Nineteenth Century Essay

by on May 4, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the third in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the earlier reviews here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas
Hearts of Iron: Europa of Iron

After Hearts of Iron, Paradox turned its attention to the nineteenth century, releasing the empire management game Victoria in 2003. It was not nearly the success that the previous games had been for Paradox, and beyond their usual long-term patch support, there seemed to be little future for the game.

However, in 2006 Paradox announced an expansion that would be primarily available through their new online game store, GamersGate. Victoria: Revolutions took fans by surprise, and revised many parts of the original game, and proved to be a surprise hit for GamersGate, and doubtless helped ensure the future of titles other than Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron at Paradox. I’ve played both versions, and while the review will mostly talk about the revised version of Revolutions, it will also mention where some changes were made.

As with Hearts of Iron, Victoria is largely the same kind of game as Paradox’s other titles. It is a grand-strategy empire management game with an area-based map of the world, and done in a pausable real-time format. In this case, the focus is largely on internal politics and infrastructure development, with the original game covering from 1836 to 1920, while Revolutions adds 15 years to cover 1920-35, and introduces a number of changes to the basic system.

One important change was an addition to the UI. A number of different notification symbols would appear in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. These alerts warn of budget deficits, production problems, remind you when no research is going on, and so forth. This system was introduced in Revolutions, but became a standard part of the UI in all further Paradox games.

With Great Prestige Comes…

The nations in Victoria are divided into three categories: Great Powers, Independent Nations, and Uncivilized. The former get various benefits, including extra diplomatic ability, while the latter are easily picked on, since their territories are considered ‘colonies’ by civilized powers, and are easier to take by conquest.

Victoria is a little more goal-oriented than previous Paradox games, as there is a score calculated off of a country’s military power, industrial capacity, and prestige. The leading eight countries are the Great Powers, and there is plenty of room for changeover during the game. Prestige is something of a currency in the game, it is gained for events, discoveries, and successful prosecution of a war. Declaring war costs prestige, as well as dishonoring an alliance, and other such activities. Finally, prestige helps the chances of diplomatic deals being accepted.

Uncivilized nations can become civilized by simultaneously hitting benchmarks in military and industrial power, and prestige. Japan can, and often will (aided by events), transition from an uncivilized nation to a Great Power by the end of the game.

Technology

Technological progress is important in Victoria, and is detailed much as it was in HoI. However, this time the entire system is very regularized: There are five basic technological fields (Army, Navy, Commerce, Culture, and Industry), each of which has five sub-fields, and then there are five levels of advances in each of those (with a sixth level added in Revolutions). Only one technology can be researched at a time, and it generally takes a year to get each one.

However, there are three different types of effects that can come from each technology. First, some technologies require other ones be researched first, so research makes those available. Second, there are immediate effects, which can be an increase in army organization, or allowing a new level of province infrastructure to be built. Third, some effects come as events, which will fire at a random time after getting the technology (most events have a time around which they should fire, so if you get a technology late, you may get a bunch of events almost immediately, but if you manage to get it ‘early’, the events will dribble out over a longer period of time).

A little math will show that it is impossible to get all the techs without getting some from other countries (one/year; 5x5x5 = 125 in an 85-year game, or 150 in 100 years for Revolutions…). However, research takes both time and research points to accomplish. If you trade for new technology with a foreign nation, you get it immediately, but still need to spend the research points (to properly integrate it with your infrastructure/culture). If you don’t have the extra research points, your current research halts until the deficit is taken care of.

Research points are generated by your funding, modified by the country’s literacy rate. As funding research also causes the literacy rate to climb, research points slowly go from being insufficient to supply your own needs to generating an excess to use in trading with other nations. In addition, all these points are generated by the population, depending on what type they are. Since one of the primary population types for research is also used in factories (clerks), as your industrialization expands, your research generation will speed up.

Economy

Victoria features a new system of interrelated goods and products as the foundation of the game’s economy. In a sense, this is close to the trade system of EU II, where every province had a product for trade. However, here all such products are raw materials, and then there are factories that turn them into finished (or at least intermediate) products. These products can be traded internationally, like in HoI, though instead of constant offers of trade in kind, countries buy and sell what they want and produce in a singular world market with a cash economy.

In fact, it is much like the trade and production system in Imperialism, and I would like to know if it was inspired by that game, or is just convergent evolution. However, while Imperialism had 18 commodities, Victoria has 47, and they do not all break down into a few separate areas, the way Imperialism‘s did. Moreover, the world market is just a big pool of available items, and there is no option for trade embargoes, preferred trading partners, or the like. On the other hand, the money does not go straight to the treasury (as, after all, the state is not producing or selling the items), but goes to the population, who is then taxed by the government.

Twenty of the 47 goods come straight from the provinces (though oil only becomes available later in the game), and the rest become available by processing suitable materials in factories (one commodity, dye, can come from the provinces, or a factory). Many of these goods are needed for other purposes, like building military units, factories, railroads, and keeping your population satisfied. Unused goods go into a kind of national storehouse, where you can set buy and sell orders (‘buy if I don’t have enough’, ‘sell if I have too much’) at the world market, which acts as a general strategic reserve policy.

Industrialization

A new map concept in Victoria is the state, which is a collection of provinces. There is an easy listing of all the states within your country, and you generally get state information first when clicking on the map (and then province information after clicking again), but the UI for this level is not very good, as it can be hard to perceive the shading of the group of provinces in a state in several map views; also, you cannot easily see which foreign provinces would be part of states that already exist in your country, if the same country owned them.

