Hearts of Iron 3 Collection

To begin with, I was a diehard HOI2 fan, having played every major power in the game, often many times. In HOI 3 so far I've played Germany several times now, with 25+ hours of game time inHOI 3 is basically the same concept, with a changed interface.First negative: no manual. Not in the case, not on the disk. I had to find it online. A small issue, but not a positive first impression. Paradox's on-line registration is impossibly buggy as well. Another bad first impression.FIRST THING BEFORE ACTUALLY PLAYING: get the hotkey list here http://www.hoi3wiki.com/HotkeysThere's a couple hotkeys regarding moving formations which radically affect the game playability, and they are left out of the manual.On to the game. It is prettier, and being a veteran HOI 2 player I only needed a couple references to the manual to handle the mechanics. The core concepts are the same, to it was just a matter of examining the interfaces and playing around a bit to sort them out. Adjusting the pop-up messages was the biggest chore, because like HOI2 the game will drown you in them. Unlike HOI 2, you cannot adjust it from the pop-ups themselves, but must wade through a clunky interface. POSITIVE: A much more immersive interface. Everything one of the control panels is improved, and you can automate things like trade so as to avoid the tedious business of hunting resources. Likewise diplomacy lets you influence counties until you tell it to stop, rather than having to keep an eye on the clock and manually do it as in HOI2. Research is much more interesting.Purchasing units/production is vastly better. The same money categories remain, but they include a button you can hit to assign the required minimum, which means you don't have to twitch the slider each time something changes (although the slider is still there). You build your divisions the way you want-German divisions can have four 'brigades', and you can assemble them any way you desire, so you could build a division of ant-tank guns if you wished. .Air combat is much improved. There's a separate interface which makes assigning your air units a breeze.Upgrading units is much improved. As the Germans you can now upgrade motorized to PG units, and similar changes.Political events are more demanding. For example I ended up facing the Danzig question in '39 (as the Germans) with an intact Czech state because I had not met the proper conditions. Its not complicated-you put your mouse on the issue and a pop-up shows you the requirements (I needed dissidence to be 1.0 or less).NEGATIVE: The province borders fade to invisible quite early. Make sure you're zoomed in enough to see them when planning attacks or defenses.TRICKY: They changed the ground unit system. You assemble divisions into Corps, Corps into Armies, Armies into Army Groups, and AGs into theaters.Its realistic, and fun in the pre-war years to build up units, and it is quick and easy to move units around. Two mouse clicks detaches & reassigns units.However, commands getting intermixed quickly wrecks everything. Make sure you get the hotkey list mentioned above so you can speedily unmix them. These commands are not in the manual.Combat can be played manually as in HOI2, or you can automate the higher HQs, give them their orders, and let them rip. I invaded Poland manually, and it was OK. For France I automated it, and it went a lot smoother, and despite my misgivings (I'm here to play, not automate) there were enough decisions and crisis management to keep me involved. A great feature about the automation is that you can assign air units (CAS is best) to ground formation HQs, and the AI will rebase the air units to best support that formation's mission.I recommend a mix of automation and manual commands, as you will need to watch the flanks better than the AI does.Expect to start over or go back to a save several times to get the nuances. But if you're a serious HOI player, this game is it.

If you like this kind of game that is. I've played numberless hours of all the HOI games and must say that this is the best. I do have fond memories of HOI2 and it did take a bit to get used to the new concepts, but this is indeed much better game. It's just alot more polished and detailed although there are still bugs in this latest compilation which is disheartening. It does crash alot and there are some idiotic events. Parlamentary scandal is my bane. Just an example. I played as Italy and had so many scandals I ran out of ministers. The only one left was Mussolini. I can't understand how a scandal can remove a minister in a dictatorship. Same thing happened when playing Germany. Every month I get parlamentary scandal. I do like the new research mechanics and the naval battles are more interesting. I was able to play this game without looking at the manual.

