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Rob Zacny

Episode 309: Hearts of Iron IV Preview

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Paradox returns to World War II with the upcoming Hearts of Iron IV and a recent press event found Rob, Rowan, Fraser, and Gamers with Jobs' Sean Sands playing a preview build of the simulation. The results? Mixed feelings. Amidst glimmers of hope for an improved HoI on the order of the successful EUIV and CK2, the panelists found a confusing interface, a lack of direction, and plenty of room for improvement before the final build.

 

Listen here.

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I for one am ALL behind 3 moves ahead just turning into EU 4 moves ahead....more EU4 discussion needs to happen

 

 

 

I'd really like at least a half episode on "Common Sense" now that its out...although waiting a week might be good since there are a number of bugs Paradox graciously included...

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I bounced off of HOI3, mostly through not quite giving it enough time to figure out which micromanagement tasks were important and which were skippable. I'm hoping HOI4 will clean up some of the fiddlyness.

 

One thing that I think would benefit HOI4 is to have a "history rails" setting. Turn it on and the factions are semi-locked, tension doled out on schedule, and the usual suspects pushed towards starting a war sometime 1939-1940. Turn it off, and all of the hardcoding is gone and you're thrown into a sandbox. You want to see if Germany and a fascist US can defeat the UK, France and a Eurasian communist bloc of Stalin and Mao? Yay for ahistorical fun!

 

OTOH you can get something similar by just starting a game on 1939-09-03, and then all you need is a decent system for US neutrality.

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I bounced off of HOI3, mostly through not quite giving it enough time to figure out which micromanagement tasks were important and which were skippable. I'm hoping HOI4 will clean up some of the fiddlyness.

 

Well original was in pretty bad shape in regards to bugs.  It was after the first expansion when I really began to sink some time in so if you bounced off the vanilla version then to be fair to you, it was REALLY hard to get something out of vanilla.

 

Like it either took end of first expansion or early in the second expansion for PI to identify and fix this 'AI super stack bug' where all the allies would hurdle their 200+ divisions on that tiny land-bridged island off north of France, and Germany would in response get their 200+ divisions on the adjacent province, effectively taking out both Germany and Allies out of the game as neither would EVER make progress against each other.

 

Then there was this bug that defensive stats for units did not work at all, and that was only discovered (yep, nobody knew about it) by the third expansion.

 

Granted once you got the meat of the game going, it was delicious.  And despite some serious bugs I mentioned, first expansion did a whole lot in making the game very playable, but then again, I did stick around through vanilla HoI3 so obviously my tolerance for the game was pretty good.

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This podcast is highly interesting to me cause it tackles lot of issues that are of no concern to me as a player (1000+ hour HoI2/3 vet) but is something that I, as a fan, am highly interested in for sake of success of the franchise.

 

Both 2 and 3 had poor implementation and connection of diplomacy/industry to actual warfighting so no surprise there to hear that it still remains rather obtuse.

 

But to hear that actual warfighting remains obtuse is... ehh I guess not so surprising because it was pretty dense to get into.

 

If I had to explain to newbies what HoI3 was primarily about, it's about fronts composed of two opposing lines of armies... and both trying to break the opposing line to encircle the other.  Think of Unity of Command, except scale it up by 10x, add dedicated unit production and run it in Paradox Time (pausable real time micro turns).  So I would recommend things like just researching and building 3 things as Germany... infantry, medium tanks and interceptors cause game largely boiled down to lines of infantry with tanks for breakthroughs and interceptors for air superiority so your production and troops remain safe from allied airforce.  Once they get hang of this front based warfare of breakthrough and encirclement, then you get into the layers of tweaking these things like adding artillery to infantry, adding CAS/TACs to airforce to build your own attack power, motorized divisions so that your breakthroughs can be better protected.

 

Left the navy out cause naval warfare was always bit of sour point (basically EU4 level of depth, get a bigger stack of carriers than the other guy and smash them).

 

So to hear that most people didn't get to dive into that juicy wargaming of the most organic breakthroughs/encirclements cause the game is still having hard to teaching the players what its about is so frustrating to hear cause it's super fun wargame underneath all that stuff...

 

Damn now I just want to play HoI3 again.  Damn now I really want to play HoI4.