Factories are of course the primary sign of industrialization in Victoria, and are managed at the state level, instead of the province level. Infrastructure is the other component, and its bonuses for a factory are determined by the average of the level of infrastructure across the state. Also, factories make use of population from all the provinces in the state, unlike the resources, which merely use the population of the local province.

The early sticking point of industrialization is machine parts, which are needed to build all factories, but the only source at the beginning of the game is a single machine part factory in England, so competition for the parts is fierce. However, several industrial technologies give ‘free’ machine parts as well (answering the question of where the first factory came from…). As the middle game starts, more machine parts factories start opening, and industrialization starts taking off.

The other component of industrialization is railroads. Railroads are the primary infrastructure of the province, and improving them will improve the efficiency of resource production and factories, and speed up military movement. Constructing them also (at least in Revolutions) consumes machine parts.

Revolutions takes the unusual step of removing a fair amount of player control from this part of the game. Governments do not generally go about meddling in production and companies directly, so most of the time, you do not get to build factories (state-run economies in socialist or fascist states are an exception). Instead, there is a class of capitalists in each country who save up money (depending on the tax and tariff policies), and when they have enough they build factories and railroads themselves.

The problem with that is you are letting the AI run the supply-side of the economy, and there will be mis-steps along the way. But the AI does judge what is ‘in demand’ (at least partially going off your market orders), and in the long run it ends up doing a pretty good job generating what is needed. Quite possibly, it is no worse than real-life ventures. The other side-effect of this is that the largest money sink in the player’s budget (new factories) is gone, leaving room for the more traditional state-funded province improvements of fortifications and naval bases.

Population

EU II gave the population of each province as part of its taxation model (with wars lowering the population, and peaceful times making it expand faster), while HoI largely ignored population in its production model, other than a manpower pool for recruiting new units. Victoria goes much deeper into the internal demographics of 19th century countries, breaking the populations down by ethnicity, politics, religion and social status, with each block of these called a “POP”. These POPs then have a job (for the working class ones), cash reserves, ‘issues’ (their political agenda), consciousness, and militancy.

At the government level, there is also plurality, which is a measure how much demand there is for democratic and social reforms. There are technologies that cause events that will boost plurality, setting the ball in motion, and a very few that will lower it again. Plurality generally drives up the consciousness rating of POPs, which is a feedback loop, as high consciousness drives up plurality.

Consciousness is a measure of how aware a POP is of politics. A POP with zero consciousness may have a political agenda (issues) at odds with the current power structure, but it doesn’t care. As consciousness rises, it will start wanting the government to address its issues, and will vote (if allowed) in accordance its desires, whereas it will generally vote for the current government at low consciousness.

Depending on the type of government in power, plurality and consciousness have an effect on militancy. Militancy is an expression of ‘unhappiness’ with the POP’s current situation. Militant POPs will either revolt, or emigrate to somewhere better (the game is set up so that POPs will generally want to immigrate from Europe to America).

Politics

Again, Victoria goes into detail not seen in previous games. EU II had policy sliders that made different countries act differently, but the method of government stayed the same. HoI has ideologies that determine what alliance countries end up aligning with. Victoria has a number of governmental forms, and political reforms, along with a political system to determine who is in power.

Government types range from Monarchies and Dictatorships to Democracy. Each country has a number of political parties, with their own agendas on things like citizenship and economic policies (originally, just the historical parties were included, but Revolutions introduced parties for all ideologies in every country). The more autocratic governments can install the party they want, but militancy rises across the country every time it is done. More commonly, an election is held every few years, and during the election season (nine months), there will be a stream of events that will sway opinions of the population of a state towards various political ideals.

There are three main ideologies in Victoria: Conservative, Liberal and Socialist. In the beginning, most countries are deeply conservative, but as consciousness rises, many classes will embrace liberalism. Partway through the game, socialism becomes available, and craftsmen, laborers and soldiers will start converting to it instead. POPs who find their needs are not being met may convert to the extreme version of their ideology: Reactionary, Anarcho-Liberal, and Communist. Revolutions adds a fourth extreme ideology, Fascism, and soldiers who have gone Communist will tend to convert over to it after 1905.

The steady creep of consciousness and plurality can be a ticking time bomb that tears a country apart in a cascade of high-militancy revolts between competing factions. This is a common fate for beginning players, as the beginning symptoms are hard to see (this, too, seems somewhat true to life…).

Military Theory

One of the first things that should happen to most powers in the game is an event caused by the army technology “Post-Napoleonic Thought”. This asks you to choose between following Jomini or Clausewitz for military theory. Many following events will be different depending on the choice made, with Jomini causing advances to emphasize morale and Clausewitz emphasizing organization.

Antoine-Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz were the two most influential writers on military theory in the 19th century, are used here as a somewhat simplified representation of some of the themes of 19th century warfare. Many militaries, including the French, believed that what was needed to win a war was superior élan (ardor or verve), which would hold the army together under the stress of combat until the enemy formation fell apart and broke. Other militaries paid more attention to the details of organization and logistics, though I don’t know if there were any quick summing up of their theory (and equating it to Clausewitzian theory is certainly over-simplifying).

