Hearts of Iron III

by Paradox

Product Features

• Play as any nation from 1936 to1948 with more than 150 countries to choose from. More than 10,000 land provinces makes this game five times more detailed than Hearts of Iron 2 and the most detailed depiction of World War 2 ever made.
• Control the oceans with aircraft carriers, submarines and battleships. Use your air force to defend the skies, support naval and ground forces, and bomb your enemies.
• Customize your divisions in detail with more than 20 types of brigades.New economic system makes it possible to buy weapons overseas. Mobilization and reserves gives the option of surprise attacks.
• A completely new intelligence system makes it possible to get information about enemy reserves and troop movements.Assign troops to ?theatres? on the map to fight two-front wars more successfully.
• Thousands of historically accurate real-world military commanders and politicians. Realistic military command AI with unprecedented levels of interaction. In-depth diplomatic and political system.

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00273Y7V6
• Item Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: August 4, 2009
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,014 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #80 in Video Games > PC Games > Strategy
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PC

Hearts of Iron 3 lets you play the most engaging conflicts of World War 2 as any country and through multiple scenarios. Guide your nation to glory between 1936 and 1948. Wage war, conduct diplomacy and build your industry in the most detailed World War 2 game ever made.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

92 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars This game won't appeal to many people, August 18, 2009

By 

Kiwi (Mississauga, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

= Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Hearts of Iron 3 (CD-ROM)

The latest version of Hearts of Iron puts you in control of a country either before or during World War II. You control everything from diplomacy, politics and intelligence, to technology, production and most importantly, warfare. You can play as any one of more than 150 countries (including New Zealand - as a Kiwi, that was fun for me as New Zealand rarely shows up in any games in any meanngful way), all of which are populated by historical figures. All countries are broken into regions (there are more than 14,000 provinces in total) and each is accurately depicted in terms of available resources. Start as New Zealand, for example, and your cabinet will be composed of such contemporaries as Michael Joseph Savage and Walter Nash (bet you've never heard of them....). You'll find yourself short on crude oil but with an abundance of food to trade (and that's about as realistic as a WW2 scenario gets for New Zealand).

As almost every other reviwer has pointed out, with good reason, the campaign map's geography leaves something to be desired (i.e., it sucks). Only Western European cities are placed with any thought to accuracy. New Zealand, Australia and Japan, amongst most others, are sadly bereft of urbanisation. New York is in New Jersey. Los Angeles is missing. Fiji is due east of New Zealand. Go figure. Each nation has a shifting and shiftable political ideology literally triangulated between democracy (Allies), fascism (Axis) and communism (the Comintern). As the appeasement of the mid-thirties evolves into the cold war of the mid-late thirties and, eventually, total war through to the mid-forties, you'll find yourself gravitating toward your natural allies. Unlike other real-time strategy sims, Hearts of Iron III puts great emphasis on historical "accuracy." A curious aside on historical accuracy: Nazi Germany is faithfully recreated but for one detail: The flag of the German Weimar Republic is used in lieu of the Swastika.

The resource limitations set on each nation mean that you'll never be able to directly advance a nation far beyond its capacity or stature within the time-frame given. In other words, if you choose to play as a minor nation like New Zealand, you'll be playing as a small cog from start to finish. However, this in itself adds an interesting element to the game. Other strategy games may allow you to take control of nations or factions with starting disadvantages but the playing field is usually levelled with a few bold strategies. Not so in Hearts of Iron III, which faithfully recreates the sensation that you're a pawn (maybe a well-liked pawn, but a pawn all the same) to more powerful forces.

The game takes place in "real" time with a live pause function: Playing at the fastest possible speed and without pausing will see you completing one day every 24 seconds. But you'll pause. Often. Very very often. For casual fans of the strategy genre, like me, the devil is in the details. Hours of meticulous micromanagement are required before executing any action. If you're approaching the series for the first time, like I did, you will likely be completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of arcane information at your disposal and the learning curve is way steep. You don't just research a new vehicle, you research the armour plating, the engine and the gun barrel - and you'll have to balance that against everything from consumer demand to trade agreements that are in constant negotiation. I didn;t find that to entertaining at first, to be honest, but once I got used to it it was kind of interesting.

Again as other reviwers have pointed out, the processing taking place will bring even a relatively late model processor to its knees. Mine wasn't on it's knees, it was almost on it's face on the floor. As a result you'll occasionally find yourself skipping around the campaign map but it's more irksome than anything else. This is all the more curious when you consider that the hardware usually struggling with any latest-release title is your six months-old graphics card. The graphics for this game are underwhelming, but then the game isn't supposed to be eye candy. The campaign map is 2D, but is superimposed with 3D models representing your armies, flotillas and air forces.

The increased number of provinces greatly enhances the tactical strategy required and the ability to use the map to your advantage: Fret about an unpinned flank or recreate the battle of the bulge by isolating a jut in the enemy's line. Like the nation-building tabs, you can let your field commanders take full AI control of a theatre. Deliver an objective to an HQ and your commander will respond with what resources they require before carrying out your orders with admirable intelligence. As with the nation-building AI, you can always step in and issue orders directly to capitalise on any opportunity you see.

The tutorial is woefully inadequate. A thinly veiled Adolf Hitler walks you through the various tabs, pointing out what each box is, but not how to maximise them. It's low-hanging fruit I know, but Swedish developer and publisher Paradox Interactive would do well to employ a grammar Nazi: The typos and syntactical errors of the text-only tutorials and alerts are about on par with a forum. While it's intelligible, it jars the player's experience and makes the game feel unpolished. In an era where most developers place great importance on user-friendliness and water down their releases in order to make them more palatable to a wider audience, Paradox Interactive's commitment to strategy micromanagement is profoundly admirable.

