WANTED: FOR MALICIOUS PROGRAMMING – JOHAN ANDERSSON
I feel like crap today, and it is one hundred percent the fault of one man: Johan Andersson.
Considering that I had to be here at Strategy-Gaming World Headquarters Tower at 0700 this morning, the fact that I stayed up until well past TWO AM playing Hearts of Iron is clearly the cause for my inability to concentrate right now and I lay the responsibility at the conspiracy of Mr. Andersson and his cabal of talented individuals at Paradox.
As you may be aware Paradox produced Europa Universalis (I & II), originally a simple (?) software port of a rather obscure board wargame, but which is now the acme of deep historical strategic simulations. Not for the faint of heart or the short of attention, the EU games became sort of a life-Kharybdis, consuming every moment of spare time (as well as more than a few moments of this reviewer’s not-spare-time, for example during interminable meetings, job reviews, etc…). If one was incautious, one’s job, relationships, pets, anything could be lost to the ravening beast that was EU.
OK, that might be overstating it a little bit. Still, EU was an extremely good game that was the source of more than slight domestic acrimony, e.g.: “Are you still playing that game?” “Aren’t you done with that review yet?” “Turn that damn computer off!” One-more-turn syndrome, indeed.
But, time passed. The reviews were ultimately finished (EUI, EUII ) and other games started piling up on my desk, clamoring for attention. EU2 never left my hard drive.
Then, just as I felt that domestic tranquility had at last been restored, I got a little email in my mailbox from Patric at Paradox. He pointed to a bland little web page press release at Paradox, mentioning in passing that they were working on a WW2 game that used the same engine as EU. I confess this wasn’t a total surprise; back when we were first going back and forth with my questions about EU, the complete success that they were experiencing made some sort of sequel obvious. They’d hinted at it and I, with my years of seasoned game reviewing experience, pshaw’d the idea: there was no way that they could make a playable game of the entirety of the Second World War at the detail level presented in EU. No way. Any such attempt would be doomed to either superficiality (EU as Axis & Allies) or be bogged in a morass of details. Maybe, I opined cautiously, it would be better if they applied the engine to something more fitting, like a Medieval game?
It turns out, they were light years ahead of this poor rube. Aside from the fact that they already had plans for a Medieval game (Crusader Kings, previewed elsewhere on this site), the fertile brains at Paradox already had a rough plan for how they’d manage to apply EU’s guts to WW2.
At the beginning of this year, I managed to get a look at their design document – a massive stack of paper that meticulously laid out the scope and context of Hearts of Iron. From this was born our early preview. In the sense that EU was an homage to the board game Empires in Arms, HoI is in a sense a similar (but more distant) descendant of World in Flames. Clearly the inspiration is there, as is a genuine affection for the subject matter.
Hearts of Iron is the newest game from Paradox, and presents you with the ability to play any state in the world through the cataclysmic years of World War 2 (broadly defined here as 1936-1948). This is a grand strategic game in every sense of the word. As the guiding force behind a country, you control quite literally everything: research, diplomacy, military campaigns, economic priorities – and you do it in real time.
From the first moment, the game looks and feels like EU. The map looks essentially the same, with the same graphics. For the more wargame oriented, there’s an option to turn on military standard unit icons (like boardgame counters), rather than the more artistic default sprites. For what it’s worth, I tried both and found that they each have their advantages and disadvantages. With the sprites, you have a small subscript that tells you how many divisions (or flotillas for navy, air wings for air units) are in that ‘stack’, plus it just looks a little more interesting with animated pictures of tanks, planes or ships. However, these divisions may be organized under one or several different commanders (which makes a difference in combat). With the ‘counter-style’ icons you have a more organizational view, each counter representing a specific general’s unit but you DON’T get a picture (other than the very rough XX=division, XXX=Corps, XXXX=army) of how many divisions are there. Ultimately a matter of taste, but very nice that Paradox gives you the option.
I’ve always felt that a subtle and underrated part of most wargames is the sound. Certainly the sound effects in HoI are decent, with the obligatory clankity-clank of tanks advancing when you move an armor unit, or the thunder of guns on the attack, but there’s not a lot of ground for creativity here. One of the nicest features of EU2 was its outstanding music, and HoI continues this tradition. With more than a 2 HOURS of mostly-martial mp3’s from Tchaikovsky’s Battle of Poltava to themes from Peer Gynt, again we have a directory full of songs that make a satisfying mp3 playlist in their own right.
My original objection to the idea of EU as a WW2 game was that player control of worldwide activities in real time would be impossible. I sorely underrated the talents of the people at Paradox. They’ve taken their extensive experience from EU1 and EU2 (already an improvement) and revamped the interface to deal with the significantly different needs of a modern game. As usual with Paradox games, we have extremely deep tooltips that explain as well as advise.
The interface itself is pretty simple, with a few main multifunction windows showing you everything you need to see. The top bar shows you all the things you need to know constantly, such as your resource totals (coal, steel, rubber, oil, and supplies) and other data about your country such as your available manpower and unused industrial capacity, your diplomatic influence, national dissent, and number of nukes owned (which is a little egregiously suggestive, I think).
The majority of the screen is, of course, the map. This can be configured to show a number of different sets of information: economic (showing resources), diplomatic (showing control and boundaries), terrain (the default screen, showing the moving units of the game as well as the general physical character of the ground). The terrain map can also have the weather overlay turned on, which shows bad weather and overcast conditions, critical for air operations. In fact, weather can be so important it would be nice if they could indicate the short term weather forecast for a zone – although frankly I don’t know how they’d cram that information onto the screen.
