It's hard to enjoy these games once you break them apart and figure out how they play. They have zero simulation value. You can make a fairly good argument that "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Prados from the 1970s was a pretty damn good simulation of WWII in Europe, with some indications as to what real impact variant events (Turkey joins the war, etc) might have had. HOI in any form isn't going to give you that.
I suppose it's all based on what you want. I happen to like simulations.
I still enjoy the game but for certain, I'm definitely under no illusions that it paints a realistic picture of the war, especially not since around 2020 when a lot of the more sandbox-focused elements and content were beginning to be introduced. Hearts of Iron 3 was quite a bit more grounded but it was also extremely opaque, so the shift in its sequel definitely made commercial sense.
I will say that I was somewhat disappointed in all of the Paradox games about the combat system - it's factor based and doesn't have any viable mapping to actual force structures. For instance, let's say you endeavor to build up an unusual country, you could possibly have that country create huge armies or navies that were totally ahistorical and wouldn't be representative of anything reality-based.
Take a look at the aforementioned "Rise and fall..." (and most simulation games of the past since wargaming became a real thing in the 1950s or so) and you find a fixed force pool. You can choose to economically juice up a country through gameplay, but it doesn't mean that the Soviet Union transcends limits to its force pool, or any other country. It can just rebuild losses without too much issue, or build out the whole force pool earlier in the game, let us say.
I'm a crotchety old guy that doesn't 'play' games, I break them to find out how they work. So maybe ignoring me is wise. :-)
See my comment above, I mentioned Third Reich (and Adv. Third Reich), which I grew up playing with my dad. I'm curious if there's a WW2 game you play these days, in preference to HOI.
I've often felt that there is a (not huge, but extant) economic opportunity for making such historical simulation games. I don't see many in the modern environment. There is a company that makes battlefield simulations that I know of, but one big issue with their products is updating and OS compatibility. For all that, you end up with a locally installed and semi-working game, at least that's been my experience. And they don't have a good WWII simulation.
For all its flaws, the DOS version of Third Reich is actually still playable if you are willing to go through the effort of simulating DOS. It did do a faithful job of implementing the rules, but it isn't very 'playable' in a modern gaming sense. It's highly turn based and you basically need to understand the PnP rulebook to work with it. And obviously the AI opponent is not good.
Got it. I discovered a game on Steam called Strategic Command, which has both a WW2 Europe and global WW2 scenarios/DLC and seems to be designed more along the lines of Third Reich. But I haven't heard much about it other than the Steam reviews and haven't tried it yet (I'm sure learning it would be a major time sink).
I bought the DOS version of Third Reich on PC way back. I probably continued to play it through the decade of the 00s using DOSBox. I always wished they had made Advanced Third Reich though.
Dad wouldn't play DOS Third Reich; he found the interface too frustrating. It's pretty awkward but I managed to master it. So I never had a human opponent there. The AI was indeed pretty bad, so I mainly saw it as a race to see how quickly I could win. Playing as the Allies I could generally keep France in the game, and therefore I'd have the Soviets conquer Turkey in 1940 just to create a wider front for their inevitable 1942 invasion vs. Germany. Which would be an insane way for an actual game of Third Reich to play out.
I've played Strategic Command. It wasn't bad as such games go, I happened to like the WWI variant best. The Gary Grigsby games were real wargames but _too large_ to be able to play in a timely fashion. The Matrix "Decisive Campaigns" series wasn't horrible either, though they were disjointed and not linked together into a larger strategic view. Unity of Command is the one I had the most fun with. It's relatively simple but fun, a different type of game than the hex-and-counter games deployed on a computer.
I agree with you and your dad about the TR on the computer. You had to really like the game to power through it. I prefer playing it as 2p. You have to dissemble a bit to do it, doing both sides, but it's more logical. France should not survive past a certain point; you can assure this as a human. The computer seems unable to play the identified strategies. Ditto for a lot of other TR situations. Forcing the 1:1 on London even in the worst case, making sure supply is always hosed for the Axis in the Med, triple lines of infantry in the SU, etc.
Reimplementing TR is a pretty good idea, but making it playable. Prados put a lot of effort into creating a good simulation, beating that is going to be hard. You can make it more complicated for sure, but does that make for a better game? Were any of his assumptions flawed? I haven't found too many.
