of foreign owned equipment, as opposed to having this feature event driven only. Research is more along the lines of HoI1, which is OK but the slowness of the games prevented sufficient experimentation to give a more complete assessment.

I guess the slowness will remain a major obstacle, unless a fix is introduced by Paradox soon. For most of the rest I can just hope that add-ons, such as CORE, HSR and others become available very, very soon. In the meantime, there is more of HoI2.