|
Stairmaster posted:There need to be more explicitly alt history style wargames. Like give me something based off the anglo-american nazi war where you gotta do normandy but with 50s tech. There's Plan Orange, which is a magazine game where Mark Herman redid Empire of the Sun but set 10 years earlier so you're fighting the Pacific war with battleships
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2023 19:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 00:27 |
|
|
It's also hilarious because the only way to win as Japan is to have THE DECISIVE BATTLE and be lucky enough to win it. The game is 100% the Americans slowly creeping up their fleet train and then the two sides mashing ships against each other.
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2023 21:17
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Topical scenario alert: yes... hahahaha! Yes!!!
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2023 21:25
|
|
|
Slavvy posted:2 separate German alt-history tracks! Oh boy!! The real selling point
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2023 21:40
|
|
|
Stairmaster posted:There need to be more explicitly alt history style wargames. Like give me something based off the anglo-american nazi war where you gotta do normandy but with 50s tech. Paradox did that Sunset Invasion dlc for Crusader Kings 2, where the Native American tribes invade Europe like amphibious Mongolians. I think everyone hated it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 02:51
|
|
|
It was okay, it helped shake up the western end of the map, but there wasn't that much flavor to the Aztecs and it as mostly a gimmick. Anyways how about an alt history wargame where the Nazis destroyed the British army at Dunkirk and Japan attacked the USSR instead of Pearl Harbor, so that Stalin essentially has to battle the combined Axis powers alone.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 02:57
|
|
|
PerniciousKnid posted:I think everyone hated it. yeah because whitey don't like it when get they get a taste of their own medicine
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 03:00
|
|
|
the problem with the aztec invasion is that its all light infantry, so after however many years of combat balance changes they're really anemic and can maybe carve out a foothold in brittany before being quickly ejected by the locals it needed more teeth to keep up and they never touched it post release for whatever reason
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 03:15
|
|
|
According to one of the devs sunset invasion sold well enough for them to consider doing more weird history stuff, but I think they just decided to add fantasy options to some of the then future dlcs to play it safer
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 03:46
|
|
|
the idea behind Sunset Invasion ruled and I'm sad they never did anything else like it the ridiculous alt-history options in Hearts of Iron IV are mostly bad, although some of them are at least funny like the Spanish anarchists having literal world domination as an endgoal
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 03:50
|
|
|
Mantis42 posted:Anyways how about an alt history wargame where the Nazis destroyed the British army at Dunkirk and Japan attacked the USSR instead of Pearl Harbor, so that Stalin essentially has to battle the combined Axis powers alone. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 03:53
|
|
|
 crops are so dang cool; I built one of those big 11,000 ton grain storage units and an entire industry sprang up around it - a food factory, then a distillery, then a livestock farm->slaughterhouse chain, then a fabric factory-clothes factory chain. it really makes you appreciate why it was such a thing that the Soviets and Axis were fighting over the grain elevator complexes in Stalingrad
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 04:42
|
|
|
Mister Bates posted:the idea behind Sunset Invasion ruled and I'm sad they never did anything else like it but yeah HOI IV can't quite decide whether it wants to be a game about "serious" history i.e Unity of Command or wacky space-aliens version of history like CK2
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 15:08
|
|
|
Mantis42 posted:It was okay, it helped shake up the western end of the map, but there wasn't that much flavor to the Aztecs and it as mostly a gimmick. this is great because it's also essentially the premise of your typical 'Cold War Gone Hot' game except with WW2 technology and it would rule with the problem being that if any wargame dev made this it would only be playable from the Axis side
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 15:40
|
|
|
Typo posted:I thought the Soviet DLC where you got to pick whether Trotsky/Stalin/Rykov got to lead the USSR was interesting at least I think Hearts of Iron would work a lot better if it started in like... 1930 or 33 or something, maybe even earlier in the immediate post-WW1 era, with a faster tick rate and longer tech tree. A lot of the alt-history stuff would feel less ludicrous with more time to breathe. Simplify focus trees so that diplomacy is an actual system players can use to sway and interact with other powers, a la other paradox games, instead of a track determined by their tree. And for god's sake add some mechanics for managing alliances and coalition warfare, it's so loving stupid how factions in HoI IV just end up heaping all their divisions together in a mess on one front unless seriously scripted to do otherwise anyway thats my HoI V fantasy that won't be realized
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 21:20
|
|
|