In-game, morale (which stands in for élan) will cause a unit to retreat when it runs out. Organization equates to ‘efficiency’, so that it helps a unit (along with a host of other modifiers) do damage in combat, and it controls the speed at which morale is recovered, and how fast a unit ‘digs in’ while it is standing in a province. In the early going, armies are vulnerable to being forced to retreat from morale loss (especially against cavalry, whose shock attack values can quickly collapse morale), but even Clausewitzian armies will pick up some morale boosts, and as the firepower of infantry increases during the game, defensive bonuses from fortifications and digging in become more and more important, and morale is not enough to win a war. (Personally, while I’ve seen forum complaints about not being constantly forced to retreat as a Clausewitzian army, I’ve never seen it be a problem, even in the very early game.)

On War

Apart from the different tracks that armies can follow, and the separation of morale and organization into two different values, military units work much as they did in HoI. There are three main types of land units, that are recruited as separate divisions: infantry, cavalry, and dragoons (mounted infantry), each of which can have a specialist brigade attached that boosts the statistics and maximum strength.

Most army inventions will improve one or more statistics of a few different types of units, and in all such cases will increase the supply cost for those unit types, so as army units become more capable, they also become more expensive to maintain, and keeping a strong military can become ruinously expensive.

One of the POP types are soldiers, and army units are drawn from these POPs. This also limits how many units can be recruited, as there must be sufficient soldier POPs to support new units. And yes, casualties reduce the size of these POPs, directly impacting the population of the country.

An extra concept to go along with this is mobilization. You can establish a mobilization pool (of four infantry divisions each time it is increased), and when a major war breaks out you can mobilize, which will give you a force of fresh divisions three months later, by converting a number of clerk, craftsmen, laborer and farmer POPs into soldier POPs until you demobilize. This can, of course, severely disrupt an economy as resources and factories go empty to support the war effort (not to mention that these POPs will probably be smaller after the war…).

Like in HoI, these units can be grouped together into armies, and leaders assigned. However, in Victoria there is not one big list of historical leaders, but rather they must be created by using leadership points (which are also needed for some unit recruitment). Leaders will have two different traits, which will determine their actual bonuses for combat. Many leaders will have mostly negative bonuses, but since the ‘default’ leader has penalties in all areas, some leader is almost always better than no leader at all.

Naval units work mostly the same as land units, except that they represent individual capital ships (starting with frigates and men-of-war and working up to cruisers and dreadnoughts and carriers) that can have smaller ships attached to them for stat bonuses. They can be lead by admirals, but do not need to be supported by individual POPs because of the comparatively low manpower requirements.

Finally, occupying a province takes time, instead of being instant as in HoI. It does not use a drawn-out, random siege mechanic, complete with assaults seen in EU II either. Instead, there is just a steady progress of occupying the province which is dependent on the number of occupying troops.

Colonization

The nineteenth century was the last great period of imperial expansionism, and Victoria has a system that ties into the state system, and works very differently from EU IIs. Instead of sending settlers to a colony until the settlement promotes to a city, and turns into a regular province, you stake claims. These are in the form of different colonial buildings that can be built with slightly different effects. Once you have one of each type of building in a state, or all the provinces in a state have one of your buildings, you can claim the colony, and make it an official part of your empire, which grants a high amount of prestige.

It is of course possible to have multiple nations claiming parts of the same state, which can lead to deadlock if no one can claim it through building types. Parts of US territory that were still in dispute are nicely represented by this system at the beginning of the game. However, the diplomatic model allows the buying and selling of territory, so it can be worked out, though the AI is subject to being ‘gamed’ without too much effort.

Revolutions refined the system in several aspects, introducing naval bases to limit where colonies can be founded (as there must be a base in range), and restricting colonization by the habitability index of the province (with various technologies lowering the minimum rating needed to colonize).

History

The event system from previous games is present in Victoria as well, and serves to keep several things on track during the game. It comes across as heavy-handed in a few places where it forces wars that may not agree with the in-game politics.

Worse, while Victoria models much of Europe fairly well, it has many more problems with the United States. Texas is as war with Mexico as the game begins, and almost always loses. The Mexican-American war tends to be out of the scope of the warfare model, so there is an event to enforce the actual treaty borders (in the event that there is such a war and the US wins…). The Civil War is also treated somewhat ham-handedly, with the historical Confederacy generally appearing all at once, and no real treatment of the border states. Similarly, there’s no option for a single war to allow the complete conquest of any but the smallest of nations, so that must be forced as well (and the AI has trouble with this).

The world market is a handy abstraction, but doesn’t account for wars, trade embargoes, or similar things, so much of nineteenth century economic policy is abstracted down to the tariffs in the budget. This makes the trade system much simpler than Imperialism‘s, despite being an otherwise complicated game.

But, many aspects of the game engine seems to do fairly well with the politics of the time, especially in Europe, where the main focus is. The system of event tie-ins to technological progress allow for a number of small essays on the creators of 19th century economic and political thought, helping the usual electronic time-machine feel (though susceptible to the usual ‘click-through-the-flavor-text’ syndrome). More importantly, the map of Europe tends to be fairly stable in Victoria, as in the nineteenth century, though wars are generally more common.

Conclusion

Victoria would be a climax in the development of Paradox’s games, being noticeably more complex than the preceding titles. In turn, it is also a thesis on the forces that drove the 19th century, and has some very interesting things so say. Despite overall poor sales and the release of Victoria II, Victoria still has some die-hard players today, and I think the exceptional ‘historical thesis’ nature of the game is part of what keeps people at it. Sadly, the general fan community has generally died off, leaving the VikiWiki unfinished, and in need of updates for Revolutions, and the main community-developed mod, the Victoria Improvement Project (VIP) was never completely updated for Revolutions either (though I understand it will generally work with it).

