HEARTS OF IRON: If at first...

1938- it took about a year and a half to repair my dissent rating. During this long stretch my Industrial Capacity increased slowly with the decrease in dissent and also as the provinces I had unknowingly knocked out of commission with the "increase industries" command started to come back on line. As the extra points trickled in I began to crank up my weapons research in an effort to gain the ability to create mechanized infantry with the speed to keep up with Hitler's blitz and avoid getting encircled.

Also in that stretch Comrade Stalin continued his scourge of the officer corps. I received two more message boxes with accompanying yes/no choices to make. Now understanding the effects of dissent and what exactly the cost of allowing my enemies to thrive was, I found myself with a very different feeling on the subject this time. The designers were going to make me pay to be merciful here. Now everyone agrees that what the man did was terrible, wrong for the country and in the end wrong militarily, but if I didn't cut out these malcontents while could I wouldn't be able to wage any war at all and that meant certain defeat for International Communism. So was Stalin right? No, but what I realized at this point was that what he did was right for him. The fact that he had to go to such lengths to maintain power probably tells us that he was most likely not the best choice for communist dictator, but the USSR was stuck with him and so was I. With conflicting feelings I found myself opting to start weeding out the badnicks and keep my IC increases humming along.

With the folk of the USSR back on the team I was able to start producing supplies in quantities that would allow us some fighting and whatnot. I began wondering where my next battles would be as 1939 arrived. Germany made the decision for me easy, it was to be Poland.

Winter 1939- Earlier in the year I had opted out of a German agreement that would have given me about a third of Poland, but would take away the land I had sundered in Lithuania. I was already half a demon myself so I wasn't about to make any deals with the Nazis. After that in March the blitz began in earnest in Poland. I attacked simultaneously from the east, between us Poland was crushed by the time fall arrived. I had a few more provinces than the German pact would have allowed me, held onto Lithuania and had not made an enemy of Germany in the meantime either. All good. Then I waited for the eventual German advance.

To my surprise, the German units abandoned their new border, leaving only one or two divisions here and there to look after their new Polish citizens. I was annoyed to see that units of the former Lithuanian army were hiding out across the Lithuanian border in what was now German-occupied Poland. This at the very least showed me that even if Germany was tolerating Russian expansion now they wouldn't be doing it in the future.

The trouble is that memories are short and mine is even shorter and during the balance of that year I became... bored. I was churning out mechanized divisions at a good rate and felt the deep seated need to enlighten some of the other border countries, much as I had done in the Lativian area. I clearly didn't want to stray into Germany at this point even if the border was nearly naked as letting them tire themselves on their western advance and being entrenched when when returned seemed a wiser course of action. So who gets to join the club next?, I wondered.

1940- The rump-end of Turkey was looking delicious (heh heh) so I sent fifteen divisions under my best commanders down there to get them into line. It looked like a cakewalk from the border. I should have started wondering at my new strategy when my regular infantry took three months to make the journey. I wasn't about to send my blitz-beating units down there and I suppose if you don't put your infantry in trucks, they're walking. Imagine walking four hundred miles. Go ahead. Doesn't seem like a great time to you either, eh? What kind jerk must I be? For what they had to face when they got there it was a wasted trip anyway.

As my men snailed their way to the south I noticed German units piling up at my border again, slowly at first and faster as my units winded down to the Turkish out lands. They got there late in the fighting season nearly September, but there was no snow or other atmospheric factors this close to the equator so I began the attack immediately. Now that far down on the European map much of the terrain is sandy desert or rocky badlands, which makes the governable parcels of land much larger and the provinces there equally so. You can imagine my surprise that moments after I gave the order to crush the enemy I learned that my infantry would not see combat for two and a half weeks. They were at the border! How much closer do you have to be?? It looked as though I had some time to kill before I would see any action there, so I returned my attention to the Russian-German border in Poland.

What I saw there was worrying. I had ten or so units to deploy, so I did and even after than I could see I was completely out-gunned. My average army size was around 11 or 12 divisions at many places along the divide. The German advance was averaging about 18 or 20 divisions, with a few spots climbing as high as 40 divisions with tanks and planes everywhere. They were not so weakened as I hoped they would be by the fierce fighting in France I suppose. Historically there wasn't much fighting at all, but I was guessing that the computer France would prove a better opponent. At that point my Turkish expedition was meeting with much more resistance that I thought there would be. The Turkish defenders all jumped out from behind the sand dunes at the same time and created a wearying slog where I was hoping for a decisive march to victory. Just about the time I was wishing I had never gone to Turkey the Germans invaded.