With a computer backing you, you can simulate at another level perhaps. For instance, I made a joke a while back about how some nation at war recently was talking about creating high technology, and that sounded like me moving to Zanzibar and creating Silicon Valley there. Not very realistic, there's a lot that goes into that kind of innovation and then production. You have to take into account human capital, industrial capacity, rail networks, port availability, etc. when deciding how much you can puff up a nation's economy. There are policy decisions that could affect this - you could encourage immigration or childbearing in various ways, but these are very long term impacts. And you don't really have to have any impact but the high level decisions and let the computer do the rest, but if you want to dive into the hex-by-hex data you can. Would be a hell of a game.
While on that topic, "Rule the Waves 3", while a different type of game, was a lot of fun in this respect.
Been looking forward to this one, and it didn’t disappoint!
I already voiced some of my gripes in another discussion, and I can see where you share them. I hate the combat model and the trap options. The idea that all this complexity ultimately serves to pursue gamey strategies. HOI is way worse than CK and EU to me because the combat model is front and center. In those other games, victory mainly comes down to numbers and a few simple factors like leadership and tech.
Submarines were OP in Darkest Hour (HOI2 fork), and however many years later, they’re OP here too. At what point do they decide to just make subs a tool for commerce raiding?
I grew up playing Third Reich and later Adv. Third Reich with my dad, which are classic Avalon Hill board games. They had lots of hard rules to make sure the war followed a historic course. Adv. Third Reich mainly added a diplomacy system to allow some ahistoric but plausible things to happen.
It abstracted a lot of things that HOI4 models out in exquisite detail. E.g., fleets and air units just have a number. I’m sending 3 points of air support to back up this ground offensive. How many aircraft is that? How good are they? 3 points worth, that’s how much.
And what’s crazy is it modeled some things you’re saying HOI4 doesn’t. E.g. German control of Norway makes it easier to intercept Murmansk convoys. The risk of losing access to Swedish ore was modeled in the diplomacy of Adv. Third Reich.
The other thing that kills me in HOI4 is the lack of feedback. In Third Reich, you probably know TOO well why you lost a battle. There’s no fog of war. The probabilities are all in front of you. It’s always some obvious combination of bad dice rolls and insufficient force.
But in HOI4, which I played for maybe 100-200 hours (mainly in its first 2 years post-release), I never once knew why anything did or didn’t go my way. Did that enemy unit collapse mainly because I upgraded my artillery, because of some doctrine I pursued, my air support, or one of 1000 other things? How much did each of those help?
In Third Reich, I always knew how much my 3 points of air support helped: 3 points worth.
I know that HOI5 won’t dial up the abstraction to that level, but feedback is one of the biggest things I would wish for, that somehow respects the fog of war while still including intelligent analysis. I wonder if an LLM could be implemented to help assess things.
Just on history, one other thing I’ll touch on: the RAF really wasn’t that outnumbered (in terms of fighters at least) in the Battle of Britain. Especially by August 1940. It was outproducing the Germans in terms of fighters. I know you’re British and maybe there’s a British myth around playing up the numerical disadvantage.
The British also THOUGHT they were vastly outnumbered at the time; the size of the Luftwaffe was vastly overestimated following the collapse of France.
I do love the combat in this game (and I really enjoy it in Europa Universalis 4 too) but I have to agree that the best ways to play are usually gamey and not based in reality. A lot of the best Hearts of Iron 4 players simply know the quirks of the stats system, peace deals and how best to exploit them, it's definitely not ideal and it frustrates me when real life strategy doesn't work; if you try to use the actual blitzkrieg/encirclement strategy Germany did to take out France, you lose every time because the area has terrible supply and the local terrain gives huge tank maluses. There are other examples too like the USSR's defence in depth not really working in-game but I won't go on, I already struggled to cut down my combat section and it turned out longer than most articles I've written.
I've played Hearts of Iron 3 before (only about 40 hours) but unfortunately not much further back.
It's always an interesting consideration with Paradox games: the balance between keeping it historically on-track and player freedom. It's not perfect but I think HOI4 probably strikes the best balance possible in comparison to Victoria 3 where the AI never seems to do anything and EU4 where within 10 years the world can barely resemble historical fact.