But it also means that the game will not appeal to a great many consumers.

82 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Simply flawed and practically unplayable, August 14, 2009

By 

E. Liaras "liaras" (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Hearts of Iron 3 (CD-ROM)

I'm also a seasoned wargame player, and I wanted to add my voice to the criticisms by other users here. I have played every previous version of Hearts of Iron. They all had their share of problems, and I was hoping HoI3 would be a leap forward. Despite some small welcome improvements, overall I was grossly disappointed. Unlike what favorable reviewers claim, this game has fundamental problems that can't be fixed with just "some patches". Die-hard fans aside, I'm running out of patience with Paradox's approach, for a number of reasons.

Of course this is a monster game, even more so than its predecessors; people who love wargames have a lot of patience, if the game proves rewarding. The scale essentially moved from strategic in HoI2 to operational in HoI3, which would understandably add detail and complexity. But there is a big difference between complexity and unplayability. Paradox's attitude is to keep adding all kinds of convoluted junk and then give the player the option to either (painfully) figure it out or let the AI (poorly) automate it. You often end up micro-managing all kinds of tedious things. A good simulation needs a level of abstraction that will make it beautiful and functional. With every new release, Paradox is feeding into the crowd that is more interested in gadget-fantasy than historical simulation. Can we separately "research" every nut and bolt that went into a German panzer? Can we order around every single US submarine or Soviet spy? We probably can, if we have six years and one day to replay WWII. I, personally, would like to play it over a week, or better, over a long weekend. Think you wanna try letting the AI take care of some things automatically? Great. Soon the AI informs you that it has declared war (on your behalf, without consulting you) on China. Good luck with that.

If the game designers could successfully put together all this excruciating detail, I would certainly give them a hats off. But again and again, despite patches and counter-patches, they have not measured up to the task. As a gamer I hope I am not alone in feeling that

- No, it is not OK to release games with all kinds of glaring problems and insufficient playtesting, invite your fans to play them for hours until they figure out what's wrong, and then promise to publish fixes months later.
- No, it is not OK to keep releasing maps with mistakes that can be picked up immediately by anyone with a basic knowledge of military history (e.g. where is the Kiel Canal in HoI 3 which existed in previous versions?)
- No, it is not OK to have such a large worldwide online community with forums where fans contribute numerous pieces of information that could help you design the next version of the game, only to ignore that and spit out more of the same. I am tired of looking at minor countries (outside the game designers' own Scandinavia) and finding the same gibberish unit names produced by bad translation software, wrong leader names, wrong political parties, wrong orders of battle etc. despite tons of forum contributions and (supposedly) years of background research.

I do want to give this game another chance; but even the graphic interface is so drab that my eyes quickly tire. The old HoI maps were badly drawn based on the Europa Universalis platform. I was hoping that the new map with larger scale would add much-needed detail, but alas, no. The new map is plain ugly: it has numerous mistakes (even in countries' borders!), terrain types are hard to discern, and there are still no roads and railways (they didn't feature in previous HoI versions either). That is no way to build an operational-level WWII game. You don't go to war with crappy maps; you don't make a good historical wargame with crappy maps either.

World War II strategy gaming should not have to be so not-fun. Check out the Making History interface and you'll know what I mean. And if you've been working on the same game title for 8+ years, there is little excuse any more for being sloppy. Fortunately there is a lot of competition in this genre, which I hope will produce better, more playable AND realistic games in the future.

33 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good concept, still rough around the edges, September 18, 2009

By 

Pete (Charlotte, NC USA) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Hearts of Iron 3 (CD-ROM)

I'm a big fan of the HOI series, and I have spent a lot of hours in the last month playing HOI3. So I have gotten my money's worth. One of the troubles with Paradox games is that people get disgruntled after a hours and hours of gameplay without thinking how low the actual cost per hour is compared to a game that you play once in a weekend and then never touch again. So I think it's fun with all the new innovations, like the AI controlling units, the new research, the new brigade system, and so on.

Now, another problem is that PI releases games that are poorly tested because they are a small company, and they rapidly patch and fix from there. There is also a substantial pool of talented modders that are hard at work. So there are a lot of bugs and some design flaws. But there are workarounds to a lot of them. If someone is playing a PI game without mods, well, then, they don't really know what they are doing. Ignore the arguments about getting what you pay for and the ideal world of software development. This game, and other Paradox titles, are designed to be used with mods and constantly getting patches, like it or not.

So, if you can deal with the bugs, and keep up to date with the mods which change every week or so, this is a very fun game. If not, then you should probably wait a few months, maybe Christmas time or January. It will be worth it for these reasons:

1 - It is already far better than HOI2, even Arma, because the battles are much better designed and more challenging. No more wiping out 30 divisions with a handful of Tac and CAS planes. No more stacks of a million panzers ranging deep into Russia without fear of supplies. No more knowing the exact date when the AI will attack you. And so on and so forth.

2 - The AI has great potential. At times it can be downright ludicrous, at others very clumsy and stupid. But sometimes you can arrange things so that the tactical AI performs great, which takes a huge burden off your shoulders. This is in its infancy but it's better than I've seen in any other game. I'm not talking about the AI you fight against, but assigning objectives to some generals, meeting the force requests from their staff, and then just letting them do their own thing. Makes me feel like a real world leader, not some sort of glorified micro-managing supply clerk.

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