1941- The battle was in question only for a short period of time. It was as if the Germans had an army from the future; employing advanced armor, artillery, and tactical bombers in every engagement in addition to the vaunted blitzkrieg. I brought my own fighters and bombers to bear in the heaviest conflict, but they were turned away by the power of the German Luftwaffe. After only a few attempts, my entire air corps was down to about 20% effectiveness. In the flanking conflicts in the north and south I had only regular infantry to defend with and the blitz attacks quickly had my Strelkovaya units on the run. The defeats began to pile up. It was over for me in Russia.

I may have been able to run to Moscow and gather together the remnants for a counterattack, but it didn't seem to me at the time that it would bear fruit. I turned off the messages, zoomed the map view out and let the game run at maximum speed. The German advance did peter out a little bit after Moscow, the immense Soviet interior either too large or too empty for them to take. What they did do was engage my units wherever they ran to, reducing my army to about 35% of it's pre-invasion size. Not a happy ending, da?

I was pretty sure that I wouldn't prevail in HoI's second world war seeing as the game was so complex, but I was secretly hoping I would give Germany more of a fight. No matter. I have recently gotten my mitts on a copy of Hearts of Iron 2: Doomsday so I will rise again from the ruins. Will I go for the USSR again? Probably not. Perhaps I'll play a small out of the way country with a more easily defended border. Someplace like Venezuela.

HEARTS OF IRON: Progress?

Spring, 1936-- Having learned a hard lesson in Rezekne, I spent most of the winter months trying to get my needs for rubber filled, as rubber is one of four main currencies of HoI. The other three are steel, oil and coal. The USSR at this point in history had complete stockpiles of everything but rubber, and it was noted in the manual that I could convert oil to rubber on the fly at a 2 to 1 rate. Good for covering me for the moment, but not sustainable from the way the totals for oil kept dropping. I set up some offers on the 'world market', a system by which you can post a trade offer and leave it there, as in "100 coal for 100 rubber" and other nations of the world can simply trade with you at that rate unrestricted until you take it down. It seemed to me like a great way to distill world demand for goods into a simple system, but I could find no way to take up computer-played nations on their offers some of which had better rates of exchange than my own. I also attempted to set up shipping convoys to get more rubber, but the interface there was so incomprehensible I just decided to stay on the world market as that was already giving me positive results.

At the end of April I checked the weather map and sent my forces into Latvia with confidence. It didn't take long for the battle to be over with the USSR victorious. Happy to just be a winner I cooled my army boots in Rezekne while internal affairs became more insistent.

Winter, 1937-- It was around this time a few things happened. First I had noticed that some idiot had given every command position in my armies to some faceless rube with no points in skill or experience for command. In the manual commanders were supposed to have these two traits as well as other notes on them like "Defensive Doctrine" or "Panzer Leader" that set them apart from one another, none of those either. So I spent a long time fitting the positions to the commanders, of which there were around one hundred in the pool to choose from. I also noticed with some interest that often the most skilled commanders were not the highest ranking, so this meant making sure I had the right rank to command the size of the army I had without sacrificing too much skill. A fun exercise but once it was over I probably wouldn't have to worry about it for a bit.

Secondly I was having problems with my industrial output. In HoI every province you control has an 'industry' value assigned to it. Add all of these together and you get your industrial output. This value needs to be split into four different areas; consumer goods, war supplies for your armies, research and development of new technologies and finally the 'force pool' which determines how many military units you can build at any one time. I was running in the red for two of the four areas, and no matter how I tweaked the sliders I couldn't make them all happy. I clearly needed more industries, lucky for me that every province detail menu I had seen up to that point had a "build more industries" button. That would solve the problem! So I started in Moscow and wheeled around the country, finding provinces with good production and building more industries. What I didn't know at the time was that the local industries in those provinces stopped making things for the mother country and started building up their own industrial capacity. Naturally this was what I wanted, but it only made the budget shortfalls worse in the short term. Not that I noticed at the time.

Summer, 1937-- I smashed the remaining Latvians, annexed Estonia without incident, and took the majority of Lithuania. Losses were minimal and I was feeling like a regular socialist dictator. Nothing to it. Sometime near the end of August I think I got a lengthy message box covering the map screen entitled "The Great Officer Purge". The text explained that starting around that point, Stalin began to notice that Trotskites were starting to gather and plot his downfall from within the military. In response Stalin assassinated them all with impunity, like a thousand of these guys. Great indeed, I thought wryly. It was also mentioned that this draconian killing spree was often thought to have lost Stalin some of the best and brightest in his officer corps, and was at least partially responsible for the terrible losses the USSR would face later on in the war. I was being given the choice to purge or not to purge. If I acted with mercy, I would only gain a 10% measure in my 'dissent' stat. Not a bad offer, save a thousand gifted men and the USSR for some abstract percentage. I deviated from Joe and decided to let them live, those scrappy officers!