That lack of feedback is the biggest barrier to new players by MILES. An advanced player like myself will look at a battle and think "Okay, the terrain isn't ideal, that template has low Soft Attack and the enemy is entrenched." But to the average player a lot of the time you see a Heavy Tank unable to smash through infantry and it just looks like bullshit. It took me maybe 800 hours to know what I was doing with this game.
Thanks for the recommendations! For sure there are some nationalistic myths that float around: my favourite of which being that we'd have been invaded without the RAF, as if the Royal Navy was suddenly and utterly going to be overpowered by Germany's ineffectual surface fleet and U-boats that were better suited to commerce raiding. I should have clarified though that I meant at the outbreak of the Battle of Britain. The RAF was outnumbered but as you say, we built more planes more cheaply and unlike Germany, pilots who survived being shot down were given a mug of tea and a lift back to the airfield, not a set of handcuffs and a shower of expletives.
To your point about realism vs. historical accuracy: I can get that. My long-running problem is with immense detail/complexity that is not in service to realism. An impenetrably complex naval combat model in which fleets of subs have a good chance to take out balanced fleets of surface ships is Exhibit A.
I don't have a problem with a game where things can go way off the rails. EU4 allows a lot of things to go way off the rails, but it's a much simpler game than HOI4, at least to me. At an extreme level, Civilization 2 shipped with a WW2 scenario. With basically no custom rules. It was pretty bonkers. But I played it a lot. Its charm was its simplicity, and taking system mastery of Civ2 to try to see how far off the rails you could get the war to go.
On another note, your last point makes me think, and I can't recall: does HOI4 model pilot training/attrition in any way? I don't recall it doing so.
This is a form of attrition that made a BIG difference in the war, even bigger in the case of Japan. O'Brien's book goes into the strains on pilot training in considerable detail.
One consequence he spends a lot of time on is attrition of aircraft from simple accidents, which I'm pretty confident HOI4 doesn't model at all, unless it was added by DLC. Japan lost/damaged a lot of aircraft by having inexperienced pilots fly them to remote island bases. IIRC, the losses from this cause alone were 2x those lost in combat. Germany lost a lot of aircraft this way too, though not as many as Japan.
Obviously this was a massive challenge in Japan's environment, given the distances involved: imagine a guy who has barely touched the controls of an aircraft before, trying to find an island somewhere in the Pacific at the edge of his aircraft's effective range. No turning around! A lot of these losses could be prevented by using carriers to deliver aircraft, but Japan couldn't afford to do that later in the war, unlike the US. But even Germany lost more aircraft this way than you would think.
It's the sort of topic speaks to the problems of modeling the war at this level of detail but then not modeling other things at a roughly equivalent level of detail that actually turned out to have an important impact.
Oh I understand better now and I see the issue, that mod I mentioned: Road to 56 goes a little bit towards this but fundamentally the game is still the same.
Hearts of Iron 4 does actually model some of this stuff. The Soviet Airforce is absolutely dreadful in early HOI4 and a big reasons for this is a set of debuffs that make air accidents incredibly common and increase experienced pilot losses; there is no model for pilot attrition/fatigue though.
I think a WW2/Modern Day total conversion for Victoria 3 would probably be the dream Paradox game because it models a lot of this but the huge caveat there is that its combat system is steaming hot diarrhoea
Agree about feedback – as a newcomer to these games, it's extraordinary how much of your time is spent trying to increase numbers whose effect won't be visible to you in any way. "Oh great, this technology gives a 1% buff to coordination. What's coordination? Well, like most players I have no clear idea, its results are completely intangible, I will never truly know if it made a difference to the outcome of anything, if some bug in the code meant it was being completely left out of the calculations it might take years for anyone to even realise... but the number's in green so it must be good, plus my alternative is another stat that I also don't understand, so I guess I'll just go for it." What's so frustrating is, if Paradox could be bothered to get better at this, it wouldn't just make their games easier for the novice – which would be pretty worthwhile in itself – it would also make them deeper for the veteran, because making these systems properly legible would offer so much more scope to deliberately interact with them.
Yes! Since I haven't touched HOI4 for 6-7 years now, I had forgotten that Coordination is even a thing, or how many stats like that there are. Could there by 10?
