HEARTS OF IRON: War is really complicated, and hell

In going from the forested glades of Erion to the blasted ruins of Europe circa 1942, I quickly began to wonder if I may be a little out of my league here with Hearts of Iron. I have to admit that the majority of my time playing strategic war games they were made of cardboard and sat on a table in the kitchen, or had more elves and dwarves than Spitfires and Howitzers, or were very realistic sims of ancient wars. Apparently when you turn the wayback machine to not-so-wayback things get very complex. After all, the modern world is a place where the definition of combined arms doesn't just mean "spears and cavalry, together!"

For just a snapshot of what WWII warfare touched on in the very basic sense; in any single action you could have infantry, artillery, engineers, anti-aircraft, anti-armor, mechanized and motorized infantry, tanks, transports, fighter interceptor planes, tactical bombers, strategic bombers... and that's just ground actions. I can see where this sort of sim does not appeal to everyone, or even most simulation fans. The people who make these games are tiny cabals (by today's game development standards) of dedicated technicians who love this sort of game and are making these games for others who could very well be in tiny development cabals themselves. It seems to me that the most common of the modern warfare strategy games have a semi-secret lexicon that is founded on the players supposed understanding of the underlying history, and the fun in these sort of 'what-if' productions is changing or better yet defying that history.

The idea is to make the simulation as accurate as possible so that when a 33 year old customer service rep from Boston leads the German panzer divisions all the way to Siam before 1945 like some reverse Ghengis Kahn, that there can be a question in the corner of his mind whether that could have really happened if he were in charge. Being in charge is a major part of the allure of these games as well. Having the entire Allied war effort on the other end of a mouse click feels pretty cool. After all it isn't easy to keep all the plates spinning and win a war at the same time, right? What I am getting at is the more inaccessible(accurate?) the game engine is the smarter you're going to feel for figuring it out and winning the game. Learning the difference between "Basic Signal Intelligence" and "Basic Signal Logistics" and why one is going to help you and the other isn't is also a cool feeling. And we the gamers are just hoping beyond hope that the conflicts and decisions that we have to navigate in front of the monitor are at least somewhat like the ones that won or lost the Second World War. That is the magic of the simulation as a game.

I'm rambling a little here but I will continue in saying that I spent some serious time early on in my gaming career with SSI's Panzer General and Allied General, but that has left me vastly underpowered for HOI. Panzer General was a set-piece tactical game, where as HOI is an open ended strategic affair. Not only is the scope vastly different, but Panzer General is turn based and HOI is real-time. That makes the timing of everything, and I mean everything critical. This little life lesson will be explained in a later post, but lets just say that the fate of your men can turn drastically on exactly when your units arrive to the battle.

I have just started up the basic scenario that starts in 1936 and fooled around getting my feet wet here and there and I can already see that this game's interconnecting systems and exhaustive detail is going to cause me some problems when it comes to writing it all down here. There is so much that can be discussed that it's a little mind boggling. Also there is the challenge to pare that down into serviceable bites that can be read quickly and for the sake of the readers (I know you are out there!) are interesting to read about. I'm probably going to go the way of The Wargamer's (http://www.wargamer.com/) After Action Reports, but throwing in commentary about design and things as I go. So next time we will discuss my personal role in the shame of Mother Russia's early defeats of the war.