Just as I pardoned the League of Stalin Haters, I got a bevvy of messages explaining that a wing of tactical bombers I had on order would be delayed until late next year for lack of industrial output. I decided that this was probably linked to the sudden increase in dissent, as I knew that the higher dissent was in the country, the less the people produced. What was my dissent currently at anyway? 51% That didn't look very good.

A quick look at the Industrial Output panel told me that my entire government was in gridlock. Every sector of the USSR was moving not at all or was just barely getting by. To top it all of the lack of consumer goods was driving dissent ever higher. My industrial output was once near to 300 points and now was flirting with 150. If things got any worse, those officers might get their way with me. I abandoned all research and unit production, also put my armies on 'life-support' with just enough supplies to stay put and not bother anybody, and cranked up the consumer goods slider to about twice what was really needed for people to live. As thanks the Russian people decreased my dissent stat by 0.05 percent per day. The USSR was closed for WWII business unless you brought your war to us, at which point the dissent effect would cause my under-supplied soldiers to fight even more poorly than regular under-supplied soldiers. To be certain, I was lucky to not have any of the other dictators on the block notice. I wondered how long it would take to get the Russian people back on the side of Ol' Joe...

1938-- The USSR launches the "Porn and Candy bar" offensive against it's own people! Truckloads of candy, pornographic magazines, pulp novels, comic books, vodka and furry hats have been dispatched to every corner of the Motherland. One machinist in Moscow commented, "Socialism can't be all that bad. I mean, look at this awesome poster of Lenin I got from the government! So cool. Those nasty army officers were totally wrong."

HEARTS OF IRON: The coldest winter

I decided to start by playing Soviet Russia, the head of the "com intern" (International Communism) alliance in HoI. The others are The Axis and the Allies as one would expect. I figured since Russia was so large and her population therefore also very large that it would be a good place to start for a newbie player. Once the game screen loaded and I saw to my chagrin the way the units moved about that the USSR's massive border along the nations of Romania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland would be very hard to defend when the computer Germans decided to follow in the footsteps of their more corporeal brethren. Now I'm not sure of the dates when this did actually happen, but I know that I had a few years anyway. In the meantime I figured I could make the border seem less porous somehow.

I was encouraged by the numerous Soviet 'Strelkovaya' Divisions I saw along the borders with Romania and Poland especially. I read in the manual that each one comprised of about 4000 men, and from the icons associated with them I could tell that they were regular infantry. They were grouped in armies of between 4 and 9 divisions each. Together I had about 60 or so divisions. That looked like a lot to me! I was drastically wrong I was to find out later. At this point I re-deployed my armies in a more even arrangement along the border and turned up the game speed to normal. I was on my way now! *sigh*

January, 1936-- In the opening month of the game I was looking pretty good. I had every intention of putting the heels to my quest for global Communism as soon as humanly possible and it seemed to me that I had the soldiers to do exactly that. Looking along my western border I saw Latvia and Estonia sitting just beyond there and saw that intel was putting them as having 1 or perhaps 2 divisions in each of their small provinces. So I brought up my tactical bomber squadrons and scheduled an attack in the Latvian province of Rezekne, and ordered them to keep up the bombing until my 15 infantry divisions arrived four days later. As the bombers attacked their positions twice a day, their organization rating (a numerical score dedicated to expressing a unit's morale and battle effectiveness) dropped from 38 to a minuscule 11. Before too long my units arrived on the scene and began combat against the enemy.

Something strange began to happen at that point however. As the battle wore on over the course of a few days, my battle strength dropped steadily and the Latvians did not budge one bit. They were out numbered 7 to 1, had no air cover or artillery and yet in three short days had eviscerated my infantry corps and sent them back across the border with half the men they left with. My highly trained military mind knew of course that these Latvians were cheating the death I had arranged for them. Was it possible that I had simply gotten a bad throw of the dice? Did they have a great general to lead them? This amazing victory would live on in the annals of Latvian history for ages, but it was ultimately a fluke. It had to be. 7 to 1! Numbers did not lie.

The numbers in Latvia the next week were slightly less daunting for the Latvians, but only in a purely academic sense being 4 to 1. Now more certain than ever I gave the order to attack, as no amount of luck would save them a second time. To my amazement, we were routed again. Now I began to wonder if my knowledge of the war was even more incomplete than I thought it was. Was there some 'Great Wall of Latvia' that I had failed to learn about from the History Channel? It certainly wasn't depicted on the map so... I was at a loss. Just to be sure I gathered another army this time of a similar size and charged the Lativan troops again, to no avail. This was no mistake, I was really missing something significant.