I consider it a title I’m very happy that Paradox produced. It has plenty of problems, entire systems that aren’t needed (like the corruption system that I haven’t mentioned because it does so little), and it isn’t necessarily very good at what it tries to model. However, the attempt to show the internal stresses on a government is worthwhile for being so rare, and despite the missteps, and complications, it still makes for a good game that I enjoy.

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Europa Universalis IV Shilling

by on April 30, 2013 at 9:33 pm
Posted In: Computer games

Okay, I normally don’t do this, but it’s just too tempting:

As you may have noticed, I really like Paradox’s grand strategy titles. I mean, I’ve even started writing a series of reviews of them, that I hope will manage to note just where certain ideas crop up, and trace them through later games. (The Victoria review should be up in just a few days.)

Late last year, Paradox announced the latest game in the series that launched it all: Europa Universalis IV. Right now, they’re launching a ‘spread the word’ campaign, where you get bonuses for getting people to sign up to their newsletter, where they announce upcoming games, and have occasional special deals (I’ve gotten a couple free games through it, though that has dropped off.) Since I’m a sucker for special forum icons, I’ve decided to take part.

So, if you’re one of the 0.375 people who actually read this blog, and have any interest in computer strategy games, go here, and sign up for their monthly newsletter.

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Europa of Iron

by on April 13, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the second in a series of reviews of Paradox’s empire management games. See the first review here:
Europa Universalis II: A Tale of Two Europas

After Europa Universalis II, Paradox Interactive stuck with what they had proven that they do well, and started work on more empire management games. WWII is apparently Johan Anderson’s favorite historical period, which became the subject of Paradox’s third title, with Hearts of Iron covering the years 1936 to 1948. It is generally regarded as using the same ‘engine’ as EU II, but very little actual code survived the transition. It was released for Windows and Mac OS X in 2002, and did not have any expansions, but an version updated to the last patch (HoI Platinum) was released in 2004 with more events, re-done AI, a new scenario, and a revised manual. I’ve only played the Platinum version, so this review will only reference it.

At first look, HoI is very much the same thing as EU II: it is a pauseable real-time game where you take control of a country (any country), and manage its military, diplomatic, and economic development. (In fact, other than the real-time part, that’s what I mean by ’empire management game’.) It has an area-based map of the world, where military units can move about and fight in a battle that can take some time, but the only outside decision in the combat, once joined, is whether to retreat from a losing fight. So… change the date, put in tanks for cavalry and call it a day?

However, past the most superficial overview, there are major differences: Religion does not appear in the game. Since the scope of the game has contracted from four centuries to twelve years, hours tick by, instead of days (and the day/night cycle sweeps across the world, and can be seen in the minimap, and affects combat). Diplomacy is greatly simplified, and governments now have internal ministers that can provide various bonuses.

Economy

The trade and money system of the EU series is absent here, replaced by a resource system more common to various conquest-style games. The general resources are industrial capacity, coal, steel, oil, rubber and supplies.

Any sort of production (including research) consumes industrial capacity, which is the pool of industry available in all of your controlled provinces. In addition to the normal production of new units, it is used to generate consumer goods (if you don’t satisfy the demand the civilian population gets restless), and supplies, which exist in a pool which is consumed by military units (at a constant rate, higher on the move and in combat, and then there are surcharges for reinforcing a unit).

Steel, coal, oil and rubber come from specific provinces on the world map, and if you don’t have all of them, you need to trade what you do have for what you need. Instead of the wide variety of commodities generating money through trade as in EU, the economic system focuses on just these few. Trading with a foreign power is accomplished largely by making an offer in kind on the world market. If no one wants it, it’ll be marked in red, and you can sweeten the pot by offering more of what you have per unit of what you’re trading for.

Rubber is by far the most uncommon commodity, but this is the era where artificial rubber was starting to be produced, so you will automatically turn oil into rubber if you have one and not the other (at a fairly poor rate, but there is technology that improves this). Similarly, coal is the most abundant resource, and some will automatically be turned into oil if your oil stocks run out.

Shipping is also important, and if you have overseas territories that produce resources, convoys will have to be set up to ship them home so they can be used. These do not appear on the map, but are subject to being intercepted by enemy ships (that are on the map) during wartime.

Finally, there are improvements that can be made to the provinces themselves. Industrial capacity can be built, AA batteries can be built to defend against air attacks, fortifications can be build to defend against land or amphibious attacks, and the infrastructure can be improved to both increase resource output and increase movement speed in the province, but all these take some of the existing industrial capacity in the province out of action.

Politics and War

Instead of every country working out alliances out of practicality or for protection, HoI has a tripartite power struggle. Each country falls within a triangular space of political ideology with the points being democracy, socialism or fascism. There is one alliance for each of these ideologies, with the Axis permanently led by Germany and the Allies permanently led by Britain. (The Soviet Union is the leader of the Comintern, but can dissolve that alliance to join either the Axis or the Allies.)

Peace settlements are also much simpler than in EU. You can annex a country, or you can make it a satellite nation (both requiring that you hold significant parts of the victim), or you can return to the statis quo antebellum; there is no negotiating a peace in return for a couple of provinces, it’s all or nothing, unless you have specific territorial demands on a country, in which case you can diplomatically demand the territory, or go to war over it, in which case the other country can surrender the territory.

You can spend diplomatic influence with other nations to try to influence their governments towards your political ideology. A country that shares your ideology can then join your ideological alliance. In general, the game tries to enforce a tri- or bipartite power structure, as most wars will force one or both parties into the alliances, if they aren’t already in one.

