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This is the fifteenth 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
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three
EU III: Heir to the Throne: Not Done Yet
Victoria II: Same But Different
EU III: Divine Wind: Winds of Change
Sengoku: Shogun: Only War
V II: A House Divided: Limited Expansion
Crusader Kings II: The Second Crusade

A year after the previous expansion, Paradox announced a third expansion for their WWII grand-strategy game, HoI III. As usual, it targeted a few particular subjects, and Their Finest Hour came out in September 2012 for PC, with a Mac release following two months later. Since the Collection was for the previous release, and there no further expansions, it was never included in a collection of its own.

Doing it Your Way

While HoI III starts in 1936, the main event usually doesn’t get going for at least three years. There are options to begin at that point, but one reason for the 1936 start is to work on production, politics, and research how you want them, rather than what happened historically. So Paradox added the ‘Custom Game Mode’ which allows some reworking of all of that, starting with a particular scenario as a base.

It’s an interesting idea, if not one that I’ve done much with, though I’ve seen it noted that its especially handy for a multi-player game, so you can start with the action about to get underway, and still have things set up as you want, as if you’ve played from 1936.

Combined Arms

Generally speaking, at any point in history, armies have been aided by having different elements which synergize with each other. This especially true in WWII, and was well recognized at the time, as well as in a variety of different games on the subject, all the way down to Panzer General’s rock-paper-scissors model of combat that made it such an effective game in a very simple format.

HoI III tried modeling that by each type of brigade have being ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ depending on its type, and then granting a bonus to a division that had a mid-range ‘softness’ rating, even if the elements of that division didn’t add up to anything special.

With TFH, they’ve gotten rid of this arbitrary rating, and now look for a combination of infantry and the other arms. Everything’s color-coded on the production screen, and there is a bonus to a division that contains armor, artillery, ‘direct fire’ (AT and AA assets), and engineers. This much more like how some operational-level wargames look at the problem, and an easier to understand answer to the problem.

Landing Craft

Amphibious invasions came in for a round of extra detail. Now, invading forces must disembark from their transport craft, and in addition to the normal amphibious invasion penalties, they suffer a reduction to damage dealt and taken while they unload (granting extra time for a naval battle to disrupt everything). Unloading progresses through several hours until the troops are fully unloaded and operating normally (as normally as possible during an invasion combat).

In addition to this, two new unit types were added to the game. You can still invade using normal transports, but can now research landing craft, which are much more effective, and also lead to research to reduce the amount of time a landing takes, and the defensiveness of all transport-type units.

The landing craft are really transports with associated landing craft, as they can do everything the transports can, including shift units across an ocean. They’re better than the base transports in every way, including speed, defense and carrying capacity. Researching the improvements to invasions mentioned above then allows research of assault ships, which act the same as landing craft, but with better defense, and some bonuses for armor unloading from them.

This is one of the more visible changes to the game (as long as you’re not playing a fairly land-locked game like Russia). And it is a nice bit of extra detail that helps make amphibious operations flow a bit better.

Special Units

The main seven nations also came in for special treatment by getting new unique units. These are all slightly better versions of regular units, and can only be built in fairly limited quantities (no more than 4% of all infantry brigades). Three of them are better mountain brigades than normal (though the British Gurkhas can also airdrop), two are improved infantry, and US Rangers are a paratroop brigade, and the German SS units are improved motorized infantry (which, despite the reputation, is not appropriate for SS units as a whole… the number of well-equipped and trained SS units is about right for the number that you can build).

They’re a neat idea, and well into the ‘why not?’, range of things. Though there might be something to be said for being able to just spend a bit more on a unit to make it better trained/competent in general. Though that is pretty much what the division composition, and the flags for ‘prioritize upgrades and reinforcements’ already does.

Conclusion

TFH would be the last expansion for HoI III, and certainly the game had come far from it’s initial extremely buggy release. It’s a fairly decent package of changes, and seems to have sold well, and certainly gets recommendations from fans of the game.

Certainly, if you like HoI III, it’s worth getting, as everything it does is an improvement, and there are no backward steps. Furthermore, if you’re just getting the game (or rather the Collection, which has the previous two expansions), and you can get this in a package deal, get it. It does not make the game any more complicated or harder for a new player; it just reworks a few things that needed it. At the same time, it’s not going to change your mind about it either; it took a while for me to start noticing what had changed at all.

This is the eighth 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
Victoria: Nineteenth Century Essay
Crusader Kings: A Dynastic Adventure
Hearts of Iron II: Return Engagement
Europa Universalis III: A Whole New World
Europa Universalis: Rome: Make a Desert and Call it a Game

Given the number of other projects that Paradox could have done, the four-year gap between Hearts of Iron II (2005) and III (2009) is fairly short (especially when considering that the final expansion to II didn’t come out until 2007). However, in that time Paradox had developed the Clausewitz engine for their empire management games, and with the HoI series being Paradox’s most successful one, it is no surprise that they hurried to get a new WWII-era (1936-48) empire management game out with the new engine.

