Saves: My game auto-save in three rolling slots; autosave, old auto save and older auto save. You might have to get a later patch or something.

Trade: If your merchants won't stick it's best to turn off autosend and place them manually. Use the ledger and check your compete chance in the different CoTs and don't bother with CoTs with less than 70% chance untill you've got more money to spend. Other than that I agree trade is implemented in a lackluster fashion.

Trading looks to be better in 4 anyways with trade routes that can be controlled and contested

Yeah, the big problem with EU3 is that the human player doesn't have a big enough advantage over the AI in wars. Need to nip that one in the bud.

+1 to the above, I found the total war games gets super trivial quite quickly, I just roll them every battle.

I find them still fun in their own "arcadey" kind of way. But like I said, both games/series have their places and they shouldn't mix.

Try playing on hardest settings.

Does that stop the AI general from charging headon into my arrayed forces, dying, forcing all his troops to lose morale and get easily routed?

If you are playing the first total war, no.

If you are playing Shogun II, yes.

Or, you know, just play online

If there's anyone like me who hasn't gotten into EU yet, EU III is 50% off for the winter sale on steam.

It's 15 bucks (€) on GamersGate including all expansions. Plus you don't have to play it inside of a client. I know a lot of people put up with Steam and have no problem with it, but for me it's a deal breaker.

I'm guessing Eu3 will get to 75% off sometime during the sale.

If you buy Eu3 through Steam you don't need Steam running to play it.

Also Steam is awesome.

Well, here we go.

My first AAR-ish whatever thingy .

After a pretty long Paradox-Hiatus I decided to fire up my all time favourite:



Darkest Hour - A Hearts of Iron Game.

They have released a new beta patch (1.03) that fixes a lot, and changes a bunch of stuff, mainly in the battle engine, i.e. in the way battles are calculated. If anyone is nerdy enough to try and find out what they changed:

here you go .

Full patch notes/change-log can be found here.

I had only recently tried to make an honest effort at actually understanding how combat is worked out in DH. I felt the urge to free the world of the evil Bolshevik threat (), but this time I didn't want to just "wing it" like I always did; this time I wanted to actually understand why I do what I do. Why some stuff works, why some doesn't; that sort of thing. So I did something that in this day-and-gaming-age seems almost like some relic from an ancient past.

I RTFM . (Google it, if you don't know what that means)

Needless to say, before I started the game, I browsed the Paradox forums and found the 1.03 patch. Obviously the fancy new graphics pack got me insta-hooked and within a few minutes I had "patched" all (or most) of that valuable RTFM knowledge out of my brain .

------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------

So, here we are. It is mid July of 1937, and I *MAY* have just issued a decisive series of orders to the troops that my nationalist friends in Spain have so kindly put under my command.



I say "may", because with the new combat system, I am now, after almost twelve months of grinding civil war, prepared to expect the worst. Before that patch, the civil war was pretty easily won, more often than not in 1936 already, and if not, in early 1937.

Here are two of the points that got revised in the patch:

Especially that very last point, "Season" really ****s up all your plans, if you don't account for it. My advance ground to a total halt from mid November until the final days of February. Add to that the fact that I ****ed up royally twice:

1.) Losing the airport where all of Nationalist Spain's air force was stationed, :facepalm:

and

2.) Getting 4 infantry divisions encircled and destroyed like a noob,

and you have got yourself a recipe for a very unpleasant campaign on the Iberian peninsula.

In May I somehow managed to do a sweep/shift movement to the west with the bulk of my troops, who were holding the line Salamanca-Segovia-Madrid-Guadalajara (middle red arrow; you can see the "Gua...").
I swept my best troops from east to west through Tarancon, Toledo, and into Caceres (concealed by troops in the screenshot. It's the three provinces south of Madrid, between the two rivers.)

I caught 5 evil anarchist scumbag divisions in Plasencia (northernmost blue arrow in the screenshot "...sencia") off guard, encircled and destroyed them.

That finally gave me some hope that I can, in fact, still win this civil war for my Spanish brothers.

I'm now hoping that I can reach Tarragonna (west of Barcelona) quicker than the 12-ish divisions that are retreating towards Castellon de la Plana right now. If I can do that, encircle and destroy them, then those misguided anarchist people of Republican Spain will be all but lost, and the rest will (hopefully) be an easy clean-up job.

There is just this one river to cross...

Holy **** 1.03 is out. Gotta try it ASAP.

Thanks for letting me know SN.