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I hope that HOI4 can turn it around in time for release. This is the one series of theirs that eludes me. 

 

It's a shame that the Cold War game never came together, as I'd rather play a Vicky-2-styled game set in that period. 

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Listening to the podcast, I feel like the current state of Hearts of Iron 4 is the multiplayer-first design philosophy of Europa Universalis 4 put into a historical setting where just it does not work as well. There's the drastic reduction of internal politics in the name of keeping players focused on the international scale of gameplay and not preventing them mechanically from partaking at will, even though it means that sometimes they have nothing to do if nothing relevant's happening on the international scale. There's also the interest in railroading huge confrontations, but without the interest in making them balanced, assuming that the player will do that heavy lifting.

 

I agree with the podcast that the great powers need a lot of event chains to be scripted to push them in the direction that they appear to be headed, even if that direction's against history, and that the neutral nations need to be held back by paucity of military might, not tech disadvantages and lack of unique national focuses. I'm also just a little bit sad that the hilarious parts of previous Hearts of Iron games is mostly missing, where the player is desperate to predict and prevent World War II but held back by their nation's politics, which are run by people who have no idea what a threat Hitler is going to be.

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Don't know how the folks who have already replied listened to the podcast but when I try to d/l the mp3 file I get a zero bytes file - yesterday and right now. Playing the stream on the page works but as I usually listen to it away from the computer that's not too useful. Perhaps you need to give the server a kicking?

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I don't get why Hearts of Iron franchise exists. I don't get what is it trying to do. I've tried HoI2 and HoI3 and both felt like a Frankenstein monster. Is it a game about micromanaging 200 divisions on the Eastern front? Is it a game about involving neutral powers into your struggle? It tried to involve me with detailed research and politics but as soon as the war started it expected me to play the most complicated wargame I ever saw. Just why.

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I don't get why Hearts of Iron franchise exists. I don't get what is it trying to do. I've tried HoI2 and HoI3 and both felt like a Frankenstein monster. Is it a game about micromanaging 200 divisions on the Eastern front? Is it a game about involving neutral powers into your struggle? It tried to involve me with detailed research and politics but as soon as the war started it expected me to play the most complicated wargame I ever saw. Just why.

 

It's a wargame first with everything else serving at best as minor flavor stuff or at worst, as distraction.

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It's a wargame first with everything else serving at best as minor flavor stuff or at worst, as distraction.

 

But most countries start game several years before the war. And the war is not gradually more complex like in, say, EU4 or even Civilization, the day the war starts you're operating dozens if not hundreds of units. I've always felt that wargame in HoI crept from behind and shouted "Ha-ha, fooled you!" while I was trying to do grand strategy stuff instead of getting down into general's shoes.

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My .02 - they need to roll the start date back to 1900, and make HoI the 20th century version of their series of Grand Strategy Games.  Many of the complaints that the panel had were  a result of the very narrow time frame, which makes really interesting deviations from historical reality either silly, or uninteresting binary results (i.e. Germany wins instead of losing).  Go back to 1900!  Britain has no allies and is hostile to Russia.  Will it still join the Entente?  The USA is still a puppy, albeit a puppy with big paws.  In the far east the Russo-Japanese war is on the horizon, with huge implications for both countries.  What a MUCH more interesting time period to start from!  What a MUCH greater range of potential "historish" results!  

 

EU4, a game about renaissance Europe wisely starts its Grand Campaign from 1444, right at the very end of the medieval period.  HoI, if retooled to be a game about the 20th century, would be wise to begin at the twilight of the 19th century.

 

What most people (well, Americans like me) don't realize is that WWI is vastly more interesting than WW2.  I could write about 500 pages explaining why.  WWI is much more ripe for a grand strategy game than WW2.  The more I think about it, the more excited/agitated I get about the possiblity of HoI starting in 1900.  What a great game that could be!  

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My .02 - they need to roll the start date back to 1900, and make HoI the 20th century version of their series of Grand Strategy Games.  Many of the complaints that the panel had were  a result of the very narrow time frame, which makes really interesting deviations from historical reality either silly, or uninteresting binary results (i.e. Germany wins instead of losing).  Go back to 1900!  Britain has no allies and is hostile to Russia.  Will it still join the Entente?  The USA is still a puppy, albeit a puppy with big paws.  In the far east the Russo-Japanese war is on the horizon, with huge implications for both countries.  What a MUCH more interesting time period to start from!  What a MUCH greater range of potential "historish" results!  

