Hearts of Iron II is a fantastic game by Paradox Interactive that gives you the reigns of any country in existence during WWII. This might sound like any other RTS game on its surface, but when I say any country, I mean any country. You can play the common ones like the US, Britain, Germany and Japan like you can in most WWII-themed games. If you ever had the need to play through WWII as Brazil, however, then you might want to check this out. The game combines massively in-depth strategy, rightly called “grand strategy,” and good replay value to create an impressive RTS.
One of the most in-depth RTS's of all time.
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Now this game is not new, it came out in 2005, but it still carries its value well. This is mostly because there are no other games like it on the market. The game uses a freeze-time version of play that allows you to proceed in real time until you need to make some adjustments. You can then freeze the time, make your changes, give attack orders, research, allocate resources, and examine the front lines, and then restart time and watch your plans unfold. The time can be accelerated or decelerated in several stages to enable you to keep pace with the action, or fast forward through peacetime.
The scale of the game is immense, in both space and time. The time is the period of history surrounding WWII, from 1936 to 1947. You select a benchmark start date, such as 1936, 1938, 1941, 1943, or 1945. You can also select from a list of preset scenarios such as the Invasion of Normandy, Operation Barbarosa, or the Battle of Midway. The game’s timeline proceeds hour by hour from the time you start to the date you finish. The seasons actually affect your fighting ability, as do various weather phenomena like rain and fog.
These are just A-C of the available countries
Once you select your time, you select your nation. As I mentioned earlier, you can choose the standard WWII players: USA, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan. You can also choose from many of the forgotten participants like the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, France, Bulgaria, Austria, Japanese Manchuria, etc. You also have the option of choosing someone who didn’t have anything to do with the War at al, like Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, or Tibet.
Combat in Hearts of Iron is based on a whole bunch of mathematical algorithms that you influence, rather than directly control. You research advanced levels of infantry, tanks, aircraft, and ships to improve their stats. In addition, you can attach what are called “brigades” to each type of unit you create. Say you have three units of infantry. You know that you will be going against the formiddable German heavy armor, so you create some Anti-Tank Guns and attach them to two of your units. You will also need to cross a river, so you attach an Engineer brigade to your other unit. Each brigade modifies the stats of your units to better counter certain units or situations. What sets HoI II apart is the sheer variety you have to choose from. You can equip your land units with heavy tank battalions, artillery, self-propelled artillery (that doesn’t slow down your infantry like regular artillery), anti-tank, rocket artillery, armored cars, engineers, military police, and mobile anti-aircraft guns. Ships and planes get their own brigades. You can customize your armies depending on the situations you think they will find themselves in.
Heroic American troops fight to liberate Norway from the Nazis!
One of the most expansive areas of the game is the game map. Literally hundreds of provinces fill your screen, each with some form of resource production value, defenses, or other strategic point of interest. The size and terrain of the provinces affect your troop movements and combat. Mountainous terrain slows down all units, but slows mountain units to a lesser degree. They also offer the defenders a large advantage and give the attackers an equally large penalty. Wheeled vehicles move more slowly in provinces with a low infrastructure value, especially in hilly terrain, but tracked vehicles excel in those areas. Swamps and jungles seem like impossible obstacles to vehicles and most infantry, but marines enjoy bonuses when attacking or defending these provinces. See a province with high defensive fortifications? Just drop down with paratroopers and eliminate those bonuses. Then you have to worry about supplying your troops, but I’ll talk about that later. Paradox has done their best to take as much into account as they could regarding realistic effects of terrain on a strategic level.
Admiral Nimitz relaxing in England while in command of the most powerful navy the world has ever known!
The only time the borders are historical is when the game starts. The game sets up the national boundaries as they were in the time you selected. After that, anything can happen. I began the game in 1936 as the USA, and spent all of my time moving my country away from isolationism. By 1938 I was able to join the allies and help France defend against the German invasion. With my trusty ally, Great Britain (a.k.a. my little brother) we defeated Germany by 1942, after which Japan decided to launch a delayed attack on Pearl Harbor and start war. In another game, after defeating Germany and Japan in 1946, I found to my surprise that Equador had conquered all of Central and South America, including much of Mexico. In another game, France launched a preemptive strike against Germany in 1937 and ended the War before it had even begun. The variety of outcomes means that no game will ever be the same. While you may develop effective strategies, you will have to adjust for different scenarios that the AI thinks up.
That's a lot of provinces!
The one thing that will probably repel casual gamers is the amount of complexity of the game. There are dozens of things you have to take into consideration while you are playing a game (which makes the pause button that much more amazing). You have to allocate resource production sliders to meet the requirements of your nation’s military and economy, you have to conduct research that improves the areas that you want to improve (it is virtually impossible to complete all research before the end date of the game), you have to constantly create new units to fight the enemy’s growing armies, you have to replenish/upgrade your existing battle-hardened troops, etc. The game helps with the sliders, but you have to do everything else. The game will also take care of most of the supply problems for you, but you have to make sure there are enough transport and escort ships to get everything shipped across the world. If your troops fall out of supply, they start taking strength and organization losses. If you can surround a strong enemy army, then all you really need to do is wait and they will eventually start to disappear. The weather might suddenly turn all your plans around as well. A well planned and coordinated attack might go horribly wrong if a sudden blizzard blows through, ruining all your well-laid plans. Managing all of your provinces can be a challenge in itself as well. The Soviet Union must have at least 200 provinces, and about 90 are open to attack!
The AI is both a strong point and a weakness. The AI is pretty smart when it comes to certain things. It certainly knows where to attack and when. They do their best to deprive you of your industrial ability to continue the war, whether it be through capturing your resource provinces or bombing the hell out of them. They attack with a strong mix of units and try to match the units with their strengths (mountain troops will fight in hills and mountains, marines will fight in the swamps and launch amphibious assaults). They don’t always use the best units that are available to them, though. I’ve been attacked by a huge army of 15,000 militia, which my army of 4,000 mechanized infantry and a tank division easily pushed back. The AI knows to attack your forces while they are recovering from a recent battle, but also has a tendency to stretch its own supply lines so thin that isolating large numbers of their troops is easy at times.
One of the reasons I really like this game is that I can play it on my laptop. My laptop is not a gaming beast. I’m lucky if it even decides to start sometimes! Hearts of Iron II runs very well, and is very stable. I am able to play during my long breaks during school or take it to a friend’s house.
The multiplayer is enjoyable as well, as long as you can find someone willing to play the game with you long-term. You can’t finish the grand campaign in a few hours. You can fight with or against your friends, or even control the same country. This might be useful coordinating troop movements in the Soviet Union, or fighting a Pacific and a European war simultaneously as the United States. Anything you can do in singleplayer is available in multiplayer. The game gives a choice as to the number of pauses, but their pause is only good for 30 seconds before the other players can unpause the game.
I have enjoyed this game immensely since I first bought it two years ago. It might be difficult, or impossible, to find on a store shelf now, but you can get it over the internet for a very reasonable price. The two expansions are also very enjoyable if you like the experience, and add a lot to the game. If you aren’t afraid of its complexity, then this is an awesome RTS with a great replay value. And it runs on most laptops!!!
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