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One thing I like nearly as much as playing games is history, and one
of my favorite periods of interest is WW2. Many times I had thought
to myself, "what if this happened?" or "what if they did this
instead of that?" Many war games came out and tried to do that, but
were not up to the ideas that I was interested in.
Then out comes Hearts of Iron, an incredible war strategy game that
works in real time, RTWS. Hearts of Iron combines the notable
features of an RTS, like resource gathering and (of course) real
time battles, and combines them with a rich war strategy, with
logistics, war waging, alliance forging, and even research. HoI
turns out to be a particularly interesting war strategy game.
Graphics - Basic, Boring
The graphics in Hearts of Iron are primitive at best. The entire
world is portrayed much like a Risk board, provinces with your unit
icon in the center. Everything is played out in an orbital view of
the nations. All units are 2D sprites with only a couple of frames
of animation for moving and fighting. There aren't even a load of
colors here, as the game is barely considerable of 16 bit. The
menus, though, are well done and perfect for the time period.
Great Soundtrack
There are a ton of soundtracks, around two hours worth. Fortunately,
unlike the graphics, these are REALLY well done. Every single one of
them is a CD quality MP3 and is comprised of war-themed classical
pieces. It is perfect to invade Germany to the 1812 Overture. Good
job on the soundtrack, sounds great, and there are a lot of them. It
is rare to put a soundtrack on my WinAmp playlist that originates
from a game.
Gameplay, Where It Is All At
The meat of this game is the gameplay itself. I'll go into each
individual part below: Resource Management: Resource
management is a simple concept. Your nation has factories in each
province that provide materials for your nation. The more factories
you have, the more materials you have to use. To run your factories
you need coal and rubber, which have to be either produced within
your borders or bartered on the world market for your own excess
supplies. Run short and you are going to have a lack of materials
needed to run the nation at full speed.
The industrial might is then divided up into four parts: Consumer
goods, supplies, research, and military construction. Consumer goods
are dependent on number of factories present as well as government
type. This is needed to keep anti-government sentiment down, which
in turn keeps your factories working at full steam. Supplies are
required to keep your military units intact, as well as reinforce
damaged units. Research points are obvious, they are used to give
your nation and military more advanced equipment, and thus an
advantage in battle. Construction is needed to build units to invade
other nations and protect your own.
Another important resource is manpower. Each province under your
control produces a set number of men per month, conscription age
people. They are needed to reinforce armies and produce new ones and
are just as important as any other resource you may have. No men
means no army. Logistics is a very important part of
this game. Sure, you can float your navy and dump your army just
about anywhere on the map, but keeping them fed and gassed up is not
easy. This is where your logistics takes place. It is necessary to
make sure you have a land route open and under your control, or a
port open if you require a sea lane. You open up a simple menu, set
ships to go, and off they go, delivering needed oil and supplies.
Unfortunately, you cannot just forget about them. The seas are not a
friendly place, as they are subject to attacks from enemy ships.
This is where you need to assign them escorts as well as make sure
you order your navy to keep the sea lanes clear of enemy attacks.
Of course, when your line is cut, your unit may disband entirely,
leaving you with nothing but an easily conquered piece of land.
Attacking takes strategy, not just dumping units into the enemy. You
may want to perform specific tasks to ensure a victory on the field.
Since the game is in real time, you are able to set attack times to
your units. Say you want to invade a neighboring province, and you
have land and air assets at your command. A good method of attack in
this case is to first send in infantry. Next, send in tanks in blitz
mode to disrupt the infantry, and an hour before that, send in the
bomber squadron to further disrupt the enemy. This makes them
disorganized and a victory is just a bit easier.
Organization is important, as a disorganized army fails quickly.
Organization is dependent on multiple factors: researched tactics,
length from last battle, and length from last reinforcement. A
unit’s organization builds up at a rate dependant on the
infrastructure of the province it is in. Better the infrastructure,
the faster they become fully organized.
It is also to specify which units you want to stay behind. You are
capable of building specialized units, like the engineer version of
the infantry or marine, which has a high defense. The longer a unit
stays in a particular province, they begin to dig in more. By
digging in, the unit is capable of building up its defense even
more. While sitting there, it is also wise to invest in defensive
positions, like bunkers or AA guns, to further improve the defensive
power of your units against an attack. So, if you plan on moving a
unit to a front line position, make sure you keep them there until
they are out of the way of attack as they are highly able to defend
themselves.
Now, what is a fighting force without commanders? Commanders help
determine the fighting ability of a unit. Better commanders can
command more units as well as make them more effective against the
enemy. They gain experience, and can also be promoted. Field
commanders fall in this place. They are important to keep your front
line commanders fully effective. If a field commander is too far,
they lose their touch. With all those features, and more
that I cannot even remember, how easy is it to actually do all that?
Seems like a lot of work. Fear not, manipulation of all those
functions is rather easy. A series of menus, five of them total, are
used. Never do you have to go more than two deep so what you are
looking for is always right there on top. Good stuff.
Stability Problems
The biggest issue with this game is the stability of it. I
frequently get random crashes during the game. I'm cruising along,
taking over South America, and boom, crashes to the desktop as if
nothing was running in the first place. No error message, nothing,
just as if I clicked the quit button. This also happens frequently
in the scenario editor.
Scenario Editor is OK
First and foremost, the editor DOES NOT work in anything but
16 bit mode. It gives me an error in 32 bit. Anyway, this allows you
to do some fun stuff. You can increase the enemy's tech level,
decrease yours, play with resources, whatever. A lot of factors can
be played with to make the game as easy or as challenging as you
want. Not much here, other than playing with available units,
province stats, and technology. Playing with technology doesn't seem
to work well. Never seems to have saved the changes even though it
said it did. You cannot add land masses to the map and altering
borders is a pain in the rear.
Difficutly - What you want when you want
There are three ways to adjust your difficulty level. First, your
standard difficulty level. Easy to hard, normal stuff. This
determines ease of winning fights and working with logistics and
other factors. Then, there is your AI aggressiveness level. Higher
the aggression level, the more readily the enemy invades. Then there
is a cool one. You can pretty much play as any country in the game.
Just right-click on the flag at the select screen and play on. Want
to fight the war as Chile? Go ahead, no one is stopping ya. Playing
a small, backwater country in this game offers a greater degree of
challenge.
Bottom Line
Hearts of Iron is a solid, entertaining war game. Visuals aren't the
top of the line, but that hardly matters, this thing is fun. Had
there not been a load of stability problems and random crashes, this
game could have easily been of A quality. This baby is really an
incredible war strategy otherwise.
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