Hearts of Iron II

Hearts of Iron 2 is the latest in the line of games from Paradox Interactive. It is a grand strategic game that concerns itself with the period 1936-1948, the period of massive geopolitical change and upheaval leading up to and including World War 2. This game gives the player the opportunity to control the government, economy, trade, production, diplomacy and military of any nation in the world at the time. You can be any of the main belligerents of the time, a secondary power, or heck, you can even be Luxembourg if you want to!

Hearts of Iron 2 is most definitely Grand Strategic in nature---it is not operational or tactical. It's pretty complex too, for a strategic level game. This game has a short, sharp learning curve, followed by a long period of knowing how to play but gradually wrestling with the depth of the game and working out how everything interacts and what you need to do to win. For battle weary veterans of Hearts of Iron, this game will still take a little while to get the hang of because there have been some fundamental changes to the game engine, but we're talking hours rather than days or weeks. For people who haven't played the predecessor, these words from the excellent manual provide a hint as to what you're in for: My best advice would be a mixture of "don't panic" and “be patient." Hearts of Iron 2 can seem a bit intimidating and complex at first, but once you've played it for a little while you'll find that most aspects of it are quite intuitive.

While we're talking about intimidation, the manual itself is a real shock in today's world of short, glossy and ultimately meaningless manuals. This thing is 96 pages of solidly packed text, with the occasional picture squeezed into a corner so as not to interrupt the text too much. Fortunately it is superbly written, and covers everything you could ask for. I loved the manual so much that I read it twice!

Installation is a breeze---the game comes on one CD and has a patch available from the website. Another nice little touch is that you don't need the CD in the drive to play the game. If you have any troubles, Paradox Interactive has a specialized forum for support, along with a website and general discussions forums (complete with an extensive fanbase) that will cover practically everything you'll ever need or desire gamewise. This really is another big plus you get when purchasing Paradox Interactive products---a friendly and dedicated fanbase that is in it for the long haul.

The system requirements for this game are fairly modest for a modern computer game, although it is a bit RAM hungry. Most machines should run this fine, although you may have some problems playing multiplayer games with a dial up modem---oh the humanity!

Hearts of Iron 2 provides opportunities to play either a campaign, or scenario. Campaigns offer the full features of the game (i.e. production, diplomacy, trade, and more) while the scenarios are really just an operational level battle or series of battles. The provision of scenarios adds a further option if you're a bit short on time or just want a little fill-in game. On the other hand the scenarios lack most of the things that are really good about Hearts of Iron, and there are games out there that do a better job at the operational level. Hearts of Iron 2 is a grand strategic level game, and in my opinion, that is the level it should stay at. The scenarios are a good addition, but I wouldn't buy the game for them.

The frantic clicking has been taken out of warfare in Hearts of Iron 2. If you play a few RTS' on the side like I do, and use your superior click speed as a key advantage over your more thoughtful and ponderous opponents, then this is terrible news. But taking a wider perspective, it really is very good. One of the most controversial decisions Paradox ever made was to go real time in its game design, with a key disadvantage of this being that they lose some of the strategic elements to their games, in the frantic click and hope world of real time simulations.

Hearts of Iron 2 makes huge strides in redressing this drawback of its predecessor. You now really have to think like a military strategist, making decisions like whether to put all your troops in the front lines, or set up reserves. You will have to decide in advance what sort of air force you want, and then how to use it. If you want air superiority you'll need to think about more than just manipulating the game system---you'll need to employ fighter sweeps, and look to knock out your opponents airfields. There is also provision to refine how your bombers operate in ground support missions---you can try to kill enemy troops or use interdiction. But the critical improvement is that you can set all these things up in advance. You set up reserve orders before combat, and can use these as a sort of insurance policy, or to play little tricks on your opponent. If you want your fighters to fly CAP, you can select the region in advance and fine tune when they will stop flying CAP and the times of day they will be in the air.

This game also has some nice combat touches and enhancements. Supply is an important factor in combat. While Hearts of Iron 2 wont have you micromanaging rail schedules and moving tinned beef from factories to the front, it will make you think seriously about the supply situation of your troops---both in terms of ensuring that you have enough supply and oil on hand, and that it makes it to the front in an efficient manner. There's also now an option to supply units in preparation for an offensive, which is often the critical factor between the success or failure of your military actions.

