I have, in general, nothing but praise* for Paradox games, for example, Europa Universalis (EU) III and Victoria (Vicky) II have absorbed far more of my life than I would care to admit, with Sword of the Stars (SotS) acting as an occasional distraction. Therefore, Hearts of Iron (HOI) III seemed like another dose of the same sweet, sweet, hyper-detailed, poorly documented, overwhelming, quasi-historical empire building. However, I've found HOI to be.... less than fully engaging. This isn't to say that I'm not going to try to take USSR to victory** in the Great Patriotic War***, but I doubt that I'll lose many weekends to it. So, is it Nazi fatigue, or is there something more at work?
Part of it is, of course, that HOI has all of the standard Paradox games.... interesting and exciting information presentation issues. It takes a while to get used to the way that information is organized within the interface, and there's a big chunk of learning curve to figuring out HOW to do things. Beyond even that, your ability to figure out what things actually do is a bit of a sticky wicket. For instance: if I order to my spies to increase national unity, what have I really accomplished? If I research something that gives me +10% to radar effectiveness, is that meaningful? Close air support craft are researched from the bomber pane, but are predicated on fighter upgrades, does that mean they benefit from bomber or fighter research? What do various infantry doctrines do? How do I add more guys to an army? Does the suggestion pane for production give reasonable advice? Ok, so, the Spanish Civil war started, can I send dudes over to fight for the republicans? No? Okay, why? Why are the commy Republicans not interesting in joining ComIntern? Why is Communist China not interested in Alliance, even though it's GETTING FUCKING INVADED BY JAPAN? Etc.
Additionally, HOI assumes you have a basic idea how WWII era armies are put together. I don't, at a fundamental level. I have a basic idea about the major tactical and strategic ideas (i.e. I know about the importance of logistics, combined arms, Schwerpunkt and Blitz, the formation of pockets etc.), but how the armies were actually organized, not a clue! I know it's an admission of weakness, but I have so many hours in a day, and I'd given a choice between reading about the various ranks of command in the Red Army and making space humans shoot at space possums, the choice is clear****.
I must confess that I found WWII to be substantially less interesting than the conflicts that bookended it: WWI and the Cold War. WWII has an easy beauty to it, and, at least in freedom-land^, it's THE war. Whereas WWI is largely forgotten, except as a reference to the discussion of the 1920's to explain why people suddenly started acting, well, modern, and the Cold War is regarded, not as a conflict in which real strategic choices were made, but more as... a period in time over which people have no control, like a season, or as a purely internal conflict within the United States, a sort of national test of character, which, I suppose, was the experience of most folks during the conflict. They're boring at best, and ugly at worst. Of course, part of my slight distaste is due to the fact that I'm a dirty hipster, so, of course, I can't like the popular war.
I suppose I should clarify what I mean by beauty. I'd like to establish that I understand war is not pretty-pretty. Real people die, leaving their friends and family bereft; resources which could be used to improve human life are instead wasted on trying to destroy it. I am not, in general, in favor of armed conflict. With that said, I play a lot of strategy games^*. Strategy games require a challenge, which must be overcome, in order to be interesting^**. Interpersonal conflicts are easier to model that intrapersonal conflicts, and, for that matter, armed conflicts are easy to model. So we get war and death on a massive scale so that we might be entertained.
Beyond that, most people^*** have a fair amount of competitive itchiness, which is well-scratched by games which pit you against another human being, real or simulated, and, beyond even that, in the Oort Cloud of the solar system analogy of the human psyche, war is a force that resonates within us^****. I could make a long paper on the appeal of war and/or fighting in games, but, to return to the point at hand^^, there are a lot of games that simulate war, and I play many of them. I have an appreciation for the unique aesthetics of games. When the mechanics of a game create interesting decisions, the results of which make sense in an intuitive way, I find that pretty. When the mechanics create non-decisions, that's boring and/or stupid. When the mechanics of a game create situations in which there are interesting decisions, but the results of which cannot be evaluated except through the lens of internal game-logic or there are so many decisions that I am unable to evaluate the outcomes, I find that ugly. These categories are somewhat mutable, as previously ugly systems can have an inner beauty that becomes evident on repeated playings
Some example of the above:
Rock, Paper, Scissors is simple, but pretty. The interactions of the three choices make sense and are easy to evaluate (R>S>P>R etc.), but the player interactions yield a surprising amount of depth (there's no simple best choice in any given throw).