Combined with the fact that all of my vehicles have like 10 different stats. I just looked that list up again. Your aircraft have 4 different stats to manage how well they do in combat against another aircraft: Agility (not to be confused with Speed), Air Attack, Air Defense, and Air Superiority.
Great, so if I somehow manage to even notice that my Fighter (not to be confused with an Interceptor) is mostly losing in air battles against the enemy Fighter, which of those stats is responsible for it?
If they really want to keep that level of complexity, I think we'd be making progress if the game just had some formula for producing an Air-to-Air Effectiveness stat that was thoroughly tested and correlated pretty well to which plane wins in a dogfight, even if it was imperfect. And the game would give recommendations: increasing your Agility by +1 here would give +3 to Air-to-Air Effectiveness; a +1 to Air Defense would only give +2.
The same goes for bombing ships, where you have both a Naval Targeting and Naval Attack stat.
It's actually over 20 different stats for a land division! The most insane one for me is that there two separate stats for Hard Attack (basically representing your attack power against armoured targets) and Armour Piercing (um... also representing your attack power against armoured targets). Planes I haven't even begun to learn.
A classic issue with the whole strategy genre. They never bother to make a good tutorial, every video on it is 40mins. long and if you forget any of it while playing you're left to trawl Steam overlay for a guide
I recommend Gerhard Weinberg's "A World at War". It's really the best one-volume work on the war. I've read the Overy book. It's good. But I have some of its secondary sources which are more illuminating if you have the time.
Weinberg's conclusions were head and shoulders above all the other material I have read, and i've read a lot. Some personal and a lot of it in pursuit of a degree.
Haven't read Weinberg, I'll put it on my list to take a look.
The economic story has come to interest me a lot more as an adult than the play-by-play on the battlefield that fascinated me so much in my youth. And I think the economic story is what a grand strategy game is better positioned to simulate.
Well yeah, that's definitely true. That was what Prados was aiming for, in a PnP environment where computing power was scarce. Nowadays, I don't think we've scratched the surface of what might be possible in a simulation.
GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) is true, but there's a lot of data we could put to use in this effort, and not just war production figures and casualties. Economic data and demographics. Regional population.
And then spur endless argument about relative weighting of these factors.
I finally did it, I found the time to read your epic in it's entirety! 😉
In all seriousness, it was a very good, detailed read. I've never heard of Hearts of Iron before and strategy games are not my wheelhouse. However, I found it really interesting reading about your perspective on it. To spend 2000 hours playing it over many years, you clearly like it, yet you also spend just as long explaining its many flaws which leave you frustrated. It's a strange juxtaposition to me, I don't think I've ever experienced a game with this many conflicted feelings about it before, so I liked seeing your point of view.
Glad you made it through! It's a monster of a read, took me months to even begin to tackle some parts of the game, so I appreciate you reading it.
Paradox games have this effect on a lot of people. They are the only developer making grand strategy games with this much depth, content, budget and quality... and they know it too, so they have gotten more and more stingy over time and they seem to take literal years to iron out some issues with their games... but there's just nothing like Paradox's games. 5/10 sessions annoy me and I end them early, Of the remaining 5? 3 will be bang average but the last 2 will be the greatest game ever and a save I will remember for years.
My Europa Universalis 4 review will be coming likely next weekend and that's another Paradox game I feel similarly about.
I felt much the same way about the original Rome: Total War - I spent hundreds of hours playing out different scenarios and marveling at the possibilities that were hidden behind just a few little shifts in the historical record. At least when I wasn't getting stymied by obnoxious design decisions and screwed over by moronic AIs, that is. And just like HOI, I remember a phase where footage of TW games, Rome especially, was being used in lieu of recreations or cheap CGI by professors and documentarians.
It's hard to enjoy these games once you break them apart and figure out how they play. They have zero simulation value. You can make a fairly good argument that "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Prados from the 1970s was a pretty damn good simulation of WWII in Europe, with some indications as to what real impact variant events (Turkey joins the war, etc) might have had. HOI in any form isn't going to give you that.
I suppose it's all based on what you want. I happen to like simulations.