However, the main democratic nations try to keep out of wars at the beginning. They have an extra rating of what percentage of the population supports going to war. This starts off low, and generally goes up about 1% a month. Aggressive actions from Fascist or Communist nations will tend to speed this up (though fighting within a faction will slow it down). Once at 100%, a declaration of war, or joining the already at-war Allies usually follows (this apparently will often target Germany, so playing a peaceful Germany is difficult to do).

To counterbalance the simplified external relations of the country, the internal power structure is more detailed. There are eight ministers that can be appointed out of a pool of historically appropriate people (in some cases the entire pool is one person…). In addition, there are two are special cases: the head of state (who can only be ousted by a coup or election) who determines the general ideological leaning of the nation, and the head of government, which is effectively the player, and determines the AI behavior of a non-player country. Each minister has a personality which provides bonuses or penalties to things like construction efficiency or dissent.

That last, dissent, is effectively the stability replacement of HoI. Dissent causes loss of production, guerrilla armies to crop up, and erodes the loyalty of the ministers, which is one of the few hidden statistics in the game. Ministers with very low loyalty can end up deliberately sabotaging government projects, but this is hard to see.

Military

Unlike in EU, military units are indeed units in this game. Instead of recruiting 1000 infantry which is slowly attritioned away and eventually disbanded or supplemented with fresh recruits, you organize a division (or air wing, or ship), which exists as a discrete organization. Every unit has a strength and a organization rating. The latter is effectively morale, and the usefulness of a unit is effectively its applicable combat statistic times strength times organization. A unit at zero organization is making no contribution to the battle (though it is continuing to absorb damage), and when all units in a force are at zero organization, it must retreat.

Organization slowly comes back to its maximum when the unit is sitting still and doing nothing. Strength can only be replenished by user intervention, and reinforcing a unit will drop its organization value while the new troops are properly integrated into the formation, forcing the unit to stop and reorganize for a while (at least, if there was any appreciable amount of strength to replace). Moving around in bad weather/climate can also reduce organization, making attacks in extreme climates harder to manage.

When moving into a province that currently has enemy units, a little clock dialog appears, where you set exactly when your units show up. This allows coordinated attacks from different provinces (which provides a bonus), air attacks to go in right before hand, infantry to engage the enemy right before the tanks show up and try to break through, etc.

Unlike the three basic troop types of EU II, there are a bunch of possibilities in HoI. Just in ground divisions, there is regular infantry, motorized and mechanized divisions, armor, mountain troops, paratroopers, marines and militia. All of these have different abilities, and most can have brigades (anti-armor, anti-air, artillery, or engineers) attached to them (as a permanent part of the unit) to enhance the normal stats. Units can be grouped together into larger structures as needed, and leaders can be assigned to them. These are rated by skill, which improves performance in combat, and rank, which determines how many units they can command without penalty. However, managing the units, and their parent organizations is one of the pain points of the interface, as most of the information you want isn’t present when managing the units. You can (for instance) separate a weakened unit from a force so it can stay behind and rest, but the display to do it only displays the unit names, so you need to work out which ones need to be culled first, and then remember their names.

In keeping with the mobile warfare, and continuous fronts, of twentieth century warfare, there is no need to besiege a province. It passes to the control of the invading country as soon as the enemy is driven out, and the fortifications that can be built in a province instead directly help the defending force in combat. Supply is very important in HoI, so a chain of provinces leading back to the home country is needed, or the cut-off forces will slowly become less and less combat ready (if invading overseas, a supply convoy must be set up to supply units, in the opposite pattern as convoying resources from overseas home).

Technology

WWII has sometimes been called ‘the wizard’s war’, with technological progress driving many of the turns the war took. This shows up in a number of WWII games, from the equipment upgrades of Panzer General, to the research projects of Axis and Allies.

HoI has one of the most extensive technology systems there is for a WWII game. There are fourteen different subject areas, each with theoretical and applied projects to research. The theoretical ones need to be researched in order to get the next batch of applied projects, but have no prerequisites other than the previous theoretical project. The applied projects are all grouped under various theoretical projects, and often have other prerequisites, either from within the subject area, or from another subject area.

The effects of the practical applications vary quite a bit. There are Land, Air, and Sea Doctrine subjects that mostly increase the maximum organization rating of the appropriate units, and therefore make them more effective in combat. Electronics research is often needed in other fields, and includes advances that make surprise more likely (when attacking) or less likely (when defending), mostly to do with encryption and radar technologies, and also includes the early computers developed in the period as an aid to further research. Rocket and Nuclear research needs a lot of work to pay off, but eventually allows new unit types. Infantry and Artillery research enhance the abilities of existing units. Armor, Aircraft and Naval research all allow new vehicle types, and units must either be upgraded to them or built fresh.

This last combines with several of the unit types, where they are assigned a particular vehicle type, and if you want to re-equip your armor division from Panzer IIs to Panzer IVs, you have to select it, and re-equip it, and it will then spend time off the map in the industry production queue. This only applies to tanks and planes however; with naval units there are upgrades to their basic stats that require you to refit the ship in the production queue, but you do not change the actual class of ship.

History

As usual, Paradox has provided a very good electronic time machine with HoI. It does concentrate on trying to bring forward many of the most important aspects of the period, the ideologies/politics, rapid evolution of technology, and a sweeping total global war.

