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By playing the tutorials in Graviteam Tactics Mius Front I’ve returned to World War II, even if my intention is to return only briefly. Have I inadvertently opened the floodgates? That I took first one, and then two, minor diversions makes it seem all the more logical that I should pick now to install Hearts of Iron IV on my computer and run through its tutorial. The true logic behind my timing, however, is based on my own mistaken reading of dates.
Hearts of Iron IV, as a major facelift to the long-running series, was announced some time in 2014. At that time I was very much focused on World War II gaming and so this was naturally very exciting news for me. The release was originally slated for 2015. That said, I didn’t have illusions that I’d be jumping into this one within the year. Paradox has demonstrated a habit of releasing games in what seems to be a partial state of completion. Combine the frustrating game play with the costs of these titles at full freight and, let’s just say, early adoption was not in the cards for me. The smart money seems to hold off at least a year to give time for things to stabilize on both fronts.
Nonetheless, I was eager to get on board as soon as prudence would allow. The prior version of the engine had its weakness and bringing the excellent game play of the earlier Hearts of Iron iterations into the Europa Universalis IV engine seemed like it could deliver everything I always wanted. In the meantime, of course, I had to content myself with the earlier games in the series which, in addition to settling well into their groove, had also produced some very impressive mods and conversions.
The irony (tee hee, get it?) of this all is that I drifted away from World War II before I ever really took advantage of HoI 2 or 31, despite having paid for both. If memory serves (never a given these days), my only extensive game time in this particular branch of the Paradox family was with the original Hearts of Iron sometime in the mid-aughts. Furthermore, despite my professed excitement (recall, I’ve even gone so far as to credit the Hearts of Iron IV release with inspiring me to include regular wargaming discussion to this blog), it took me years before I was inspired to purchase the title and years more before I opened it up to play. That is to say, just now.
Yet the true reason I was keen on finally installing now is that HOI4 has an apparently well-received mod for the Cold War era called Cold War Iron Curtain. The project extends the engine to pick up where Hearts of Iron leaves off. In fact, there are three such launching points… immediately following the war, 1960, and 1973. My mistake was to jot down that a scenario started in 1970. As my gaming has taken me into the fall of 1969, I figured I needed to be ready for this new game. As with Mius Front, however, the tutorial takes you back to World War II. Actually, in this case, a bit before.
The HOI4 tutorial starts you off as Italy and gets you running that country just in time to fight the good fight in Ethiopia. The relatively-limited fighting, taking place during a time before Europe was engaged in general conflict, allows the player to ignore all else but completing this one conquest. I’ll add, though, that if you take away all the tutorial guidance, you’re simply playing Italy in 1935-1936.
I had yet to see how HOI4 handles front lines and operations and the tutorial does impress. Add this to the EU4 UI improvements that streamline the management of your empire, and this game looks like it satisfies those long-held expectations. Indeed, it would make me eager to play out a HOI4 scenario except that I don’t really want to spend the next eight months working through a grand-strategic treatment of World War II.
That’s why the Cold War mod appealed to me. The new game, the great mechanics, but about a topic I am also enthusiastic about. Out of the box, though, I ran into several problems.
The worst of them is that I had a crash to desktop as I was trying to get some of the initial settings right.
Just to walk into this one slowly, let’s recall that my goal is to align the 1973 scenario from Cold War Iron Curtain with the real conflicts from that same year and the other games that portray them. My starting point, as I lengthily explain above, was the tutorial from the stock game. Step two was the 1960 scenario, from which I could get a feel for the mod without actually investing myself in a lengthy play session. As with most Paradox games, the default starting point is one of the designated significant nations given the chosen starting year. This pointed me to playing the United States (although I’ll not bore you with all the reasons why). One might assume this starts me off (counterproductively) at maximum complexity – but my point is not to win, or even to enjoy the game… just to get a feel of how the mod works.
What I discovered was that my nation was constructing military units that were all out-of-date, an artifact of how HOI4 models technology. The base game uses a tree to simulate the advance in weaponry through World War II. Sufficient resources and proper planning allows a player to progress from research to design through manufacturing and deployment, fielding weapons and technology that might give their nation a key advantage in battle – assuming one had the foresight to prepare in advance.