I still enjoy the game but for certain, I'm definitely under no illusions that it paints a realistic picture of the war, especially not since around 2020 when a lot of the more sandbox-focused elements and content were beginning to be introduced. Hearts of Iron 3 was quite a bit more grounded but it was also extremely opaque, so the shift in its sequel definitely made commercial sense.
I will say that I was somewhat disappointed in all of the Paradox games about the combat system - it's factor based and doesn't have any viable mapping to actual force structures. For instance, let's say you endeavor to build up an unusual country, you could possibly have that country create huge armies or navies that were totally ahistorical and wouldn't be representative of anything reality-based.
Take a look at the aforementioned "Rise and fall..." (and most simulation games of the past since wargaming became a real thing in the 1950s or so) and you find a fixed force pool. You can choose to economically juice up a country through gameplay, but it doesn't mean that the Soviet Union transcends limits to its force pool, or any other country. It can just rebuild losses without too much issue, or build out the whole force pool earlier in the game, let us say.
I'm a crotchety old guy that doesn't 'play' games, I break them to find out how they work. So maybe ignoring me is wise. :-)
See my comment above, I mentioned Third Reich (and Adv. Third Reich), which I grew up playing with my dad. I'm curious if there's a WW2 game you play these days, in preference to HOI.
I've often felt that there is a (not huge, but extant) economic opportunity for making such historical simulation games. I don't see many in the modern environment. There is a company that makes battlefield simulations that I know of, but one big issue with their products is updating and OS compatibility. For all that, you end up with a locally installed and semi-working game, at least that's been my experience. And they don't have a good WWII simulation.
For all its flaws, the DOS version of Third Reich is actually still playable if you are willing to go through the effort of simulating DOS. It did do a faithful job of implementing the rules, but it isn't very 'playable' in a modern gaming sense. It's highly turn based and you basically need to understand the PnP rulebook to work with it. And obviously the AI opponent is not good.
Got it. I discovered a game on Steam called Strategic Command, which has both a WW2 Europe and global WW2 scenarios/DLC and seems to be designed more along the lines of Third Reich. But I haven't heard much about it other than the Steam reviews and haven't tried it yet (I'm sure learning it would be a major time sink).
I bought the DOS version of Third Reich on PC way back. I probably continued to play it through the decade of the 00s using DOSBox. I always wished they had made Advanced Third Reich though.
Dad wouldn't play DOS Third Reich; he found the interface too frustrating. It's pretty awkward but I managed to master it. So I never had a human opponent there. The AI was indeed pretty bad, so I mainly saw it as a race to see how quickly I could win. Playing as the Allies I could generally keep France in the game, and therefore I'd have the Soviets conquer Turkey in 1940 just to create a wider front for their inevitable 1942 invasion vs. Germany. Which would be an insane way for an actual game of Third Reich to play out.
I've played Strategic Command. It wasn't bad as such games go, I happened to like the WWI variant best. The Gary Grigsby games were real wargames but _too large_ to be able to play in a timely fashion. The Matrix "Decisive Campaigns" series wasn't horrible either, though they were disjointed and not linked together into a larger strategic view. Unity of Command is the one I had the most fun with. It's relatively simple but fun, a different type of game than the hex-and-counter games deployed on a computer.
I agree with you and your dad about the TR on the computer. You had to really like the game to power through it. I prefer playing it as 2p. You have to dissemble a bit to do it, doing both sides, but it's more logical. France should not survive past a certain point; you can assure this as a human. The computer seems unable to play the identified strategies. Ditto for a lot of other TR situations. Forcing the 1:1 on London even in the worst case, making sure supply is always hosed for the Axis in the Med, triple lines of infantry in the SU, etc.
Reimplementing TR is a pretty good idea, but making it playable. Prados put a lot of effort into creating a good simulation, beating that is going to be hard. You can make it more complicated for sure, but does that make for a better game? Were any of his assumptions flawed? I haven't found too many.
With a computer backing you, you can simulate at another level perhaps. For instance, I made a joke a while back about how some nation at war recently was talking about creating high technology, and that sounded like me moving to Zanzibar and creating Silicon Valley there. Not very realistic, there's a lot that goes into that kind of innovation and then production. You have to take into account human capital, industrial capacity, rail networks, port availability, etc. when deciding how much you can puff up a nation's economy. There are policy decisions that could affect this - you could encourage immigration or childbearing in various ways, but these are very long term impacts. And you don't really have to have any impact but the high level decisions and let the computer do the rest, but if you want to dive into the hex-by-hex data you can. Would be a hell of a game.