Fuligin posted:I think Hearts of Iron would work a lot better if it started in like... 1930 or 33 or something, maybe even earlier in the immediate post-WW1 era, with a faster tick rate and longer tech tree. A lot of the alt-history stuff would feel less ludicrous with more time to breathe. Simplify focus trees so that diplomacy is an actual system players can use to sway and interact with other powers, a la other paradox games, instead of a track determined by their tree. And for god's sake add some mechanics for managing alliances and coalition warfare, it's so loving stupid how factions in HoI IV just end up heaping all their divisions together in a mess on one front unless seriously scripted to do otherwise I'd like a post ww1 game. Something that was either set right after the brest treaty or after the german surrender and then have the game be about reshaping he postwar world.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 21:25
|
|
|
The focus trees were a terrible idea imo As mentioned, they make the diplomacy system mostly useless, and make the game into a choose-your-own-adventure book rather than any kind of dynamic simulation.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 22:38
|
|
|
paradox should have played cataclysm and empire of the sun and also not made their wwii game continous play
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 22:47
|
|
|
Endman posted:The focus trees were a terrible idea imo agreed. something that turned me off really hard from HOI4 was experiencing that the focus trees operate in a special netherworld that nonetheless overrides everything else in the game every 45 or 90 days.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2023 23:15
|
|
|
The focus tree feels like it was specifically designed so that you couldn't do HOI3 style diplo cheesing. Either way as a system it gave us everything from goofy alt-hist paths to entire CYOA storygames using the game's engine.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 00:05
|
|
|
yeah HOI is one of the most obvious victims of scope creep in the Paradox lineup, because the thing that originally set it apart from most of their other titles was its extremely narrow focus - it was a series about a specific war and all of its mechanics were built around recreating that war. it is not a game about simulating the 20th century, it is a game about an extremely short time period of less than 10 years and covers that time period in granular detail. it is not a grog game by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a wargame first and foremost, with everything else - the economy simulation, the extremely limited internal politics system, the diplomacy, all of it - existing almost exclusively to provide support and context for the war the game is actually about. the base game was fun because it was a WW2-themed sandbox toy in which you could take this existing conflict everyone knows about, poke it, fiddle around with it, and see what weird and interesting outcomes you could get if you changed certain parameters around. it's more like smashing plastic army men together and making machine gun noises with your mouth than some kind of serious political sim - which is fine, it's not a criticism of the game, but it also means that it's built mainly to do that, to be a war sandbox where everything you do is about either getting ready for a war, establishing the context in which a war will happen, or fighting a war. almost all of the political maneuvering - indeed, almost all of anything that you can possibly do that isn't directly related to war - has no actual gameplay mechanics built to support it and has to be done through the national focus system, so all of the outlandish alt history poo poo basically boils down to clicking a button and then reading a text prompt that says 'congratulations Paraguay is now an absolute monarchy with cores on Zanzibar'. it's pretty unsatisfying as a gameplay experience and only has appeal for how funny and weird the outcomes are; getting to those outcomes kind of blows and usually isn't meaningfully tied into the rest of the game.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 01:05
|
|
|
That's a long way to say the least appealing thing about the game is the gameplay, which blows I can just use my imagination to do an alternate history where Italy invades France with it's hardened Ethiopian campaign veterans
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 01:14
|
|
|
bedpan posted:I'd like a post ww1 game. Something that was either set right after the brest treaty or after the german surrender and then have the game be about reshaping he postwar world. there was a HOI II mod about exactly this it was boring af the HOI mechanics are based on modelling WWII, it really really doesn't work if WWII isn't happening or about to happen
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 01:20
|
|
|
Not a fan of having to meticulously design every plane/ship/truck for a +0.30% bonus for division toughness. Edit: HOI4 has the problem of implementing things that sound "cool" but make gameplay unpleasant or a slog.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 01:20
|
|
|