The 1960 scenario starts with a well-funded American military-industrial complex churning out Cold War armaments to bolster a position as protector of the free world. A warning, however, pops up explaining that nearly everything being produced is technologically out-of-date. That is to say, the advantages of American ingenuity circa 1960 made it through research and design but not into manufacturing and deployment. This seemed to me to be an oversight and so I updated all my production queues to use current technology.
Shortly thereafter the game crashed.
From what online discussions there are, this mod does not seem to be inherently unstable. I’m going to assume, without putting into the additional work necessary to verify, that the cause of my crash was something that I did or, at least, something that I could avoid. Perhaps it was the massive shift in manufacturing made instantaneously. Even if this is so, itdoes not bode well for an extended foray into the realm of what-if that I’d have to tiptoe around the game’s sensitivities. Moreover, the insta-hitch was enough to make me stop and think about HOI‘s combination economy/military model and whether it fits into the 1960s or the 1970s.
What I want from this game, and I must assume what the mod developers were going for as well, is an ability to simulate a World War III. After all, that’s what Hearts of Iron was built for – grand-strategic, global war played out in detail. Naturally, given both the background and HOI4‘s prewar focus, part of the experience has to be that transition from historical events to the alternative history. That is to say, Cold War Iron Curtain has to be a plausible simulator of actual Cold War economics and diplomacy so that the lead-in to hot war makes sense. Otherwise, a decent TOAW NATO v Warsaw Pact scenario would probably be more satisfying than a reskinned HOI.
It should be obvious that I didn’t get into this deep enough to properly evaluate, but I do question whether HOI‘s economic and diplomatic modeling can fit the Cold War era – especially into the 1970s. In the 1930s, the keystone of world diplomacy remained the nation state and I think most understood that there was an arms race, of sorts, to prepare for (or perhaps just deter) a repeat of the First World War. HOI’s prewar gameplay attempts to capture this. Do you start trying to out-tech your enemies, designing game-changing advancements for tanks and aircraft? Do you begin to beef up your numbers of men under arms and get them experience (perhaps in minor conflicts like Ethiopia or the Spanish Civil War)? Do you build the fortifications that defined the path of World War I or break new ground for mechanized warfare and combined arms?
Moreover, World War II (although nobody might have realized it at the time) represented an end to the age of colonialism. Prior to the Second World War, the economics of world power meant securing the natural resources necessary to fuel an industrial economy. Post-war, global trade and its dependencies replaced colonialism and the economic guarantees of sea power. Immediately following WWII, America’s manufacturing base may have been singular but the realities of the 1970s saw the build-up of the global supply chains that, for better or for worse, we now enjoy.
Armaments themselves underwent a shift as the Cold War got underway. As the superpowers fought through proxies, they provided the belligerents with arms, ammunition, funding, and (presumably) direction. Non-belligerent allies were granted defense contract exchanges and licensing deals, sometimes coming with extensive strings attached. Can a game like HOI model “advisors,” diplomatic pressure, and the CIA? Does it understand that the “arms race” that one the war was in technologies – such as space weapons, nuclear systems, and “stealth” – that may never have actually been intended for use?
I am not, at this point, comfortable that the mod (and the substrate that it is built upon) is up to the tasks at hand.
I’m hoping that by the time I get around to the Yom Kippur War, the false start of this month’s adventure will be forgotten. Perhaps some future updates to this mod will smooth my entry into the game and, by this time next year, I will be able to derive both pleasure and understanding from Cold War Iron Curtain.
In the meantime, I’m looking at the well-aged Hearts of Iron 4 and thinking I’d probably really appreciate its grand-strategic take on the Second World War. Too bad I’m not in a World War II mood. Although I do seem to be stumbling in that direction despite myself.
- Between the time I started writing this post and when I hit publish, the blog Strategy and Wargaming posted an article about the best Wargames to have circa 2024. Hearts of Iron IV is, of course, on the list (at number 12) but that post reminded me of another feature of the older HOI iterations. The #3 release, especially when including some of the hard-core mods, may have perfected the game as a “wargame.” Many long-time fans felt that Mark IV took them away from that. ↩︎
et tu, Bluto? 