While on that topic, "Rule the Waves 3", while a different type of game, was a lot of fun in this respect.
Been looking forward to this one, and it didn’t disappoint!
I already voiced some of my gripes in another discussion, and I can see where you share them. I hate the combat model and the trap options. The idea that all this complexity ultimately serves to pursue gamey strategies. HOI is way worse than CK and EU to me because the combat model is front and center. In those other games, victory mainly comes down to numbers and a few simple factors like leadership and tech.
Submarines were OP in Darkest Hour (HOI2 fork), and however many years later, they’re OP here too. At what point do they decide to just make subs a tool for commerce raiding?
I grew up playing Third Reich and later Adv. Third Reich with my dad, which are classic Avalon Hill board games. They had lots of hard rules to make sure the war followed a historic course. Adv. Third Reich mainly added a diplomacy system to allow some ahistoric but plausible things to happen.
It abstracted a lot of things that HOI4 models out in exquisite detail. E.g., fleets and air units just have a number. I’m sending 3 points of air support to back up this ground offensive. How many aircraft is that? How good are they? 3 points worth, that’s how much.
And what’s crazy is it modeled some things you’re saying HOI4 doesn’t. E.g. German control of Norway makes it easier to intercept Murmansk convoys. The risk of losing access to Swedish ore was modeled in the diplomacy of Adv. Third Reich.
The other thing that kills me in HOI4 is the lack of feedback. In Third Reich, you probably know TOO well why you lost a battle. There’s no fog of war. The probabilities are all in front of you. It’s always some obvious combination of bad dice rolls and insufficient force.
But in HOI4, which I played for maybe 100-200 hours (mainly in its first 2 years post-release), I never once knew why anything did or didn’t go my way. Did that enemy unit collapse mainly because I upgraded my artillery, because of some doctrine I pursued, my air support, or one of 1000 other things? How much did each of those help?
In Third Reich, I always knew how much my 3 points of air support helped: 3 points worth.
I know that HOI5 won’t dial up the abstraction to that level, but feedback is one of the biggest things I would wish for, that somehow respects the fog of war while still including intelligent analysis. I wonder if an LLM could be implemented to help assess things.
Just on history, one other thing I’ll touch on: the RAF really wasn’t that outnumbered (in terms of fighters at least) in the Battle of Britain. Especially by August 1940. It was outproducing the Germans in terms of fighters. I know you’re British and maybe there’s a British myth around playing up the numerical disadvantage.
The British also THOUGHT they were vastly outnumbered at the time; the size of the Luftwaffe was vastly overestimated following the collapse of France.
I recommend 3 books on the economics of WW2:
Why the Allies Won, by Overy
Wages of Destruction, by Tooze
How the War Was Won, by O’Brien
I'm glad it lived up to the very long wait.
I do love the combat in this game (and I really enjoy it in Europa Universalis 4 too) but I have to agree that the best ways to play are usually gamey and not based in reality. A lot of the best Hearts of Iron 4 players simply know the quirks of the stats system, peace deals and how best to exploit them, it's definitely not ideal and it frustrates me when real life strategy doesn't work; if you try to use the actual blitzkrieg/encirclement strategy Germany did to take out France, you lose every time because the area has terrible supply and the local terrain gives huge tank maluses. There are other examples too like the USSR's defence in depth not really working in-game but I won't go on, I already struggled to cut down my combat section and it turned out longer than most articles I've written.
I've played Hearts of Iron 3 before (only about 40 hours) but unfortunately not much further back.
It's always an interesting consideration with Paradox games: the balance between keeping it historically on-track and player freedom. It's not perfect but I think HOI4 probably strikes the best balance possible in comparison to Victoria 3 where the AI never seems to do anything and EU4 where within 10 years the world can barely resemble historical fact.