HoI uses an event system similar to EU II‘s, scripting in major events such as the Spanish Civil War, and Lend-Lease shipments. There are several of these dealing with the start of WWII, which has the effect of scripting parts of the setup of the conflict—which certainly helps keep the AI on-script. In general though, there is much less use of events than in EU II.

For all the details about vehicle types, they don’t feel well served. All the interdependencies tend to be overly detailed (taking several otherwise useless steps to get a new model), and very logical and linear. Logical and linear in ways that don’t follow how actual vehicle development worked. Most egregious is tanks, where you must research light tanks, and then improved light tanks, and then move on to medium tanks. The game completely ignores that light, medium and heavy tanks all had different roles, and were generally developed in parallel. Concepts like the infantry tank (slow, heavily armored tanks with light guns) are effectively ignored to fit into the straitjacket of the progression. On the other hand, the development of things like tank destroyers is presented in a slightly parallel track, and just add bonuses to units, abstractly representing the integration of these specialist vehicles into the main organization.

Important themes like the strategic bombing campaigns, the struggle over shipping, the evolution of equipment and doctrine are all given attention, and handled well. Subjects like combined arms don’t work out as well (partially because things like paratroops are hard to use), but effort was put into it, and the ideas are sound.

AI

HoI is a complicated game, but the AI generally seems to know how to play it well, and what it lacks in smarts is made up by the ability to handle several subjects in detail at once.

Much of the point of ground combat is preserving supply lines, so units do not take lack of supply penalties, and can rest to regain organization when needed. The AI understands this, and generally maintains fronts well, which means that fronts with two AI players facing off tend to devolve into limited shoving matches, with the occasional breakthrough that is usually cut off, but more often turning into a staring contest between high stacks of units in rough terrain.

In naval affairs, the AI seems to have more trouble, with fleets in the Pacific in particular tending to get cut off far from home and supply, and vulnerable to defeat in detail. However, it does understand the convoy system well, and will effectively disrupt shipping if critical areas are not protected.

Conclusion

I have found that HoI is my least favorite of the initial Paradox empire management games. Part of this is because I find it overly fiddly, and concentrates too much on lower-level items that clash with what I expect to see in a grand-strategy title. Also, there are some real problems with the shift from the exploration and limited war model of EU II to the total war presented in HoI. You can end up needing to coordinate military operations in widely separated areas at the same time, and that is never a good fit with a real-time title, pauseable or not.

However, I think the real problem lies elsewhere. One of the things I enjoy about Paradox’s games is a certain sense of discovery. I like history, and I know something about any period they have, or will, tackle. However, these games always show me something new, there’s a lot of world out there, and just scrolling around the map will show you something that you hadn’t heard of. On the other hand, the world of 1936-48 is much more familiar to me, so I am not really finding new facets of history in it. Furthermore, I have a lot more experience with WWII from a game perspective, so I am also bringing more concrete expectations to it.

There are also some definite poor fits scale-wise. Using divisions as the basic unit of armies, which most major countries fielded well over a hundred of, and then (in Europe) fitting all these divisions (plus air units) into a front that’s maybe ten provinces wide causes all sorts of pain in trying to manage it all, that the UI just has no hope of dealing with.

All that said, it is a good game, and in representing many of the primary concerns of the period, shows a good amount of flexibility of approach from Paradox. For anyone who plays it, I recommend getting familiar with the game, and then looking at the Undocumented Features List thread on Paradox’s forum.

There’s some very good info in there, once you have some context for it. Item numbers 9, 27 and 7 are helpful to get around some of the problems with the UI.

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A Tale of Two Europas

by on March 16, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Posted In: Computer games

For me, 1997 represents a high water mark in computer gaming. Some of this is an accident of circumstance, where I had a fair amount of free time and money, and a roommate who shared my interests. But, for me, it is really hard to beat any year that sees titles like Panzer General II, Emperor of the Fading Suns, Warlords III, and Imperialism.

By 2000, the honeymoon was long over. By now, my circumstances had changed, and I was starting to drift back to my first love: board wargames. SSI was dying, and not putting out anything interesting. TalonSoft was purchased by Take Two, and stopped doing the serious wargames that had been their specialty. SSG had faded into the background where they remain. Meanwhile, ever more demanding RTS and FPS games were coming out and taking over the market, and had long since turned what had been entertaining novelty games into frustrating (and uninteresting) click-fests.

But I discovered something in a used game bin that year. If I hadn’t already been pretty seriously drifting away, I would have paid a lot more attention to the names “Strategy First” and “Paradox Interactive”. (And, sadly, the former is gone now too.)

Europa Universalis is of the grandest stripe of grand strategy games. It is what I call an “empire management game”. In it, you take charge of a country, and chart its course over three centuries of history on the world stage. EU covers from 1492 to 1792, taking it from the discovery of the New World to a little after the American Revolution. Unlike previous grand strategy games, it used a real-time format: days tick by one by one, and many actions require a certain amount of time to happen.

However, while being ‘real-time’ and ‘strategic’ it holds no real relationship with the real-time strategy genre; EU was grand strategy in scope, rather than purely tactical (‘strategy’ in the RTS name merely refers to needing strategy within the scope of the game, not to the military/wargaming idea of being ‘strategic’, which examines countries and wars, or even entire periods of history the way EU does). Beyond the scope, the game is pauseable, so you can stop and ponder the situation, and issue orders as needed. It is not designed to become a contest of who can issue orders the most efficiently, the way most RTS games do. In fact, its real time elements are more due to the game’s simulation roots, and comparison to the various games from Maxis might be a little closer to the mark. (Including the fact that few others have dared to tread on the respective ground broken by Maxis and Paradox….)