Prepare yourself to get roflstomped.

I might continue tonight after La Liga wraps up.

Before that I might read up a bit more deeply on the changes to the battle engine.

Kein Plan überlebt die erste Feindberührung
(No plan survives the first contact with the enemy)

- Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke

--------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------

My plan to reach Taragona was soon rendered useless, when, as I arrived in Zaragoza, I saw that the enemy had 4 divisions parked there. Without any support from other troops, there was no point in me even trying to push over the river with my four divisions. Not even with one of them being a mountain division (It's never plain in Spain ), and an "Engineer" general attached to them.

They were pretty exhausted, too, so I decided to rest them in Zaragoza.

Generally speaking, Spanish troops suck donkey balls. Most of them carry 1921 equipment, and the sparse max. organization they have, gets depleted in no time.

On 15th August, however, I noticed that the enemy had made a critical mistake:



They had evacuated Taragona, and I seized that opportunity to push over the river into the now undefended territory.

Meanwhile my western front got attacked repeatedly and I decided to pull back into Plasencia and Madrid. In the north the anarchist scum had pushed over the river from Pamplona into Soria, and I figured I might need some support up there, and deemed that more important than stubbornly holding the line in the south-west.



Unfortunately the enemy had managed to evacuate most of his troops from Castellon de la Plana, and so all I managed to annihilate with my maneuver were two measly divisions. Better than nothing, plus I had now cut off all of their western forces from their capital, and thus from their supply, which led to me making a committal decision:



I abandoned the south altogether and concentrated all my forces to dividing them into two pockets and cutting off their advances in the north. Unfortunately, along the way up north, nine of my divisions got caught on their way from Segovia to Burgos (which at that time was in the hands of the anarchists, but undefended). The enemy quickly overwhelmed my tired forces and as a result they got annihilated completely.

I'm not sure whether or not that's a bug; it seemed kind of WTF-ish at the time. I wasn't encircled; I had plenty of my own provinces in the vicinity and could have easily retreated to one of those.

Anyways:



I continued without them, and succeeded in annihilating the Bilbao pocket, while totally relinquishing central and north-western Spain to my enemy. I killed off nine divisions in that pocket, and have another five trapped in Gerona, who will soon fall.

Before I ended the session I realized that all of my divisions were showing the "Out of Supply" icon. Unable to see Spain's supply stockpiles when playing as Germany, I reloaded the game playing as Spain:



They have no supply left, and basically no means of producing any, not only because the anarchists now hold most of the provinces that have factories, but mainly because after now 18 months of civil war, the country's industry and infrastructure has turnded into absolutely and utterly FUBAR, so basically no one can produce anything right now.

First order of business next session will be for me (Germany) to give my Iberian brothers some supply for free.

Then, when spring comes, I'll launch my (hopefully) final and decisive offensive, to free Spain from the evil, leftist cancer that has befallen the country which is rightfully theirs.

Release date aug 13th.

I stole the below from Jay85 over at the pdox forums:

The regular game is ofc for lowly serfs while the noblemen who ignore any and all peasant rabble will spring for the deluxe edition.

People confirmed furious not about day1 dlc per se but about non-cosmetic dlc ie extra muslim events. On paper I agree it's not ideal but those events are prob pretty cosmetic as well. We'll see!

my eu :boner: is only getting harder

wtf @ extra event dlc

Who cares IT'S GONNA BE AMAZING

who cares about events, you have mods dor that

Reading some of the newer dev diaries that I hadn't seen before, I like what I'm seeing:

That they recognize flaws of this nature and are focused on how they can turn them around and make them fun mechanics is a massively positive sign, imo.

I'll wait 6 months and pick it up on Steam for 75% off with the DLC.

Always better after some patches/expansions.

Multiplayer should be epic given everyone will be starting to play the game at the same time so knowledge/skill will be same. Will put an even greater emphasis on diplomacy. Jim gonna dominate.

the worst part of eu4 so far is the butt ugly political map mode overlay. looks like play doh or something.

Does it? I haven't seen much of it, pulled this sshot from a Youtube vid:



I don't think that looks too bad. I hope it isn't ugly, I spend most of my time in political (hate the terrain map).

few thoughts,

SN in here continuing his elite taste in games streak (i pretty much always hitler it up when hearts of ironing, never play as britain. boats are annoying.)

lol anyone who uses terrain map mode

think it looks fine. looks identical to the CKII map (CKII is a great game btw)