That lack of feedback is the biggest barrier to new players by MILES. An advanced player like myself will look at a battle and think "Okay, the terrain isn't ideal, that template has low Soft Attack and the enemy is entrenched." But to the average player a lot of the time you see a Heavy Tank unable to smash through infantry and it just looks like bullshit. It took me maybe 800 hours to know what I was doing with this game.
Thanks for the recommendations! For sure there are some nationalistic myths that float around: my favourite of which being that we'd have been invaded without the RAF, as if the Royal Navy was suddenly and utterly going to be overpowered by Germany's ineffectual surface fleet and U-boats that were better suited to commerce raiding. I should have clarified though that I meant at the outbreak of the Battle of Britain. The RAF was outnumbered but as you say, we built more planes more cheaply and unlike Germany, pilots who survived being shot down were given a mug of tea and a lift back to the airfield, not a set of handcuffs and a shower of expletives.
To your point about realism vs. historical accuracy: I can get that. My long-running problem is with immense detail/complexity that is not in service to realism. An impenetrably complex naval combat model in which fleets of subs have a good chance to take out balanced fleets of surface ships is Exhibit A.
I don't have a problem with a game where things can go way off the rails. EU4 allows a lot of things to go way off the rails, but it's a much simpler game than HOI4, at least to me. At an extreme level, Civilization 2 shipped with a WW2 scenario. With basically no custom rules. It was pretty bonkers. But I played it a lot. Its charm was its simplicity, and taking system mastery of Civ2 to try to see how far off the rails you could get the war to go.
On another note, your last point makes me think, and I can't recall: does HOI4 model pilot training/attrition in any way? I don't recall it doing so.
This is a form of attrition that made a BIG difference in the war, even bigger in the case of Japan. O'Brien's book goes into the strains on pilot training in considerable detail.
One consequence he spends a lot of time on is attrition of aircraft from simple accidents, which I'm pretty confident HOI4 doesn't model at all, unless it was added by DLC. Japan lost/damaged a lot of aircraft by having inexperienced pilots fly them to remote island bases. IIRC, the losses from this cause alone were 2x those lost in combat. Germany lost a lot of aircraft this way too, though not as many as Japan.
Obviously this was a massive challenge in Japan's environment, given the distances involved: imagine a guy who has barely touched the controls of an aircraft before, trying to find an island somewhere in the Pacific at the edge of his aircraft's effective range. No turning around! A lot of these losses could be prevented by using carriers to deliver aircraft, but Japan couldn't afford to do that later in the war, unlike the US. But even Germany lost more aircraft this way than you would think.
It's the sort of topic speaks to the problems of modeling the war at this level of detail but then not modeling other things at a roughly equivalent level of detail that actually turned out to have an important impact.
Oh I understand better now and I see the issue, that mod I mentioned: Road to 56 goes a little bit towards this but fundamentally the game is still the same.
Hearts of Iron 4 does actually model some of this stuff. The Soviet Airforce is absolutely dreadful in early HOI4 and a big reasons for this is a set of debuffs that make air accidents incredibly common and increase experienced pilot losses; there is no model for pilot attrition/fatigue though.
I think a WW2/Modern Day total conversion for Victoria 3 would probably be the dream Paradox game because it models a lot of this but the huge caveat there is that its combat system is steaming hot diarrhoea
Agree about feedback – as a newcomer to these games, it's extraordinary how much of your time is spent trying to increase numbers whose effect won't be visible to you in any way. "Oh great, this technology gives a 1% buff to coordination. What's coordination? Well, like most players I have no clear idea, its results are completely intangible, I will never truly know if it made a difference to the outcome of anything, if some bug in the code meant it was being completely left out of the calculations it might take years for anyone to even realise... but the number's in green so it must be good, plus my alternative is another stat that I also don't understand, so I guess I'll just go for it." What's so frustrating is, if Paradox could be bothered to get better at this, it wouldn't just make their games easier for the novice – which would be pretty worthwhile in itself – it would also make them deeper for the veteran, because making these systems properly legible would offer so much more scope to deliberately interact with them.
Yes! Since I haven't touched HOI4 for 6-7 years now, I had forgotten that Coordination is even a thing, or how many stats like that there are. Could there by 10?
Combined with the fact that all of my vehicles have like 10 different stats. I just looked that list up again. Your aircraft have 4 different stats to manage how well they do in combat against another aircraft: Agility (not to be confused with Speed), Air Attack, Air Defense, and Air Superiority.
