Hearts of Iron III (PC)
The Good War just got a little better.
8/7/2009 2:21 PM | 5 Comments | Page 1 of 2
What's Hot: Deep military/industrial simulation; Easy-to-customize micromanagement
What's Not: Problems with lag and tech research interface; HQ learning curve
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. -- Winston Churchill
Historical strategy games pull on two contradictory impulses. First, they depend on the desire of the audience to relive the past, to put itself in the shoes of Napoleon or Jefferson Davis or Adolph Hitler. Second, they embrace the Time Lord in all of us, challenging players to undo history, to write a past that will never be. Bring Britain to its knees. Win independence for the Confederacy. Take Moscow before winter comes.
World War II is the most popular setting for strategy and wargames because it tugs on both of these threads. In many ways, this largest of all conflicts, with nations becoming heroes and villains, is the founding myth of the post-imperial age. But because it's a story that almost everyone knows, armchair presidents and prime ministers can point to where the whole thing could have gone off the rails.
Poland is a pushover.
Paradox's
Hearts of Iron III straddles these contrary desires. If you play the grand campaign from 1936 forward, it looks like history is moving in lockstep as Austria and Czechoslovakia fall to the Reich without a shot. And then the Republicans win the Spanish Civil War, Turkey forgoes neutrality, and all hell breaks loose in Sweden.
This is, admittedly, old hat for Paradox at this point. Games like this are its forte, and the Hearts of Iron series is the most popular of its franchises. It plays more like a wargame than a grand strategy game, forcing you to be general and president, supply chief and researcher.
Hearts of Iron III's big achievement is to make balancing these roles more user-friendly. It allows enough micromanagement to satisfy the grognards, and has enough macro-level tools to make the Liberation of Europe that much easier. Never has a game this deep allowed you to customize so much of your involvement.
Fighting the war itself is the best example. Your army is divided into headquarter units (HQ), each over or under another HQ, up to the theater-level commander. If you are having trouble making sense of just how to break through an enemy line, you can give any HQ a general objective (defend Potsdam, attack Warsaw, and so on). The HQ and any other units under its command will move to a reasonably efficient position and progress toward your objective. Any air or sea units under the HQ's control will also be given tasks to help you meet the overarching goal. Once you have given an HQ objectives, you cede control of every unit under its influence; so the higher the HQ you instruct, the less flexibility you have to adjust things on the fly. But if the Eastern theater is a mess and nothing's going on to the West, you can fine-tune your plans depending on where the troops are.
The Decision system is imported from the recent EU games.
It gets better. One of the big problems for newcomers to games like this is that they never quite know what kinds of units they should be building.
HoI3 tells you. If your HQ has an objective to meet, it will let you know what additional troops it thinks it needs. You can add all these to your production queue with a click. Then it can even deploy these troops automatically, though it is very cautious with the deployment. (When America is fighting for freedom in Flanders, sticking a tank unit by the Canadian border shouldn't be a priority.) The HQ management can get confusing at times, and there should be a smoother way to select an HQ and all attached divisions to be sent to a region. But it is a major step forward in war fighting.
