Also, the music is fantastic and sets a great tone.

They burned me on HOI 3.  I will never buy another Paradox developed game.  They still publish some good ones but they released an unplayable mess.  They should be ashamed.  So I'll speak the only way I can; with my wallet.  Well and this message.

What happend with HOI 3 that is getting Paradox so many "fans?" I am guessing bugs which Paradox doesn't seem to get away from. I thought it already had an expansion. Did they never bother to fix it?

Paradox is devolving like Creative Assembly, Victoria 2 from what I hear is simplified, and at present has a game breaking bug in the release version that causes full scale revolts to explode across entire countries. If you play up to.. 1880 I think it was, you'll see dozens of countries just buried in rebels that never disappear locking the entire world in an anarcho liberal depression.

Victoria 1 was complex but good, though with some interface problems. Europa Universalis was fantastic but needed a better AI. HOI was more complex and detailed, though slow with too much army micro management.

Then come the sequels and Paradox for whatever reason forgets how to make video games. HOI3 was too "accessible" Aka simplified to the point of boring and riddled with bugs. The only thing they managed to improve was the warfare.

Victoria 2 is looking to be more "accessible" than the previous with its own mess of game ruining bugs, can't say more than that because I haven't played the full game yet. Holding off on a purchase until its own forums have something good to say about it.

I can offer a prediction too about how the next Europa might look, just think of a way it can be simplified and broken, and Paradox will do just that.

Paradox used to be one of my favorite developers, I don't know what happened to them. It's depressing.

Wow, a lot of Paradox hate! I found Victoria I (and HOI 3) to be absolutely impenetrable, so making it "accessible" is not a problem for me. For that matter, the only Paradox game that I can get into is EU3. The bugs you are talking about do worry me though, and in some AARs I've read the countries aren't very faithful to the real-world counterparts in some cases (i.e. a lot of "Canadian Nationalist" revolts, AI USA doesn't reach West Coast very well, Britain is much more unstable than it was historically), although Prussia and Austria do compete with one another very nicely. I guess I will see how the patches fix things before putting money down.

I noticed that as well. The developers and moderators on their forums are some of the worst I've seen in the gaming industry. I also don't like how they segregated the forums by requiring you to buy the game in order to READ them (example: the bug forum). That's such bullshit.

Their only game that I liked was Hearts of Iron 2 - which was a damn good game. After that, they just stopped making good games.

Arsenal of Democrycy is very good standalone expansion of HoI2 which was made by another company. I hope same people will some day create sequel based on HoI3. I am currently playing 1936 game as USSR on hard diff. against agressive AI and so far its very nice chalange.

It seems I can't quote you without keeping the previous quote as well... this will look messy. As for EU3, even at release, it has been a fairly stable game, with a fraction of the bugs you will (still) see in HoI3. It may well be their best title for a long time to come.

I like Paradox, but HOI3 was a bad and bug ridden game for me, and the AI did very bizarre things such as defenders leaving entire fronts open for the invader to conquer, and stacking of units in strange and pointless locations (jokingly, people would say they are just on vacation). Gladly, I only bought it for $7 (sale) a while back. I love EU3: HttT and CK. There is a large rumor they are making CK2 right now.

I've been reading on the Paradox forums about Vicky 2, and there are problems. Such as for some reason there is a drastic global iron shortage in a very large amount of people's games, which even if your country produces iron as a product, you still can't stockpile it before it's sent off to the great powers (GP's get first dibs). Also the revolts are irritating, you need large standing armies all over your nation because sooner or later they will be popping up no matter how pleased your people are.

Well they have an official facebook page on it and some silly thing about announcing CK2 if they get 25k accounts on it, barely over 5k though. If they do CK2, and I hope they do, I want them to trash most of the CK code. That's been their excuse the whole time with the issues with CK, that it wasn't their code and they can only do so much with it. I'll only accept that excuse so many times.

Victoria 2 is a playable game, at least for most greater countries and the first 20 years. After that you will problem with the expanding bureaucracy, and all AI countries are dealing with never ending revolutions from factory workers who for some reason needs to eat 100 times as much a farmer, and thus goes to bed hungry every night (Paradox have even claimed this consumption is working as intended). The moderations on the forums have gone mad, but Vicky2 is actually a playable game from launch it just doesn't cover all of the 80 years it should, but only 20-30.

By contrast EU3 and HOI3 wasn't playable until the first expansion. Four months and twelve months respectively. The latest HOI3 patch is not horribly broken, it just broke feature that makes the game a lot more annoying to play.

The amount of sitting around doing nothing in this game is appalling. I feel like it's MOO3 where the game just plays itself and there's little a player can actually do. Quite a huge step back from EU3.