 

EU4, a game about renaissance Europe wisely starts its Grand Campaign from 1444, right at the very end of the medieval period.  HoI, if retooled to be a game about the 20th century, would be wise to begin at the twilight of the 19th century.

 

What most people (well, Americans like me) don't realize is that WWI is vastly more interesting than WW2.  I could write about 500 pages explaining why.  WWI is much more ripe for a grand strategy game than WW2.  The more I think about it, the more excited/agitated I get about the possiblity of HoI starting in 1900.  What a great game that could be!  

 

I don't think so.  There's no good focus for that kind of game, and a game kinda needs a strong focus to be a good game, otherwise you get cold war games where you customize the turrets on warships.  Also, ww2 is quite interesting.

 

I think a ww2 wargame is a fine game to make, and i've played a lot of them, but you have to know what they're about, and starting from 1936 feels like a good way to just make everything go way off the rails.  It seems like there's a desire not to make any sacrifices in the design to get a good ww2, so they try to have everything, and you never get any kind of ww2 really.  The minor countries are given way too much significance, Allies are allowed to rearm with impunity, etc.

 

If I had a say, I would start the game in 1939 with a sort of CYOA system to give a few changes to the pre-ww2 history and let people have some customization within bounds.  You'd start with things like the Sino-Japanese war in situ, but that's a sacrifice that has to be made to have Europe work.

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I challenge you to name a good WW2 Grand Strategy game.  The Axis and Allies board game?    

 

There ARE lots of good WW2 games, but they are all about a single battle or campaign.  The more WW2 games try to encompass the entire war, and the lead-up into the war, the weaker they get.  Because (and I recognize that this is blasphemy) WW2 does not make for an interesting grand strategy game.  

 

Panzeh, I think the game you are describing is a wargame.  And to be fair, perhaps all HoI really wants to be is a wargame.  If so, fair enough, and in that case your idea is better than mine.  But it sounds like it also wants to be something more.  It also sounds like the panel wants it to be something more.  I too want it to be something more.  

 

PREDICTION:  There will be a DLC that rolls the clock back to before WWI.  It will be the 7th DLC.  It will cost $14.99, and for an additional $4,99 you can get the Belgian Unit Pack.  And it will all be awesome.  

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I challenge you to name a good WW2 Grand Strategy game.  The Axis and Allies board game?    

 

There ARE lots of good WW2 games, but they are all about a single battle or campaign.  The more WW2 games try to encompass the entire war, and the lead-up into the war, the weaker they get.  Because (and I recognize that this is blasphemy) WW2 does not make for an interesting grand strategy game.  

 

Panzeh, I think the game you are describing is a wargame.  And to be fair, perhaps all HoI really wants to be is a wargame.  If so, fair enough, and in that case your idea is better than mine.  But it sounds like it also wants to be something more.  It also sounds like the panel wants it to be something more.  I too want it to be something more.  

 

PREDICTION:  There will be a DLC that rolls the clock back to before WWI.  It will be the 7th DLC.  It will cost $14.99, and for an additional $4,99 you can get the Belgian Unit Pack.  And it will all be awesome.  

 

Unconditional Surrender!, Axis Empires: Totaler Krieg/Dai Senso, World in Flames, Advanced Third Reich(and its derivatives).  These are all games that cover the whole war, and there are others, at varying levels of railroadedness.

 

I think USE has the best combat out of all of them and Axis Empires is probably the most interesting-  Axis Empires starts in 1937, but it's far more structured than Hearts of Iron, and the three(or five) players each have their own option cards to play, including different things to do in the pre-war period.  Japan probably has the most in-depth choices, but the USSR and Germany have some interesting ones, too.

 

I will say A3R and WiF have playability issues, but the concept isn't really the problem.  It's all about implementation.  I don't know if a 20th century everything-game is going to resemble the 20th century in any way that isn't going to be utterly bloated.  It would be tough to even make a combat system that would work in both 1900 and 1999.