Unfortunately, ‘hurried’ is all too apt a word. Paradox’s games always had a reputation for being buggy upon release, but would then be patched into a solid game. The release of HoI III was particularly bad in this regard, and after the complaints that caused, Paradox has made an (increasingly successful) effort to release their games in good shape.

After the initial release of HoI III for PC and Mac in late 2009, the first expansion, Semper Fi, was released in June 2010, and a second, For the Motherland, was released in June 2011. These were packaged together as the HoI III Collection, which is all I’ve played, and what this review will be about.

Leadership

Originally, all the resources in the HoI economy were tied together, as they all fed into Industrial Capacity (IC), which was used for everything, including research. In HoI II, research was separated from the IC economy, but still required money to fund, which came from consumer goods (generated by IC), and the number of possible simultaneous projects was controlled by the amount of IC the country had.

HoI III introduces leadership as a second economy that does not generally interact with the resource/IC economy. Leadership is like IC in that it is generated by provinces the nation controls, but is a constant like resources, instead of being upgradeable like IC. Leadership is then split to research, espionage, diplomacy and officers.

Tripartite Threat

HoI II used policy sliders like in EU II to determine government type and which faction a country was close to. HoI III returns to the tripartite political model of the original game of the series, where every country is placed in a triangular diplomatic space with the Allies, Axis and Comintern represented by the points.

As usual, diplomacy has a number of options, including influencing another nation towards your point of view. This is only available if you are already in a faction, or else you are subject to influence from those countries that are (you can align yourself towards one particular point of view). All of these actions cost diplomatic points, generated from leadership. Most actions (negotiating a trade deal, instigating a coup) have a one-time cost, but influence has an ongoing cost for as long as it is kept up.

Most countries also start with a fairly high neutrality rating. This is a new mechanic to represent a country’s resistance to going to war. You can only go to war with a country with a threat rating higher than your neutrality rating. Threat is generated by military build ups, going to war with other countries and the like, and is also reduced by distance. So an aggressive Germany will generate a lot a threat against France, but not so much against America on the other side of the Atlantic.

Practical Engineering

In the first HoI game, research was split into theoretical advances that then allowed practical advance follow-ups. HoI II simplified the model down with nearly every advance having a direct impact, but each was made up a few sub-advances that had different demands, but those did not interact with each other at all.

HoI III introduces the idea of engineering knowledge (or theory), and practical knowledge. Every time you complete research in a field, you get a point in the theory for that field, which will slowly decay over time. Building units, or engaging in combat generates practical knowledge in the relevant field. Knowledge of both types affects the difficulty of research. So, the more you concentrate on one field, the better your theory is, and the easier it is to get more advances. The more experience you get with, say, air combat, the better you know what improvements your aircraft need, and it becomes easier to advance in that field.

In general, each unit type has a number of different advances (often about four) that each improve different unit statistics, and together add up to the next ‘level’ of that unit (Infantry I to Infantry II, etc.). As in HoI II, land and air units can be upgraded in the field when new equipment is available by allocating IC to the job. However, land units can also be upgraded by type, with, say, motorized infantry being converted into mechanized infantry, which places them into the general production queue (removing them from the map), but they will return to their previous unit if it still exists at that time.

The old problem of inappropriate detail returns, with many ship and tank types being given real-world names appropriate to the country. As these are often appended with asterisks to denote one or more differences from the ‘actual’ version, this is cosmetics without meaning. Worse, the ahistorical research sequence of light armor allowing medium armor, which then allows heavy armor returns from the first game.

Espionage

HoI II: Doomsday introduced espionage to the series, and it is still here for this game with spies, counterespionage and the like. Like last time, I’ve generally found it too much effort for the payoff.

However, For the Motherland did introduce a new resistance… mini-game. Countries can try to put together resistance cells in a foreign country. This is the most likely in the occupied territory of the country putting together the resistance. A resistance network is generally invisible to the targeted country, though Police units do have an effect on them. Once it is in place, it can be turned into a normal militia unit, which seizes control of the province it is in.

A long-term problem with the HoI series is that partisans never really worked, despite attempts to include their effects. This much more direct approach actually solves the problem fairly well. Supplies are important in this game, and often get moved up to the front through a handful of province routes, so a few Soviet partisan units can have a dramatic effect. One of the goals of this was to give a human government-in-exile player something (potentially) useful to do for his allies in a multiplayer game, though it would still be a somewhat lackluster experience.

Production

Production works pretty much the same as with HoI II, with the player having to split available industrial capacity between consumer goods, supplies and new production as well as dedicating resources to reinforcements and upgrading existing units (or he can turn it over to the AI). The interface for those settings and the main queue where you prioritize new production has not changed much.

However, it too is affected by the ‘practical knowledge’ rating that affects research. New units have a base time to complete, but the better the related practical knowledge for that item is, the shorter the actual time becomes. Since this will apply to all further units, it encourages setting orders to produce multiples of the same thing in a chain, with each one starting when the previous one finishes, kind of like a… production line.

