12 Mar

A Nationalist China AAR – Hearts of Iron 3 (Introduction)

Filed under: PC Games 2 Responses

Despite fancying myself as a strategy gamer, I am ashamed to confess that I have never played a single game by Paradox Interactive. Even Hiew has played Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis. For my part, I’ve always been intimidated by their complexity and the real-time nature of the games. It didn’t help their case either that many players consider their games bug-ridden messes and are unhappy that their many expansions basically amount to charging money for patches and user-interface features that should really have been part of the original game in the first place.

Still, I have to admit that no one else makes the kind of games that Paradox does and many fans are perfectly happy to play them, so I duly snagged both Hearts of Iron 3 and Europa Universalis III Complete when they were on sale on Steam and now I’m playing HOI3 first. Rather than write a review about this beast of a game, I thought it would be more fun to write an After Action Report on it. Note that I’m playing a fully patched but unmodded copy of the game with the Semper Fi expansion. Also, unlike the other posts on my blog, all screenshot images used are clickable to expand them to full size. There’s a ton of detail in these pictures and I figure that people following the AAR might want to scrutinize the screenshots more closely.

I picked Nationalist China to play because the sheer scale of the major powers still frightens me and China while being big enough to influence major events is still small enough to fully grasp. I have tinkered a bit with Siam before this to learn the mechanics but found that to be boring as I couldn’t accomplish much and so gave up on that game. I have also read the manual, the official strategy guide and extensively studied the HOI3 wiki so it’s not like I’m exploring blindly. However, I also notice that a lot of that information is obsolete due to Semper Fi and subsequent patches, so I do still need to watch myself.

Finally, I am well aware that many people start AARs but never finish them. This is because we play too far ahead of our reports and forget what happened. Therefore I will try to post an update as quickly as possible after each playing session. I will also take lots of screenshots and let the images tell the story whenever possible so I won’t have to write as much. This does mean that this blog will be updated a bit more often than usual with tons of small posts.

Written on March 12 2011 and is filed under PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “A Nationalist China AAR – Hearts of Iron 3 (Introduction)”

Trackbacks

  1. A friend’s HoI3 AAR – Nat China « After Action Reporter
  2. The Founding of a Republic | calltoreason.org

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