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But most countries start game several years before the war. And the war is not gradually more complex like in, say, EU4 or even Civilization, the day the war starts you're operating dozens if not hundreds of units. I've always felt that wargame in HoI crept from behind and shouted "Ha-ha, fooled you!" while I was trying to do grand strategy stuff instead of getting down into general's shoes.

 

All the pre war stuff pretty much boils down to building up your army and customizing it that way.  You can try weird stuff with diplomacy but the game is just not built to withstand going too ahistorical (for example, Hungary's aggression never ticks off any major powers in the world, which allows it to gobble up everything one by one in very silly manner).

 

About the micromanagement, there is... a way to get around that via corps, army, army group and theater HQ assignment but setting that up itself is so tedious that yes, the game is indeed pretty fucking horrendous when it came to UI, even when it was for stuff the game is suppose to be best at (large land warfare).

 

And as for the the game guiding you into the meat of the game (large land warfare)... yep, you are right it doesn't do that well at all.  There are too many distractions and ultimately pointless features that keeps teasing the players of something other than a grand war game with heavy focus on land.  All I've been saying is, that's what the game is amazing at and the game is really good IF players can be guided into that experience.  Like you won't get any arguments from me regarding to game's near-impenetrable feel, even to lot of Paradox fans.  Or that it has ton of questionable designs.  Just saying that there is something amazing in there that is indeed not focused very well by rest of the game at all.

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  I don't know if a 20th century everything-game is going to resemble the 20th century in any way that isn't going to be utterly bloated.  It would be tough to even make a combat system that would work in both 1900 and 1999.

I should say that my thought would be to end the game in 1960, so more of a "first half of the 20th century" game.  

 

Perhaps I just expect too much from HoI because it is a Paraodox game.  We are so used to the free-form madness of CK2 and EU4 that we want a similar universe of possiblities from HoI.  Instead, it sounds like what we get is a diplomatic game of timing (hold off the war if you are Axis, speed it up if you are Allies) that transitions to a rather complicated wargame.  That design could certainly work if implemented right, but I can't see it having a lot of replayability.  

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I should say that my thought would be to end the game in 1960, so more of a "first half of the 20th century" game.  

 

Perhaps I just expect too much from HoI because it is a Paraodox game.  We are so used to the free-form madness of CK2 and EU4 that we want a similar universe of possiblities from HoI.  Instead, it sounds like what we get is a diplomatic game of timing (hold off the war if you are Axis, speed it up if you are Allies) that transitions to a rather complicated wargame.  That design could certainly work if implemented right, but I can't see it having a lot of replayability.  

 

It's also really odd, in terms of theme, because the Allies desperately wanted to hold off the war in reality and there is absolutely no mechanical advantage to doing so in the game. We all know, in the terms that Hearts of Iron is dealing, that letting Germany act unchecked is an absolute ill, but it doesn't seem like Paradox has been very successful at all with simulating or systematizing the Allied powers' reasons for not checking German expansion immediately.

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It's also really odd, in terms of theme, because the Allies desperately wanted to hold off the war in reality and there is absolutely no mechanical advantage to doing so in the game. We all know, in the terms that Hearts of Iron is dealing, that letting Germany act unchecked is an absolute ill, but it doesn't seem like Paradox has been very successful at all with simulating or systematizing the Allied powers' reasons for not checking German expansion immediately.

This is indeed an odd design challenge in a game that's this specifically about war.  Like, this is far easier to envision reasons to want a peace in more comprehensive games like Civ or EU series.  But HoI series is about THE war, a single war.  This war is going to happen and winning this war is all that matters... there is nothing else in HoI universe, so why would any participants be reluctant to engage in it when they already are?

 

Maybe they will implement it so that you can't pick the best national laws even when you are in a war as democratic power, and in order to get your country ready for war you need time, but it's doubtful that will be fun at all.

 

I'm fine with HoI game being in this awkward thing it is, but I also wouldn't mind them just throwing out the rigid "World War II" theme out and just embracing more broader "Modern-Motorized-Combined-Arms-Grand-Strategy" as well.  All I want are the grand battles simulated, afterall.  Don't care much that it's WWII or some bananas war cooked up by devious players and crazy RNG.  Because it just sounds like everyone at the event wanted something to do with diplomacy ala EU4, while HoI series was never ever ever about some diplomatic maneuvering.  EU was about how you start wars, while HoI's theme made it so that was an answered question, and instead tackled how you fought it.  I doubt Paradox wants to restrict the scope of HoI4 into more narrow wargame, so then they might as well as expand it.

