Hello all,
I have been out of the HOI2 community for a while. I absolutely loved this game and especially the CORE mod. Since there are now a few standalone mods that have been released for the game I was hoping I could get some opinions from you guys. I have read up a bit on Arsenal of Democracy and Darkest Hour but I am still not quite sure which is best. I also have played HOI3 but it doesnt have quite the same charm. I read that AoD has the cooperation of CORE, so I was thinking that might be the best fit for me. I was hoping you guys might be able to shed a little light on what these games really are. Any help would truly be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Hi Wolf,
I can speak only for AoD since I've never played DH. Anyway, put simply: if you liked HoI2, you'll love AoD. The game is a huge improvement over its parent game in almost every compartment but the greatest innovations, the "no turning back" features, are IMHO:
● Advanced sliders. You'll no longer curse and waste your time moving your production/supply/reinforcements etc. sliders every single time something screws them up (e.g. the enemy bombing one of your provinces). With those, you just set a minimum and a maximum threshold and the AI adjusts them for you without wasting IC or making your prod. lines go in red. Absolutely brilliant, you won't understand how could you play without them after seeing that feature.
● New supply system. Instead of the basic "every province has the same supply level" of HoI2, now your supply level (i.e. ESE) is based on a series of factors, like in real life. Type of terrain, infrastructure level, infra of provinces
which link that one to the capital/nearest supply depot etc. It' s much more engaging and forces you to plan your strategy more accurately, since a lower ESE will dramatically influence the rate at which your troops refill their own supply stocks. Yes: every unit now carries its own supplies and fuel (roughly enough for one week; don't recall, at the moment. Anyway, this can be modded in the misc.txt file), which in turn means that an encircled unit won't suddenly run out of supply (as it was in HoI2, and still is in DH as well) but, realistically, it will be able to hold on for some days before running out of food and ammo.
● New combat mechanics. Air, naval and land combats have been deeply revised. Land combat especially is more realistic since now great stacks of units will suffer a penalty - the more units, the larger the malus (roughly equivalent to the square root of the number of divisions involved). This applies both to attack and defence, and the net result is that you'll see less "überstacks" within the game. Of course, all factors being equal, 20 divisions will be always stronger than 10, but you'll "waste" a lot of fighting power, proportionally, if using such large concentrations of troops. Combats involving large stacks of units last longer (Stalingrad anyone?).
A direct consequence of this is that, in AoD, quality rules over quantity, i.e. it's very important to brigade yuor units and to keep them upgraded to have the upper hand over the enemy.
● High flexibility. A LOT more values than in HoI2 can be accessed and modified simply accessing the misc.txt file.
I could go on and on, telling you about the importance of infrastructure (now it gives a bonus to IC and resource production in the province, so it's much more important to build it), synthetic fuel and rubber plants (conversions are no longer authomatic: you have to build these and decide by which % make them run), and so on. You could take a sneak peek at the
developer diaries to get a better idea of what's new in general (but also take note that new things have been polished and added with the patches).
I can't recommend a game more, especially if you've been a HoI2 fan. This is really what HoI2 should have been from the start.
