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Hearts of Iron

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review
Article Date: December 17, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: Hearts of Iron
Category: Real-Time Strategy
Developer: Paradox Entertainment
Publisher: Strategy First
Release Date: November 19, 2002 (Released)
Sys. Spec: Click Here
Files & Links: Click Here

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Plenty of Depth

Paradox’s Europa Universalis (EU) games were brilliant, so many of us have been eagerly awaiting their latest offering. Hearts of Iron (HOI) covers twelve years around World War II, from 1936 through the end of 1947. Much of HOI is very similar to EU, down to the near-continuous engine that processes small chunks of time as mini-turns. In HOI, those turns are each one hour long (for 105120 hours over 12 years, as opposed to 146000 days over 400 years in EU2.) The games are also very similar in that the initial release was in dire need of patching. HOI is superb—but even with two patches under its belt, it’s still a bit rough. Even with that roughness, it has got all the depth most of us are likely to be able to handle, and it should keep you entertained for quite some time.

As in EU2, you’re given a block of time and can play any nation on earth, from Germany to Panama. You’ll have a lot more to do if you play as Germany, of course! However, the breakdown of major angles to the game is different. EU2 sported foreign and domestic politics, religion, economics, and warfare. HOI sports foreign and domestic politics, technology, economics, and warfare. In EU2, the variable used to glue together special events and national condition was Stability. In HOI, Dissent serves the same role: higher levels of dissent make it increasingly likely that your industry will output nothing, your military units will disobey orders, and your government ministers will launch a coup.

Nothing like, nothing like - dropping the bomb

Economics

The most obvious impact on dissent is the part of your economy dedicated to consumer goods. Spend too little and dissent rises. Spend more than enough and dissent falls. It falls slowly, however, and events frequently ask you to choose between an undesirable result or a loss of 5 to 10 stability: for example, the Soviet officer corps purge forces you to choose several times between killing officers for a stability increase or saving them at a cost of 10 stability. What do you do if a key leader shows up on the execution list?

Balanced against the consumer spending are Supply, Research, and Construction. Supply provides supplies for your units, and a solid stockpile is a very good idea. Research allows you to uncover new technologies, without which your units will soon be hopeless on the battlefield. Construction goes to the building and upgrading of military units. The source of the points you’re using in all this is your Industrial Capacity: the sum of all the factories in all the provinces you control. Provinces can make another factory in 1 year at the cost of half their output (building fortifications, coastal defences, and flak is handled in much the same way.) The factories are also hungry maws consuming oil, rubber, coal, and steel. If you haven’t got enough of one of them, then your industrial output falls accordingly.
“The factories are hungry maws consuming oil, rubber, coal, and steel.”
If you are short of some resource—and everybody is short on something, generally oil, rubber, or both—you have three options. Through technology, coal can become oil and oil can become rubber, but the techs that do this efficiently are a long way up the tech tree. You can conquer the provinces that provide the resources, but rubber-producing provinces are a long way from Berlin. Finally, you can trade resources you have in excess for the ones you need on a somewhat generic world market. You offer a given multiple of your resource for one of the other, and if you’ve outbid the other nations, you make the trade. The value of the offered resource is taken into account. You can often trade 1:1 between oil or rubber and anything else, but will often have to trade 3:1 on coal for rubber. Strangely, however, these resources don’t seem to travel on convoys, which means that Germany has full access to the world market even when closely blockaded by the Royal Navy.

What does travel on convoys is the materials you send elsewhere. If you have a force overseas, it needs supplies. If it burns petrol, it needs oil. Now you need a convoy to move the material. Freighters get built steadily and automatically behind the scenes. You choose the starting port, the ending port, and then assign freighters and check boxes for the resources to move. This is also how you move resources from your East Asian colonies back to Blighty, in distinct contrast to the relatively easy time the Germans have contending with the world market where no convoys are needed! Convoys are easy to set up, but also dead meat against enemy raiders unless protected.

In sum, the economic engine does what it is meant to do. You need to make long-term decisions on matters such as economic expansion, research, and unit construction. With a few oddities, the system succeeds in presenting a macro view of economics that still leaves the player in control of the key variables. It also succeeds in showing the relative strengths and weaknesses of various powers. Germany has a developed industrial base but a very thin resource base. The Soviet Union boasts an economy that dwarfs the German one and has a better resource base to boot, while the American economy is mind-bogglingly humongous. The fly in the ointment is that Paradox made it quite difficult to lock the allocation sliders, which can become quite irritating. The solution is simple: make the lock/unlock button separate from the slider itself; but Paradox seems committed to double-clicking the slider itself instead, and unless you click on precisely the right place, the slider moves.

