Hearts of Iron 4 is an incredibly complex World War II simulation that will require potentially hundreds of hours to master, both in-game and poring over wiki articles that read like an economics textbook. And as someone eager to invest that kind of time into a game as long as it continues to reward me with new layers of depth, I consider that a very good thing. Thanks to an unusually striking look and clean, easily navigable interface, the biggest challenges we Hearts of Iron 4 presents us with are the good kind: strategic planning, division composition, and fine-tuning economic and political policies. The payoff is brilliant for those willing to put in the time to learn.
The amazingly large world map of Earth circa 1936 is made up of over 11,000 unique provinces, sea regions, and air zones. That’s roughly 250 times as many as a Risk board, and it really feels like a board gamer’s dream representation of Earth during the Second World War. Climates, terrain, the day/night cycle, weather patterns, and supply lines are simulated and animated down to the individual province, and all have noticeable effects on your units’ real-time movement and combat. At the highest level of play, you’ll be considering things like waiting for the weather to break before launching your armored offensive, and the dilemma of deploying your strategic bombers in the wee hours of the morning for better accuracy on vital targets or in the dead of night for a lower chance of being detected by enemy fighters and AA emplacements. It added up to make me feel like I was really there on those North African battlefields of ‘42, considering all possibilities both foreseeable and unforeseeable to eke out a victory.
Any nation that existed between 1936 and 1939 is playable, and while great powers like Germany, the US, and the United Kingdom are a lot more detailed, the experience of playing a minor nation is the best it’s ever been at release in a Paradox game. In Europa Universalis 4, for example, you might need to wait months or years for the Aztecs or the Mali Empire to be fleshed out in a patch or expansion. But HoI4’s generic focus tree (used by all nations who aren’t great powers and thus, don’t get their own historically geared focuses) is powerful and open-ended enough that mid-tier and even backwater countries can pick a faction and ideology (Democracy, Communism, or Fascism), make a contribution to the war, and have a good time.
I only had eight divisions on the field, but they had kill-to-death ratios that would make a pro Counter-Strike player sweat.One of the most entertaining runs I attempted was as fascist Estonia, among of the smallest and least-advanced players in Europe. I buddied up to Germany, spammed industrial buildings to keep up in arms production, and held off the entire might of a Soviet army on the banks of Lake Peipus into early ‘45. I only had eight divisions on the field due to my tiny population, but they had kill-to-death ratios that would make a pro Counter-Strike player sweat, enough stored veterancy that their unit cards were emblazoned with skulls, and were overall just the hardest bastards on the entire Ostfront.
These amusing and flexible ahistorical options exist for the majors, as well. By spending political power on national focuses and various, historically based government ministers, you can play as a Germany who pushes its luck as far as it can with political demands, but never actually fires a shot. You can oust Hirohito as Japan, put the workers of Tokyo in charge of a hardworking People’s Republic, and cast your lot in with Mao and the Soviets. You can foment support for a fascist referendum in the American heartland and decide Canada ought to be yours, and those tea-drinking Brits across the pond be damned for thinking otherwise. What’s astonishing is that Paradox foresaw and supported each of these alternate paths with a unique flag, country name, and quasi-historical leader to represent them. The amount of divergence that can take place in the relatively compact 1936-1948 timeline can’t match the centuries you have to play with in Europa Universalis or Crusader Kings, but there are plenty of alternate scenarios to uncover beyond the World War II we all know and love. I can’t get enough of alternate history, and the volume of crazy possibilities adds enormous replayability.
Regardless of the path you choose, however, it’s likely as not to end with a stuttering stumble to the finish. Almost every campaign I played past 1944 or so bogged down my beefy Core i7 4770K with the complex AI orders being issued from Normandy to Nanjing, making the last push toward victory, or desperate defense against defeat, a slightly vexing affair. Watching armies putter around with a choppy frame rate takes some of the magic out of it.
But the high-level competition between nations and ideologies in Hearts of Iron 4 is, somewhat unintuitively, not really about commandos or dive bombers or tank battalions. Its beating heart is its intricate simulation of the industry and logistics that allow warfare to take place at all. Even the most gifted commander with the best technology and most elite soldiers would do best to knock out larger, more populous opponents quickly, as wise resource management and industrial development will almost certainly prevail in the long run. That factories, production efficiency, and developing your civilian sector can win you the war is an engaging realization that made me operate outside my comfort zone and think about global conflict in new ways. In addition to considering which ships to build and how many marines I needed to take Iwo Jima, I had to contemplate how to weigh arms production versus expanding my infrastructure in Michigan. I had to strike a balance with my manpower reserves between the factory floors and the front lines. A prominent industrialist in my government cabinet ended up making a larger contribution to victory across the length of the war than any hot-shot fighter ace or brilliant general. This all lends a sense of nuance and so many new, interesting strategic layers to the whole campaign.
