Hearts of Iron - what the #$%@* am I doing?

Having heard lots of good things about Paradox games, EU, HOI, thought I'd give HOI 3 a go as my first non-Civ grand strategy game foray. I get the game, load it all up, read the manual, do the tutorials, and upon finally starting the game, my reaction:

What the %$(#@%! am I supposed to be doing?

The tutorials are useless. The manual is pretty useless. I'm dumped into the middle of 100 different systems, none of which are transparent to me in their function or interaction with each other. One of things I've always appreciated about Civ games are their ability to start simple and then layer on a series of systems which interact in increasingly complex ways, but via their gradual introduction and the clear way in which they function it never feels overwhelming. With this game I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing, how the tools at my disposal are supposed to do it, or even really how they work.

Is there any way to understand this game without having to watch 11 hours of YouTube tutorials? Is this documentation level typical of other Paradox games of this genre?

I learned how to play my first Paradox game by playing it with easy countries a couple times aka a couple hundred hours. That was EUIV though, I think HOI is more complex, but don't quote me on that.

Paradox games are notorious for thier steep learning curve and opaque tutorials. The only way to understand is to play a lot and watch let's plays/read paradoxplaza forums. Start with easier nations like (ironically) Germany.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/hearts-of-iron-iii-major-threads-links.494022/

There doesn't seem to be a way to play these games without investing many hours understanding the pacing. I end up understanding most of the systems, but I have a hard time grasping the pacing, personally. i.e., I always feel like I should be doing something, I never know when to fast forward or take action, it's a bit annoying. Frankly, while I enjoy CK2 and EUIII, I don't have time anymore in my life to invest in figuring out these kinds of games. Maybe if they were all I played, but I have so many other games to play.

CaptainKoloth said:

What the %$(#@%! am I supposed to be doing?

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Frankly I dont know how Germany lost WW2, All Hitler had to do was not screw up, just build up your war machine and unleash it on Stalin.
Thats pretty much the entire game.

HoI3 was not the best PDox game to start with, although there is at least a fair bit of automation you can use to help you get into the game. Hand off some aspects of your nation to the AI and focus on learning other parts.

Though YouTube videos are, to all intents and purposes, the tutorials. PDox have admitted they don't bother fixing bugs in the in game tutorials cos no-one uses them due to Arumba's videos.

PhroX said:

Though YouTube videos are, to all intents and purposes, the tutorials. PDox have admitted they don't bother fixing bugs in the in game tutorials cos no-one uses them due to Arumba's videos.

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What?
These people are bloody jokes

I find this really frustrating. It's almost like they want to punish you for wanting to play the game- "You want to play OUR game? Good luck... try to figure THIS out!" I feel like you haven't finished your job as a developer if no one can figure out how to play your game. I'm a physicist in my day job and as one of my mentors told me many years ago, if you can't give a really good explanation of something, more often than not it's an indication that you don't fully understand it yourself.

CaptainKoloth said:

I find this really frustrating. It's almost like they want to punish you for wanting to play the game- "You want to play OUR game? Good luck... try to figure THIS out!" I feel like you haven't finished your job as a developer if no one can figure out how to play your game. I'm a physicist in my day job and as one of my mentors told me many years ago, if you can't give a really good explanation of something, more often than not it's an indication that you don't fully understand it yourself.

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I mean it's just a different design focus for the company. They feel that throwing a ton of concepts and abstractions at you would just confuse you and giving a "step by step" tutorial à la Total War would either be overlong or unhelpfully vague.

Besides it's antithetical to Paradox's design aesthetic: that there is no such thing as "winning" or "losing" in the game, beyond what you deem a win or a loss. The way the game is designed is for you to jump in and dick around. Make enormous, hilarious mistakes; learn from those mistakes, and then try not to make them next time. Paradox tends to shy away from telling you how you *should* be playing their game. It's not like civ where you're explicitly working towards a win-condition, your only directive is to not-die (and even that's a weak directive). This is why the first piece of advice for new paradox players is to pick a big nation (like Spain or England in EU; Germany in HoI): this best guarantees both that you will have the most options available to you to play the game in whatever way interests you most, and that you will be able to make mistakes and experiment without getting hilariously curbstomped.

The best piece of advice I can give for any Paradox game is to experiment and not be afraid of making mistakes. And remember: although they appear to be in real-time, the games are turn-based. If you find things are moving too quickly for you, there's nothing stopping you from pausing the game, slowing down, and taking in what's going on around you. Also setting message notifications (that is, which message-types pop up, and which messages cause the game to pause automatically) is your friend.

Lohrenswald said:

What?
These people are bloody jokes

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Why waste dev time on something no-one cares about (the tutorial) when you can use it to fix bugs in the game proper and/or add new stuff?

-Look for tooltips. Everywhere. Hover over numbers, hover over the text next to the number, hover over boxes, hover over sprites, hover over provinces, hover over same provinces for each different map-mode, mouse hover over all of the things.