With Germany's oil running low, Manstein is out of gas

Technology

That difference in economics shows up in the nature of the various nation’s tech advances. Technology research is fairly realistically implemented, requiring players to develop underlying doctrines and technologies before researching stuff that actually finally has an impact. Thus, players can research their way up the Armor tech tree, but if they ignore Artillery, then their Super-Heavy Tanks will be armed with popguns. Doctrine is expensive and slow to learn, but provides access to many other technologies: if you don’t know you want Wire-Guided Anti-Tank Rockets, how can you study them? The US is one of the few countries that can consider the long climb to nuclear weapons without crippling the rest of its research effort. In fact, the US is probably the only country that can routinely research every available technology. All the rest need to cherry-pick based on their strategic situation. Thus, the Soviets can ignore the naval techs entirely, but are in desperate need of artillery, while the Japanese are going to be hurting badly without naval technology.

As designed, the technology system works well, and rewards careful thought on the part of the player. The system is highly complex in places, but the tech screen lets you see what the Required and Leads To techs are for any given technology, and by clicking on the items listed you can piece your way through the tech tree to find out that, say, that you need to develop Nylon to have Paratroops. The oddity in the mix is the starting technologies, one of the areas where HOI is a Teutonophile’s wet dream. Germany begins the game with an ahistorically large lead in technology, especially in the slow, expensive, and unit-quality-enhancing doctrine fields, while most nations begin the game having ostensibly never bothered to analyze combat experience from World War 1. Presumably this is to enable the Germans to go on their historical rampage when a human intelligence is directing the enemy with foreknowledge of German aggression, but it, combined with Germany’s large starting army in 1936, it makes the “instant rabid pit-bull” strategy highly viable for a German player.

Learning to swim

Politics

Technology can, of course, be given to any nation you choose, though sadly none of them will ever give you anything. Oddly, these gifts have no impact on how much they like you, but it’s a great means of trying to shore up your allies! All countries are rated in terms of their place on a political triangle whose corners are Fascism, Communism, and Democracy. Influence another country to shift to your political position, and you might be able to ally with them. In practice, there are three alliance blocks for the three corners, and this allows for enough flexibility to cover the historical situation with plenty of variation inside it. The Soviets not being formally allied to the British and Americans, while the Germans and Japanese are also not formally allied, means the Soviets and Japanese are not automatically at war. The system also allows minor allies to slip one way or another, and you can set up puppet governments for conquered states or annex them outright.

Annexation requires that the enemy has lost all of its victory point (VP) provinces. What’s odd here is that these aren’t the ones in the nation’s at-start boundaries, but the ones it controls anywhere in the world. You might control all of European Italy, for example, but be unable to defeat it outright because it owns some small VP area in East Africa. Equally, when you advance into enemy territory from an ally’s territory, the province you just conquered becomes your ally’s. Since landing in France begins the process of liberating France, you advance into Germany from France, and France thus controls the German provinces. It’s not a game-breaker, but it is odd.

On the whole, diplomacy is less involved than in EU2. There are nifty things you can do with it, but the timeframe is not long enough to make it an equal counterpart to the sword as in EU2. One aspect of diplomacy blends into the combat model: you can send military forces as expeditionary forces to somebody else’s war. Unfortunately, in 1.02 this is somewhat broken, since the forces sent are absorbed into the host nation’s order of battle along with their leaders! You can also shore up a friendly power by setting up a convoy to ferry raw materials and supplies: Lend-Lease in action!

Gearing up for Operation Olympic

War

All of which, of course, leads us up to warfare. HOI usually runs along at a rapid pace in peacetime, as you let the days speed past while you wait for factories to be built or research to be completed. When the war starts, hours start to be important. Your rate of progress through the months will slow to a crawl, but you’ll find yourself very, very busy. HOI uses a system clearly derived from that in EU2. You build divisions, which get grouped under leaders. Each division is rated for a variety of combat abilities, its overall strength, and its cohesion. Lose cohesion, and the unit loses its effectiveness. Lose all its strength, and it is toast. Leader ability, on a scale of 0 through 5, has a huge impact on combat. Leaders are also rated for their rank, which controls how many divisions they can control, and gain experience through combat, which eventually raises their skill levels, which you can cash in for higher rank.