Great, so if I somehow manage to even notice that my Fighter (not to be confused with an Interceptor) is mostly losing in air battles against the enemy Fighter, which of those stats is responsible for it?
If they really want to keep that level of complexity, I think we'd be making progress if the game just had some formula for producing an Air-to-Air Effectiveness stat that was thoroughly tested and correlated pretty well to which plane wins in a dogfight, even if it was imperfect. And the game would give recommendations: increasing your Agility by +1 here would give +3 to Air-to-Air Effectiveness; a +1 to Air Defense would only give +2.
The same goes for bombing ships, where you have both a Naval Targeting and Naval Attack stat.
Almost tempted to make my own guide reading this, I fully sympathise and even 2000 hours in, I'm only greatly familiar with the ground stats
It's actually over 20 different stats for a land division! The most insane one for me is that there two separate stats for Hard Attack (basically representing your attack power against armoured targets) and Armour Piercing (um... also representing your attack power against armoured targets). Planes I haven't even begun to learn.
Soft Attack = Your attack against unarmoured targets like trucks, infantry etc.
Hard Attack = Your damage against armoured targets like tanks
Piercing = How much you negate the armour bonus of a hard target, think of it as how much Hard Attack actually gets through the tank's plating
A classic issue with the whole strategy genre. They never bother to make a good tutorial, every video on it is 40mins. long and if you forget any of it while playing you're left to trawl Steam overlay for a guide
I recommend Gerhard Weinberg's "A World at War". It's really the best one-volume work on the war. I've read the Overy book. It's good. But I have some of its secondary sources which are more illuminating if you have the time.
Weinberg's conclusions were head and shoulders above all the other material I have read, and i've read a lot. Some personal and a lot of it in pursuit of a degree.
Haven't read Weinberg, I'll put it on my list to take a look.
The economic story has come to interest me a lot more as an adult than the play-by-play on the battlefield that fascinated me so much in my youth. And I think the economic story is what a grand strategy game is better positioned to simulate.
Well yeah, that's definitely true. That was what Prados was aiming for, in a PnP environment where computing power was scarce. Nowadays, I don't think we've scratched the surface of what might be possible in a simulation.
GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) is true, but there's a lot of data we could put to use in this effort, and not just war production figures and casualties. Economic data and demographics. Regional population.
And then spur endless argument about relative weighting of these factors.
I finally did it, I found the time to read your epic in it's entirety! 😉
In all seriousness, it was a very good, detailed read. I've never heard of Hearts of Iron before and strategy games are not my wheelhouse. However, I found it really interesting reading about your perspective on it. To spend 2000 hours playing it over many years, you clearly like it, yet you also spend just as long explaining its many flaws which leave you frustrated. It's a strange juxtaposition to me, I don't think I've ever experienced a game with this many conflicted feelings about it before, so I liked seeing your point of view.
Glad you made it through! It's a monster of a read, took me months to even begin to tackle some parts of the game, so I appreciate you reading it.
Paradox games have this effect on a lot of people. They are the only developer making grand strategy games with this much depth, content, budget and quality... and they know it too, so they have gotten more and more stingy over time and they seem to take literal years to iron out some issues with their games... but there's just nothing like Paradox's games. 5/10 sessions annoy me and I end them early, Of the remaining 5? 3 will be bang average but the last 2 will be the greatest game ever and a save I will remember for years.
My Europa Universalis 4 review will be coming likely next weekend and that's another Paradox game I feel similarly about.
Imagine not figuring out navy at 2k hours...
Jk - nice piece! Good to see hoi get some love outside of smelly autist corners of the internet.
Who says this isn't in that corner?
Inshallah we will get there
I felt much the same way about the original Rome: Total War - I spent hundreds of hours playing out different scenarios and marveling at the possibilities that were hidden behind just a few little shifts in the historical record. At least when I wasn't getting stymied by obnoxious design decisions and screwed over by moronic AIs, that is. And just like HOI, I remember a phase where footage of TW games, Rome especially, was being used in lieu of recreations or cheap CGI by professors and documentarians.
I distinctly remember my teacher using a Medieval II video to explain the Battle of Hastings as a kid