Quick Look: Hearts of Iron III Their Finest Hour [with Gameplay Video]

Their Finest Hour is the third full expansion for Hearts of Iron III, the grand strategy game from Paradox Interactive, and the package aims to update some of the game mechanics, fundamentally change at least one core game mechanic and add a couple of new scenarios.

People rarely play the self-contained scenarios that Hearts of Iron III offers, preferring to focus on the big picture of fighting the entirety of World War II while controlling one country.

For this Quick Look I decided to choose one of the scenarios, the one that deals with the Spanish Civil War and play it from both perspectives to see how Their Finest Hour changes the core structure of Hearts of Iron III.

The Spanish Civil War starts with the two sides evenly matched and there are sufficient gaps in the front lines to create a situation where a war of movement is the best idea, with the aim to cut off the enemy forces, starve them of surprise and destroy them.

Unfortunately, the armies are mostly infantry and the rest period after an assault makes progress slow.

Tank forces seem to be much more useful, mainly because they tend to take less damage from infantry that lacks any kind of anti-tank support and they reduce organization much faster.

As the Republicans, I tried to retake the north of the country while holding Madrid and slowing down the enemy in the South which, as you can see in the video attached, as a tactics was met with limited success.

Later during the scenario I carelessly stripped down forces from around Madrid to shore up the southern defenses which allowed the Nationalist forces to take the capital, which basically created a death spiral for my own armies.

There are a lot of improvements in Their Finest Hour and most of them are better seen and explained while playing the core full World War II scenarios.

Worth a full Softpedia review? Yes.

Via: Quick Look: Hearts of Iron III Their Finest Hour [with Gameplay Video]