Candyland is stupid/boring. You make no choices. It's entirely determined by card-draws with no player input. It's a game for the L7 crowd^^*.
Tic Tac Toe (and other solved games) is(are) also stupid/boring. The only real decision is: do I want to play optimally?
Axis and Allies (the classic edition) has a fair bit of ugliness. Consider the case of the German army staring down the Soviets on the eastern front. Infantry units cost 3, and have a 1/6 chance of hitting on the attack, and a 1/3 chance of hitting on the defense. Tanks cost 5, and have a 1/2 chance of hitting on the attack and a 1/3 chance of hitting on the defense. The tactically correct decision for both sides is to build nothing but infantry.
Evidence: Imagine both sides have 15 to spend. If player 1 buys 5 infantry, and player 2 buys 3 tanks and attacks, the following will happen when player 2 attacks:
player 1: 5 infantry*1/3 chance of hitting gives 1+2/3 hits = 1.666 tanks die on average
player 2 3 tanks * 1/2 chance of hitting gives: 1+1/2 hits = 1.5 infantry die, on average
result
player 2 is trading tanks for infantry at <1 for 1, and tanks cost more.
If player 1 attacks:
5 infantry * 1/6 chance of hitting gives 5/6 hits = .83 tanks die
3 tanks * 1/3 chance of hitting gives 1 hit = 1 infantry dies
result:
player 1 is getting an resource advantage of ~4.16 to 3
If both players build infantry, the person who attacks is at a disadvantage
So, the ideal strategy for a WWII game is trench warfare. This is ugly.
To return to the actual conflicts in question^^**, namely, what I mean when I say WWI and the Cold War are ugly/boring in comparison to WWII. WWI is boring at best, at least during the majority of the war, because you can't really attack unless you have absolutely overwhelming force, because the defense is so much stronger than the offense, in basically every situation^^***. The Cold War descends into profound ugliness, again at the tactical level, because the offense, in a "proper conflict" is completely unbeatable. So, you get silly proxy wars and counter insurgency, in which you can't use your best weapons, and if you start winning TOO much, the other side will step up their commitment and you're back where you started. I apologize to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Columbia, Guatemala, Egypt, Israel, the states surrounding Israel, the Palestinian people, Cuba, and anyone else who I missed . The conflicts in which NATO or the Warsaw Pact contributed significantly to the outcome are not trivial from the perspective of the people who fought in them, but from the perspective of an American War nerd, they're a lot less clean/interesting than, say, Operation Barbarossa or even the US Pacific campaign.
However, and here is the crux of my argument, despite the fact that the battles of WWI and the Cold War were less interesting than WWII, the, for want of a better term, grad strategy of the conflicts was, in my mind, far more interesting. The Cold War conflicts were, by the nature of the two factions competing, political, economic, and social struggles as well as military ones. The threat of nuclear annihilation made both sides circumspect, wary of making use of the full extent of their might. So the battle between the USA and the USSR was channeled into a thousand minor battles and skirmishes, with each commitment only as important as the other side made it. The game of brinksmanship is exhilarating, as you never quite know how far you can push before the other side pushes back. In this sort of war, a defector is as important as a brigade of infantry, and the various minor actors in the conflict are capable of choosing sides and making a difference^^**** in the outcome.