One small problem with the system is that once you commit an order to the queue, you can’t edit it, say to change the total number to produce. If you change your mind immediately, you can cancel it and start over, but otherwise you’re stuck keeping an eye on it.

Chain of Command

The basic land unit of construction and maneuver in the HoI series has always been the division, with brigade attachments to provide specialized abilities. HoI II expanded on this idea with a more extensive brigade system, that was also used for carriers and air units. In HoI III, the basic unit of maneuver is still the division, but the basic unit of construction is now the brigade.

Divisions are now made up of three or four brigades (or five with the right research), and can be constructed as a unit, or assembled out of component brigades (is possible to have individual brigades running around, but the system doesn’t really support that as a regular thing). Each country has a number of pre-done construction ‘templates’, which can be modified and saved, so a player can easily tailor his production to the structure he desires.

The truly new part is that higher levels of command are now directly represented in the game. Divisions can be grouped together into corps. This does not force the units to stay together (and, sadly, there is no easy way to select every unit in a particular corps at the same time), but does generate a headquarters unit which is an extra brigade. As with previous games, historical leaders are given to each country, and their abilities directly impact the performance of the division they command. A leader assigned to a corps increases the odds of extra divisions reinforcing and taking part in a combat. Corps can be similarly grouped into armies, which add to the organization of child units (which is the unit’s combat effectiveness). Armies can be grouped into army groups, whose leaders decrease supply consumption. And finally, army groups can be grouped into theaters, whose leaders can reduce the combat penalty for having too many divisions in too small a space.

All of these have their own headquarters units, which can take part in combat, but are not especially useful as such. Instead, the main purpose is that each headquarters has a range in which their bonuses apply. Corps have to stay relatively close to their divisions (say, 4-5 provinces), while a theater command in the middle of the Pacific can cover most of that ocean.

But more important than any of the above abilities is the fact that these can be turned over to AI control—at any level. You can let the AI control a particular division. Or corps. Or an entire theater. The AI is, as ever, not the best player, but neither is it truly incompetent. The point is to be able put entire sections of the game under AI control, so that the player can concentrate on those parts that are truly important. Invading Poland as Germany in 1939? Set the western theater to AI control, so it can handle anything Britain and France might do, and then concentrate on Poland.

This is aided by giving the AI directions as well. Once a unit is set to AI control, you can tell it to act offensively or defensively, and can flag particular places as goals. These could be places to defend, and places to attack. Once the UI is set, selecting the appropriate HQ will display a dashed line ‘front’ on the map which gives some idea of what the AI thinks of the situation.

All of this only partially applies to naval and air units. All the headquarters are land units, so while naval and air units can be grouped into smaller units (‘divisions’), they then must be integrated into the land force structure (possibly just at the theater level).

How Wide is my Front?

Combat is largely the same as it was in previous titles, including the ‘movement is combat’ model of HoI II. There are some tweaks and additions, the most important one being that battles are marked on the map with little bubbles that give the current winning/losing percentage. Battles that are going well are in green, ones that are going poorly in red, and the undecided middle ground yellow. Sadly, a big attack by weak units against a well prepared defender will often end in a defensive victory, but the combat rating (and bubble color) are based off the current gross numbers, not who is actually taking damage.

All units have a combat width, and generally each combat has a maximum width that units can fight in (with attacks from multiple provinces increasing the maximum width). Units in excess of the maximum width do not take part until other units are forced out of line (usually from loss of organization) to make room.

Along with the manpower pool needed to reinforce units and create new ones, there is also an officer pool, generated from leadership. When a unit is under heavy strain in combat, it can shatter instead of retreating, which removes it from the map, and forces it to be reformed, either with its parent unit, or somewhere in the home territory of the country. Each unit needs a number of officers, and the ratio of available officers to needed officers adjusts the odds of this happening.

Conclusion

Troy Goodfellow pronounced HoI III a ‘must have’ strategy game on Three Moves Ahead because it solved the ‘virtual viceroy’ problem. I’m less positive than that, as the AI runs into the same problems that SSG’s old Panzer Battles and Great Battles of the American Civil War series ran into: you can tell the AI where you want it to go, but you can’t tell it how you want it to get there.

That said, the hierarchical command system, with the ability to turn control over to the computer at almost any level is, largely, the key to solving the bigger problem of needing to have too many units to control in a real-time game. What is needed now is better communication.

I was surprised to see the armor research model go back to the ahistorical linear model of the first game, but every other place where HoI III goes back to the first game (and there are several), it is for the best. II showed a lot of lessons had been learned from the first game, and this one generally takes the best of the previous two.

The map gets really fine-grained in this title, and that is part of an over-detailed aesthetic that is partially alleviated by all the AI controls. For me, the HoI series remains Paradox’s least engaging effort, largely due to the expectations I bring to a WWII title. HoI III is the best of the series so far, and worth looking into for any grand strategy fan.

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.