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This is indeed an odd design challenge in a game that's this specifically about war.  Like, this is far easier to envision reasons to want a peace in more comprehensive games like Civ or EU series.  But HoI series is about THE war, a single war.  This war is going to happen and winning this war is all that matters... there is nothing else in HoI universe, so why would any participants be reluctant to engage in it when they already are?

 

 Does HOI factor casualties into their national morale? This is one major reason why the Allies dreaded war.  To have millions of casualties as they did in World War 1 would cause massive societal and governmental dislocation for Britain and France. The US, being a bit more isolationist, wold have major issues as well if the suffered massive casualties.  The US could not have fought on the Russian Front with those kind of casualties - the national will would have collapsed. 

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 Does HOI factor casualties into their national morale? This is one major reason why the Allies dreaded war.  To have millions of casualties as they did in World War 1 would cause massive societal and governmental dislocation for Britain and France. The US, being a bit more isolationist, wold have major issues as well if the suffered massive casualties.  The US could not have fought on the Russian Front with those kind of casualties - the national will would have collapsed. 

 

HoI2 and 3 did not.  IIRC only victory points (major provinces had this thing called victory points that simulated the operational value of the land) is the only thing that mattered when it comes to surrender.  It's actually not that uncommon to see many major powers completely deplete on manpower and continue to fight the war with under-reinforced armies.  Also unlike EU4, it's also not uncommon for industry heavy nations like Germany to actually be able to convert all of their manpower to fighting force (no army size penalty here so more you build (and can supply), more you field so no point in having reserve manpower pool)

 

But still, that's a surrender condition.  Still doesn't quite explain why Allies were material wise capable but unwilling to fight the war.  If they just implemented national morale hit from casualties and Allies were highly susceptible to it, all that would do is make Axis/Commitern victory easier.  Allies would still want to get in the war ASAP to maximize their industry (democratic nations have national laws that lock away most of their industry in peace time so that Axis doesn't get roflstomped) before Axis gains power.

 

Actually now that I mention it that is interesting... due to the way national laws are setup, it is Axis and Commitern that wants to delay the war for a while so they can maximize their peacetime advantage.  Commitern it makes sense since USSR was historically looking to buy time more than anything...  But as for Germany, the fact that their peace time military buildup cannot be challenged by the Allies always pushed Allies for wanting to declare war ASAP.

 

It's just this really weird problem coming out of the fact that Paradox locked away best national laws for war time.  Kinda makes sense that in a war game, convincing your nation to be more warlike when at war seems logical but because it's a wargame (big war is inevitable), that makes everyone eager for war to maximize their potentials.

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It's weird to hear this critique compared to youtube personalities (like Quill18) who are a lot more ... let's call it excitable. Don't get me wrong, it's a breath of fresh air compared to <best game ever> meaningless blather. So thank you for providing some grounding and in-depth discussion of the mechanics that work or don't work.

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Like someone said, the player's historical knowledge is the crucial problem here.  The difference between reality and game is that in reality the Western powers hoped that they would not HAVE to go to war with Germany, while in the game the player knows it's going to happen, and thus has an unchecked incentive to speed up the onset of the war.  In essence, the incentive in the game is the exact opposite of the real world incentive.  It sounds like the current game mechanic that addresses this - global tension - doesn't work.  It certainly SOUNDS unsatisfying - instead of putting you in the position of a real allied leader, who genuinely wants to avoid war, you are instead like a rabid dog straining on a leash, just waiting for it to snap so you can tear the Axis to pieces.  Sometimes we talk about historical accuracy, but I think what that ought to mean for a game is that it gives you a sense that you are confronting the same dilemmas that historical leaders did.  (As opposed to a definition of accuracy that is concerned with whether the game accurately simulates a particular weapon, has the correct OOB, etc.)  By this definition of historical accuracy, the global tension mechanic looks like a failure.  Since it also sounds like it's a pretty critical feature, then it sounds like a pretty critical failure.  

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