Each province has a wealth of detail. The terrain and economically exploitable resources are certainly present, but also infrastructure (how fast resources can be extracted, as well as how easy it is to move forces or resources through that region), industrialization (the number of IC’s it generates – more on that below), fortification, coastal fortifications (I haven’t yet figured out if building coastal fortifications is particularly more efficient than overall provincial fortifications) and AA defenses.
With a game of such staggering scale and detail, one of the simplest actions becomes the most complicated. How – on a map broken into irregular and varied regions – can the player hope to coordinate combined arms activities? If you have invasion forces traveling across multiple sea zones, in a real time game you don’t have the luxury to sit and watch until those forces arrive to launch your airstrikes from land bases, or initiate your shore bombardments. In any case, such a focus for a strategic commander would be unrealistic at this scale. Therefore Paradox has employed a novel and effective agent for the task: the CCB or Combat Coordination Box. When you move a unit or group of units, you right click on the target province (almost anywhere within reasonable distance from the unit, excluding special actions like loading an ocean transport for ground units, etc) and up pops the CCB. The engine presents you with a time and date, which is that unit’s ETA at the destination, given the current conditions. You also have movement and attack options such as feint (a light probing attack, after which the attacking unit returns to its origin region), normal attack, or if an armor/mech unit, “blitz” (a penetrating attack that severely damages the targets organization, and can result in the armor unit penetrating into a region past the target). Click on the next stack of units, and right click on the target region and the CCB pops up again, with the same date if the unit can get there in time, or it’s own ETA if it cannot. Then, when you unpause the game, the units will coordinate their departures so as to all arrive at the projected time. (Note: if you aren’t pausing to enter these orders, definitely sandbag your arrivals by an extra day or two in the future as conditions can change radically enough over the time it takes to issue orders, that a distant attack can be totally discombobulated.)
This CCB system sounds simple, and it is. But it’s also extremely powerful.
For example: let’s say you are going to attack Western Poland from Germany. You have an armored corps, a big infantry corps, and a couple of infantry divisions to either side of your main force, as well as tactical air at bases behind you. The Poles have a formidable infantry defense, with cavalry but no armor or air resources. Set up the infantry force to attack, and the CCB might tell you that you can arrive at 0300 on 9/1/39. This is too early, as in 1939 you do not have effective night-attack technology. So you advance the infantry corps’ arrival to 0900, 9/1/39.
Click on the two flanking corps, and move them to the attack. Since the Polish forces can put up a surprising resistance, we don’t want these small forces to get trapped in a major battle with the Poles, so we set their attacks to ‘feints’ – this will put negative penalties on the target forces, as they try to defend against multiple formations attacking from multiple directions. These attacks will ALSO occur at 0900, 9/1/39. So far, so good.
Now click on the armor unit. The Poles have only infantry and cavalry, so they are a good target for a blitz. This will totally disrupt their organization and leave them disorganized, as well as (if successful) putting that armored corps in their rear, so cutting them off from supplies. We plan this for 0800, 1 hour before the main assault.
Leaving no advantage unexploited, we launch the Stukas, and schedule them to attack at 0700, just before the armored assault. This will disperse and again disorganize the Poles, making the armored breakthrough that much easier.
Net result: an annihilating attack led by tactical airstrikes, with armored units exploiting the disorganized defenders, and cutting off their rear supply. Finally, the infantry moves into the region and faces little resistance from a thoroughly demoralized and disorganized foe. If they survive as a formation, they will retreat back into the already-penetrated armor units and be wiped out. Total time to set up: about 10 seconds per formation, maybe a minute total. I should know – I played the Poles who were struck early by the Germans in 1937 and I watched as my frontline formations were decimated by precisely these tactics.
The CCB is a wonderful tool that no wargame should be without.
(A tip: when setting up such combined arms attacks, start with the slowest unit moving over the harshest terrain first – basically, the last guys to get there. This then coordinates the whole attack on their arrival. Pick another unit and your attack will either be piecemeal or you will have to go back and re-issue everyone’s orders!)
A text window at the bottom of the screen displays messages of lesser import (while they are being accumulated in a log that you can look over later to see what happened and when), and a small but important window shows the day/night regions constantly displayed. While this is nice, I’d have preferred it being displayed directly on the main map as a highlight, since the day/night window is too small to easily translate onto knowledge about a specific province. This too is important for air activity, because until you develop radar, planes don’t do much good at all in the dark. Since HoI seems to also take into account seasonal variations in sunrise/sunset, it would be useful to know somehow the day/night TIMES for a specific region in advance. Is an attack on Oslo at 0800 in February a day attack or night attack? I’m guessing night, but it would be nice to know. Barring that information, I’m just careful to err on the side of safety and plan my northerly attacks a little later in the morning than usual. (Caveat: I don’t really have any good idea how they would convey this, but hey, I’m just a critic, right?) But complaining aside, how many games even take this into account, much less make it important?
This smaller window also has access to the Paradox-standard plethora of charts, graphs, logs, and lists invaluable for managing your state. The ledger-lists of costs and resources help you manage your economy effectively, while the lists of military units and air/sea/ground commanders help make sure your forces are as well-led and organized as possible.
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Reviewed by Steve Lieb.