The high-level focus became a double-edged sword the more I played, however. When you’re expected to manage potentially millions of men and hundreds of factories all around the globe, the tactically brilliant actions of Able Company or the Desert Rats get lost in the mix. Tales of individual heroism go unheard in the blandness of statistically calculated warfare. By the same token, feedback about the performance of individual companies is a rare luxury, and Hearts of Iron 4’s interface makes it hard to track specific data after the fact about your new rocket artillery’s contribution to the battle, if the sandstorm severely affected your tanks, or when and how your crafty general outmaneuvered the enemy commander.
I never felt like I was getting a lot of help in judging the success of decisions.All these things are happening under the hood, but remain largely invisible, especially with so much going on simultaneously. This often led me to one of two options: a policy of throwing army templates at a wall made of the enemy and sticking to the ones that made the biggest hole without ever fully comprehending the underlying mechanics, or simply building my armies based on what seemed to make sense based on my real-world, common-sense understanding of what tanks, bombs, and towed anti-aircraft guns do. I never felt like I was getting a lot of help in judging the success of these decisions in any way more complex than “You won” or “You lost.”
This has the unfortunate effect of minimizing some of Hearts of Iron 4’s other strengths. I was able to customize each of my divisions down to the number of infantry companies and tanks, and which types of support equipment they carried. I could increase the number of guns on an Iowa-class battleship or create a P-51 fighter variant with bigger engines and better reliability. But without a way to track the effect these small, granular changes were having once deployed, it kind of felt like I was just putting little “+1 to Fighting” stickers on my men and vehicles and hoping it helped in some kind of non-specific way. It may seem odd to ask for more spreadsheets and statistics in an already numbers-heavy game, but I would kill for some sort of report I can pull up detailing how many of my fighters were getting shot out of the air and by what, where and why my tanks were breaking down and what I could do about it, or how much extra punch those new truck-mounted rockets were adding to my motorized infantry divisions. I often felt like a supreme commander with a mute general staff, lacking the answers to basic questions I needed to fight the war to the best of my ability.
HoI4 thoroughly obliterates the idea that any conflict can be won by throwing enough men and technology at it.The excellent logistics interface, by contrast, shows how feedback should be done. From one easy-to-read screen, it’s straightforward to determine exactly how many rifles, jeeps, and aircraft I’m producing, whether I’m meeting the demand to equip new divisions and resupply those already in the field, and how many outdated models I still have in my stockpile for a rainy day. The supply map mode also makes it very easy to track which directions it’s safe to march in based on things like terrain, weather, and the availability of transport infrastructure, whether a particular unit behind enemy lines is able to get food and ammunition, and whether a naval invasion or a quick blitz to the enemy capital would be viable under the current circumstances. Charging headlong across the Russian steppe in winter or trying to invade Brazil through the Amazon basin will stop even the most advanced and overwhelming force in its tracks, thoroughly obliterating the idea that any conflict can be won by throwing enough men and technology at it in a tactically braindead banzai charge. Control of ports and major cities, the ability to project air power and maintain air superiority, and whether a nation has access to natural resources (through province ownership or trade) also play a huge role in how effectively each side fights. He who thinks and plans, wins.
The political systems are a bit on the scrawny side for a Paradox game, but do a more than passing job of emulating the realities of the early 20th-century leading up to humanity’s largest armed conflict. A mechanic called World Tension, which rises through aggressive actions like Germany annexing the Czech Sudetenland or Japan pillaging Nanjing, acts as a throttle on the ability of the democratic nations to act. Thus, even though we all know what’s coming, the UK, France, and America can’t all buddy up and decide to kick Hitler’s arsch in 1937; they have to wait for him to play his cards, escalate the situation, and show the world just how out of his mind for power he really is before the political will to send the whole free world to war reaches critical mass. Higher levels of tension unlock new options for the allies in stages, such as offering lend-lease of equipment, sending volunteer divisions, and drawing a line in the sand by guaranteeing the independence of smaller nations like Belgium against foreign aggression. This gives countries like the US something to do, foreign policy-wise, while their hands are still tied in terms of declaring all-out war, and it prevents their early game from being a long snooze waiting for Pearl Harbor.
My only other gripe is that the control interfaces for air and sea warfare are not nearly as intuitive or communicative as those for ground armies. The system for launching naval invasions, for example, is borderline abominable. It requires far too many clicks and offers no substantive assistance in figuring out why your D-Day invasion is stalled at the cliffs of Dover. There are several small, non-obvious things you can do wrong that will cause the entire order to simply refuse to execute, and it took me literally hours to get a handle on the exact sequence of commands I had to input in the right order to circumvent them. Likewise, assigning orders to air groups, especially carrier-based ones, has far too many obfuscated provisos and edge cases standing in the way of “click to make my bombers go to this place and blow up the bad guys.” When I’m managing such a complex conflict, I want to be able to give orders to my ships, planes, and naval transports with as few clicks as possible. If my clicks aren’t translating into action, I want to know precisely why, in plain English written in big, impossible to misunderstand capital letters. Otherwise, I just get frustrated and decide to let my paratroopers fend for themselves. My apologies to the 101st Airborne.