WWI was both an accident and the fervent wish of most of the countries involved: A massive arms race, the desire to stay a great power, and questions about long-run industrial/fiscal standing, combined with a belief on the part of several parties within the great powers that a war would strengthen their hand lead to an intense desire for conflict. However, The alliances created a deadly web that would enmesh the whole world in war once any string was plucked, so, of course, going to war was unthinkable, and the spider's web-dam held back the bitter water of ware. But, the bullet of Princip, a man who was rejected from The Black Hand for being "too small and weak, " the struggles of a tiny fly, broke the web, making NOT going to war unthinkable and unleashing a deluge.
Even after the war began, the question of which side Italy would fall to, the entrance of the US into the war, and the collapse of Russia made diplomatic maneuvering an interesting part of the conflict. The issues of the British blockade of Germany, and corresponding German submarine warfare made questions of trade and transport essential. Moreover, the exhaustion of both sides, exemplified by the collapse of Russia and the French Mutinies at the front, meant that both sides had to carefully manage their own political situations, desperately trying to maintain national unity and control dissent. Finally, the Great War was not a morality place, claims of various historians to the contrary, neither the Triple Alliance nor the Triple Entente were monstrous, both were as vicious or virtuous as the circumstances required.
But WWII is, on the highest levels, clean. The sides of the conflict are more or less determined, and the level of internal struggle within the various Allied or the Axis powers was low. No-one considered anything other than the complete capitulation of Germany, (or Britain, or the USSR) to be an acceptable outcome. The Lend/Lease Act, combined with the untouchable industrial heartland of the Central US meant that time was completely on the side of the Allied powers once the USA entered the war, and for that matter, the question of US entry into the war was less, in my mind, a question of if as when. In short, despite the fact that WWII was a total war, it was effectively a purely military conflict.
Which bring us full circle. I think my biggest complaint about HOI is that it's effectively a wargame, rather than the sort of sandbox history game that Vicky and EU are. There's never a question IF a war which looks remarkably similar to WWII will come, the only questions are 1) when, and 2) what preparations will the various powers have made. In comparison, in Vicky, I've grown Prussia along vaguely historical lines, but, I've also created a united Scandinavian republic, taken over Egypt as the United States, Unified Italy and continued in relative^^^ peace and prosperity, and lead Argentina to utter defeat in a Falkland Islands-esque war with Great Britain circa 1870. In EU, I can tell you stories about my Russian (I was Novogorod, not Muscovy, thank you) and Bohemian games, share tales of the woes of the Knights of Teuton, and weave an epic yarn about the creation of a French-speaking US of A^^^*. In HOI, I've fought Germany as the USSR, I've fought Germany as Czechoslovakia, and Japan as Nationalist China. In other words, I've fought WWII thrice.
This is the main problem that I have with HOI: is that it feels like I'm playing some old Cardboard and Hex wargame. A wargame with a lot of depth and a bunch of fascinating options, but a wargame none-the-less. I am going to fight WWII at some point during the game, it's just a question of how well I do. Spain will have a civil war. Germany will absorb a bunch of surrounding countries. Japan will join the Axis etc. These games are fun, don't get me wrong, but if you're going to shoot a fire-hose of information at me in order to provide the illusion of complete control over the destiny of a country, I'd like to be able to, you know, choose the destiny of a country, rather than seeing if I'm better than Rommel or Guderian or Zhukov or DeGaulle. Because let me tell you, I'm not. I am, however, arguably better than any of them at shooting space possums.
*for specific values of nothing and praise
** here victory means: not being absorbed by the fascists
*** I am but a horrible, twisted, grognardy parody of a man
**** I murder the space Possums for you, Jenn my darling.
^That's the US of A for all you communistic foreigners.
^*For arguments about what is a strategy game, see Three Moves Ahead: The Best Strategy Game Podcast in my personal opinion
^**For that matter, I would argue that a lot of other things require challenges to be engaging
^***By this I mean: most people I know, which is a very poor sampling of human beings
^****This has been discussed at some length in the excellent War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
^^ However tangentially related to the actual thesis of this post
^* Those are squares, hepcat.
^^** I bet you thought I'd never get back to the point at hand!