Excellent game for those who love true historical strategy games. Play is from brigade to global level. Detail can be overwhelming and you have to play it a number of times before you get a complete feel for the game, but this is a game you will enjoy playing multiple times. Only disappointment is the US player. Really hard to play the US starting on the earlier periods (you can start as early as 1936) without the game being entirely to one sided for the allies.

This doesn't come with the final expansion of the series, Their Finest Hour. It's a great game but TFH should have been included if this was a "complete" collection.In reality, this collection is from 2011 and is not complete. Which isn't so bad, but I didn't realize this when I bought it.

This is an awesome game series and I wanted to catch up on it. I already own Hearts of Iron II and found it to be a great game so I was really looking forward to get into the new version. I was looking forward to playing the basic game and then add each of the add on as I gained experience. Unfortunately, this collection installs all of the items at once so that you can get an idea of how the first version of the game plays without the add-ons. I am still looking through three (3) online manuals printed out in order to understand why what is described in the original manual is not what I see when I look at the screen. Due to the above, I have not had a chance to get into any real long sessions on the game, but it does look promising. Other than what I just said, the game looks good and this is a good way to catch and be ready to install the next add-on.

Very good game. This cd is bug free

Very detailed have not had the time to really get in to it.

Very challenging and some surprises. The game is complex and demanding and has a long learning curve to become very proficient at it.

The game itself is probably worth 4 stars. if you're into these sort of "tabletop" strategy games where you move counters around a map and manage your nation's economy then you'll love it.It has it's advantages over Hearts of Iron 2, the interface is perhaps a little less clunky, the AI a little more intelligent - the game speed greatly improved. By 1946 in HOI2 my PC would be running at a crawl, I've noticed no such slow down in this version.The additional map segments are a positive, allowing you to more easily exercise grand strategy; feinting, outflanking and encircling the enemy are now much more feasible - whereas in HOI2 I felt the battles often just descended in brute force attritional warfare.The idea of allowing the AI to control your forces for you in separate theatres however doesn't work IMO so there is a fair amount of micromanagement involved - it's very easy to forget about your two divisions of Royal Marines island hopping across the Pacific whilst you manage your three Army Corps racing for Berlin.Another area where the AI fails in its management of your allies. My last two games, playing as the British, have been rather spoiled by the foolish actions of my American allies. In the first game they launched a futile invasion of the low countries in 1942 thwarting my own invasion plans as I foolishly rushed in to try and rescue their doomed attempt. In the second game they were somehow dropping an atomic bomb every month by 1943 which took the fun out of the game somewhat (and by 1945 poor Tai'pei, as the last Japanese stronghold, was getting an atomic bomb dropped on it every other week).In HOI2 this sort of thing didn't happen as you were able to take control of your allies' forces, thus allowing co-ordinated planning, but this doesn't seem possible anymore.This for me throws up another flaw with this version compared to it's predecessor - it is much less flexible. In HOI2 you could play out counter-historical scenarios very easily - you could even easily edit the maps and national boundaries to create a completely new version of history (One of my favourite playthroughs was when I edited the British to include full control of all the British Empire countries, sided with Germany and was landing Royal Marines in New York by 1950). Sometimes these were a bit stupid (see previous game!) but they were fun.This version sucks some of that fun out. It is still just about possible to create these counterfactuals but only through massive use of cheat codes and laborious effort. I did still manage to nuke Paris, Berlin and Moscow whilst my armies rolled across Europe and my fleets glared at the US Navy across the Pacific ocean but it wasn't really worth the effort.The only real way to play the game to win without cheating is to plan your strategy exactly the way strategy played out in the real world. You can't convince the Americans to go for the soft underbelly of Europe rather than Normandy for example.This is very historically accurate - but it gets boring after the first run through. The game seems to have lots of inbuilt hidden rules designed to make sure things happen exactly the way they are supposed to happen. Dull.In this way the game has also lost much of the charm of HOI2. In HOI2 you could focus your research and assign the Supermarine works to design the Supermarine Swift, or De Havilland to produce the Venom in 1945 - in this version you allocate research points so you produce a generic Level 3 Jet fighter. It's just... not as cool.The game also lacks in one final way - it's all got a bit PC. I fully understand the game designers choice not to include things like genocides, terror bombing, deathcamps and the like. I absolutely wouldn't want things like that in the game either. But they've gone too far the other way, the game no longer even records statistics of who won battles, how many soldiers have died, how many tanks have been lost.These things are important IMO, not just as a way of keeping score (though there's an element of that) but as a way to tell how your war is going. Are you winning the attritional battle on the Eastern front? There's no real way to tell.As the war rages you very quickly lose track of all the updates as they come rolling in and it's very easy to lose situational awareness and become confused as to just whether you're about to break through the enemy lines - or they're about to break through yours. Again this is possibly quite historical (Hitler had no idea by the end how powerful his armies were compared to the Soviets - though his generals knew) but it's not much fun.Anyway! It seems like I'm taking a pop above but I'm not really, at this price (£10ish) the game is well worth the money and you'll get hours of fun out of it.I had no problems running it on my medium spec PC.The final caveat, and the reason this collection only gets 3 stars, is that by buying this 'Collections' version you seem to be effectively locking yourself out of the latest expansion pack and updates. This collection does not include the "Their Finest Hour" expansion - the English version of that seems only to be available to be downloaded via online sellers such as steam - and the online downloaded versions are not compatible with this disc version. My game also won't update beyond the 3.05 patch for this reason.The game is still playable at this level, but it would be nice to be able to play the latest version.