FirstnameLastname posted:i totally get what you're saying This is a good post and I think it is worth broadening the discussion with another perspective. A lot of my friends do fencing, and they often remark at the parallels. Tempo, pressure, distance, are all super important concepts in games, and it feels like hardly person playing games can even see them, much less understand them. When playing basically any multiplayer game - from Starcraft through Halo and even World of Tanks - if you develop a sense of it, you can really easily feel enemy focus and weakspots, and you can feel when a push will have an outsized effect, and when you're better off doing a little prodding and poking. I often notice that outside of really high level play, people in games tend to be extremely passive. To tie it back into Soviet doctrine, it was highly tuned to make those decisions simpler. I was very impressed when I learned that even the spacing of different elements of a regiment on the march was tuned to give a commander the right amount of time to figure out what to do with the next arriving element during a battle. Through trying to make war a science, communists gamified it. Zeppelin Insanity has issued a correction as of 01:36 on Sep 28, 2023 |
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 01:25
|
|
|
bedpan posted:agreed. something that turned me off really hard from HOI4 was experiencing that the focus trees operate in a special netherworld that nonetheless overrides everything else in the game every 45 or 90 days. the focus tree feel like the result of paradox unable to make the core design decision of whether they want their game to be a sandbox or theme-park style game also the endless amount of obessession their playerbase have with who would be the king of America if the US became a monarchy in the 30s
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 01:45
|
|
|
them making the division designer was a bigger sin imo.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 01:53
|
|
|
Tankbuster posted:them making the division designer was a bigger sin imo. Yeah, now you have to remember the max combat width of every type of geography and make specialized divisions for each. Or ignore it but at that point why is pdox spending time on that crap.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 02:15
|
|
|
I think I'd honestly prefer if you just ran the war effort in Hearts of Iron, and they dispensed completely with the political and diplomatic systems beyond how they affect actually fighting WW2.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 02:22
|
|
|
Darkest Hour was the peak of the series in my opinion, it had a bunch of potential weird alt-history outcomes and different scenarios while still understanding that the game was not a general political simulator or broad-focused grand strategy game but was instead specifically about simulating war, with every single other thing heavily abstracted and reduced down to only those parts that mattered to the military, and peacetime existing only as a warm-up period before the main event. every other system mostly got out of the way and let you focus on smashing divisions together. HOI IV had a really good idea with its production system, and it was, in the beginning, a clear improvement over previous games, an interesting mechanic that simulated something which was extremely and immediately relevant to the war and had huge effects on how and why certain things happened. for whatever reason they have taken this perfectly serviceable mechanic and keep making it steadily worse with every release, by adding more and more poo poo you have to design.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 02:31
|
|
|
the other game that they licensed their hoi2 engine to for a fan remake was arsenal of democracy and i got that for free because they ran a giveaway on twitter and i was the only person to enter
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 02:43
|
|
|
I think everyone has memory-holed HOI III which has like 100x more division designer type mechanics that makes the game tedious
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 18:28
|
|
|
The ranking goes HOI 2 > HOI 3 > HOI 4 > HOI 1
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 18:33
|
|
|
i'll die before i touch hoi3 again
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 19:14
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:i'll die before i touch hoi3 again fav hoi3 meta was to make every infantry division with just one infantry brigade because otherwise the AI would get even more confused
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 19:25
|
|
|
meticulously setting up the command layers only for the AI to never advance the HQs leaving them permanently out of radio range of the units
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 19:26
|
|
|
HoI3 map on release having Stalingrad massively in the wrong location was very funny. Especially if you combine it with the dev diary going into how they were basically simulating the weather using temperature and humidity per province area or whatever they called them in that game. Like just excellent use of development time and very emblematic of everything that would be to come for that game.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 19:26
|
|
|
Typo posted:I think everyone has memory-holed HOI III Hoi 3 let you make your own OOBs and reshuffle divisions into brigades. It was and is an absolutely unplayable mess.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 19:27
|
|
|
Brigade level grand strategy lol.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 19:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 00:27 |
|
|
Orange Devil posted:HoI3 map on release having Stalingrad massively in the wrong location was very funny. Especially if you combine it with the dev diary going into how they were basically simulating the weather using temperature and humidity per province area or whatever they called them in that game. I think there was a dev diary shortly before release that mentioned as an aside that the AI routines for the countries did not exist yet. As in entirely did not exist and had not been written.
|
|
#
?
Sep 28, 2023 19:28
|
|