^^***Note, this only really applies on the western front
^^****I don't know if a quick Russian victory in Afghanistan or US support of the Anglo/French forces in the Suez Canal Affair would have lengthened the life of the USSR by even a day, but from the perspective of the people who were in the thick of things, these questions were of critical importance.
^^^Read: BORING
^^^* The A is for Africa
Part of it is, of course, that HOI has all of the standard Paradox games.... interesting and exciting information presentation issues. It takes a while to get used to the way that information is organized within the interface, and there's a big chunk of learning curve to figuring out HOW to do things. Beyond even that, your ability to figure out what things actually do is a bit of a sticky wicket. For instance: if I order to my spies to increase national unity, what have I really accomplished? If I research something that gives me +10% to radar effectiveness, is that meaningful? Close air support craft are researched from the bomber pane, but are predicated on fighter upgrades, does that mean they benefit from bomber or fighter research? What do various infantry doctrines do? How do I add more guys to an army? Does the suggestion pane for production give reasonable advice? Ok, so, the Spanish Civil war started, can I send dudes over to fight for the republicans? No? Okay, why? Why are the commy Republicans not interesting in joining ComIntern? Why is Communist China not interested in Alliance, even though it's GETTING FUCKING INVADED BY JAPAN? Etc.
Additionally, HOI assumes you have a basic idea how WWII era armies are put together. I don't, at a fundamental level. I have a basic idea about the major tactical and strategic ideas (i.e. I know about the importance of logistics, combined arms, Schwerpunkt and Blitz, the formation of pockets etc.), but how the armies were actually organized, not a clue! I know it's an admission of weakness, but I have so many hours in a day, and I'd given a choice between reading about the various ranks of command in the Red Army and making space humans shoot at space possums, the choice is clear****.
I must confess that I found WWII to be substantially less interesting than the conflicts that bookended it: WWI and the Cold War. WWII has an easy beauty to it, and, at least in freedom-land^, it's THE war. Whereas WWI is largely forgotten, except as a reference to the discussion of the 1920's to explain why people suddenly started acting, well, modern, and the Cold War is regarded, not as a conflict in which real strategic choices were made, but more as... a period in time over which people have no control, like a season, or as a purely internal conflict within the United States, a sort of national test of character, which, I suppose, was the experience of most folks during the conflict. They're boring at best, and ugly at worst. Of course, part of my slight distaste is due to the fact that I'm a dirty hipster, so, of course, I can't like the popular war.
I suppose I should clarify what I mean by beauty. I'd like to establish that I understand war is not pretty-pretty. Real people die, leaving their friends and family bereft; resources which could be used to improve human life are instead wasted on trying to destroy it. I am not, in general, in favor of armed conflict. With that said, I play a lot of strategy games^*. Strategy games require a challenge, which must be overcome, in order to be interesting^**. Interpersonal conflicts are easier to model that intrapersonal conflicts, and, for that matter, armed conflicts are easy to model. So we get war and death on a massive scale so that we might be entertained.
Beyond that, most people^*** have a fair amount of competitive itchiness, which is well-scratched by games which pit you against another human being, real or simulated, and, beyond even that, in the Oort Cloud of the solar system analogy of the human psyche, war is a force that resonates within us^****. I could make a long paper on the appeal of war and/or fighting in games, but, to return to the point at hand^^, there are a lot of games that simulate war, and I play many of them. I have an appreciation for the unique aesthetics of games. When the mechanics of a game create interesting decisions, the results of which make sense in an intuitive way, I find that pretty. When the mechanics create non-decisions, that's boring and/or stupid. When the mechanics of a game create situations in which there are interesting decisions, but the results of which cannot be evaluated except through the lens of internal game-logic or there are so many decisions that I am unable to evaluate the outcomes, I find that ugly. These categories are somewhat mutable, as previously ugly systems can have an inner beauty that becomes evident on repeated playings
Some example of the above:
Rock, Paper, Scissors is simple, but pretty. The interactions of the three choices make sense and are easy to evaluate (R>S>P>R etc.), but the player interactions yield a surprising amount of depth (there's no simple best choice in any given throw).