I can just see the designers sitting round a table shrouded in smoke. Its 3am and one of them says 'I've got it!' 'Lets take all the good bits from HoI2 like the colourful map, the easy to follow rules, the characters, the joy. And lets give people a bland lifeless map, no characters and an R&D section that is total crap'. The rest of them go 'fantastic'!And here it is folks HoI3.Keep playing the old version and save your money.

La saga di Hearts of Iron è popolare e molto nota.. in lavorazione c'è il quarto, ormai, e numerose uscite sono il frutto del lavoro di sviluppatori che hano cominciato ocme semplici appassionati, sfruttando la versatilità del motore.Fatta la premessa, la mia impressione è stata di un cambiamento piuttosto forte tra la seconda e la terza edizione del gioco, laddove invece le differenze tra HoI e HoI2 erano molto meno evidenti.Esteticamente bello, tema assolutamente identico, livello di gioco forse più amichevole per il giocatore umano (l'eccesso di dettagli dei primi due rendeva davvero impossibile, ad un certo punto, la gestione dei detagli che pure erano disponibili) che limita le dimensioni (la qunatità di unità che si andranno a gestire) e permete di disegnare la propria strategia con grandi pennellate (e concentrarsi, volendo, solo sui punti cruciali) per lasciare il programma a gestire la messa in pratica.Provenendo dalla esperienza dei primi due, è stata una sensazione spiazzante cui devo ancora abituarmi (e che ha motivato la valutazione "media" delle tre stelle).Gioco ormai maturo (dal punto d ivista del prezzo) e una bella aggiunta alla collezione di un appassionato.Resto nostalgico delle infinite varianti inventate dai creativissimi appassionati sulla base di Darkest Hour, però... :)

Paradox es la mejor compañía de videojuegos de Gran Estrategia, y la serie Hearts of Iron lo mejor si te quieres sentir como el comandante general de alguno de los ejércitos que combatió en la IIGM. Este Hearts of Iron 3 es el más profundo y complejo de todos. Muy recomendable si te gusta la estrategia y más aún si te encanta la IIGM.

This game will own you! Great fun and very workable now it has been put together with expansions - Take the time to watch all of the tutorials by Surray01 on Youtube which are essential to any newcomer. With his advice, as Germany, I managed to defeat the UK and the Russians by aug 1944 and to date keep the U.S out of the war! (Although the aid of historical hindsight likely benefited as well).Only concern is that the extra sprits appear not to work - I have found the solution in the forums but as it is not important to the way I play did not bother trying.Operation unthinkable is a worthwhile addition to boot.