Like a dog that's had it's nose boxed I ran away for a time and took to reading the manual which was actually made of paper (how novel!), and tried to understand where I was going wrong. This was the first time I was really getting acquainted with the rules of HoI outside of the tutorials provided within the game. I was again amazed at the amount of detail coded into the game. While pursuing a two page treatise on something called the "Land Offensive Resolution Logic", part of a series that had entries for air and sea offensives, as well as defensive resolutions for each, I read a curious passage from a bullet list.

"snow- The attacking force receives a -50% to its offensive statistics in the event of snow fall in the attacked province."

At that point I began to seriously wonder if it could have been snowing in northern Russia in the middle of January. A quick return trip to the computer and a glance at the newly discovered "Weather Map Mode" told me that in the hills of Rezekne blizzard like conditions prevailed from October until around mid-March every year. Imagine that! Snow in Russia in January! And so close to Finland too, I thought it would be a tropical paradise! ... It's fair to say that the last time I was so embarrassed while sitting in front of my computer it involved Yahoo chat, a webcam, and a person named supasexy1980! who was a little less than clear as to their gender beforehand. I guess I shouldn't have to tell you that I then...

-RELOADED FROM SAVED GAME-

January, 1936-- In the opening month of the game I was looking pretty good, especially since I had no plans whatsoever to send the young future of the Soviet proletariat into the Latvian hillside in the dead of a winter blizzard to attack fortified positions manned by invincible fire breathing snow demons. Yay for me. Go Communism!

The games go on...

A really strange yet wonderful thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I work at a small software company in customer service, and as there are only ten people in my office you get to know people pretty well. I tried to keep things under wraps for as long as possible, but around the one year mark at this new job people began to realize that I was videogame nut. I was sorta worried that people would think I was some sort of man-child if they knew, but I guess it really didn't phase them. I don't really talk about it at all, but some of my culture references tipped my hand. Our marketing man apparently had played some of the same PC games that I had and we had a few good conversations about Doom and Master of Magic. What happened about a year later really blew my mind.

I was talking shop with him one day and right out of the blue he told me that one of his best friends had recently died, a man he'd known since high school. I offered condolences and gave him space to talk but he didn't tell me much more than that about him. What he did tell me was that his widow had met up with him a few days back and gave him a cardboard box full of computer games. Like... fifty computer games. I really didn't know where this was going at this point, so I just nodded at him. The widow knew that he was into PC games like her late husband and she was aggressively donating/selling/moving his things in an attempt to move on, so in that fashion they passed to him. He then said that he wanted me to have them.

Now all of this happened in the space of a little more than a minute so I was sort of stunned. It isn't everyday that someone offers you something a dead person owned once, let alone computer games. When you think of the things people leave behind you imagine clothes or watches, perhaps a baseball glove or tool set. I don't think that any one imagines a copy of Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield on CD-ROM. Now I'm not saying that these games were his prized possessions or anything, but seeing as how irrational I get when it comes to games perhaps I assigned extra meaning to the gesture. I was floored.

I told him that they were his and that was what the widow wanted. He explained that he didn't have time for them now that he has two children. He kept coming back at me and I kept trying to put him off. I felt really uncomfortable about it. In a part of my mind all I could think was, "I really don't deserve this stuff, it's not his fault what happened to him and everything. Why should I profit?" The next week he walked in with the box and talked me down out of my tree. It got a little easier when I saw some of the titles in there, I must admit.

Better than that though, the discs were in near perfect condition and everything had it's codes and documentation. He had taken better care of his PC games than I ever had apparently. He left me alone with the box and I went over them during my lunch. I left a lot on the table but with what was in there I couldn't take them all without feeling really skeezy. Here's what I came home with...

-Hearts of Iron
-Half Life 2
-Black and White
-Age of Empires II
-Sid Meier's Pirates!
-Rainbow Six 3 + Athena Sword Expansion
-Civilization IV
-Return to Castle Wolfenstein
-Axis and Allies
-Warcraft III
-Rise of Nations Gold Edition

Listing them all here just makes me feel like I was cherry picking after the fact. I guess I was, but I was told to! The other part of it all is it reads like a list of the PC games I would have bought over the last six years if I wasn't throwing money at my consoles. It's just amazing. I'm playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein right now and it just feels so strange that this man I never met went down all the same hallways and twisty labyrinths I am in right now, except he didn't really. Neither am I, but he did, and now he's gone and... I'm not sure what to think about it all, but I know what I want to say about it. Thanks a million, man!

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.