A second game dropped on me way too soon: Europa Universalis II. It is very much the same game, and there are cases where there are bigger changes caused by an expansion to a game than there are between these two games. However, there was some significant rewriting of core concepts (and presumably code), so a new full package is understandable. Notably, the event engine was completely rewritten and expanded, and made moddable. Also, the world map was redone, and the scope of the game expanded from three centuries to four (now covering 1419-1820). It markedly improved upon the original title, and the bulk of this review will be talking about EU II in particular, although most of it will apply to the original as well.

History

Three to four hundred years of history is a big subject, and EU has a lot of moving parts. Like many strategy games, the initial problem is that it is very hard to know what to do, or, really, what can be done. Here, the problem is all the greater because it is that rare animal: a sandbox strategy game. While it lends itself most easily to being a game of conquest and world domination, that’s not necessarily the core intent, and certainly not the only thing to do. The New World will be discovered early in the game, and it is possible to concentrate largely on colonization (…conquest with less shooting and more smallpox). In the early 16th Century religious controversy will erupt with the Reformation, forcing a reevaluation of the state’s stance on religious matters. Trade spans the globe, with money to be made wherever luxuries exist. Countries form alliances, declare war, insult each other, and issue warnings against would-be aggressors.

Of course, while all of this brings the game to life, and makes sure there is always something to be concerned with, most of it is only of interest as a means to an end, as a way of getting an advantage in other realms. And, that, generally, feeds back into the final test: the clash of arms. However, while some of the concerns above apply mainly to Europe, EU II does not have to be about Europe. The original game was very much focused on Europe, with the rest of the world mostly something to be exploited, but II expanded its scope to make most of the rest of the world come to the same vibrant life as Renaissance Europe.

While the ‘main cast’ of characters continue to be European, it is possible in EU II to play as any country in existence at the start of the scenario. You can play as the Aztecs and try to survive the coming of the colonial powers. You can play as one of the countries of India, and try to unify the subcontinent to present a united front to the Europeans. You can be one of the minor powers of the Holy Roman Empire, and try to survive the deadly politics, or perhaps, with hard work, become something much more. It is this ability to take unusual positions, and say ‘what if’ or ‘I wonder if I can…’ that makes this a true sandbox game. The fact that the world is not just what you make of it, but is also what the active agencies of the other NPC countries make of it that can make it so compelling.

Events

A regular occurrence for the player will be message boxes popping up and telling of an event that just happened. Some of these are generic, and just randomly happen from time to time if the circumstances are right. Others are based on actual historical events with consequences that are meant to mirror actions of the real thing. All these events have in-game effects, which are spelled out in the hover over tag. At the same time, the response button itself is nicely ‘in character’.

Some events fire off, and all you can do is acknowledge it. Others present two or three options. An interesting wrinkle in the game engine/AI is that an AI nation, confronted with an event with a choice, will usually choose the first option, but has a chance of choosing the second or third options. With a historical event, the historical choice is presented first, so that when it happens to an AI nation, it will most often choose to mirror history, but they can go off on tangents….

There is an annoying UI shortcoming here. When an event pops up, it pauses the game—which is good—and keeps you from working any other controls. Many events can actually change governmental settings, but because you’re locked out of the controls, you can’t go check what the current settings are.

And at this point I should mention that the historical events demonstrate a general philosophy of the game. Events and leaders are historically based, so the entire game is built around ‘acting out’ history even while parts of that history are redefined. It is also possible for an event to have ‘triggers’ so that they only happen when appropriate. For instance, The War of the Roses resulted in large part because of dissatisfaction with English losses in France at the end of the Hundred Years War. If England does not lose its French possessions, then that event doesn’t need to fire. But these are limited to obvious historical turning points, and the real focus of the game is to mirror actual history.

Government

The general idea of the EU series is that the player is the “Grey Eminence”, or the power behind the throne. Kings come and go, but the player remains, guiding the country to its destiny. What, precisely, this destiny is, is largely up to the player as mentioned before. Of course, the other nations around will sooner or later try to impose their goals on you, which not only means dealing with things like unwanted wars, but can also shape your goals. Getting revenge on a the stubborn AI power that keeps declaring war on you may have little to do with your initial goals, but it is by no means uncommon….

Even by the somewhat more modest standards of the 15th-18th centuries, governments are big complicated things, and in Europa Universalis, there are a lot of means at its disposal to pursue goals and dreams of glory.

In the original game, various countries had certain bonuses over others. England did better in naval matters, and Russia had lot of cheap infantry available. In EU II, this was turned into a system of policy sliders (rated from +5 to -5), where each slider represented an extreme policy on each end, and the various positions (at the ends and in between) had in-game effects, that are generally mixed, so that there is no one ‘perfect’ setting. For instance, Russia’s default high ‘Quantity’ setting allows you to buy more military units, and they are cheaper, but morale is lowered, making them less effective at winning battles. England’s high ‘Naval’ rating allows cheaper ships, with higher morale, but army expense is raised and army morale is lowered.

Military

The modern concept of the ‘standing army’ only really got started in the mid 15th century. However, the EU series ignores this, and armies, once deployed, are intended to stand around even in peacetime, though parts of it might be disbanded to save on upkeep. Being a high-level game, there’s not a lot of detail, and there’s no units below the armies that you move around the world, but men may be consolidated or split off freely.