On the same topic there is now attrition to worry about. So when you're stuck deep in the heart of Russia during the winter, you are going to suffer some strength losses. Hardly a revolutionary concept, but good to see it in the game. And all this at the same time that you're worrying about the bigger picture concerns of balancing supplies against replacements and reinforcements. More on that later though.

Naval combat has been completely overhauled. And about time too, since the previous incarnation was a shocker. Now, when your navy goes into combat, you'll have to think about ship ranges, the weather, time of day and the unit mix. All of these things become important to naval warfare, and the results feel much more realistic as a result. Carrier warfare has also been overhauled, with the single most significant change being the introduction of the “Carrier Air Group" to replace the previous "put your land based aircraft onto carriers" system. Carriers are now a critical part of the naval combat system.

Leadership is of course another important element of warfare. In Hearts of Iron 2 you assign leaders to command any sort of formation you create (land, sea or air), and you also have specialist headquarters units that provide the upper echelons of leadership for your armies. Every leader you choose has an individual rank, skill and set of skills. Unfortunately while you can sort leaders by skill or rank, you cannot sort by skill set. So if I want a panzer leader to command my tanks, it's quite an effort to get just the right man for the job. So selecting the right leader can be a bit of a hassle.

Production is integrally linked to warfare. The production engine is all about balancing the needs of your armed forces both in the short and the long term to achieve your strategic goals. Industrial Capacity is the primary tool for producing pretty much everything, although it combines with manpower for lots of things, and money is the primary requirement for research. IC needs feeding before you can use it, and this is where the resources kick in. You need to get the right balance between the raw resources your nation has on hand in order to run your IC (and thus your economy and military) at full capacity. As an added touch IC feeds directly into your Transport Capacity---or your ability to move things around the territory you control---and TC in turn has a direct effect on combat. Complex huh?

You can trade for raw resources, but you can't buy manpower, so this resource becomes a natural sort of cap on the size of your military. After you've fed your IC, you get to decide what to use it for. You need to balance producing supplies, upgrades, repairs and replacements, against your need to expand the size of your military and build infrastructure like airbases or AA guns.

If you like driving King Tigers around in 1943 while the Atomic Bombs rain down from intercontinental ballistic missiles, then you're going to be a bit disappointed by the research system in Hearts of Iron 2. Now, I'm not being entirely flippant here---the new research system is a real straight jacket compared with its predecessor. It is really quite difficult to pick a research area and achieve something truly spectacular in one sphere. You are held back by the number of research teams you can have going at one time, their quality and whether you are ahead or behind the world standard. The whole thing feels quite realistic really, but the big "what ifs" are no longer lucrative to try for, and are extremely hard to achieve if you opt to try regardless.

Land doctrine research has a particularly profound influence on the game. Countries like Russia get lots of human wave style doctrines, making infantry cheaper/better, and pushing them down the quantity over quality route. Again this is a bit of a restriction on flexibility, but increases the realism of the game. No doubt people will view this in different ways depending on what you're into.

On an unambiguously positive note, Paradox Interactive fixed one of my big gripes from the preview version, and made it easy to see which of your teams is best to do a particular piece of research. It is also really easy to view the technology tree, and sort out which things you really want to research, and for smaller countries, the number of research teams you get is linked to the size of the economy, giving another incentive to expand your IC.

Diplomacy and trade are almost certainly not where you'll be spending most of your Hearts of Iron 2 game time, but the time you do spend here is critical. This is where you set the real high level settings for your country---you pick ministers for your cabinet, determine domestic policy, trade deals, and diplomatic agreements and proposals.

Ministers and domestic policy sliders are tools for fine tuning your nation. These allow you to influence an enormous array of the economic, military and diplomatic fundamentals of your country. Both run on an annual cycle, with new ministers arriving for selection annually and you are allowed one annual change to a policy slider. Despite the wide variety of things you can influence, there are some things that just make much more sense to do than others, and the set of realistic options that you might select from are much more limited.