-For HoI, the first game you should probably expect to play fairly historical until the war gets fully going. If you start the game and don't know what goal you should be working towards, pick a country that clearly has a historical goal to work towards like Italy or Japan that have early wars to prepare for from the very start, these are also good practice before the "proper" WW2 starts.

-Just dive in, take a look over everything, set up all your menus, queue up techs and production not necessarily working towards anything other than basic spending your resources and building sensible stuff. Blast full time-speed, lean back and wait for the game to throw something at you.

Just some thoughts of mine. Learned Paradox' way of designing games so long ago I'm probably not the best to answer how to learn the basics and find your way around for the first time though.

PhroX said:

HoI3 was not the best PDox game to start with, although there is at least a fair bit of automation you can use to help you get into the game. Hand off some aspects of your nation to the AI and focus on learning other parts.

Though YouTube videos are, to all intents and purposes, the tutorials. PDox have admitted they don't bother fixing bugs in the in game tutorials cos no-one uses them due to Arumba's videos.

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Very much agreed, though I'm not sure which Paradox game IS good to start with. Even EUIV is getting pretty dense, though I suppose it's still an easier introduction than CKII or Vicky 2.

ArneHD said:

Very much agreed, though I'm not sure which Paradox game IS good to start with. Even EUIV is getting pretty dense, though I suppose it's still an easier introduction than CKII or Vicky 2.

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I'd probably say CK2 is the easiest to start with. If you're, say a count on newbie island (Ireland) there's not really that much you have to learn to be able to play, and then you can start to pick up more stuff as you go on.

EUIV probably has a bit more "essential" knowledge, with the possible exception of playing a tediously boring start like a colonial Portugal game (seriously, someone suggested I do that when I first got into EU3. Very nearly gave up on the game given how dull it was. Fortunately I gave another nation, I forget which, a try and it was much more enjoyable).

Though I got into PDox games on in the HoI2/EU3 era, so that's purely guesswork as to how it would be going into the current games blind.

PhroX said:

Why waste dev time on something no-one cares about (the tutorial) when you can use it to fix bugs in the game proper and/or add new stuff?

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New players care about the tutorial

and almost all the new stuff they've added since launch has made the game worse so

Lohrenswald said:

New players care about the tutorial

and almost all the new stuff they've added since launch has made the game worse so

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Except new players weren't bothering with the tutorial but watching YouTube videos instead. So again, why waste time fixing it?

because the youtube videos are awful and too long

and why waste time making changes to make the game worse

I'd rather have a better tutorial than the forts or colonial nations

That's what turns me off to it. When I see a beginners tutorial that's 60 parts long and each part is an hour, and everyone says this is the best way to start learning how to play, it really makes me hesitate. Granted I may well be missing out on something great, but I also have other games to play and a family and a job.

CaptainKoloth said:

Having heard lots of good things about Paradox games, EU, HOI, thought I'd give HOI 3 a go as my first non-Civ grand strategy game foray. I get the game, load it all up, read the manual, do the tutorials, and upon finally starting the game, my reaction:

What the %$(#@%! am I supposed to be doing?

The tutorials are useless. The manual is pretty useless. I'm dumped into the middle of 100 different systems, none of which are transparent to me in their function or interaction with each other. One of things I've always appreciated about Civ games are their ability to start simple and then layer on a series of systems which interact in increasingly complex ways, but via their gradual introduction and the clear way in which they function it never feels overwhelming. With this game I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing, how the tools at my disposal are supposed to do it, or even really how they work.

Is there any way to understand this game without having to watch 11 hours of YouTube tutorials? Is this documentation level typical of other Paradox games of this genre?

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This comes from a guy who used to play Denmark in EU2 (ouch ouch ouch) --

I seriously believe the steep learning curve is worth it. Eventually you'll master the systems and have a lot of fun managing threats, resources and expanding your empire, there's so much to do/work with which is why it's overwhelming.

Personally, however, WW2 strategy games don't interest me as a setting, so... I can't give you instructions on Hearts of Iron.

But I'd love to play with you on EU4.

HoI2 is a lot easier to learn than HoI3

I remember when I was playing my frist game of Hearts of Iron 1, roughly 12 years ago. Piled all my divsions under Rommel, attacked Poland, got encircled and lost. Good times.

...so, yeah, HOI isn't exactly an easy game to get into and HOI3 is indeed quite tough if you have no experience at all. To be honest, I haven't played HOI3 for so long that I can't even give many tips and hints.

I guess my suggestion would be to lower the difficulty and then play some minor like Canada or Australia to get a hang of the basic mechanics. Set other stuff to AI control and just play around a bit. Once you understand how one system works, take manual control of another one in your next game.

Apart from that, don't bother with all that HQ/OOB stuff. Create one Theatre HQ for each frontline and assign all units directly to it. You will lose certain HQ related benefits, but on the flip side you don't have to keep units within radio range and all that annoying business.