Armies are divided into the standard branches of infantry, cavalry and artillery. Combat has a ‘shock’ phase and a ‘fire’ phase, with an army generating losses in men and morale depending the types of troops (cavalry does better in shock than fire, for instance), and the current military technology of the nation. At the beginning of the game, artillery does not exist, and once it does, it is nearly useless in combat despite being slow to build, slow to move and very expensive. Similarly, infantry and cavalry have no ‘fire’ ratings, and don’t do any damage in that phase, but the real point of military ‘technology’ is as a gage of how much re-equipping the military has done, and as technology levels go up, so do the shock and fire ratings of the troops—shock much more slowly than fire.

Cavalry never does that well in the fire phase, so combat slowly moves from being dominated by cavalry (especially in open terrain where there is a bonus for having more cavalry), to centering on the firepower of infantry and cavalry.

When an army is by itself in enemy-held territory, it settles down to siege the province, and take control of it. There are defensive bonuses for fortifications and rough terrain, and artillery, even the early, little value in combat forms, can provide an offensive bonus, which can speed up the process immensely.

Navies are built with individual ships, split into warships, galleys and transports. Galleys are the best ships at the start of the game, but are not very safe outside the Mediterranean, while warships become more effective as naval technology rises, and of course transports are useless in battle, but are needed to ferry land units across water.

I’m not horribly pleased about how sieges are handled, since for the most part they seem to last far longer than it normally took for an army to take control of a region. However, peace negotiations are fairly nice. Winning (and losing) battles, and capturing territories are added up into a war score, and various concessions (territory, money, vassalage) have a cost in war score. This gives a fair guide to the AI as to how things are going, and you can punish a recalcitrant player by low-balling your demands, forcing it to make peace or suffer internal instability. The system is by no means perfect, but does help avoid some abuses, and the fact that territory does not truly change hands until the peace treaty is signed is a nice reflection of the politics of the era.

Religion

In 1517 Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses, sparking off the Protestant Reformation, and over a century of religious warfare. Naturally, one of the important themes of Europa Universalis and its sequel is religion in the state. To this end, it recognizes that each country has a religion, and then the population of each province has its own religion. If a province and state disagree about religion, there is a reduction of tax revenues and military recruiting (these are linked).

There is also a system for establishing how tolerant your government is to various religions. A series of sliders allow you to set how tolerant you are of each branch of your religion group, and every other major religion. These sliders are ‘zero sum’, so that the more tolerant a country is to one religion, the less tolerant is is of every other religion. These sliders affect both how happy the population of the provinces are, and your relations with other countries.

The original Europa Universalis only recognized Christianity and Islam, with all other religions being generically lumped together as ‘Pagan’. Within those two religions there is a fair amount of detail however, with the Moslems split between Suni and Shia, and Christianity starting out split between Catholic and Orthodox, with later events creating the Protestant and Reformed branches, and eventually allowing countries to be Counter-Reformed Catholic (which has some governmental bonuses over ‘regular’ Catholicism, but is otherwise considered identical with it). EU II, with its expanded focus on the rest of the world, introduced Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism as separate world religions.

Exploration

When you start the game as any country, you can only see part of the world. (Western European powers can’t see much past Europe for instance.) Travelling off into ‘Terra Incognita’ is generally not possible; the edge of the map is the edge of the world.

The easy exception to this is taking the capital of another power in a war, which generally gets you access to their world map. There are explorer and conquistador leaders who can lead units to (slowly) explore new territory, and near the end of the game, any unit will gain the ability.

However, this is Earth, and this is history, so there are limitations keeping this from being an exploration game. The geography is always the same, so while early European explorers did not now the shape of the New World, you do. Also, the resource production of every province is fixed, so (at least after the first time) you will always know where the gold provinces are, where the rich china provinces in Asia are, and so on.

Of course, there’s an entire cast of characters (nations) in the hidden parts of the world, so when you get there, the situation can be unexpected. This is more true of Asia than of America, however, as most of the American countries do not have the power to do much to radically rearrange the map.

Summary

When Phillipe Thibault proposed doing a computer version of his boardgame, Europa Universalis, Johan Anderson quit his job to start a new company and start coding. From this beginning has grown Paradox Interactive, which has several lines of similar games, as well as publishing games from other developers. The quality of these initial games is reflected in the current size of the company.

When I first found the EU games, I fell in love with them. They were strategic, they were historical, and they were different. They aren’t perfect; a full game takes a long time to play through, and I’ve usually gotten what I want out of the game long before it’s over. But there’s always something new to do, someplace new to be. Redmond Simonsen once called wargames “paper time machines”, and Europa Universalis is a very good electronic time machine, and satisfies those cravings very well.

Playing This Game Today

This is an older game, and a bit creaky on modern systems. It was originally released for both Windows and Mac OS, but I’ve only played it on Windows. At release, EU II was plagued by ‘crash to desktop’ errors, that have been mostly dealt with during the life-cycle of patches. Currently, the loading screens flicker madly while loading occurs, but once loaded, the game looks good, and plays pretty rock-solid on my Win7 64-bit machine. As an added plus, the final version of the game does not need the CD in the drive to play, if you have an old physical copy (it is for sale in a downloadable version at GamersGate).

At one point Paradox released the source code for EU II, and the remaining community of fans that created some very extensive mods got together and reworked parts of the code, adding new features, and building the main community mod into the game. Paradox released this effort in 2009 as For the Glory. I have not played it myself, but it should be a very well-polished version of the game, with the same minimal hardware requirements. If you’re looking for a grand-strategy game for a low-power notebook, this would seem to be a great place to go.

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