by XSI » Wed Jul 06, 2016 4:55 pm
#193416
Alright dinner is done so fuck it. More HoI 4 ranting!
Politics is arbitrary and designed mainly around four parties, nothing else. This is a huge step down from HoI 3 which had 10+ in some places. In addition, you can no longer interact with politics except by spending your 'politics mana'.
Speaking of which, fuck this mana crap they're using now. "Experience mana" is absolutely awful, gone is the ability to fit different engines and different guns on planes and boats, now you can only upgrade existing attributes, often without drawback or with a drawback so small it's pretty much a joke. All it really means is that you can get a better ship/fighter. But it's not like that matters either, since the only way to really win air and naval battles is to just bring MORE, rather than any sort of tactics or skillful management. It's all about just throwing in more factory use. And I'm not talking about the USSR bringing shitty planes to fight BF109s either, every single air and naval thing in this is decided almost purely by numbers.
Bright side? At least close air support actually helps your battles. If you somehow manage to need that.
Worst is the land experience mana, as mentioned by Lumbermancer above, your units are stuck entirely as they are until you spend land-mana to change and customise your divisions. You will be annoyed early on because it is an arbitrary limitation on what you can do(Research and build things? NOPE. Nobody uses them until you reach the mystical 5 or 10 mana so you can magic equipment into your army so they actually do what you want them to do.
Not that that matters a lot, as once again, the AI will act exactly the same no matter what units are in your army. When you're France and holding the line against Italy, expect your tanks to be moved into the Alps and your mountaineer divisions to be moved to the flat land. And then expect Italy to stand there and not attack for several years until they capitulate to a naval landing of six divisions and three airplanes. The AI is exceptionally poor at any sort of defence, preferring to not move any units for any reason even if this means letting their entire nation get taken over.
I've played France and landed six divisions at Sicily. They walked from there to Rome, forced an Italian capitulation, then marched through Munich and into Berlin, where they finally met their first opponent. While the game loudly beeps at you as soon as a naval invasion is even planned, it doesn't tell you anything when the thing actually arrives. So of course you're going to wonder why the game says "naval invasion in progress" for Normandy, Bordaux, and Hannover, only to later find five units of marines(Read: Regular infantry because German AI doesn't into marines) standing on a port in the baltic sea- And taking this port ends the invasion warning.
Meanwhile, if you play Germany, expect a lot of naval invasion warnings. And not a single mention when they actually landed, you're going to be constantly flipping back and forth between the Russian front and France just to see if there is anything in sight, because if you don't, the first warning you'll get for it will be the message that Paris has been reconquered by the allies.
And then you go check and it's six americans and an Irishman, without any supplies or ports to bring them supplies, starving to death while a single Italian division leads a suicide charge across a river.
The GOOD part about this though? Again, as mentioned above, the national focus trees are nice. It's a shame they only exist for 8 nations. Literally everyone else gets a generic focus tree which, granted, is decently powerful and has some good bonuses in it.
Even some of the bigger players in the game get this generic tree- China, Spain, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, all the Benelux. It feels like they just plain decided not to finish the national focus tree stuff.
Oh, and then SPAIN. Yes. Lets talk about Spain. The Spanish civil war- Nice little thing, but it's decided before it even started. If Russia sends tanks, the communists win. If Germany sends tanks, the fascists win. If both or neither send tanks, it's a toss-up because the AI is absolutely incapable of winning without an advantage like "Impenetrable tanks". Even if they do have that advantage, expect them to sit on their ass and do nothing for a long time
I think I'm done here, but mostly just because if I keep going I'm going to fill up the entire page here.
In short: HoI 4 is only better than HoI 3 in one way: Less crashing.
Not that it doesn't crash at all, it still does. Just less.
And you still need to pause the game to reorganise everything every now and then. Just expect to do it in smaller scales more often because you have to babysit everything now. Every single unit you have needs your personal attention or they'll put a fork in the power outlet
Last edited by
XSI on Wed Jul 06, 2016 5:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.