When moving into a province with known enemy forces, you can select the time of your forces’ arrival. This permits you to coordinate attacks, so your air support begins to soften up a target a few hours before your attack arrives, or so that the attack begins in daylight to avoid nighttime penalties. As in EU2, forces slug away at each other unless one routs, retreats, or is destroyed. It works fairly well for land combats, which frequently last quite some time. However, naval combats use much the same model and while quicker, they almost never sink ships, since one side or the other always seems to pull out before a decisive result occurs. Damaged ships take quite some time to repair, so you may have the run of the seas after a major fleet engagement, but re-creating the devastating carrier battles of the Pacific is a challenge.

The only major downside of the combat engine comes from the event-display engine. This is inherited from EU2, where events were relatively more rare. In HOI, however, you can have your event log swamped by unit-arrival notifications. Suppose you set up an aircraft patrol mission to continually check out some province and attack anything in it. The planes arrive at the target area! They get home! They arrived! They went home! And so on, several times per day! Deciding which messages to ignore entirely can become troublesome, and in times of intensive combat, your screen fills with messages in a heartbeat. Ways to avoid this aren’t clear, but if the pop-up windows irritated you in EU2, they’ll drive you buggy in HOI.

Overlord goes well despite weak forces because....

Manual and Tutorials

The single weakest link in HOI is the manual. While it goes into great detail on the mechanism of combat, the manual fails to make equally explicit other aspects of how to play the game. It took me days to figure out how to make escorts for my convoys (build destroyers, then dedicate them to convoy escort), and numerous other questions were only answered by means of the Paradox web-boards, which are a key resource for HOI, just as for EU. Note, in particular, the “undocumented features” thread which aims to cover material not in the manual; and if you ever figure out how you’re supposed to transport V1 and V2 rockets across the oceans, please let me know; as air units they won’t load on transports, yet they won’t load onto carriers they way all other air units do. Worse still, the manual makes incorrect, contradictory, and misleading statements about various aspects of the game, from building factories to your diplomacy options. Fortunately, the tutorials take up a lot of the slack of teaching you the basics of the game.

The Germans had their hands full with the Soviets!

Strategy

None of this, however, will leave you fully prepared for the playing the game; at some point, you have to simply dive in and try it. Like EU2, HOI is huge. Possibilities abound and choosing effective options from the mix may be difficult! This is, however, what makes the game great. If you’ll permit a narrative from one game of HOI, played as the Americans and illustrated by the previous two screenshots. America sat on the sidelines until early 1942, building up a titanic industrial base and researching every available technology. What I wasn’t prepared for, after playing as the Soviets and Germans, was the issue of moving troops across the sea. After solving this, I launched a mini-Overlord to see what I could accomplish in France. I poured some 10 divisions into France, and found only a single German division west of Berlin, holding Paris. I got to Berlin and Prague before a concerted German response threw me back to the Rhine. Poking about changing sides through savegames, I found out what had happened.

I’d been sending massive amounts of resources and supplies to the Soviets. Every so often, I’d have to cut back for some reason; and each time, they lost a province. I didn’t fully understand the reason but tried not to cut back. When looking at savegames as the Germans and Soviets, all was made clear. The Germans and Soviets had been beating each other into a bloody pulp, and every single German division save the Paris garrison was committed and battered. My invasion in the West succeeded because the Soviets had tied up the entire German army—and when the Germans sent forces west to meet it, the Eastern Front collapsed. As the Germans punted me back to the Rhine, the Soviets wiped out the Germans in the east. This episode also serves to show the strengths and weaknesses of the AI: it predicts poorly but reacts reasonably well.

For a different tack, compare Hearts Of Iron to Strategic Command (SC). Both are loads of fun, and both began with serious flaws that patches slowly corrected. However, SC is essentially a bubble-gum version of World War II in Europe. Everything is simplified down to the point where the game proceeds at a good clip and you can finish the war in an evening or two. HOI is the equivalent of Thanksgiving Dinner: immense amounts of food on which you can gorge until you pop. If you want something quick and relatively uncomplex, stick with SC. If you want the full meal, with coffee and dessert and nuts to follow, head for HOI. Hearts of Iron has rough edges, and some of them will make you bleed; but Paradox is on track to patching it into a worthy successor to Europa Universalis. If you enjoy richly complex strategy games, HOI will eat your mind whole.

As a final note, however, EU1, EU2, and HOI have all required extensive patching to get them to their potential. There’s a lesson there, and it ain’t pretty. Hopefully Paradox will release Crusader Kings with more polish.



Review Machine:
  • CPU: AthlonXP 1900
  • RAM: 256MB
  • Video: GeForce3 Ti200


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