Candyland is stupid/boring. You make no choices. It's entirely determined by card-draws with no player input. It's a game for the L7 crowd^^*.
Tic Tac Toe (and other solved games) is(are) also stupid/boring. The only real decision is: do I want to play optimally?
Axis and Allies (the classic edition) has a fair bit of ugliness. Consider the case of the German army staring down the Soviets on the eastern front. Infantry units cost 3, and have a 1/6 chance of hitting on the attack, and a 1/3 chance of hitting on the defense. Tanks cost 5, and have a 1/2 chance of hitting on the attack and a 1/3 chance of hitting on the defense. The tactically correct decision for both sides is to build nothing but infantry.
Evidence: Imagine both sides have 15 to spend. If player 1 buys 5 infantry, and player 2 buys 3 tanks and attacks, the following will happen when player 2 attacks:
player 1: 5 infantry*1/3 chance of hitting gives 1+2/3 hits = 1.666 tanks die on average
player 2 3 tanks * 1/2 chance of hitting gives: 1+1/2 hits = 1.5 infantry die, on average
result
player 2 is trading tanks for infantry at <1 for 1, and tanks cost more.
If player 1 attacks:
5 infantry * 1/6 chance of hitting gives 5/6 hits = .83 tanks die
3 tanks * 1/3 chance of hitting gives 1 hit = 1 infantry dies
result:
player 1 is getting an resource advantage of ~4.16 to 3
If both players build infantry, the person who attacks is at a disadvantage
So, the ideal strategy for a WWII game is trench warfare. This is ugly.
To return to the actual conflicts in question^^**, namely, what I mean when I say WWI and the Cold War are ugly/boring in comparison to WWII. WWI is boring at best, at least during the majority of the war, because you can't really attack unless you have absolutely overwhelming force, because the defense is so much stronger than the offense, in basically every situation^^***. The Cold War descends into profound ugliness, again at the tactical level, because the offense, in a "proper conflict" is completely unbeatable. So, you get silly proxy wars and counter insurgency, in which you can't use your best weapons, and if you start winning TOO much, the other side will step up their commitment and you're back where you started. I apologize to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Columbia, Guatemala, Egypt, Israel, the states surrounding Israel, the Palestinian people, Cuba, and anyone else who I missed . The conflicts in which NATO or the Warsaw Pact contributed significantly to the outcome are not trivial from the perspective of the people who fought in them, but from the perspective of an American War nerd, they're a lot less clean/interesting than, say, Operation Barbarossa or even the US Pacific campaign.
However, and here is the crux of my argument, despite the fact that the battles of WWI and the Cold War were less interesting than WWII, the, for want of a better term, grad strategy of the conflicts was, in my mind, far more interesting. The Cold War conflicts were, by the nature of the two factions competing, political, economic, and social struggles as well as military ones. The threat of nuclear annihilation made both sides circumspect, wary of making use of the full extent of their might. So the battle between the USA and the USSR was channeled into a thousand minor battles and skirmishes, with each commitment only as important as the other side made it. The game of brinksmanship is exhilarating, as you never quite know how far you can push before the other side pushes back. In this sort of war, a defector is as important as a brigade of infantry, and the various minor actors in the conflict are capable of choosing sides and making a difference^^**** in the outcome.
WWI was both an accident and the fervent wish of most of the countries involved: A massive arms race, the desire to stay a great power, and questions about long-run industrial/fiscal standing, combined with a belief on the part of several parties within the great powers that a war would strengthen their hand lead to an intense desire for conflict. However, The alliances created a deadly web that would enmesh the whole world in war once any string was plucked, so, of course, going to war was unthinkable, and the spider's web-dam held back the bitter water of ware. But, the bullet of Princip, a man who was rejected from The Black Hand for being "too small and weak, " the struggles of a tiny fly, broke the web, making NOT going to war unthinkable and unleashing a deluge.