Diplomacy and trade are now an integrated package. Establish good trade relations with a country and it will benefit your relationship. I tend to favour certain trading partners above others for precisely this reason. Relationships vary from -200 to 200, in a manner similar to the Europa Universalis system, and each nation is rated for its "belligerence" which in turn affects other countries actions concerning you. Annex lots of your neighbours and your belligerence will rise, potentially causing your erstwhile friends to take actions to stop your little rampage. This makes for some interesting geopolitical decisions, such as whether to annex or puppet nations you conquer, and it forces you to weigh up the consequences of rapid expansion.

One slightly odd manifestation of the diplomatic system is that everyone seems to start off guaranteeing each others independence.

At last we come to the bit of the review that no self-respecting wargamer would ever admit to reading in any detail. The sounds in Hearts of Iron 2 are perfectly respectable and unobtrusive. In fact perhaps too unobtrusive as some of the most useful sounds from Hearts of Iron are gone (like the warning sound when your opponent is typing you a message in multiplayer). But if you're into cool sounds and music then you should buy a CD player and a copy of “The Wall" because this is a wargame after all.

The interface in Hearts of Iron 2 is slick, easy to use and has an absolute wealth of information easily accessible. The detailed game information is tucked away in easily accessible menus, while the map itself has a wide array of sort able information at your fingertips. A huge improvement over its predecessor, and a gold standard in war and strategy gaming.

The graphics are pretty good for a wargame, but pretty bad for a real-time strategy game. Overall not much of an improvement over the first in the Hearts of Iron series, but perfectly fine graphics, although the infantry sprites really annoy me quite a lot---everything looks like infantry!! This can be annoying in the heat of battle.

The breadth and depth of the game means that the AI has the potential to ruin a game like this in a way that no other single game feature can. In many respects it did ruin Hearts of Iron, but it does not ruin Hearts of Iron 2. I think Paradox Interactive games are generally pretty good in the wider scheme of AIs, and Hearts of Iron 2 once again benefits from the experience of its predecessor, and is very solid. While its not going to launch a scintillating blitzkrieg attack and split your forces in two, it just might trip you up if you get cocky and its generally no pushover.

In spite of the solid AI, I tend to spend most of my time playing multiplayer these days. And I'm happy to say that the multiplayer in Hearts of Iron 2 is relatively bug free, and a pleasure to use, even for those of us who aren't entirely computer literate. It is pretty stable too, with crashes a rarity.

I wrote in my preview that playing Paradox Interactive games was like a rollercoaster ride through pain, frustration, anger, elation and bewilderment. Well I have to say that Hearts of Iron 2 is the exception to this rule. This is a polished, finished game. It is worth buying in its release state which, lets be honest, is not something that you can say about a whole lot of other Paradox Interactive games.

At the time of writing there is a patch out for Hearts of Iron 2, and another is in the pipeline. I must stress, though, that this is not a sign of a bad game and you wont have to wait until 1.7 to get a good game from Hearts of Iron 2. This time round, patches seem to be more adding new features and enhancements to the game rather than fixing bugs. As an example, the next patch will add a new campaign starting in 1938, add a new scenario (Case Blue, 1942), add more leaders, ministers and tech teams. Sounds more like a free expansion pack than a patch!

This game is definitely Hearts of Iron 2 rather than an elaborate patch to Hearts of Iron. Minor gripes aside, its hard to find anything much that isn't great about this game. But there is one spoiler, and it caused me much soul-searching as I contemplated this review. Hearts of Iron 2 is the game that Hearts of Iron should have been before it was released. Now if Hearts of Iron 2 had been a brand new game without any baggage it would have been simply put one of the all time greats. As it is though, I have played Hearts of Iron for quite some time now, as well as Europa Universalis and Victoria, and of course they all have a bit of the same flavour to them. So despite the substantial overhaul of the game system, I still had a feeling of “been there, done that" while playing this game. I wondered for a while whether this game was one too many Paradox Interactive games, and if I was bored of the whole series. Thankfully, it's not. I have no problem in recommending this game as one of the pinnacles in World War 2 gaming.