Even after the war began, the question of which side Italy would fall to, the entrance of the US into the war, and the collapse of Russia made diplomatic maneuvering an interesting part of the conflict. The issues of the British blockade of Germany, and corresponding German submarine warfare made questions of trade and transport essential. Moreover, the exhaustion of both sides, exemplified by the collapse of Russia and the French Mutinies at the front, meant that both sides had to carefully manage their own political situations, desperately trying to maintain national unity and control dissent. Finally, the Great War was not a morality place, claims of various historians to the contrary, neither the Triple Alliance nor the Triple Entente were monstrous, both were as vicious or virtuous as the circumstances required.
But WWII is, on the highest levels, clean. The sides of the conflict are more or less determined, and the level of internal struggle within the various Allied or the Axis powers was low. No-one considered anything other than the complete capitulation of Germany, (or Britain, or the USSR) to be an acceptable outcome. The Lend/Lease Act, combined with the untouchable industrial heartland of the Central US meant that time was completely on the side of the Allied powers once the USA entered the war, and for that matter, the question of US entry into the war was less, in my mind, a question of if as when. In short, despite the fact that WWII was a total war, it was effectively a purely military conflict.
Which bring us full circle. I think my biggest complaint about HOI is that it's effectively a wargame, rather than the sort of sandbox history game that Vicky and EU are. There's never a question IF a war which looks remarkably similar to WWII will come, the only questions are 1) when, and 2) what preparations will the various powers have made. In comparison, in Vicky, I've grown Prussia along vaguely historical lines, but, I've also created a united Scandinavian republic, taken over Egypt as the United States, Unified Italy and continued in relative^^^ peace and prosperity, and lead Argentina to utter defeat in a Falkland Islands-esque war with Great Britain circa 1870. In EU, I can tell you stories about my Russian (I was Novogorod, not Muscovy, thank you) and Bohemian games, share tales of the woes of the Knights of Teuton, and weave an epic yarn about the creation of a French-speaking US of A^^^*. In HOI, I've fought Germany as the USSR, I've fought Germany as Czechoslovakia, and Japan as Nationalist China. In other words, I've fought WWII thrice.
This is the main problem that I have with HOI: is that it feels like I'm playing some old Cardboard and Hex wargame. A wargame with a lot of depth and a bunch of fascinating options, but a wargame none-the-less. I am going to fight WWII at some point during the game, it's just a question of how well I do. Spain will have a civil war. Germany will absorb a bunch of surrounding countries. Japan will join the Axis etc. These games are fun, don't get me wrong, but if you're going to shoot a fire-hose of information at me in order to provide the illusion of complete control over the destiny of a country, I'd like to be able to, you know, choose the destiny of a country, rather than seeing if I'm better than Rommel or Guderian or Zhukov or DeGaulle. Because let me tell you, I'm not. I am, however, arguably better than any of them at shooting space possums.
*for specific values of nothing and praise
** here victory means: not being absorbed by the fascists
*** I am but a horrible, twisted, grognardy parody of a man
**** I murder the space Possums for you, Jenn my darling.
^That's the US of A for all you communistic foreigners.
^*For arguments about what is a strategy game, see Three Moves Ahead: The Best Strategy Game Podcast in my personal opinion
^**For that matter, I would argue that a lot of other things require challenges to be engaging
^***By this I mean: most people I know, which is a very poor sampling of human beings
^****This has been discussed at some length in the excellent War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
^^ However tangentially related to the actual thesis of this post
^* Those are squares, hepcat.
^^** I bet you thought I'd never get back to the point at hand!
^^***Note, this only really applies on the western front
^^****I don't know if a quick Russian victory in Afghanistan or US support of the Anglo/French forces in the Suez Canal Affair would have lengthened the life of the USSR by even a day, but from the perspective of the people who were in the thick of things, these questions were of critical importance.
^^^Read: BORING
^^^* The A is for Africa
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